How I Would Build A Business in 2026 (If I had to start over) | Ali Abdaal

If you have ever thought about starting your own business someday but you have been held back by thoughts like I don't have a good idea or I don't know what I would sell, or like why would anyone buy from me?

Or I don't have the right skills.

And you've also probably been told that starting a business is super risky.

But, to be honest, one of the things that I've really learned over the years is that pretty much anyone can start a business.

And in this video, I'd like to lay out a little roadmap for doing so.

And this is based on a conversation that I had with serial entrepreneur Daniel Priestley, who is a friend and mentor of mine.

Daniel has worked with thousands of entrepreneurs to help grow and scale their businesses.

And he's also built multiple seven and eight figure businesses of his own.

And in this video we break down exactly how you can start completely from scratch and build a business from nothing.

Certainly, if you are watching this video on a device that is connected to the Internet, you have everything you need to start a business.

The reason people say I don't have an idea, it's actually not that they don't have a business idea.

It's very easy to have a business idea.

They don't have any idea as to how businesses run.

So that's the bigger issue.

This is why you don't go and start a business as a number one first.

This episode is part of Freedom Fridays, the new series on the channel, where we explore books and strategies and ideas and conversations and tools that can help you build a business that helps you work towards fun, fulfillment and financial freedom so that you can really live life on your own terms.

So the way that you approach business is if you want to be an entrepreneur, if you know that you want to be on this journey, you know that you want to do this.

You need to do something called.

We're gonna structure the video in terms of the nine key lessons from the conversations with Daniel.

So if you'd like to take action towards building your first business and making money on your own terms and potentially becoming financially free someday, then hopefully fingers crossed you'll get a lot of value from this video.

Let's dive straight into it.

Lesson number one, school didn't teach you how to be an entrepreneur.

Now, one of the main reasons why lots of us struggle with making money on our own terms is because we've been conditioned to succeed within someone else's system.

And, in fact, the way that school and university teaches you stuff.

It's almost like the opposite of what you need to actually start and grow your own business.

So the school system emerged alongside industrialization.

Prior to industrialization, we had the apprentice system that you basically apprenticed with your father or you apprenticed with a friend of your father.

So, you know, even our surnames come from, you know, the businesses that we used to apprentice in.

So, you know, John Smith is a Smith's, you know, and Joe Wicks was a candle maker.

Literally, he's from a candle making family because they were the Wicks family.

So it was very much family businesses and you either work in your own family business or you work in a friend of the family business, uncle's business.

And pretty much kids started working from like seven, eight, nine years old.

There was something called dame schooling, which was like church schooling.

And there was one woman in the village who like, taught a little bit of reading writing arithmetic, that sort of thing.

1850s come along and they need workers.

They just need people to work in the factories.

And there was this thing called the Prussian schooling system, which was militarized school, and they basically set it up like a military barracks and they said we're going to get you in uniforms, we're going to sit you in lines, rank and file, we're going to separate you by age and and we're gonna put you through a militarized schooling system where you shut up until you're asked to speak, you regurgitate what we ask you and you learn to start on a bell, finish on a bell, eat on a bell.

You're going to be ready for the factory.

So the entire schooling system was a system to be ready for factories and offices um, anything that looks like entrepreneurship.

We're going to get that out of you real fast.

So the worst thing that you could possibly be in school is disruptive.

But if you are disruptive in the economy, they call you the front page of.

They put you on the front page of inc magazine.

You cannot be an attention seeker.

But if you're an attention seeker in today's economy you'd probably create a billion dollar business like Hailey Bieber or the Kardashians, right?

If you're good at attention seeking.

If you try and perform tasks as a team, that's called cheating, right?

What do you mean you got the smart kid to do your maths homework?

That's not allowed, but in business, that's called having a CFO.

So we basically, with the school system, we get taught all of these things that are wrong for business and wrong as entrepreneurship.

And it's really funny, because I've got little kids They're naturally very entrepreneurial.

They negotiate hard.

They know what they want.

They go after what they want.

They'll naturally deal with you.

They'll say, you know, if I want this, what do I have to do, right?

I'll do this if you do this, right?

So they're very dealmaker-y.

And, you know, they love... love going out the front and selling lemonade.

They love doing chores for money if the price is right.

So like they're really into like that kind of stuff in a natural way.

And then we beat it out of them.

And then we have to relearn those skills later on down the road.

One of the things that I've been sort of personally noodling on as well is that the skills that make you a good student, or the traits that make you a good student, are almost diametrically opposed to the skills that make you a good entrepreneur.

If you're a good student in school, you get trained to ask for permission.

Like, you know, you have asked permission, you know, to go to the toilet and whatever.

Whereas really entrepreneurs kind of have to combat that tendency to, you know, be addicted to seeking permission.

In school, you're trained to follow someone else's schedule rather than designing your own.

In school you really have to focus on getting the perfect answer straight away, because you only have one chance to submit the thing and then you get graded on it.

Whereas really entrepreneurship is a game of, like you know, putting something imperfect out there and then iterating on it over time.

And so all of this brings us on to lesson number two, which is the entrepreneurs mindset shift.

When people search things like you know how to make money, there will be a large amount of YouTube videos that are saying things like okay well, you could start a social media marketing agency.

You could start an AI automation agency.

You could I don't know do a service thing that does video editing for people this, that and the other.

And the impression I get from speaking to a lot of people who are interested in starting their first business is that what they want is a almost like a turnkey solution.

They just want to, they want a business in a box.

They want, look, just like tell me what to do, just, you know, and like, you know, paint my numbers and I'll just, I'll take the boxes like I did in school and then I'll have a business.

What's your take on?

Kind of business in a box, kind of ideas, desire to be told what to do is antithetical, antithetical to entrepreneurship.

Entrepreneurs are telling what they want to do, right?

So entrepreneurs are the shot callers, they're the creator, they're the ones who are creating.

You know, it's kind of like saying i want to be a band and i want to be a famous band and i want to do really well as a band, but i just want to play other people's songs and i want to, you know, get told when to turn up and all of that sort of stuff.

Well you, it's not really going to get you the same result as to what you imagine, what it would be like to be in a band.

We already know that if you're just playing other people's songs and turning up when you're told to be turning up, you're probably not Coldplay.

Coldplay play Coldplay songs, and they turn up where they want to turn up.

So the desire to be told what to do is that's a job right, that's what you that's, that's what you get as a job.

See, the entrepreneur does the one and the ten, but the two to the nine typically gets outsourced.

So if we think about especially with AI now so if we think about a project having ten steps and The entrepreneur is really the person who is focused on step one and step 10,

So step one is figuring out what are we actually gonna do and like, what's the vision gonna be like and who's gonna be working on this team, and what systems and processes are we gonna do.

And then there's the getting on with doing it, And then there's the time where you go okay, this is now done.

It's finished.

And now here's what we're going to do next.

And this is how we're going to commercialize it.

And here's the next thing that we're going to do.

If we were talking about farming, this is called plant the seeds, right?

And then this is called harvest right, and then all the growing bit in the middle is like outsourced to the soil.

Yeah, right now, it used to be that this middle bit was outsourced to what we called labor right someone who's working and now we're also outsourcing this to ai.

So, all this middle bit now, what does ai not do?

Ai doesn't do the beginning and it doesn't do the end right, so it doesn't know what you want it to do until you tell it, and then it doesn't know what to do next, or it doesn't know what to do with that information once you take, until you take it and go do something of value with it.

But it's very, very good at doing the middle to the middle.

So, same as employees, employees are very, very good at being told what to do and doing a whole bunch of things, but then they don't know when to stop and they don't know what to do next and they don't know how to turn that into the final finished product that is of value.

So what is the entrepreneur doing?

That bit and that bit?

Now, if you're sitting there saying, can someone else please do that bit and can someone else please do that bit, well then that means that you are actually labor and you can be replaced by AI.

So it's a new set of skills that you need to become the shot caller, the one who plants the seed, and the harvester, the one who figures out how to make money out of it.

Yeah nice, and in your opinion, Is there such a thing as a person not being cut out for entrepreneurship?

Like, are there just certain sorts of people that entrepreneurship favors versus not?

Well, I think entrepreneurship is a team sport and there's probably people who are just not cut out to be a founder, but they could be very close to the founder.

They could be very, very close.

They could even have equity in the business.

They could benefit from profit share.

They could get commissions on sales.

So they could be really riding on the coattails of the founder in many meaningful ways, earn loads more than they'd earn in a big corporate, but they're not necessarily the founder.

So the founder is the first mover that.

That person who comes up with the one and the ten right but very close to the founder, is the founders core team.

So it's often the case that people who were there at the beginning uh, end up as millionaires as well.

Um so yeah, exactly some of them are close, close at hand.

Um, so what we're looking for is to treat entrepreneurship as a team sport.

The founder role is um is not necessarily for everyone, although it's probably for a lot more people than you'd think.

Right, so when i'm thinking about who's not really cut out Look, there are people who, for whatever reason, that's not how their mind works.

To be brutal, they might not have the IQ for it, right?

So when we're talking about broad population, there just might not be people who are can manage that level of complexity, which is fine.

There might be people who just personality-wise, they just want all, even phase of life-wise, they just want to go through a phase of life where they're being told what to do so that they can just get on with it, because they've got other things that they're juggling.

So there's a number of reasons phase of life, level of IQ, all of that sort of stuff that could say it's not ideal to be a founder because it is a complex role and it's a high abstraction role.

You need to be able to work with abstractions.

It's a visioning role.

But you'd be surprised, way more people can do it than you'd think.

However, is it even smart to be a founder?

Perhaps you would be better off being a core team of a founder who's really good at what they do.

So I have a number of really super smart, super talented people who could easily be founders.

But they see more value in working closely with me because we can create way more value as co-founders, as co-collaborators, co-creators.

By the way, I really love co-founders over founders.

So co-founding is where you collectively get together and do a business.

I just think it's so much easier.

Almost all of my business, not almost all of my businesses are co-founded.

So I've always done stuff with co-founders.

I've never solo founded anything actually.

All right, at this point, I would like to tell you about a totally free resource that you should definitely download.

It's called 12 Ways to Build Wealth Beyond Your Paycheck.

And it's a collaboration between The Hustle and HubSpot, who are sponsoring this video, and Marina, who's a friend of mine, also known as Silicon Valley Girl, who pulls in over 100000 a month across multiple revenue streams.

And essentially this is a totally free guide where Marina breaks down her entire income stack so five specific income streams, each one rated by difficulty and potential return, and there's also a worksheet that helps you audit your current income situation and figure out what to tackle next.

If you want to check it out, it's completely free.

There is literally no cash, it's just a free download that you can get in the video description.

Now, one of my favorite ideas from the guide is the idea around, like you know, some business advice says you know to just pick something and just focus, focus on it like exclusively to the detriment of everything else, Whereas kind of the way Marina thinks about this is that if you are building multiple income streams which might vibe with you, if you want to build a lifestyle business, then actually, depending on how you're feeling on a given day or in a given moment, you can actually switch focus between different creative projects rather than just having to do one thing at all times.

So if you are interested in building wealth beyond your nine to five, then you should definitely check it out.

Thanks again to HubSpot for sponsoring today's video and for creating completely free resources like this that can help people achieve financial freedom.

All right, cool.

Let's get back to the video.

Lesson number three, the lie you were taught about business.

Now, something else that the education system teaches us is that going through school and then university and then getting a job, that that's the route that guarantees you financial security.

And yes, this was true of our parents' generation, but I don't think it's still true today.

So yeah, the job used to give you a lot of security, but I think we're all seeing that that's just a bit of mythology right now.

There's very, very few jobs that keep up with the cost of living, even really amazing professional jobs.

People complain about not being able to afford a house.

They complain about not being able to take holidays.

You might have two professionals living under one roof and by the time you have childcare and by the time you have all of these other expenses, you think what's the point of working so hard.

Um sadly, i actually saw a qualified doctor um on social media saying that um, there's a high chance that she'll be unemployed.

And she said there's just not enough jobs.

She said i don't know what's going on, but i like i'm applying for jobs and not getting jobs um, and she's like what am i gonna do?

She like, literally she was terrified.

You could see that she's done six seven, eight years in study and then she's sitting there going like i don't know if i'm gonna be able to get a job as a doctor.

So certainly, things like accounting used to be that the accounting profession was just a guaranteed route to six-figure income and now, with the way AI is going, you know a lot of the accounting work is just done by AI.

Now it certainly can be outsourced to low-cost foreign countries.

You know you can have your accounting firm in India.

I know of dedicated accounting firms in India that just work with British businesses.

Know of dedicated firms in South Africa that are on the same time zone as the UK and they just basically only work with UK but they're half the price.

So like this is, this is definitely a real deal issue.

So where do you go for security?

A lot of people are finding that you go to building a business that has some equity value, that has some brand value.

Here's the interesting thing, even today and I think it's going to change in the future but even today I would say a job at best is a smooth road that ends rough and a business is a rough road that ends smooth.

So a job, it's a smooth road to start and get a paycheck on day, like on month one.

It's a smooth road to leverage someone else's brand, to leverage their systems, to leverage their team right.

That's all a smooth road.

But a little bit older than you and I.

I hear the same story over and over and over again, which is that you get to 51, 52 years old, there's some restructuring that goes on.

Now you're 53 years old, you're unemployed, you haven't quite cleared the mortgage, you've still got 12 15 years for retirement, you've still got 25 years after that to sustain yourself and you find yourself at 53 years old.

You've only really been doing a technical role or maybe a management role, but now you have to basically try and go out there and get a job again and there's not a lot of jobs and now you don't know how to start a business.

And it's kind of a smooth road that ended rough.

And I see that story a lot.

And then you've got the entrepreneurial road, which is the rough road that ends smooth.

It's a rough road that you work really hard for months and you don't get any paycheck.

You might get nothing at the end of the first few months.

You're not leveraging anyone else's brand.

You're not leveraging anyone else's systems. trying to figure it out on your own.

No one's telling you what you're meant to be doing on any given day.

So all of that's rough.

But then you see the 53 year old entrepreneur who's figured it out and who's done it.

And they get an acquisition offer and they sell their company for 3.6 million pounds.

And they now join the board of the acquiring company and they get a pretty cushy board role.

And then they get to perhaps start another company or be an advisor or be a shareholder.

They've cleared their mortgage.

They've now got multiple options that are opening up to them.

So it was a difficult road at the beginning, but then it turns into a smooth road in the end.

But Dan?

Everyone says business is really risky and like 90 something percent of businesses fail and all of that kind of stuff.

Well, for starters, 90% of businesses don't fail.

That's just a total myth, because we have 6 million businesses in the UK, which means we would have had to have 60 million business failures in order to get to 6 million businesses.

We haven't had 60 million business failures.

So it can't be possible that 90 of businesses fail because we don't even have that many people in the country who could have started a business in order to get there.

So it's just mythology.

What sometimes happens is businesses do close down or they merge.

Sometimes companies spin out.

They get bought by another company.

So all sorts of stuff happens.

It's not as simple as, oh, 90% of businesses fail.

Sometimes a very fast and cheap experiment was conducted and yeah, this is not a big deal.

In many cases, what we have with business is something called asymmetrical risk, which means there's an a tiny downside of failure and a massive upside if it succeeds.

So like, just think about it from a perspective of this.

It costs almost nothing to start a company.

You can conduct fast and cheap experiments to see if it's a good idea or not, using some free software and some basic tools and a little bit of hustle.

So there's some time and some money.

A lot of my businesses that I've started.

I've started with less than five to 10 grand to get them going and to figure out whether they work.

I have had multiple experiences where the startup cost was less than 10000 and those businesses ended up producing hundreds of thousands per year two years later.

Now think about that from an asymmetrical risk point of view, that my downside is capped at a few thousand for fast, cheap experiments and my upside is a business that's worth millions.

So you only need to get one or two of those right.

Let's say it was a 90% failure rate.

If you went to a casino and they said look, this table has a 90 failure rate that only one in 10 times does it succeed.

However, when it succeeds, you win a million and it only costs a grand to play.

Yeah, how many times would you play that game?

You'd play the game even though they're warning you.

Oh, but it's a 90 failure.

90 failure it's like okay, but it cost me 10 grand to play 10 times and if i win i make a million dollars.

I'm going to play that all day long.

I'm never going to leave that table.

So lot of people really misunderstand this whole risk to reward ratio.

Yeah, i think when a lot of people think about like it, just it just seems to have really seeped into the the public imaginary that like business is risky, like super high percentage of businesses fail, um the whole.

Like startup stuff as well.

Oh, you know, 90 of startups fail.

If you're trying to do the vc thing raise money this, that the other um vcs will like fund loads of startups, hoping that one in a hundred will be successful and like do you want to take the gamble on being the one in a hundred?

I think that.

So when people imagine that like, oh my God, business fail, they imagine I've got a stable job.

I'm going to put my life savings and I'm going to spend years of my time hustling on this business.

And then I still only have a one in 10 chance of making it work.

So then I'm completely fucked if it doesn't work.

Well, what you've even described there is the definition of success that is so far beyond what most people are even looking for.

So from a VC's point of view, success only occurs if they get a billion dollar valuation.

So when they say oh, all these startups fail uh, included in that is oh, we had to sell that one for 72 million.

Yeah right, it was a real failure.

You know, we had to merge it with another company and uh, and we ended up doing a share swap deal and it was, you know, it was only 35 million of cash and 37 million of shares and you know, and there was once you took out our fees and all of that sort of stuff, it was a massive failure.

So, you know, I personally know VC backed companies that are worth 300 billion and they think of themselves as a failure because they had sold their investors the story that they would get to a billion valuation by now.

So they feel like big fat losers because they only got to 300 billion of valuation.

Right, and their VCS aren't happy with them.

And also, to be fair, They are not happy because the VC's imposed conditions that basically say they can't get much money out of the business until they hit that target as well.

That is a really different road.

That's like comparing going to the gym and getting fit with becoming a professional athlete, right?

Now, plenty of people go to the gym and get fit and they have a great time in the gym getting fit.

And then that doesn't mean at all that they are a professional athlete.

But if you ask them, did you succeed?

They say, yeah, I massively succeeded.

I love going to the gym and I got fit.

And if you say but you didn't become a professional athlete, I didn't see you win at Wimbledon this year.

They go.

But that was never the goal.

So when we talk about like most entrepreneurs, most entrepreneurs want a seven figure revenue and a six figure profit on top of whatever they would have earned in a job.

So if their current job pays 80 or 90 grand a year and they can make 80 or 90 grand a year and six figures of profit, so now they're on 190 grand a year and they're doing 12 million a year of revenue.

Most entrepreneurs they are sitting there going.

That is a home run, massively successful.

And a VC would not even recognize that as something that even should exist.

Yeah, no, that's very true.

One thing that I've been reading, Fooled by Randomness, by Nassim Taleb, and he talks about kind of wild success versus mild success and how wild success can be broadly attributable to luck but mild success can be almost entirely attributed to skills.

That's a great distinction.

And so something like you know, could Bezos start another Amazon and get to trillion dollars in valuation?

Possibly not.

Like, you know, yes, he's got skills and stuff, but like market conditions, right place, right time.

But could someone with skills start a six-figure lifestyle business?

I mean, that's not even that good by entrepreneurial standards.

It's just fairly fairly, it's fairly benign, it's it's yeah, do you know the the amazing thing about having a business that does six figures of profit is that it's almost irrelevant to the entire economy as well.

So, for example, i've had those businesses doing seven figure revenue, six figure profit during times of economic ups and downs, and it doesn't even seem to be linked to the economy.

You know, you can watch the news and they say the economy's up or the economy's down.

It has no impact on your business.

You are just this little tiny bubble in the economy.

Like a million or a million of GDP is literally nothing in the scheme of a multi-trillion dollar economy or a multi, multi-trillion dollar global economy that you can now access.

So like, for example, I know SaaS founders, software as a service founders they've created a little piece of software and they've rolled that out to four or five thousand customers.

They have a few thousand customers who are paying 30 or 40 a month um, and they've got a team of like six or seven people and like happy days.

Right, you know like they're they're doing, they're doing well.

Lesson number four what a lifestyle business actually looks like.

Okay, so hopefully at this point we understand why the employee mindset holds us back and why entrepreneurship doesn't actually have to be the super risky thing.

So let's now talk about the idea of a lifestyle business.

But before we do that, I just wanna let you know that my team and I are building an online business school for lifestyle business entrepreneurs is going to be absolutely sick.

It's a new project that we're working on.

And we are looking for a small number of people to join our first kind of cohort, where the idea is that you'll get direct mentorship with me and my team to help you build 100000 a year lifestyle business in under 12 months, guaranteed.

Yes, build $100,000 a year lifestyle business in under 12 months guaranteed.

That's like what we're going for.

There'll be more information and a waitlist in the video description.

If that sounds interesting.

Yeah, let's continue with the video.

Yeah.

So a lifestyle business is a business that is set up so that you end up with fun, freedom and flexibility.

It fits within your broader context of life.

So we often used to think of a business as something that was purely for the benefit of shareholders.

And we kind of have this mindset of like a business should try and grow as big as possible.

And it should be all about profitability at the expense of everything else, and growth and nonstop growth.

And then there's this idea that what if you could build or design a business where it gets to a point where it's actually just way better than a job?

It gives you all the benefits of a job, of the security and the cash flow and all of that.

But it also gives you the benefits of a business, the flexibility, the creative freedom.

But you design it in such a way that it's not about endless growth and it's not about endless profitability.

It's about figuring out at what point do you have enough?

And when you've got enough, you've actually just enjoy having the business that gives you enough or even a little bit more than enough.

So it's about business design.

It's an elegant design.

Probably one of the most important things to acknowledge up front is that at no other point in history could we be having this conversation.

So if we went back to my grandfather and said hey, you can have a lifestyle business, the truth is, we'd probably be leading him down a path that was not real.

We'd be we'd be scamming him.

We'd be selling him something that doesn't actually exist It's only because of the internet.

It's only because of AI, It's only because of social media and cloud computing and really fast cheap, affordable Software tools.

It's only because of those elements that we now have a situation that you can actually build a beautiful little lifestyle business.

And what are some examples of lifestyle businesses that you have seen or worked with over the years?

Let me let me give you some crazy examples.

So stephen box is a guy who enjoyed playing warhammer, which is a tabletop game like dungeons and dragons, and then he got good at talking about this silly game called warhammer.

He now literally travels all over the world as a speaker at conferences talking to people who love warhammer.

He makes videos about warmer warhammer.

Surprisingly, he earns more than most professionals.

Now, he's not world famous.

He never gets stopped on the street.

He's super famous.

If you go into a Warhammer conference that has a few hundred people in a room, he doesn't have like millions and millions of followers.

Right, it's very niche, but he's figured out how to monetize being a Warhammer guy.

I can tell you there's a guy called Scott Mansell.

Scott set up a YouTube channel called Driver61 and he talks about going on doing track days driving track days.

1.4 million people follow his channel.

He's a superstar within the track day community. and he's living his best life.

And recently I caught up with him and Ferrari had lent him a brand new Ferrari for three days to see what he would think of it, to feature it on his channel and things like that.

So that's an incredible lifestyle business.

I have a friend of mine who works in healthcare, Gabriella Rosa.

She has set up a fertility clinic and what she's done is it's completely virtual, right?

So it used to be that she worked in a traditional clinical setting.

And she has a completely virtual clinic where she has a team of remote workers all over the world who are trained and qualified in her methods.

She's written a book called Natural Fertility Breakthrough.

She gives away a few thousand books each year.

Those people read the book and then want to work with her clinic.

She has multiple seven-figure revenue really great profitability.

She went and went to Harvard, did some research, won an award for her research at Harvard and she's enjoying having a great lifestyle business where she can travel, she can have fun and she can express what she wants to see happen in the world through that business.

So that's three examples that just pop straight to mind.

Nice.

And so lifestyle business sort of as opposed to what sort of business?

Like what are the other sorts of businesses that people might be Well?

So if you take my businesses, my businesses tend to get bigger and bigger.

This is before I really discovered lifestyle businesses.

I think if I was to start my career again, I'd probably be focused on lifestyle businesses, knowing what I now know.

Because it's very demanding when you go over 12 employees, 12 people.

So there's a ceiling at about 12 people on a team, between three and 12 people on a team.

It's very easy to manage.

It's almost self-managing.

It's like having three to 12 people over to your house for dinner.

That if you were to have three to 12 people come around to your house for dinner, it wouldn't be like a massive job to organize everything.

Everyone would kind of just like, it would just be time to go to the table and eat.

So we'd all head over to the table.

You wouldn't have to, like you know, do anything particular to organize the group.

As soon as you go 13 14 15, now it's a house party and now it's a better bit out of control.

Some people are in the kitchen, some people are in the lounge room, some people have gone out uh, in the back garden right and, and it's like there's different groups that are now forming in different parts of the house and if you wanted everyone to do something, you'd have to kind of walk around for about 15 minutes kind of hurting everyone back together in order to get something done.

And it's the same with your business.

If you go over 13 14, 15 people.

You've got your sales team hanging out talking about sales and you've got your ops team talking about ops.

No one's coordinating starts drifting in different directions and it's a lot of work to just to try and get everyone aligned.

So i've got businesses that are north of 50 full-time employees and you need general management, you need a board, you need something called an executive committee right, you have meetings about the meetings that you're going to have.

So there's all this stuff that goes on in a.

In a slightly bigger business.

All of that doesn't really exist when you're less than 12 people.

So whenever i've had a business personally from three to 12 people, it's what I would consider the good old days.

So every business that I've had that's grown big.

We always look so fondly at the time when we're three to 12 people and it was just working and it was just amazing.

And there was always this little fantasy of like, oh, what if you just kept it at about 12?

And that's a lifestyle business.

Nice.

Lesson number five, goodbye Homer Simpson.

Yeah, another idea I've been reading about recently is this idea of like the large corporation.

It's like a fairly new idea.

And if you just go back a few hundred years ago, like everyone was working in, like family businesses or like on the farm or for the feudal lord or like whatever,

But I think this idea that we are all entitled to have a high paying middle class job for a large corporation, that then sort of you know we stay with for 50 years.

That's a relatively like a tiny slice of human history.

It's a post-World War II idea.

The vast majority of all businesses up until very recently, up until the 1900s, were about 150 people is the biggest a corporation could get.

It was about as many people as you could possibly organize under one roof.

There were some notable exceptions.

The government had militaries, for example, which were well-organized militaries or militias.

There was East India Trading Company, so that was a sovereign-backed corporation.

There were certain exceptions to this rule, but the vast majority of manufacturing production, all sorts of things, it split off into teams of about 150 people.

That was the biggest a company could get.

It's very very, very recent.

This idea that you can actually have mega corporations, global corporations, international corporations, that you can organize groups of more than 150 people is very new.

The idea of a middle class is a post-World War II phenomenon that has lasted for about 60, 70 years.

And wages, there's a reason that that happened in the West.

And that was, there was a huge amount of money injected in to rebuild after World War II.

Straight after World War II, only 50% of adults worked in jobs.

So women hadn't yet entered the workforce, but then they did enter the workforce.

Unfortunately, the unintended consequence that no one wanted or intended was that when women entered the workforce, they diluted the value of labor in the workforce.

And we ended up with households required 12 paychecks to run for the year and now they require 20 paychecks to run for the year.

And that was basically because when more people enter the workforce, you have more choice as to who you get to work.

And it kind of sucks.

But basically there was so much labor that was untaxed by government uh, women working in the home, and actually everything was kind of like based on that model.

And then when we changed that model, everything repriced itself, even the cost of buying a home banks went oh, we can just take money from them and them right.

So we kind of changed society in an unintended way, and i'm not saying you'd do it any other way, but that was the unintended consequence.

Then the reason that this has all gone massively downhill since the 70s is because we invented technology that could outsource jobs overseas, massively expanding the labor pool into low-cost labor.

We invented technology that could automate the process.

So in the SP 500 the largest companies in the USA they went from having eight people making a million dollars to two people making a million dollars because of automation.

Even the biggest employers.

In the USA, a steel production company that used to have 30000 people now has 5000 people, and the amount of steel they produce has gone through the roof.

So like automation has totally taken over there.

So what we've done is we've decoupled labor from being a key ingredient to being an abstract ingredient in the production process.

And that is basically what.

If we map it out, we've had the agricultural age and that was replaced by the industrial age.

And then the industrial age is now being replaced by the digital age.

And what's happened is that this point here is where they did the show The Simpsons.

And The Simpsons has a star of the show, Homer Simpson, who is an average guy in an average town who gets a five bedroom house and a car and a wife, doesn't have to work, has three kids and that's totally fine.

You could not create The Simpsons in today's.

You couldn't start that show because no one would believe it exists around this time.

When they had The Simpsons in the 90s, 50 of people aged 30 had a house and had a marriage and had started a family.

Now that number is lower than 12%, right?

So this was the absolute peak of that late stage industrialized society.

And now that is absolutely slipping down.

But at the same time that that's disappearing, the digital age took off.

So the internet started, cloud computing, social media, AI, and here's where we are here.

So what we have now is a widening gap in society.

Those who are in what I would call the digital economy, and their life is getting better and better every single year.

Every single year.

Your life, for example, gets better and better and better.

And there's the industrialized economy, which is working for a factory or an office or a big employer, and that gets harder and harder every year.

So, as this is slipping down, this one's going up, what you did is that you were on this trajectory and you just went hey, wait a second, i'm doing two things i'm being a youtuber and a doctor, and it seems like this doctor thing gets worse and worse and harder and harder every year.

I'm gonna jump off the doctor thing and go do the youtuber thing.

And you actually got off of the declining industrialized system and you got into the ascending digital economy.

And you went, oh, okay, now I'm on this thing.

And then ever since you did that, you just went... and you rocketed ahead.

So that's kind of what's happening.

But, mind you, this used to happen with.

If you used to be a lord and you had land, you were the king of the castle.

This was like Robin Hood days.

This was like oh, the landowners were the best ever.

But actually shortly after the people who were the big landowners, they got overtaken by the industrialists, and people who owned stately homes couldn't even afford to run their stately homes, even though they had vast tracts of land, but the people who were industrialists came along and bought their stately homes because they had a factory.

So this happened a couple of hundred years ago as well.

That's very interesting.

I like this little graph.

I think what people have also noticed is like since, like the 2010s, if you just worked in tech in any capacity like software engineering developer AI, like even AI research before it was cool, you just kind of got rich by default because the whole wave like if we look at the SP 500, is basically 95 90 is like tech stocks and stuff like that.

Just like, just being on that wave.

40% of the S&P 500 is 10 stocks.

Yeah, it's mental.

So it's like just being on the right wave.

So right now that wave clearly is the AI stuff, the tech stuff.

It just doesn't to me.

If someone cares about improving their living standards, becoming financially free, it doesn't make sense to be in any industry other than the tech enabled ones or the AI enabled ones.

Even being in tech doesn't necessarily get you the greatest life.

It's better, it's not a bad choice because it's so connected to the rising economy, but it's actually missing the point.

So there's these guys called classical economists, and the classical economists basically said there are four moats, four things that are very important, and they said land Labor capital, enterprise.

Those are the four things that make the economy work.

So in the agricultural age, the most important was land.

And labor and capital were afterthoughts.

Enterprise was a total afterthought.

It didn't matter how entrepreneurial you were.

If you didn't own land, it didn't matter.

Richard Branson, if you're not a landowner, it doesn't matter that you're Richard Branson.

Then in the industrial age, it only mattered if you had capital and could organize labor.

And actually it also didn't matter if you were entrepreneurial, if you couldn't get capital and you couldn't get labor being entrepreneurial.

There were plenty of entrepreneurial people who got working in a factory and that was all they could ever do.

It also didn't really matter if you had land, it only mattered if you had labor and capital.

As we go into the digital age, doesn't actually matter if you've got labor or capital, because you don't need that many people and you don't need that much money to start a business.

So now we have the importance around entrepreneurship.

So it's the entrepreneurs who are now making the most of this time.

So unfortunately, even if you like the idea of working for a tech company, in many cases you are providing labor and which works in the industrial age.

But there are many people who provide labor to these large tech companies.

They're just paid like normal people because there's so many people who want that job.

So you're missing the point.

It's not about being a tech company, it's being about.

It's about being more entrepreneurial.

Lesson number six how business actually works.

Now, one thing that comes up constantly whenever we survey our audience about what's holding them back from starting a business is the primary thing of like i don't have the right idea.

But before we even get into ideas, it's worth asking what actually is a business?

Because it might seem like a super basic question, but a lot of people get caught up in the complexity and they forget the fundamentals.

Look at a very basic level.

You're in business when you've got a customer who wants to buy something and then you can go off and figure out how you're going to supply that.

So you've got a customer.

As soon as you've got a customer, you've got a business.

If you've got multiple customers, you've got a business.

You know it's funny because a job is in some ways has the elements of the business.

You are selling your services to an employer.

You have one customer who goes on to a long-term retainer and enters into a contract, an employment contract, which is protected by government.

So essentially you've just got that one customer.

A business is really when you start saying okay, I'm gonna have that, I'm gonna deliver value, but to multiple customers.

And one of the mistakes that a lot of people make when they're thinking about what is a business is they think that a business is having something to sell.

And a business is when you have someone who wants to buy.

Right now, I could have a lot of things to sell and not be in business.

Yeah, The business springs into existence when someone says I'm ready to go, I'm ready to buy.

Now, I know that's a subtle distinction, but the reason it's important is because you can put an enormous amount of time energy, effort and resource into creating something to sell and then discover that nobody is interested in buying or that you don't have the skills to get them to buy.

And the smartest entrepreneurs and the best, most successful businesses.

They don't even worry about having something to sell until they first have someone who wants to buy.

When someone thinks about starting a business.

We've done loads of surveys to our audience around like hey, what's been holding you back from starting your first business?

Or making money on the internet, or whatever the thing might be?

And by far, the biggest one is I don't have any ideas or I don't have the right idea.

And I think by idea, what people are meaning is like a quick business idea.

What would I actually do?

What would I do?

What would I sell?

That kind of thing.

Well, the idea has to be so much more than just the idea.

So the idea is like, okay, it's very easy to have an idea.

Like, here's an idea.

Let's pull down an old building and put up a new building.

That's an idea.

Or here's an idea.

Let's open a vet clinic.

We walk around life and we spot all sorts of things that are less than perfect.

And anything that's less than perfect would be a good business.

Or we might go to North London and see a really great, thriving little business in North London, like this podcast studio, for example, and go gee, I wish there was one of those in South London.

That's called cloning.

So cloning is a perfectly valid way of doing things as well.

We could say, oh, I've seen something really cool when I was on holiday in Mauritius.

I want to open up something similar near my home.

So that's just a cloning idea.

But having that as an idea is not enough.

You need to have an idea as to how businesses work.

How do they generate leads?

How do they make sales?

How do they keep customers happy?

How do they do ongoing product development?

So the reason people say I don't have an idea, it's actually not that they don't have a business idea.

It's very easy to have a business idea.

They don't have any idea as to how businesses run.

So that's the bigger issue.

So this is why you don't go and start a business as a number one first.

And that brings us on to lesson number seven, the 766 apprenticeship.

So the way that you approach business is, if you want to be an entrepreneur, if you know that you want to be on this journey, you know that you want to do this you need to do something called a 766 apprenticeship first right, so a 766 apprenticeship is where you find a business that already does seven figures of revenue right so US dollar revenue and six figures of profit.

So it's a profitable small business.

And you go and do six months as a direct report to the entrepreneur.

That's your first mission.

Your first mission is to do a 766 apprenticeship.

So you might say, okay, I'm interested in setting up a day spa.

Don't set up a day spa, go work in a day spa, especially go work in a profitable day spa, right?

Now you say, okay, well, what would I do for them?

Well, you might mop the floors, you might be an assistant, you might work on their social media account.

Your job is to sell yourself in so that you can do whatever it takes to spend time up close and personal with the founder and to actually see what's going on behind the scenes.

Because in a seven-figure business that has six figures of profit and you're spending six months with the founder, you are going to discover that they have figured out how to generate leads, how to make sales, how to look after customers, how to do ongoing development.

All of those types of things have already been figured out.

And now you're going to learn those skills.

You're going to get a much clearer understanding as to whether you have what it takes to then go and replicate and clone that.

Okay, but Dan.

What if you know I'm in my 30s, I'm a doctor and I've got kids and I've got, like you know, the regular monthly paycheck in the NHS.

What, should I just take six months off and try and get like an internship?

Also, why would they hire me?

I mean, I don't have any skills that like a spa needs, right?

Yeah, the more you have, the more you should not just roll the dice.

I don't think it's a good idea for people to take a leap of faith.

What we wanna do is conduct fast, cheap experiments to see if it's a good idea or not.

You wanna protect your family and protect your wealth and protect your time and you wanna protect yourself from bad decisions.

So what we're trying to do is conduct fast, cheap experiments.

The spirit of intent behind a 766 apprenticeship is that it's a fast, cheap experiment that protects you from risk.

So now what you might do is say okay, in that situation I'm going to make an agreement with my spouse that I'm going to do one day a week, or I'm going to do a day on the weekend.

In that situation, I'm going to go to to that person, to the, to the business, and I'm going to see if I can find out whether I can lend my skills to them in any capacity.

Now, a fallback position might be that, rather than choosing a business that you're going to get into, you choose any business at all, provided it's a small business with seven figures of revenue, six figures of profit.

One of the biggest things that I'm trying to get at here is that if you work in the NHS, you have no idea how a small business works.

If you work in KPMG or Ernst & Young, you have no idea how a small business works.

So anytime that you're working within a big corporate context, you've got no idea what it's like to be a small business.

So any idea, any exposure to a small business is going to bring in the realities of what it's going to be like and also, if you want a lifestyle business, you're trying to get as close to the realities of that as possible so that you can actually understand what it really takes and what's going on.

So let's say you are a doctor, you might find a small business that needs a doctor, So some sort of private clinic or some sort of private startup business that leverages doctor skills.

So you say, okay, fair enough.

So long as I'm getting a little bit of exposure to the founder, that would be helpful.

If you are an accountant, go and be an accountant in the evenings or on the weekends for a small business, that you're actually getting hands-on with the founder.

So you that.

The main thing is that we're just trying to de-risk.

We don't want to put the kids in jeopardy, we don't want to put the marriage in jeopardy, we don't want to put that mortgage in jeopardy.

We want to conduct this as a fast, cheap experiment to see if there is a bridge that is going to be viable across to this nice.

Okay, two questions.

Firstly, why is contact with the founder important?

Because you're going to be stepping into that role.

It's like anything where you, you know, whatever career you're currently in, you had contact with people who are further along in that career.

You know, if you were a lawyer, you worked as a junior lawyer under a partner.

If you were an accountant, you worked under a senior accountant.

If you're a doctor, you worked under senior doctors, if there are such thing as that right.

So you, you walk, worked under people who were 10 years, 20 years further along down the road, and it was by working alongside those people who are further along than you that you actually got to understand what the realities are of that role.

So being a founder is a particular role.

That is a job.

That's a thing that people do.

So you want to have exposure to that job.

You want to have exposure to that role and see what it's like pitching things and see what it's like trying to recruit someone without a big brand.

See what it's like trying to get a customer to part with their money, all of those kind of things.

Setting up a landing page, doing a video for social media all of that.

You want to be behind the scenes and seeing what that's like.

Nice, and in this context where I've got a day job and I'm sort of moonlighting on the side, working for working for a small business, should I be trying to get paid for it or like?

How do we think about?

Like yeah, you want to get paid for it, but you want to get paid in something more valuable than money, which is experience.

So you're getting paid to learn in the same way that you went.

You know a lot of people go to university and they might spend 10 to 30000 per year paying for a fast track experience.

You're getting paid in experience.

Now, if you can get paid any actual money on top, happy days, even better.

But what you're really there for is you're there to get a return on investment for your time in the currency called experience.

Don't miss the forest for the trees.

That's the only reason that you're there.

Everything else is a bit of noise.

What you're trying to achieve is you're trying to level up your self-awareness when it comes to your own strengths and weaknesses as a founder.

You're trying to level up your commercial awareness so that you actually understand how a business operates and how it works.

And you're trying to level up your access to resources, whether it be team and talent, or suppliers or money.

You're trying to basically get more of those three things.

So, by getting more self-awareness, commercial awareness and more resources, you are getting paid, but you're getting paid in a currency that's more valuable than just cash.

I love that.

Yeah, I find that we've done a couple of new hires in Hong Kong recently like in-person team members.

And I'm always interested in asking them like, hey, how are things going?

And one thing they always say is oh, my God, I've learned more in the last month than I did in the previous like eight years working in my corporate job.

And i'm always like keen to double click on that like oh, that's interesting because because to me i'm sort of inside the bottle and i can't sort of, but from from their perspective, it's like just just the fire hose of information you get.

When it's like oh, this is how a small business is actually making money, this is what our notion looks like, this is what our google sheet dashboard looks like, this is what like it looks like when angus runs a meeting and the meeting nodes and we have action points.

And This is what it looks like to be sort of connecting with Zapier to this, this and this.

And they're like, oh, I didn't even realize the software existed.

And it's all this sort of stuff that's just sort of in the water of small business world, which is completely fucking mind blowing to someone who's never done it before.

And you've it's probably taken you ten years of trial and error to get to this point.

And they're just stepping straight in and seeing exactly how it all works.

I've had a dozen of my ex-employees.

Now, not many people leave my company.

I've got an amazing long tenure.

People have stayed with me for 10 plus years regularly.

But I've had a dozen ex-employees who are now millionaires, and they're millionaires because they've gone off and started their own businesses.

So there's Tom, who went off and started a music studio business and now has seven figures of revenue, six figures of profit, employs a bunch of people.

There's Jordan, who used to be my assistant, and Jordan took over his family business and has 12x the revenue since he owned it.

So the family business had been around for 20 years.

He did two years as my assistant. then went back, took over dad's business and his 12X revenue.

There's two young sales guys who were on my team who absorbed absolutely everything that they could.

They then went off and started a online infrared sauna business uh, built it and sold it to private equity for multi-millionaires.

They became multi-millionaires before the age of 30 and when i caught up with them, they said yeah, we just applied a lot of the dent playbooks that we um, that we learned while we were working.

You know in and around you guys, so you know it's.

There's this thing called the paypal mafia of all these billionaires who worked for elon musk and peter teal And then, as a result of working for those two guys and doing an apprenticeship, they went off and started YouTube and they went off and started all these other businesses that became multi-billion dollar businesses.

Yeah, I think people really underestimate just how much a business is actually just the acquisition of skills.

Because we take it for granted.

Obviously, when it comes to if, for example, you're a doctor, obviously you had to go to med school, you had to do your work experience before then you had to do all these different A levels to get the foundation in chemistry and biology.

Then you go to med school, then you do placements in hospitals and you get all this practice and all this experience.

And in any career as you get further ahead in your career, If you give advice to someone who's 10 years younger than you, you just have an enormous enormous, enormous wealth of experience that that person would totally benefit from, because they haven't yet done the 10 years of experience in the thing.

But I think for like business or like making money and stuff.

When I speak to people about this there's often this sort of idea that like It's almost this black box that doesn't have the characteristics of a normal career, where actually the more you do it, the more experience you get, the more skills you get, the easier the thing becomes.

Well, I have seven different companies right now.

I've previously done seven startups that went zero to a million in their first 12 months.

I've had three businesses go north of 10 million.

I can tell you it's just a system.

It's just a process.

You couldn't do that by luck, by the way.

The chances of doing what I've done by luck would be one in hundreds of thousands.

And it's just a process.

There are certain steps you go through, you follow those steps, you follow those processes and out the other end comes the ultimate result.

Entrepreneurship is a series of experiments.

You conduct experiments, you get the green light to go to the next experiment and literally there is just a set of processes.

I often think of entrepreneurship a lot like the aeroplane industry, that if we go back 110 or so years, They just didn't really understand aerodynamics enough.

And they would just try stuff that didn't work and there were lots of people crashing.

And what they discovered is that there's just thousands of ways to crash a plane.

And there's thousands of ways to create a plane that doesn't work.

And there's thousands of things that slow a plane down.

But in amongst all of those thousands of things that don't work, there's a narrow set of things that absolutely work.

And it's no coincidence that all planes from all manufacturers look very similar to a set of things that work.

And when pilots fly, they go through a set of checklists.

And isn't it strange that the thing that was the most dangerous thing that you could possibly do 100 years ago has actually become the safest thing that you could possibly do?

You are the safest you will ever be when you're on a plane, statistically.

So while you're flying through the air, or during, even during takeoff and landing, it's the safest form of transport.

It's safer than walking around the city.

It's safer than all sorts of stuff, because we have a set of things that work and we just repeat those things that work.

It's actually the same as business.

There are hundreds of ways to crash a business, thousands of things that slow the thing down, thousands of things that are a disaster.

And there's a narrow set of things, a narrow path that just totally works.

Lesson number eight, your founder opportunity fit.

So once you've seen how real businesses operate from the inside, you are then very much primed to start looking for the right opportunity for your own unique situation.

So let's now talk about ideas.

Almost universally.

The idea that businesses start with almost never becomes the idea that they scale with.

The idea changes so many times.

Like, you can almost start anywhere and end up making contact with customers and you'll end up somewhere different anyway.

The, the idea itself is is almost not that important when it comes to entrepreneurship and business.

Um, and what do i mean by that?

Well, i'll give you the best idea.

The best idea, it's a trillion dollar idea, all right, So here's the trillion pound idea.

Take every old building in London, knock it down and put up a new building.

We're going to be rich.

We're going to be rich, right?

Trillion dollar idea.

Now, it's evident that that's a great idea, right?

Because, like old buildings are falling apart, new buildings would be great and people would prefer like it would be like Dubai.

It would be amazing.

Everything would be brand new.

We know that execution is way more important than the actual idea itself.

It's very easy to have a big idea.

Big ideas are super, super easy.

I'll give you a terrible idea, like just terrible idea sandwiches let's make sandwiches right, so let's every day.

We'll just make little sandwiches.

We'll cut them in half and we'll put them in a little box.

We'll have an open fridge and people can just see the lineup of sandwiches and you can see a little plastic window that tells you what's in the sandwich, and then you can go in and grab that sandwich and take it to the front desk and pay for it and it's just going to be this cool little sandwich shop.

Now that I'm describing Pret a Manger and Pret is a multi hundred million dollar success story, which is a dumb idea.

Like it was at, at no time was it revolutionary to come up with the sandwich shop idea.

Right.

But they just executed it really, really well.

Yeah.

So entrepreneurship is more about business and a business understanding and business execution than it is about a particular idea.

There are better ideas than not.

There are things that ride on good trends and things that don't ride on trends, but it's not hard to see the stuff that rides on trends.

What we're actually looking for, by the way, is not a good idea.

We're looking for something similar to a good idea, but it's a little bit of a nuanced thing and it's called a good idea for you.

And it's called Founder Opportunity Fit.

So we have a term for this in entrepreneurship called Founder Opportunity Fit.

And what you're looking for is, based on your origin story, based on your case studies, based on your background, to find something that seems like a really good next step for you.

So you know, like for you, getting involved in some sort of, let's say, productivity related business some productivity app, some software, some maybe productivity school right, obviously like just a good founder opportunity fit, because you've already got this group of people who would take interest in that.

But if I tried to sneak on in and get in on that opportunity before you and get you out, the result would be vastly different, right.

So let's say I somehow convinced the app that wanted to do a deal with you and I say I'll steal that idea and compete.

So I see what you're doing and I try and compete with it.

There's no chance that that's going to be a good idea for me to do that.

It's a great idea for you to do that, but it's a terrible idea for me to do that.

So the real thing we're looking for is founder opportunity fit.

And there's a few questions that you can ask.

You can say origin, mission and vision.

My origin story is.

What is my background?

What successful case studies have I already gone?

When did I do something special that other people noticed?

When did I transform somebody's life?

When did I do something that people said oh, we should do that more often?

When did I do something that people said that's really valuable.

Thank you for helping me.

When did I do something that people said oh, that was too cheap.

I would have paid twice as much for that.

So that's called your origin story.

Your vision is what do you really find yourself thinking about in the future?

What do you want to see happen in the world?

Not necessarily what rewards do you want?

It's not about like your vision to have a Ferrari, but it's like your vision for the future.

What do you hope happens in the world that you feel like you would work hard towards?

Your mission is what is the highest value activity that you could possibly do throughout a month?

So, for example, I've seen people who work in dentistry, let's say, and most of the month is like drilling teeth and all that sort of stuff.

But occasionally throughout the month they do a special consultation where they talk to someone about, like you know, what's possible with veneers and different things.

And that person then signs up to a 12,000 package and like, yep, $12,000 package.

I want to do that.

And actually the most valuable thing they did through the month was the 15 minute conversation that resulted in 12000 upsell.

So it's like, okay, can we leverage that?

So that's like understanding mission moments.

Mission means the moments of highest value.

So for me personally, going on your podcast is a mission moment, because in this moment I can create value at scale.

If I was sitting at home by myself journaling, much, much less of being on mission.

So origin, mission, vision exploration is a really good one.

Lesson number nine, pain, prize and payment.

So, alongside figuring out your founder opportunity fit through origin, vision and mission, there are a few other things to consider when coming up with business ideas.

I speak to a lot of doctors, actually.

Which I think maybe is a too specific example, but I'd be curious to get your take on this.

Where a lot of doctors follow my stuff and they don't like medicine and they want to leave and they're like okay, I need to come up with a business idea.

But literally the only thing they can think of is helping people get into med school.

Cause that's like, clearly they have expertise in that.

It's like the Dr. Ponzi scheme.

And so, like any one with a shred of entrepreneurialism, when they, as soon as they get into medical school, they tend to think hmm, let me start a courses business that helps people get into med school, and that sort of thing.

But what that results in is that this massive massive, massive oversupply of people helping people get into med school, kind of thing.

And, you know, you're targeting students, so their willingness to pay is kind of low.

And you know, we had someone come to our event the other day and she was like trying to offer a student's personal statement marking service.

And it's like, really, that's price anchored at, like, 10, 20 quid.

So it's really hard to build a business out of that.

And I was struggling to, in that, like, 30-second interaction, just sort of give her a better idea.

Because I was like, yeah, any thoughts on this?

Yeah, so the three things that I look for with a better idea is what problem or pain do you know how to solve?

What prize do you know how to deliver?

Big outcome, big prize, big emotional uplift.

And what do you know to do that people are willing to pay for?

And what people can you get in front of who have big budgets to pay for?

So pain, prize, payment.

So doctors can solve all sorts of pain, not filling in exam forms.

They know about how the body works and they know they also can solve pain of lending credibility to things.

So, for example, a doctor joining the board of some sort of health related startup gives them a massive uplift in credibility because they have a doctor on the team.

So doing your apprenticeship, where you're actually working with a healthcare-related startup as a resident doctor, you are solving a problem for them.

You are actually doing that.

So now when we come to payment, you mentioned here price anchored at 10 an hour.

One of the things that's interesting is that, of all the people you meet, if you were to meet 100 people, one person has 15 of the budget to spend, nine people have 45 of the budget to spend and the other 90 people share in just 40 of the budget to spend.

This gives you a really unintuitive signal about how markets work.

So unless you know that information, the signal that you get from market is that everyone's broke.

And the signal you get from market is everyone's really price conscious um, and the signal that you're picking up is that i should lower my prices and do something cheap.

And there's lots of people and especially too, you sit there and go.

Oh, i can relate to that because that was my story not that long ago.

But if you had x-ray vision and you could have special glasses that reveal people's budget to spend, you'd realize that it's pretty much worth ignoring all the people who've got no money, just spending a lot of time talking to the one person who has 15 of the budget to spend.

Now what that actually looks like in money terms is one person is willing to spend 15 grand, nine people are willing to spend five grand each and everyone else is willing to average out at 445 each.

That's how it actually kind of comes together.

So most people are running around worried about what the 445 people think and they're not paying any attention to what the 15 grand person thinks or what the five grand person thinks.

So we need to do stuff.

That's unintuitive, because ignoring the largest part of the market actually means that you're focusing on the most affluent part of the market.

Lesson number 10 on selling to rich people.

I had a little session with some friends yesterday who are all in the high ticket space of helping Chinese people from abroad get into universities in the UK.

And their programs start at about 7,000 pounds and they go from 7,000 pounds to 15,000 pounds.

And they're selling them entirely through ads and absolutely printing cash.

And these are just like normal people who are in like you know, they're like doctors and dentists and stuff like not even that qualified like in like F1 or F2, the first couple of years post-university.

And they were telling me all about the business and I was just absolutely amazed that the amount of laser focus they have on only the affluent, only the really, really rich people,

They're asking qualification questions in their application forms to look at what school the kid is going to and cross-referencing that to see are the school fees at least £25000 a year or whatever it is.

Because they know that if they only have conversations with those people, they're way more likely to sell someone for a 10000 pound package compared to the other 98 of people that are in state schools or something like that, where they just wouldn't be able to afford that.

And these guys have an absolutely thriving business with amazing results, and they were showing me some of the testimonials and I was just blown away by how good the service was and also how much money they were making, because they were laser focused on the really rich people.

That's it, you know it's.

It's funny because, you know, I've got this friend of mine who's a personal trainer and he's like I'm not sure how to find customers and I'm gonna think about doing all these YouTube videos or Instagram things like can you please just stop by knocking on the doors of this street, just here, because every house on that street is a massive house.

Yeah, All of those people have loads of money.

They all are the types of people who have fitness trainers.

And you would literally pick them all up and they're all in the same location, which makes your life easy.

He's like, I never thought about just knocking on doors in an affluent neighborhood.

Yes, you totally can do that.

Or at least put something through their letterbox or something.

It's like the people who have money.

They can justify the spend on so many things because whatever they're spending, they're freeing up time that they can be earning top money right.

So let's just say theoretically, there is a CEO who makes a million dollars a year, $20,000 a week.

If you can save them a week of time, it's worth $20,000.

Now, you might perform the exact same service for someone who earns $2,000 a week.

And for them, it's worth $2,000.

And for the other guy, it's worth $20,000.

So people see value not based on your situation.

They see value based on their situation.

I'll give you a really great example.

There's a couples therapist, a marriage couples therapist, who her name is Esther Perel and she's very famous and you might have met her.

But she figured out really quickly that couples that are worth more than 30 million their marriage staying together has a higher value than couples who don't have any money right.

So when she goes and sells her services to someone who's got 30 million worth of net worth, she knows that quarter of a million is cheap to keep together a marriage that is 30 million worth of assets or more.

Whereas she knows that quarter of a million is expensive for a newlywed couple that don't have any assets.

Now it's the exact same service.

If she was sitting down with either couple, she'd be delivering the exact same thing, but she knows that it's much more valuable to this couple here.

So she has positioned herself as a key person of influence for that market.

So 90% of the value that people see is based on their situation, not your situation.

But Dan, this is really unfair.

Are you saying we should only sell to the rich?

I want to sell to people.

I want to make my products and services affordable.

Yeah look, so this is about designing a business that it meets your needs.

We talk about lifestyle business.

It's just.

It's just a lot higher chance that it's going to meet your needs if you can have a few clients who are higher paying clients.

Like smaller number of clients is easier to look after.

Higher value is more profitable.

So this is just about making design choices so like, for example, you take your home right and Do you just randomly put the cheapest television in your home and the cheapest furniture and the cheapest everything and you try and cram as much furniture into your house as possible.

Or do you make selective design choices because you want it to reflect the type of home that you want to live in?

You make design choices, you say okay, I don't necessarily want 10 TVs at the cheapest rate, I'd rather have one nice TV.

I don't want 10 couches that you know that as cheap as I can get them, I want one really nice one.

Well, it's the same.

When we build a business, we make design choices that result in having a business that we want to live in now.

Separate to that, you can do all sorts of things once you've got that.

So, for example, I go into prison and I do some mentoring with people in prison to try and help them to not re-offend.

Now I don't have to have a business doing that, I can just do that because it's something I want to do.

I create content for startups and that content is freely available on the internet and I just make it freely available.

I don't charge for it.

So, For example, I have one one-to-one client who has a business doing 200 million a year.

He pays me a massive amount for me to be available for conversations throughout the month.

It's worth him paying that for one-to-one time with me because a couple of key decisions per year makes that fee irrelevant, but it's completely out of the grasp of most startups.

But because I have a client like that, I can then spend my time giving away content for free or doing all those things.

So the key here is that, when it comes to our business which is gonna be our money-making thing we're going to make design choices that result in a business that we're really happy to run and that's really profitable.

Is it fair?

No.

And no element of life is fair.

Is it fair that you were born in this particular moment in time?

Is it fair?

None of your ancestors got access to YouTube.

If your ancestors were looking at your life right now, they'd say it's incredibly unfair that Ali got to be born at the right time and we didn't get to be born at the right time.

If we say just purely and simply born with geography, why is it, you know?

Is it fair?

You got born in the geography you got born in when other people got born in less favorable geography.

Nothing about life is fair.

Get over it.

I think one thing that really surprises people until you point it out is that Like, let's say, you're trying to make 100000.

You could sell one thing for 100,000.

Or you could sell 10 things for 10,000 each.

Or you could sell 100 things for 1,000.

Or you could sell...

100,000 things for $1.

And I think until people have really thought about this, they think all of these are the same level of difficulty, that it's just as easy or just as hard to sell 100000 copies of a thing for 1 as it is to sell one thing for 100000.

What's been your realization of the relative ease or difficulty or the trade-offs associated with high price versus low price, high volume versus low volume?

Yeah, so I mean, if we think about this as like an x-axis of value and volume, you know, and it creates a big kind of like X graph, at the extremes you end up with problems.

So at the extreme of a hundred thousand to one client is a job.

Now you're stuck in a job and if that one client disappears, for whatever reason, they call you into the office and say i'm really sorry, we're restructuring, your job is no longer with us, best of luck with your life.

You go from a hundred thousand to zero in one meeting.

So that has a massive problem.

Now if you're in a job, you feel the pressure of that problem all the time.

You feel the oh, my goodness, i don't want that problem to exist.

So you think oh, business would be better.

And the mistake you might make is to look at the other end and the other extreme.

100000 things for a dollar.

Now, volume is insanely hard to do.

The hardest businesses in the world are volume-based businesses selling cups, selling drinks, selling food, perishable products that you have to sell enormous amounts of them.

I mean, I just want to... facepalm for every entrepreneur that says oh i'm going to leave my hundred thousand dollar job to do a mexican burrito stand and i'm you know it's like have you figured out that you need to be selling 1500 of these burritos every day to just pay for like the basics you know this is this is gonna be a like very very hard business you know people say oh I saw these two entrepreneurs who is doing cans of drinks and they're doing like an energy sports drink it's like you have no idea the only reason they can do that is because they have 10 million followers between them without those followers this would be impossible this is like trying to throw a rock at a plane or something like that like you and you are fighting so much gravity this is never gonna happen yeah so the balance is roughly speaking the balance is selling something that is between one and ten thousand dollars to between ten and a hundred people so like the easiest businesses to get started with right for your first business and I'm not saying you stay in this for a long period of time but it tends to be ten to a hundred customers with one to ten thousand per customer or even two to twenty thousand per customer these are often called agency businesses or services businesses and you know these businesses tend to be the perfect balance to go from having a job to having a business it's the right step in the right direction rather than doing one client pays a hundred you know three clients pay forty now okay that's pretty cool we've now got a better uplift here or you know 20 clients play 20 great we can make two sales a month at 20 grand a client right happy days we can you know we can we can do something along those lines so yeah those those businesses tend to be way less risk way more likely to succeed nice all right so if you enjoyed this video then you'll probably also get a ton of value from this one over here where i interviewed my friend sahel and we turned it into a case study of how he quit his corporate consulting job to start a business that now generates 1.2 million dollars a year in recurring revenue and we talked about all of the 12 steps in detail that he took to get there so check out that video over there if you're interested in a very long very useful case study thank you so much for watching i'll see you

[The Ultimate Roadmap to Building Your First Business from Scratch]-[How I Would Build A Business in 2026 (If I had to start over)]

📋 Summary

From Employee Mindset to Entrepreneurial Freedom: A Strategic Roadmap

1. Deconstructing the Schooling Myth

2. The Entrepreneurial Mindset Shift

3. Redefining Risk: The Asymmetrical Advantage

4. The 766 Apprenticeship

5. Founder-Opportunity Fit and the Power of Niche

6. The Strategy of Selling to the Affluent

7. The Digital Age vs. Industrialized Economy

Conclusion

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

[The Ultimate Roadmap to Building Your First Business from Scratch]-[How I Would Build A Business in 2026 (If I had to start over)]

📋 Summary

From Employee Mindset to Entrepreneurial Freedom: A Strategic Roadmap

1. Deconstructing the Schooling Myth

2. The Entrepreneurial Mindset Shift

3. Redefining Risk: The Asymmetrical Advantage

4. The 766 Apprenticeship

5. Founder-Opportunity Fit and the Power of Niche

6. The Strategy of Selling to the Affluent

7. The Digital Age vs. Industrialized Economy

Conclusion

Deep Learning with ListenLeap

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

ListenLeap Brings You Into Real Context Learning