The Proven, Reliable Path to Earn $1M (Step By Step) | Ali Abdaal

In this video we're gonna take you through a step-by-step blueprint to building your first business and scaling it to a million dollars in revenue.

It's a framework that I learned from one of my most important business mentors, Daniel Priestley, who built his first multimillion dollar business at the age of 21.

And since then has scaled multiple seven and eight figure businesses from absolutely nothing.

There's a process for doing this.

Process number one is the apprenticeship.

I'm gonna do something that starts and finishes in 90 days.

Why 90 days?

Why is that important?

Because you need to do a value creation cycle.

It starts with founder opportunity fit.

So that is you finding an opportunity that's good for you.

How do we come up with an idea like what's the process?

The process is to come up with 10 ideas.

What happens next?

We're going to go out and we're going to try and find a collaborator.

How important is that?

In your experience, it's everything, oh man, nice.

What would you say is a realistic timeline?

I genuinely believe you can do this really a lot faster than people think.

And so hopefully, what this video will show you is that starting a business and even scaling it to something like a million dollars in revenue is really just a step-by-step process that anyone can follow.

And when I say anyone, I really do mean literally anyone no matter what your external circumstances, no matter what else is going on in your life.

You actually could choose to follow this step-by-step process if, for example, you have a job and a family and not that much spare time.

Maybe it'll take you longer than someone else who's like a 21-year-old student who's able to grind for 80 hours a week.

But it's really still the same step-by-step process that gets you to the same destination, as long as we're a little bit agnostic about how much time it's actually going to take us to get there.

And so, with that said, I hope you enjoyed this episode of Freedom Fridays, the ongoing series on the channel, where we explore how to actually physically work towards financial freedom so that you can live life on your own terms.

Step one, the 766 apprenticeship.

All right, so this is Dan's framework.

So basically, anything below the line is the stuff that you are doing to prepare to start your business.

And then anything above the line is the stuff you're doing to actually build your business.

And everything starts with what Dan calls the 766 apprenticeship, where you basically go and work for a profitable small business.

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.

Three things that you're trying to get commercial awareness, self-awareness and access to resources.

So commercial awareness is you understand how businesses work.

Self-awareness, you understand your own strengths and weaknesses and who you need to have around you.

And resources, you know how to get the things that you need to start the business.

So that's what you're trying to get from an apprenticeship.

How necessary is the apprenticeship?

It was massively valuable for me.

I have seen so many people who have worked.

Look, I had a mentor.

I did two years working for a mentor and then I went off and started a business that did seven figures in its first year and eight figures in the third year.

So like I wouldn't have done that at 22, 23 years old had I not had a mentor.

I've seen many of my young employees go off and start seven figure businesses before the age of 30 because they worked for me.

So I just know that there's something magical that's happening in that mentorship.

I think this is a very underrated aspect of entrepreneurship, because if you are currently feeling imposter syndrome about oh my God, I don't know how to start a business, you probably have never really worked within a small business.

I have so many people who are in my team right now and who've been in my team in the past, who this is their first time working for a small business.

And then immediately, they get this like massive firmware update in their own mind.

Because maybe they were previously working as a cog in a massive corporate like corporation, where you really don't get a feel for how the business is run.

But if you join a team that has four people, five people, 10 people, 12 people, you literally understand like oh, this is how the money is made.

This is how the products are made.

This is how sales are done.

This is how content is done.

Oh, okay. this isn't too hard.

I could probably kind of do this myself further down the line.

So I think there is enormous value in doing the apprenticeship.

But anyway, whether you do or don't do the apprenticeship, let's now move on to step number two, which is the 90 day side hustle.

Then there's the side hustle.

Now the side hustle is the entrepreneurial test where you're just testing, can I do this?

And the key with the side hustle is open and shut in 90 days.

So you might say I'm gonna put on a workshop and I'm gonna get 30 people to pay 100 a head And I'm just going to do like from starting out to finishing the workshop.

I'm going to do that.

I'm going to make a few thousand dollars.

I'm just going to see if I can do it.

And it's all going to be open and shut in 90 days.

I'm not describing this as a business.

I'm not telling people this is an ongoing thing.

I'm going to do something that starts and finishes in 90 days.

Why 90 days?

Why is that important?

Because you need to do a value creation cycle, a value creation loop, and then to be able to stop and evaluate, whether you like it or not.

What's a value creation loop?

Um, so a value creation loop is going from an idea to completion, where you've exited the like, exited the business or finished up, and then you can pause and reflect.

What you want to do is also take the pressure off that this has to be some perfect business idea.

So, for example, in my side hustle days i I bought 100 roses and I dressed up in a tuxedo and I went door to door and I sold my 100 roses.

Now I bought the roses from a wholesaler for 40 cents each and I sold them door to door for $4 each.

So I made some money.

Now, that was great money at the time.

I was a teenager, but it was about having an idea, finding a supplier, going out, taking a small risk.

I think it might have cost me $40 to buy the wholesale roses and sell them for $400. so pretty pretty cool right I also ran some nightclub parties so I have found a venue that was willing to put on a host a nightclub party I promoted it I filled the room we ran the party I made the money and then that was it it was done so I ran my nightclub parties objection your honor you know I'm i've got a job and my job pays 100 grand a year and i don't want to screw around trying to sell roses on the side like that's just you know that would be such a waste of time the right idea like yeah yeah but you might say i'm going to take on two consulting clients and i'm just going to do a 90-day consultation where during that 90 days i'm going to get paid 15 grand to deliver a piece of work you know I'm gonna create a report I'm gonna do something you know I might create a set of videos for them right but it's gonna be open and shut in 90 days I was a I was a teenager when I was doing side hustles so you know it's not like I could have done a consulting project or something like that but so for me my side hustles selling roses running nightclub parties those were appropriate When I was slightly older, 21, 22, I did a tiny little side hustle where I did some sales training.

So I actually found some companies that, because I'd been doing appointment setting and sales, I found a few little companies that wanted to learn what I knew and I was a few steps ahead and I actually did some sales training days.

And I was like 21 years old, with a little group of people around the table and I was teaching them some of my sales skills and I was making actual calls in front of them and showing them how I would make a sale.

And we were just going through it.

And I got a few people to pay me to do that open and shut side hustle.

So it can be, it can be scrappy or it could be consultative or it could be, you know.

So it's it's project based.

It's essentially it's a valuable project.

And would you start like let with you know if you were to have any business idea, or if someone were to have any business idea, is it worth doing the side hustle experiment for 90 days just to see what happens?

It's like a validation process.

That's it.

Validation is such an important word in entrepreneurship.

We want fast, cheap experiments because when you make an idea for a business, it is in the absence of customer involvement.

And when customers get involved, you discover things that you had no idea they wanted, or that they objected to, or any of that sort of stuff.

I would say the best best, best business idea is probably 40 of like you probably get to 40 of your awareness of what a customer actually wants.

Like if you were to be the most unbelievably planned out person who really intimately knew the market.

You probably know about 40 of the things that you need to know.

And only through interacting with customers do you get the other 60%.

So you have to do fast, cheap experiments.

You also have to detach your ego from those experiments.

Let's imagine you are actually a scientist and someone paid you, as a scientist, to conduct an experiment.

Do people want spicy toothpaste?

Like a lot of people like mint and they like sweet, but we've never experimented with savory flavors of toothpaste.

So let's say Tabasco flavor toothpaste or chicken stock flavor toothpaste, right?

So you laugh.

But maybe there's this entire garlic and uh, rosemary cheese and onion crisp flavored toothpaste, right you?

You might say there's some some, there might be a group of people who love Tabasco sauce and they want Tabasco flavored toothpaste.

So um, so the thing is we want to say okay, we're going to go, and so like if, if I threw that at you and said your job is to figure that out, now you've got a scientific background, you would probably say well, I better go with some fast, cheap experiments.

So, out of curiosity, what would be a couple of fast, cheap experiments that you would go with for chili-flavored toothpaste?

Okay, nice.

So firstly, I would probably just get some toothpaste and just add Tabasco to it.

And now I've manufactured my own sort of Tabasco-flavored toothpaste.

And then I would go out somewhere where there's a lot of foot traffic.

And I just offer free samples, to be like try out our Tabasco flavored toothpaste.

Completely free sample with like some tiny ass like disposable toothbrush that you can buy for like five cents or whatever.

I just get a hundred of those.

You know, people grab a toothbrush, grab the toothpaste.

And I have someone there recording their reactions if they're open to it.

And we see what happens.

And we do that in like a day. amazing so like you don't need you don't need a manufacturer you wouldn't need to talk to any like major expense you just buy the most bland flavored toothpaste you can add tabasco to it it's it's what's called directionally correct right so it's it's not the finished product but it's a directionally correct product so you essentially go out on the street now here's a question i've got for you How many people would you have to survey for you to intuitively think you had some sort of statistical significance?

Like.

For example, if you surveyed five and five people said I don't like it, would you immediately rule out after five?

No, I think 30 to 50 would be my rough.

Yeah.

So the truth is that the the numbers, the two numbers that work is 30 and 150.

Okay, so when dealing with population sizes, we can get our first sigma at about 30 samples and then we can get our second sigma at 150 samples.

And what we're talking about here is we can infer something from 30 samples and we can infer a lot more from 150 samples, right?

So, for example, we might see if, like if we got 30 people to brush their teeth with chili flavor and uh, three people liked it and said they'd be open to it, we say oh, about 10 percent of people uh, are interested in this.

Right, if we did 150 and we got 20 out of 150, we go oh, it's higher than 10 percent, right we?

So initially it was 10, but now we go, it's actually as much as 12 15, so we can actually start to fine-tune from 150.

So for entrepreneurs, we need to know that when we conduct tests fast, cheap experiments, 30 people is the minimum for telling us anything at all and 150 is for fine-tuning as well.

This reminds me of when I my first vaguely successful business was when I was 18.

And I had the idea that I would teach courses to help people ace the BMAT entrance exam for medical school.

And I was like, I'd been sort of dabbling with business ideas for like a few years at that point.

So I was sort of well versed in the thing around fast, deep experiments around like okay, let's just do this.

So like, The following weekend, I got some of my brother's friends to come over to my house and I prepared like a PowerPoint and projected it onto our living room TV and offered them the thing, a one-day course in the BMAT for like 50 pounds or something.

And I had like six people in the room and I enjoyed it and they enjoyed it.

And so I was like okay, six is not amazing, but like this was a good like proof of concept that this is a thing that I actually could charge people for.

Yeah, and especially, look, if you do get a result from six, but here's what I'm trying to avoid.

I speak to so many people that go.

Oh, I spoke to six people and nobody went ahead, so therefore it's not a good idea.

And you probably got lucky with your first six.

But I really tell people, you don't know anything until you've spoken to 30.

Like 30 sales meetings is my minimum.

Now I actually know a billionaire, you met him actually, you went to his house with me.

So I know a billionaire who came up with an idea for a new piece of software.

And his first thing that he did.

His time is incredibly valuable.

First thing he did was 30 one to one sales meetings, where he personally did 30 one on one sales meetings to see how customers would react.

Most people who were doing a sales meeting with it had no idea they were talking to a billionaire.

And he was just talking to them as a software salesperson.

And he was just seeing if he could sell this software.

And he was just finding out what customers thought.

So even a billionaire knows 30 sales meetings one to one face to face is kind of where it's at.

Now, if you are thinking of building a business, then one of the most interesting business models is software.

And this is something that me and my team have been getting into for the last 12 months or so.

So far, we've launched two apps.

One of them, VoicePal.

We launched about 12 months ago and that's already at 70000 in monthly recurring revenue.

And we've also just launched Momentum, which is a habit tracker with accountability built in to help you stay way more consistent with your habits.

And there is one tool that we have been using throughout the entire development process and that is Lovable.

Who are very kindly sponsoring this video?

Now, what Lovable does is that it massively lowers all of the barriers that are involved with creating software.

Essentially, even if you don't know how to code, you just describe what you want to build, and then Lovable's AI will help you create actual working applications.

So, whether you just want to whip up a tool for your business, or if you want to build some kind of app for a problem that you've noticed, or even just as something fun to experiment with,

And the way that my team and I use.

Lovable is that it's an intrinsic part of our prototyping process.

So essentially we'll come up with an idea for an app like VoicePal or Momentum.

And then back in the day, if you wanted to make a prototype, you would have had to draw boxes on a page in like Photoshop or Figma or something.

Whereas now what we can do is basically just like have a conversation with Lovable.

And then within seconds, it gives you a clickable prototype of the thing that you've described.

Now this is incredibly helpful because now what used to take hours to try and visualize like a particular screen or whatever, now is literally done within seconds.

And it massively speeds up our iteration process when we are prototyping and developing.

If you already know how to code, then Lovable gives you absolute superpowers.

And if you don't yet know how to code, then Lovable is a great way to get started with being able to create stuff without actually needing to know the ins and outs of coding.

So if you would like to give Lovable a try, you can start completely for free with five credits a day.

So there's literally zero risk in playing around.

And if you do want to upgrade, you can head over to lovable.dev.

And if you use the code A-L-I-Y-T, like Ali YouTube A-L-I-Y-T, then that will give you 20 off the pro plan.

So thank you lovable, for sponsoring this video and for helping us out in our own development process for our apps.

And let's get back to the video.

Step three, idea generation.

Okay.

So step three is sort of at this inflection point in our graph, because here we are going to talk about idea generation.

Do we come up with an idea like what's the process?

So the process is to come up with ten ideas and then to rank those ideas by does this solve a problem that people experience?

Does this deliver a remarkable outcome that people really, really want, and would people be willing to the people that I'm selling to do?

They have a high disposable income?

Are they willing to pay for this?

Can they justify a high return on investment?

So in that sense, our toothpaste idea would score low on all of these fronts.

Score low on all of these.

Because toothpaste is price anchored.

Even a billionaire wouldn't pay more than about five quid for a toothpaste.

It's not that painful a problem.

No one's complaining, oh my God, I wish the toothpaste had better flavors.

And what was the last one?

Dream outcome.

It's not a massive transformation.

It's not delivering some amazing outcome.

But still, I mean, it's an idea, cool.

So we're we're coming up with ten ideas and we're ranking them in terms of payment, pain and price.

Yep nice, yep.

So we're coming up with so.

So first we rank those, we're gonna focus on the first couple of like two or three, and we're just gonna do fast, cheap experiments.

So 30 test, 150 test, and then we're gonna go with, given that we came up with all ten of these, we're probably going to then apply filter, like if there's a, if there's a tiebreaker, is there one you're more passionate about?

Is there one that you have a better story for?

Do you have a better background associated?

So we're trying to find founder opportunity fit, and this is really at this early stage of the journey here.

So, founder opportunity fit.

We're coming up with 10 ideas, we're picking the best one, we're conducting some opportunity related testing and then founder related testing.

So founder is your passion, your backstory, your origin mission vision, your opportunity testing is 30 test, 150 test fast, cheap experiments.

Um, how does this score on pain prize, payment?

So that's how founder opportunity fit uh, stage.

All right, before we go any further, let's just confirm exactly what Dan means by origin, mission and vision in the context of coming up with ideas that have a good founder opportunity fit.

My origin story is what is my background?

What successful case studies have I already got?

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 um 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 12000 package and like yep, 12000 package.

I wanna 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.

Um 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 uh, journaling much, much less of being on mission.

Um so origin mission vision, exploration is a is a really good one, Interesting.

Questions.

So at this point in the process of idea generation, should we be thinking about like the vehicle?

So, like I'm going to sell a course for X, or should we focus it on the, I'm going to help people do get X, like how?

Yeah, that kind of thing.

A really good idea is this concept called cloning, which is to understand what businesses are already successful, that are very close, that are adjacent to what you're trying to do.

It's really, really powerful to look around the market.

You want to enter and say what are the examples that are the closest examples to the lifestyle business?

I would want.

It's often the case that in any market there's three four, five different competitors and you only have to be slightly better than the other competitors to be massively out ahead.

So I'll give you an example.

In my local area there are a number of veterinary clinics and there's like one that just stands out and there's a few things that they do really well which is built into the floor.

They have a set of scales so that when you bring your pet in it's super easy to stand on the scales, weigh the pet And like that's just like effortlessly done.

It's also really clean.

They have little treats available for the pet straight away when you arrive.

There's tiny little things that they're doing that just make them that slightly bit better as a veterinary practice.

And that's why everyone kind of goes there and we pay subscriptions to them.

They've figured out how to get our subscription revenue.

Everything's included for a subscription, so like it's just.

It's not like they reinvented a veterinary clinic.

They just figured out okay, we can also be a veterinary clinic in here, but we've just figured out three things that make us a little bit better.

So so we don't have to be revolutionary, we can actually just be evolutionary.

And it's really smart to go and look at like Like you might say oh, I'm going to do this in this particular industry.

Is there anything close that is like, you know, worth cloning?

Like, if you had to pick some clonable businesses, what would you clone to try and figure out what's close?

In school, it's really bad to copy.

In business, we copy all the time.

It might surprise people to hear what you just said because then people might think that if there are competitors, that means I should not pursue this business idea.

To a degree, that is true if you don't intend to find something that you can be better about.

Now, better is very subjective.

I'll tell you one thing that always blows my mind when it comes to business training.

Entrepreneurs don't wanna learn, typically, from billionaires.

It's really strange, but what I've discovered is that a classic mistake that is being made in the entrepreneur training space is that there's a bunch of Silicon Valley companies that go out and find a bunch of billionaires to be the faculty.

And then the business flops and fails.

And this has happened like a dozen times.

And what I've noticed on the sidelines is that entrepreneurs who are starting out are not so interested in learning from Richard Branson and Reid Hoffman and all the usual suspects.

They actually really like learning from people who have a seven figure or an eight figure business, who are just a few steps ahead.

And then they're interested in learning from the billionaires, but only once they get to that next level up.

So something that's interesting is that you can make a business more relatable.

So you might say aha, what I've discovered is that my advantage is that I'm actually much more closely aligned.

So let's take the health and fitness space.

It might be the case that people don't even want to learn health and fitness from someone who's ripped and has always been ripped and has been an athlete and who's six foot two and who's like like, like shredded.

They might actually like to.

There's a market of people who might say oh 45, and I want to learn from a guy who's 45, with kids, who was overweight and lost weight and has been able to keep it off.

He's not shredded, all right, but he's actually been able to like he's more relatable.

So there's these other factors that like if you're competing with Joe Wicks, you may just simply be more relatable than Joe Wicks right, if that makes sense.

So you can compete on relatability.

You can compete on price.

Not a great one.

It's not great.

Ideally, price is something you want to try and establish price points.

You kind of want to be in the higher band because that's where profitability happens.

As soon as you lower price, you have to massively go through volumes.

It used to be that small businesses could be more cheaply run.

But actually in the current economy, bigger businesses, you know, can have 10 person teams as well.

So it doesn't necessarily mean that a massive business has thousands of employees, you know, that are dead weight.

It actually can be that.

You're, you know.

So you know you ideally want to be competing on something other than price.

Nice, So we've got price relatability.

What other factors can we be thinking of when it comes to sort of looking at business?

How can we be better?

So connectivity.

So, for example, if you're competing with someone who's famous, but they're so famous that there's no way someone gets a chance to actually have any one-on-one time with them whatsoever.

So that's called competing on experience.

So there's the experience of having some one-to-one time with that person.

It may not scale, but for a lifestyle business, it may not need to scale.

So you know like, for example, I could learn fitness from Joe Wicks, but I can't learn fitness one-on-one from Joe Wicks.

Whereas my local PT, I could have some one-to-one time and also some of the other digital tools as well.

Yeah.

Step four, the two person team.

Okay.

So now we're moving into this $10,000 a month phase.

And the next step in Dan's framework is all about building a two person scout team to get the business off the ground. okay so now what we're gonna do is we're going to go out and we're gonna try and find a collaborator so this could be a co-founder it could be an assistant a sales assistant it could be a head of customer success we want a plus one yeah so how important is that because I in your experience it's everything it's the ability like there's so much value in just nattering so like if you and I were co-founding a business let's say the two of us independently we're off doing our own thing and we're working on it on our own like there's just this feeling of like loneliness and struggle and all this if you and I got together and started a business and every Monday morning we're having a nattering session about it's more fun but your idea is going to get compounded with my idea I'm going to come up with something we're going to lock horns on a few things as a result of locking horns we'll actually get to a better outcome so also we can just delegate so I can say I'm gonna go make 30 sales calls can you go and see if you figure out that customer success issue that's going on and at the end of the day we both regroup and now two major problems have been solved right as opposed to on day one I have to make 30 phone calls then I have to stop doing that and go do a customer success type deep dive and it's just like oh but Dan like I don't give away equity Yeah, I...

Um, well, for starters, you're not giving away equity.

You're paying for a service with equity.

So your equity is not worth a lot at the early stages, but you're paying for a particular service, and the service you're paying for is a faster growing business that's worth more.

Um, so you'll.

So if I said to you, you can either have uh, you can either have a hundred percent of a tent, that is like on the side of a highway.

Or you can have 50% of a beautiful house that's in a nice neighborhood.

Far better to have 50% of a house.

So it's just like you can have 100% of your tent if you want your tent.

It's not worth anything to anybody, but it's yours.

Or you can actually build something of value.

So what you're paying for is you're paying for speed, value, and you're paying for that with equity.

Now the other thing too.

The way equity often works is that it's not you own everything, and then you're giving away half.

It's that you own something, they own something, and you're mashing those things together.

So let's think about it in a different way.

Let's say you and I were neighbors.

You've got a house worth a million, I've got a house worth a million, and together we're neighbors.

Now, if we got together and said hey, if we combined our blocks of land, we would have a development site.

We could put a 10-story building on this development site, but we have to work together.

Why don't we have 50% of a development site together?

Now, in that example, did you give me anything?

No, I've contributed my million.

You've contributed your million.

So on day one, I have a million, you have a million house.

On day two, I have 50% of a two million block of land that is two houses.

Then we get zoning permission and we have a development site that's now worth four million.

I have 50% of a four million development site.

Then we put up the development and it's worth 12 million and we pay off our debt, now all of that sort of stuff, and now i have 50 of something that's worth 10 million.

So now i have gone from having something that was worth 1 million to something that was worth 5 million, but i only could do that because i partnered with you.

Yeah now ultimately, did i give anything away?

No, I just simply contributed my piece, you contributed your piece.

So at no point did anyone lose anything.

So when we think about having 50 equity and 50 equity, it's like no, we're actually contributing something each.

Yeah, I guess someone might object to that, saying that like well, if I start my business and I managed to do it myself, I could then, once it's sort of making some money, could hire someone and just pay them a salary.

Totally could.

Yeah.

And if you can do that, great.

When I say a collaborator, you could have an executive assistant, you could have a customer success agent, you could have a salesperson.

And if you can get that person to contribute without sharing equity, through some other means like paying them happy days yeah so what you're doing is you're you as an entrepreneur you've got multiple forms of currency one form of currency is your equity another form of currency is cash so you can just choose do I want to pay for this service with my equity or don't want to pay for this service with my cash Yeah, and I guess there's a third currency, which is your own time, which is that like, yeah, if you really wanted to, you could sort of work overtime and try and do the sales calls yourselves and this, that, and the other, but either way, you're paying for it.

You're paying for it somehow.

Yeah, exactly that.

And also, it doesn't have to be 50-50.

So, for example, if you're a doctor and it's a medical-related business and you want someone to be a salesperson now you can't afford their sales commissions.

You might say, hey look, I'm going to let you earn into 5 or I'm going to let you earn into 7, because those first couple of hundred grand worth of sales commissions we're actually going to credit those against equity.

Now, you're not giving up 50%, you're letting someone earn into a smaller percentage.

Step five, minimum viable product versus core offering.

All right, so what happens next?

So we've got our two person scout team.

I call this a scout team because they're still scouting the opportunity.

And we're bouncing between having what we call an MVP, a minimum viable product, which is just testing, towards actually having a core offering which is something to sell.

Okay, so your minimum viable product could actually just be a landing page where people can give you their email address or their phone number to join a waiting list.

So this basically means that you don't have to create anything before you start collecting leads or signals of interest that people actually want your thing.

So, for example, if you're writing a book, you can say hey, I'm writing a book, sign up here and you'll be one of the first to hear about it when it's published.

And this will give you a sense of like.

You know, if someone's not going to give you their email address for a free thing to be on a wait list, they're probably not going to want to buy your book.

And so it's a good way of validating the idea.

But your minimum viable product doesn't have to just be like a landing page.

It could also be a dinner party or an online event or an in-person event or a free trial to something like you know, we offered trial versions of voicepal and momentum, which are two of our apps, when we launched the apps and those were sort of like the minimum viable product version of those as a way of validating demand, that like, is there actually a market for the thing?

And also getting some people into the door to be the first to test it out.

Oh, by the way, if you are interested in checking out the apps that my wife and i are co-founding, we've got voicepal, which is an ai writing app, and we've got momentum, which is an app to help you stay consistent with energizing habits.

Both of them are linked in the video description.

So now we move on to step six, which is one-to-one sales.

Remember that a business comes into existence when you have a customer, not when you have something to sell.

So we're very focused on customer acquisition.

One-on-one sales.

What if I'm selling like a 10 pound thing?

Yeah, one-on-one sales.

Okay, like going out, i guess, with my bmat course back in the day.

I'm like messaging my brother's friends on facebook that i know are applying to medicine.

Be like hey joshua, i'm holding a course for the ucat next weekend.

Do you want to join me?

Yeah, you could do.

You could do dms.

You could do texting.

Yeah um, but it's still.

You were texting people one to one, right?

Yeah yeah, so it's still one-on-one sales.

Yeah, so it's one-to-one communication, sending out DMS.

Now what you could do is you could add to this with daily social posting as a way of getting people who are interested to have one-on-one sales.

Yeah, all right, so you could actually find people who are interested through the algorithm, but ultimately reaching out to people one-on-one sales, whatever it is.

Now, if you're selling something that's ten, ten dollars, You know that one-on-one sales is not going to pay the bills, but what you're really acknowledging here is that you're still in the learning phase.

So the more that you can have one-to-one interactions, because customers will tell you stuff.

They'll say, oh, I really love that, but it's blue.

Well, why is that a problem?

Well, I always want it to be red.

Okay, well, then we'll make it in red, like whatever.

Or, oh, it's a six-month training program.

I can only do five months.

Can I do it if it was a five-month, okay, yeah, it's a five-month program.

So you're talking and interacting with customers because a few of them are gonna say stuff and you'll start picking up on.

Oh wait, a second.

Everyone wants it in red in five months, not six months in blue.

So it's like, okay, cool, I'll make those changes.

People are really scared of the word, of the idea of one-on-one sales, especially the word sales.

Any thoughts on this?

I get over it.

It is just a big part of business that you need to communicate your value with others.

It's so funny.

The higher up you get in any job, you're in a sales role.

CEO of a public listed company is in a sales role.

You're just selling investors and you're selling people all the time.

If you end up as a senior role in HR, you're selling people to come and join the company.

You're out there sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, come and join the team.

If you end up in a senior marketing role, you'll sell, sell, sell, sell, sell all the time.

Like any role, like if you're the president of the United States of America, you're selling ideas all the time.

You're just selling, pitching, pitching, pitching, sell, sell, sell.

I spoke to the Major General of the Royal Marines.

And we talked about how everything turns into a sales role.

And he said, being the Major General of the Royal Marines is just sales all the time.

So regardless of what you do, you're in sales.

Being partner at a law firm, being partner at a consulting firm.

You're in sales.

Being a doctor.

In a sense, one of the biggest issues that doctors have is compliance, like people sticking to the treatment plan.

So how much of your role is just selling them on the idea that they must stick with this treatment plan?

And the doctors that make money are doing private practice, which is entirely a sales problem.

In sales.

And unbelievably, the medical like the GP appointment is a sales call like like what seems to be the problem mmm right oh this is the problem what symptoms have you experienced what do you think might be causing this right symptoms causes okay are you ready for me to prescribe a treatment plan right which is my solution that you're gonna buy right with either time or energy or money but essentially those same things of what are your what are your problems and what are the underlying insights as to why those problems exist yeah okay here's a treatment plan here's what we're gonna do about it then very much that is that is a very much a consultative sales process nice okay two questions firstly but Dan I don't want to be a salesperson I want to do the work I don't want to sell the work yeah so with entrepreneurship you elevate up out of the work but well the truth is as an entrepreneur you'll probably not also do the work either entrepreneurs tend to end up being conductors in the orchestra and we don't play any of the instruments we conduct the orchestra it's very very much the case that you will elevate out of all of this and you won't be in any of the roles but we start out doing all the roles we start out figuring stuff out so we we figure out how to get a customer and then we figure out how to deliver a customer and in the early days we're very hands-on with all of that how does one do a sales call yeah so when you're talking to a customer it's um it follows a pattern what's your current situation what are you trying to achieve what's your biggest obstacle what's in the way right those are the three things that you're always trying to find out so where are you now where do you want to be what's in the way Wait, so I'm not just telling them to buy my thing.

I'm being facetious here, but I feel like people have an idea of sales being like, oh God, I've just got to tell them to buy buy, buy.

Like, sell me this pen and all that shit.

Yeah, no, well, I've never sold that way.

So where are you now?

Where do you want to be?

What's in the way?

So just asking those questions typically and it often is actually in fairness is often preceded with like before that it often is hey look, this is what I'm up to, this is what I'm doing.

So directionally, this is what I'm talking to you about.

Of course, that's in there and it's a good idea because, and all that sort of stuff.

So in the appointment setting phase, you might say I'm working on working on a business where we're we're launching software that helps video editors and we've got this, we've already got Ali Abdaal's team signed up and blah blah, blah.

Can I show you, tell you a bit about what it is that we're up to?

We're doing so.

Then you would do a little mini presentation.

So we're doing software and it's all of that.

Would it be okay if I ask you a few questions, just so I can kind of marry up the features and all that sort of stuff?

So um, where are you now, what?

Where are you uh, trying to get to relating to this thing?

Yeah, what's your biggest obstacle?

And then, if you think it's appropriate, you always ask permission can i share with you some insights and some potential solutions that we would offer?

All right, so insights i'm going to share with them.

What have i learned about their situation?

What, what is my um, what is my take on their situation?

So i just talk broadly and then i'd say here's what i would do and here's what we can offer you to do that.

So insights, methods, solutions.

So I'm gonna basically say so it looks like you're doing this this, this and this, but you're not using some software and it's gonna take you a long time to do this.

As you scale up, that's gonna become even more of a problem.

And putting in some software now is going to alleviate that now, but it's also going to allow you to scale.

So this is the insights.

And then solution is, so we've got this solution.

It's all packaged up for 49 a month.

It includes this, this, this, and this.

It really connects with what you were saying about here and the obstacle that you're currently facing.

This is how it does it.

And then say how does that sound?

They go sounds pretty good.

I say great.

So what we like to do normally is to do a three month trial period so that you can see that it is actually working for you.

And if it's not working in those three months, then we just leave it there.

And if it goes, at the end of three months we do a review and then and then we go forward and we leave it in place.

Sounds good?

That's a sales call.

Okay right, that feels it seems a lot less scary.

Then yeah, just a conversation.

Yeah yeah, and also like anything, anything feels scary if you've never done it before.

Like, at one point, driving a car was terrifying.

At one point, getting on a bicycle was terrifying.

At one point, standing on a stage and talking is terrifying.

Um, you know, if you're a doctor, at one point, seeing blood was probably terrifying.

So like, all of this stuff is terrifying.

Do you know?

What I've learned is 30 samples also gives you confidence.

So when you do something 30 times, you level up in confidence.

30 sales calls.

At the end of 30 sales calls you feel very differently about sales than at the start of 30 calls.

And then 150, gets you to the next level of confidence, right?

It's funny that these are called confidence intervals.

And it's the first confidence interval is 30.

And then the second confidence interval is 150.

So don't expect to have confidence without reaching a confidence interval.

So 30 or 150.

Okay, really cool.

Um, we've got a bunch of students in our sort of 1k challenge we're going to make your first thousand dollars online who are like oh, you know, i've made a pre-order page for this thing and like no one's buying it.

I'm like okay, how many people have you told about it?

Like three.

Yeah okay cool, let's just speak to more people.

You know that's it.

Yeah, that's it.

Yeah, a lot of people do not realize just the like how hard it is to how many people you need to talk to.

It's often the case that 50 leads creates one sale.

For a thing that's a few thousand, it's 50 to 1 these days, especially in the online environment.

The old days of offline, it was 10 to 1.

So you talk to 10 and get one.

In the online environment, it's 50 to 1.

Yeah.

One thing that was interesting as well is we were doing like this live Zoom event thing and you know, people were asking like oh you know, no one's buying my thing.

I was like, okay, just have a guess.

Like, you know, we sell our part-time YouTuber Academy course for $1,000.

Have a guess at what you think the conversion rate on that sales page is.

Like, you know, let's say of 100 people that hit that sales page, how many of them will buy?

And we had a wide, like some people were like 50%, 70%, 90%.

I was like, holy shit, we're 90%.

I'd be a billionaire by now if that were the case.

Our conversion rate on that sales page is 0.5%.

I was going to say, it wouldn't even be 1%.

Yeah, exactly.

And so it's like Ali Abdullah's big ass YouTube with 6 million subscribers running this thing for five years.

So many testimonials and it's 05 on that sales page.

And then people were like, holy, oh, okay.

Like one in 200.

One in 200 buys the product.

Yeah, so it's like so, 199 out of 200 hate you, yeah.

Yeah, that's how they feel, like people when they're entrepreneurs.

It's like oh, but people who aren't buying, it's a real problem.

No no no, even when they love you.

One in 100, like one in 200, buy um i, i have similar stuff.

Like you know, like people would be shocked to discover that it's about one in 50 to one in 80.

Uh, who buy our thing?

And that's that's for a qualified lead um who might attend a workshop or something like that.

So like, it's just on the, in the online environment where it's very easy to interact, the numbers plummet through the floor.

Yeah, you can build a multi-million pound business off one in 200.

Yeah, that's the thing.

Because I guess, if the thing you're selling is, you know, between 1000 and 10000 or 2 and 20, you actually don't need that many sales in order to have a solid six-figure lifestyle business.

So I got ScoreApp off the ground just sending 3,000 DMs a month.

So 100 a day.

And all we were doing is just messaging people and I would message them my little case study.

I'd say, a few years ago, I launched an online quiz.

Here's how it performed.

Here's some of our stats.

If you're interested in launching an online quiz, we've just launched a new piece of software.

Let me know if that's of interest and I'll send you through the link for the free trial.

Sounds pretty chill.

And you're sending these DMs to people on your Facebook list?

Well, people who are in groups in Facebook that are already in a group about marketing.

People who have hashtags on Instagram that are related to the product or service.

So I would just do some searching.

In 2021, this thing called Clubhouse took off.

It was just a new social media.

And it just so happens it coincided with the time that I was getting ScoreApp off the ground.

And every single day I would host a little social media hangout room called Sales and Marketing for Entrepreneurs.

And I would just get some guests in there and we'd have 30 or 40 people in that room at any given time.

But about 130 would cycle through across the course of an hour.

And every few minutes, I would just say, this room's brought to you by ScoreUp.

We are a piece of marketing software for lead generation, doing online quizzes and assessments.

Now let's get back to the conversation.

So I kind of do it every five minutes, just a little nudge.

And I'd say, if you're interested in the special link for a special offer, DM me and I'll reply with that.

So some of my DMs came through that Hangout. which I did every single day, seven days a week.

And then I also did seven days a week DMing 100 random people.

And that got me my first clients.

And, you know, that business is now worth 50 to 100 million.

So, you know, but I started with just random DMs.

Someone, again, someone might be listening to that and register surprise.

They're like, oh, shit.

Hey, that's quite a lot of DMs to send.

And B, man, I thought this lifestyle business thing was supposed to be easy.

And you're saying like every day you're like literally cold to DMing 100 people.

You, Daniel Priestley, with all your fame and fortune and all that shit.

Yeah, exactly.

Weird, huh?

And like even at that time, like, yeah, you know, I was already a millionaire and already that.

But that's how you start a business.

So I just go through the same steps.

Step seven, find an associate key person of influence.

All right.

So at this point you've got your two-man team that's bouncing between an MVP and a core offering and doing lots and lots of one-to-one sales, which should get you to about 10K a month or about 100K a year fairly easily if you just do this.

Now the next stage of business is where you start to become even more profitable, and step seven is all about building your four-person team.

But there's one person in particular who's super important here, at least according to Dan's framework.

So I'll tell you who's on the four-person team.

Probably the most important role is what we would call the associate key person of influence.

So the associate key person of influence is someone who lends their name to the project and it's their name and reputation, but they don't put a lot of time and energy in and that person opens doors right.

So, for example, you've got a brand, you've got a name, reputation.

If i was launching something that was youtuber related or productivity related, if i could just simply agree that you would in some way put your name or reputation to this, i would open a thousand times more doors in right half the speed.

So i call this the associate key person of influence.

And then We've got someone who's involved in sales or customer acquisition, someone who's involved in customer success and someone who's involved in just general management.

So essentially, general manager in sales is like the entrepreneur, does a little bit of all of these three, but it's good to have some people around you.

So if your strength is sales, you're gonna have someone who is your executive assistant with general management and someone who's the head of customer success.

If you're head of really good at looking after customers, you're gonna need a salesperson and a general manager.

If you're a general manager type person, you're probably gonna need a salesperson and a customer success person.

So as the entrepreneur, you're gonna kind of pick a lane and then get two people to help you.

But very importantly, you get an associate key person of influence.

This is exactly the setup we have for our various apps that we're working on.

Like me, plus or minus my wife are the associate key persons of influence where we're lending our brand and credibility to the thing.

Our co-founder, Pablo, is like the entrepreneur who's actually running the business.

And he's got a full-time developer for each of the apps.

Okay, i guess, customer success, and we're in the process of looking for someone on growth, because pablo's been doing growth and uh, so we're trying to.

Well we, we have someone on a team who's doing growth across all the apps yep, but now we're looking for specific sales roles, i guess, for each individual product.

Amazing, there you go.

Basically this four person, four person squad.

Yep, that's pretty cool.

So that's your four-person squad.

A lot of people don't do the associate key person of influence and therefore they never get off the ground.

So, like every business that I've gone really rapid, zero to a million, we've always had associate key person of influence.

There's someone whose name reputation, that we're leveraging.

That's not me, that's not my team yeah, it's.

It's someone who is loosely associated to the business.

So if you happen to know that person, then great.

But what if someone's listening to this and they're like, man, I don't know any fancy people.

In most cases, I've reached out to fancy people.

So my first business, I was 21, 22 years old.

I reached out to a guy who I saw him featured in the newspaper.

Got reached out, found out, got in touch, said I'm launching a new business.

Relates to what you were talking about in the newspaper.

I would like to give you 5 of our revenue um, and we'd like to book 10 speaking engagements where we pay you 1500 per speaking engagement.

Um, that's pretty good yeah, and he, he ended up making 130 grand that year for for a combination of speaking 10 times and being associated with the business, getting five percent of every sale right, and didn't have to do much other than turn up for the speaking um, which is good for you because you get his name and credibility.

You get free money.

So everything was name it, like the whole business worked because of his name and credibility.

So like that's how business works about, in like a sort of let's say, i don't know, you're a veterinary clinic or something like do you do?

Or like an accounting firm.

Most accounting firms work because there's a senior partner um who is the name and credibility.

If you look at like a kpmg, the partner gets paid about six hundred thousand, seven hundred thousand a year and they do a lot of swanning around um, managing their networks and all that sort of stuff um, and then you know i mean this is a much bigger business, but essentially you've got an associate key person of influence.

If I was launching a veterinary business, I would find someone who is somewhat famous with vets, with animals and whatnot, and see if I can get them associated.

Now, mind you, an associate key person of influence could be paid to turn up to the launch event, could be paid to be featured on the launch campaign.

Maybe it's just simply I find someone who's happy to collect a two grand or three grand day rate to be part of the launch day and film some stuff and that goes on our social medias.

But just something associated with the person who's the trusted, credible person in the industry.

Okay, that's very interesting.

And it also doesn't need to be someone who has millions of followers.

You know, normally that person is a bit out of reach.

It could be someone who's got 20000 followers or 50000 followers, or they've got one heck of a great story.

Oh and, by the way, if you are enjoying this video so far, you might like to check out something that my team and I are cooking up called the Lifestyle Business Academy, which is a mentorship program where the whole idea is that we work with you directly for 12 months to get you from being a complete beginner to having your own six-figure lifestyle business in under 12 months guaranteed yes, it's literally guaranteed.

There'll be more details in the video description if you want to find out more, but it's our lifestyle business academy where our goal is to basically build the world's best online school for lifestyle business entrepreneurs.

So if that sounds like your thing, there's a link in the video description.

All right, step eight your product for prospects.

All right, so step eight is where you build a product for prospect, a P4P in Dan's terminology, which then leads into your core product.

And now this difference is really important, because businesses that promote their product for prospects over their core product are generally way more successful.

But what actually is a product for prospects?

So a product for prospects is essentially a pre-product that leads into the core product and that allows you to sell one to many.

So a pre-product could be a webinar.

A pre-product could be a online assessment or scorecard.

A pre-product could be a sample kit, a sample pack, a pre-product could be a trial period.

But essentially the product for prospects is where you're selling a low commitment, easy first step that then leads into the core product.

And it means that you can aggregate your efforts where you can get 10 or 100 people on a webinar and then make your sales.

Or you can get 10 or 100 people taking a free sample and then make your sales.

So product for prospects into core offering and you're just going to um repeat that over and over and over again.

Now you're also doing this with a four-person team now.

Now, how this basically works is that your product for prospects or your lead magnet leads people into a one-to-one sales meeting where you then talk about your core product and generally, the reason why you don't want to promote the core product first is because it's a much bigger commitment for your client or your customer.

We do this with our part-time YouTuber academy.

For example, we have our 1000 academy thing, which is our core product within that particular value ladder.

But we very rarely say, hey, buy the course, buy the course, buy the course for $1,000.

We generally promote a product for prospect or our free lead magnet, which is our seven-day YouTube crash course, email sequence.

And so someone enters their email.

We send them seven days worth of emails that are really really valuable about like how to grow a YouTube channel.

And in the final couple of emails we start mentioning that hey, by the way, you know, we've got this bigger thing.

If you enjoyed these free emails, then you're gonna absolutely love the hundreds of videos we've got in this course and this thing over here.

That includes a community.

And so, in a way, it's a lot easier for us to get loads of people in to our product for prospects, which is our free thing, rather than just like bye bye bye, like the course.

Let's now move on to step nine, which is your perfect repeatable week.

And the idea here is that you plan what you're gonna do every day throughout the week, in a super systematic way to ensure you're consistently making at least 50000 a month.

I know if you're watching this right now.

50000 a month seems absurd because like, how the hell can you make?

Like genuinely, I've been doing this online business thing for like 18 years of my life now and actually successfully for the last 13 years.

And seeing Dan's framework come together has just sort of slotted so many things into my mind where I'm like, oh yeah, like this actually does work.

And I know maybe you know if you're where I was a few years ago where you might have a job.

I had a job that was paying me 40 grand a year.

And I was like, shit, like I couldn't even imagine anything more than a hundred grand a year.

And then you know we've got.

We're throwing out figures like 50000 a month and like 600K a year and stuff.

And it just seems completely unfathomable.

But, trust me, as you get going on the path know to quote the poet roomie as you walk the path, the path will appear.

So as you start going through the framework and doing the thing, suddenly 600k a year, it doesn't seem that bad.

50k a month, it's like oh, that's kind of it.

Like you start to get this firmware update as your skills and your mindset evolves as you do the stuff.

So anyway, all that said, Let's now talk about the perfect repeatable week, which includes things like team meetings, sales calls, getting customer feedback.

But one of the most important things here is actually marketing.

Ie telling people about your stuff.

Okay, so at this point, in this first 10K or even going up to 50K a month, how important is it to do social media content and personal brand building and all that stuff?

It's not wildly important.

It's mostly important to do sales activity.

So, in this perfect, repeatable week, what we're looking for is repeatable steps that we can do every single week.

So for example, posting every day on social media.

Yeah, we could do that.

And that's probably going to generate some leads.

Running a few ads.

We could actually have a little ads budget that we're running every single week.

Sending 100 DMs could be part of our perfect repeatable week.

So essentially, what we're trying to do is work backwards from what activity gets us to 50000 a month.

So let's say we're selling something that's 5k and we need to sell 10 of them.

So, roughly speaking, we need to sell two or three a week.

Yeah, so the question is okay, two or three a week, let's call it.

Call it three a week.

And we say, what percentage?

Okay, so one in one in 200 by, so we need 600 leads a week.

So we say okay, our job in the perfect repeatable week is to somehow identify 600 potentials and message them and then get our three sales.

So what we're trying to do is orchestrate our sales targets.

Everything really just comes back to that.

Like we're just working backwards from sales targets.

Interesting.

Now we could do that potentially.

Now, mind you, if we said three sales of five grand per week, we've got 15 grand worth of weekly revenue at that point.

So we could say allowable cost per lead, uh is you know.

Let's say it's ten dollars per lead is totally fine um, or actually no sorry, we need 600 leads.

We could say allowable cost per lead, um is five dollars, so we can spend three grand as long as we're getting five dollar leads.

We could spend three grand on ads to get our 600 leads right.

So all that could be part of the mix.

Some of it could be social posting right.

So we're now now doing that.

So we go okay, combination of ads, combination of social posting, all right.

Combination of, you know, people who are attracted to the associate, key person of influence.

So you know we're now getting the thing started.

You've also got to have a picture in your mind of, like you know, a ginormous concrete flywheel, very slow to get it going.

Once it starts to spin, it spins faster and faster and faster and you only need to tap it to keep it spinning.

Businesses are the same, very arduous to get going.

Once you've got it going, you can just keep it going, tap it, tap it, tap it.

So this is the getting it spinning phase.

Right, so it's the hard phase.

I said earlier it's a rough road that ends smooth.

It's not a smooth road, you know, that ends rough, like a corporate career.

Yeah, that's interesting.

Because this in some ways makes it seem very straightforward, that like oh, you're literally just working back from the numbers and reverse engineering it.

But in some ways it also feels like quite a lot of work to try and get like 600 people every single week, of which only three are going to buy.

Oh, my God, like, this is not the passive income dream that I was hoping for.

Yeah, it's not at the beginning.

Absolutely not.

Have you ever watched the movie The Shawshank Redemption?

Oh, yeah.

It's one of the most famous and loved movies of all time.

And people love this movie.

The reason that I think people love it without knowing why they love it?

Because he very very, very slowly tunnels out of prison.

Now, if you think about that just as a metaphor, how do people get out of the prison that we find ourselves in?

We're all born into a prison of some sort.

Very rarely some people are not born into a prison.

But most of us can relate to the idea that we're born into a scenario where there's not a lot of freedom, not a lot of being able to do all the things you'd like to be able to do.

And unfortunately, the way you get out is tunneling out very slowly.

Like, it's very rare that people can just jump the fence.

So how do you get out of living in a society with massive amounts of constraints?

You figure out how to tunnel out slowly.

The truth is that he didn't get out of the prison with one giant thing.

He also didn't get out there in a nice, happy, friendly little way.

He had to tunnel through cement.

So unfortunately, on the other side of the prison wall is all the things that you want, but you kind of have to tunnel through some cement.

So, and mind you, this tunneling through cement, once again, this is not dodging bullets.

We're not digging ditches.

We're actually just sending DMs.

We're doing the type of things that teenagers do in their bedroom, right?

Like it's not that hard.

Oh, man.

Nice.

In your experience, what would you say is a realistic timeline for, let's say, someone is in their 30s corporate professional?

They don't have too much free time on their hands, but they've got some evenings and weekends.

How long would it take them to build, to tunnel out of the prison of the nine to five and build this thing?

That could get to 10K a month, 50K a month, that kind of thing every.

It's hard because every business I've done I got to a million in the first 12 months, like I'm really good at kicking the door down.

So I genuinely believe you can do this really a lot faster than people think in terms of you can run.

You can run launch campaigns like in the first bear.

Bear in mind, at this phase we've already done product market fit and testing and all that sort of stuff.

But look, if we said that phase is 90 days, you know for the first three months you're gonna do core offering product market fit MVP.

The reason it's 90 days is because you did an apprenticeship and you could build your confidence.

You also did some side hustles and you built your confidence.

So now that's only 90 days right, and then this is a launch campaign.

So you're actually like launching properly with a team of three other people and the associate key person of influence.

So you launch in 90 days and then you get into perfect, repeatable week.

For the rest of the year.

You should be able to build up to 20 grand a week worth of sales.

Once you're at 20 grand a week, you're at a million dollars a year run rate.

So like, it's not like, I don't know.

Like for me personally, those are the kind of timeframes I'm looking at.

Step 10, close the value creation loop.

Okay.

So the final stage in this framework is when you hit seven figures in revenue, so a million dollars in revenue.

But we're not gonna get into the weeds here because it starts to get pretty complicated.

And I suspect if you're watching this video, you are not yet at a million dollars in revenue.

Maybe you'd like to get there someday.

Plus, if you want a lifestyle business that gives you fun fulfillment, flexibility and financial freedom, you don't really need to hit seven figures in revenue.

Most of us are gonna be totally cool with like six figures in revenue.

Like you know, if you had a business that was making you know 500K revenue and maybe like 300K profit, a pretty good gig, right.

Like you know, you can work on your own terms.

You've got financial freedom, time freedom, creative freedom.

You don't need to be hitting seven figures in revenue, but if you want to, then there's obviously the option to scale anyway.

The final thing we're going to talk about is the value creation loop.

So we mentioned these a little bit earlier in the video, but we didn't actually look at what they are in a lot of detail.

But now that we understand a lot of this new terminology and the different phases of building a business, we can take a look at what the value creation loop really is about and how we can close this loop.

So entrepreneurship is a big value creation loop.

So it starts with founder opportunity fit.

So that is you finding an opportunity that's good for you.

Goes to mvp minimum viable product.

So that's doing the testing we talked about.

It then goes to what we call product market fit.

So this is you've figured out a product, now you're figuring out how to sell it into a marketplace.

So i now know what what i'm selling and i now know who i sell it to.

Then there's go to market, which is where you actually get out and sell it and do perfect, repeatable weeks and you are out there making sales.

Then there's scaling up, which is where you sell to more people, you run ads, you hire more people, so you throw the kitchen sink at it.

At this point you've really figured stuff out.

This is where money like go to market and scale up.

This is where you start actually making profitability and this is where you make profit at scale.

So you know, go to market and scale up and then, once you scale up, you can exit, which is where you can either sell the company for a life-changing amount of money or you can exit with your time.

You're no longer required to be there all the time.

You've got a team and all that sort of stuff, and then you celebrate and rest and then you go again.

Yeah, so that's called a value creation loop.

Okay, then the associated groups of people that are associated with this.

This is typically soul searching.

So that's one MVP to product market fit is where you're like two people scout team.

This is where you're about a four person team with an associate key person of influence included.

Your go-to-market team is probably going to be about eight.

Your scale-up team is where you're at about 30 people and you tend to be at about 30 people plus when you exit.

So it's like two four eight, thirty.

So once you've got an idea of what is good for you, you jump from two person, four person, eight person, thirty person team.

Yeah so MVP, product market fit go to market, scale up, exit and then you go again and especially to, if you get.

If you get somewhere close to a thirty person team and you exit, it's probably going to be somewhere between two and two and ten million that you end up with.

Yeah, so you know, you can actually take quite a lot of time to celebrate and rest before going again.

And sort of.

If you wanted a lifestyle business rather than a scale up and exit, then presumably you'd stop at the eight person mark somewhere around here.

This go to market.

This is where you would have a perfect, repeatable week.

You would have a team of eight people who are really doing a good job.

You would have positioned yourself as the key person of influence, not having an associate key person of influence.

You would now be the figurehead of your business and you're.

You're there with an eight person team, everything runs smoothly and you're semi-exited.

So you're not exited, but you're semi-exited, which means you don't have to put a lot of time and energy into the business in order for it to work.

So you might be doing four or five meetings per month that keep the business on its rails.

Nice.

Yeah, so that's that point there.

That's the lifestyle biz.

And one thing that I remember you and I were talking about a lot in the early days is like what I got from your advice was you kind of need to decide do you want a lifestyle business or do you want a performance business?

Because in the middle, there's like this dodgy gray area.

Well yeah, once you enter the scale up zone of taking your team from eight to 30 and from like doing everything at scale like, it's a very intense period.

Scale up is very, very intense and it's only worth it if you really go to exit.

So if you sit there and go I don't want that intensity and I don't necessarily even want to exit, I just want the fun bit and I'm happy to not necessarily fully exit, I'll just partially exit then the lifestyle business is the place to stop and then you skip the scale up and exit phase.

Yeah nice, yeah.

Um, in your experience, what are the biggest mistakes that people make along this, along this journey?

The biggest mistake is just not knowing that all this exists.

So like, for example, you obsess about the ideas phase or the exit.

Like you might read about some entrepreneur who exited their company for 100 million and then you go wow, let's read about the story and it's all about how they had the idea and there's not a lot of MVP product market fit, go to markets to scale up.

So, not knowing that this set of steps exists, You know it's funny because it's like, like I love using medicine examples when I'm around you because, like there was a particular time where it was considered to be crazy to wash your hands between patients.

And it was considered literally.

They locked a guy into a loony bin because he said that there are these microscopic things called germs and that we need to wash our hands so that we don't transfer the germs from one person to the germs of another person.

And they thought he was schizophrenic, right.

And then they figured out oh, actually he was right and you should wash your hands.

So there's then.

They introduced that step.

Now imagine, you know, you're having to figure it all out from scratch.

Imagine that you decide to turn your back on medical discipline and turn your back on established wisdom.

Could you say I'm just gonna figure everything out from scratch?

You're back to the start of figuring out.

The germs even exist, which took hundreds of years to figure out and is like the most basic thing of like have some soap and water.

That's it.

It's the same with entrepreneurship.

There are so many things that have already been figured out for you, And it's like you have to treat this as a discipline.

You have to learn the steps and go, oh, okay, so I've got to do that particular thing.

Oh, I have to send some DMs at the start.

And oh, I have to have an associate key person of influence.

And oh, I should have some software that does certain things for me.

So it's like, follow some best practices and innovate around the edges.

Yeah, I really like that.

I think there's.

I speak to people who want to start businesses and I was speaking to this girl the other day who wants to start a fashion line.

I was like, oh, okay, interesting.

I'm curious, like, why a fashion line?

I was like, oh, because I think it would be cool.

I was like, okay.

And we kind of had a little bit of a conversation about it.

And it emerged that she has never read any book about how to start a business.

She has not listened to any podcast about how to start a business, except the Richard Branson-esque ones where she was super inspired by the story of the billionaires.

And I think she maybe read the story of like the Spanx founder or something.

It's like that billion dollar valuation.

And she was like super inspired.

And it just transpired that she just had not.

It was sort of this pipe dream of like oh man, imagine if I had a really cool fashion brand, sustainability and stuff.

And she was like 23 and had not done any of the groundwork.

And it's sort of like you know watching I don't know Grey's Anatomy and be like I want to be a neurosurgeon.

I'll be a neurosurgeon.

It's going to be so cool.

Let's get started.

Get me the can opener.

There is a path.

There's a path that requires learning and reading and understanding and practicing and doing the thing you know sort of you know fairly prescribed process.

That's it, and if something was easy, everyone would do it, and if everyone did, it wouldn't be very valuable.

So the reason that people can sell companies for millions of millions is because it's very hard to do.

Now it's not impossible to do, but one of the things that makes it hard is most people who try to do it don't do any learning at all.

In the entrepreneurial space, the thing that works really really well for me as an entrepreneur is that school doesn't teach this.

Hardly any business schools actually even teach this.

They teach mbas, which is how to run existing businesses.

There's so few people who learn the path that it makes it very easy for me because now i know the path, i can just have multiple businesses make a lot of money because i'm very skilled at this.

But there is a set of skills.

There's a lot of skill acquisition that goes into being able to do this.

But the payoff for this set of skills is astronomical relative to other set of skills.

I would say it's actually deeply unfair that if I were to acquire the nursing set of skills where I can nurse someone back from near death to health, I get paid a barely livable wage for life-saving nursing skills.

Right, it's deeply unfair.

But that set of skills the UK doesn't reward that set of skills very much.

Other countries do a bit more, but it's it's just for whatever reason, that is not a valued set of skills.

And then my set of skills of just being able to send some DMS and launch something and get some people engaged with it and sign up some customers and get some people signed up on contracts, recurring revenue contracts is a ridiculously highly rewarded set of skills.

To what extent would you recommend people start on this path to try and build a lifestyle business?

I think at any other time in history I'd be really cautious in saying that this is a good idea, because a corporate career offered so much entrepreneurship was pretty risky.

The tables have absolutely turned right now.

If you get this right, you can scale up to a global audience.

You can have a global team of people.

You can live and work from anywhere.

You can run your business in the cloud.

The alternative is that the benefits of being an employee have dropped through the floor.

The livable wage is like.

Hardly any jobs meet the conditions of a livable wage.

There's almost no big payday that's coming, so the rewards have been so diminished on the typical working wage And the upside is now massive upside on the entrepreneurial thing.

I think if you've listened to all of this that we've talked through, you're probably in the category of people that should be exploring this more seriously.

Nice.

Yeah.

Yeah, one thing that I've been noodling on recently is that I don't think everyone should be an entrepreneur, but I think everyone should at least learn the skills for independent income generation.

Because even if you want to stay as an employee, they're just really useful skills to have.

If you ever get laid off or the company gets acquired or, like your boss, changes and now that person's a bit of a d, then it gives you the option, like knowing that you've previously made money in the past by sending some DMs.

Or even, rather than working for a company that has 5000 employees, you go and work for a company that has 50 employees, but you do so on a you know, revenue share or a equity deal where you earn into the value of the company and even if you're still working in the job but you're able to apply some entrepreneurial skills to get a piece of equity, it could be very much the case that, if you know, a few years from now they sell the company and you get 250000 pounds as your little slice.

You know happy days.

That at least is a possibility, as opposed to what was happening in the corporate career, where it just wasn't even possible.

All right.

So if you got to the end of this video thinking whoa, I've just learned a bunch of new things, then you'll probably wanna check out this video next, which is all about how to flip the switch from consuming stuff, consumption mode to action mode, where you actually go out and start your first business.

Because, to be honest, as much as I'm appreciative that you've watched this video and given us your valuable time and attention because learning only gets you so far

And if you have any goal related to freedom, whether that's financial freedom, time freedom, location freedom, creative freedom or all of the above then you really wanna start creating stuff.

And so in this video, I will show you exactly how to do that.

Thank you so much for watching, and I will hopefully see you in this video.

Bye-bye.

[A Step-by-Step Blueprint: Building and Scaling Your First Business to $1 Million]-[The Proven, Reliable Path to Earn $1M (Step By Step)]

📋 Summary

The Apprenticeship: The Foundation of Commercial Awareness

The 90-Day Side Hustle: Validating Ideas with Speed

Founder-Opportunity Fit and Idea Generation

The Two-Person Scout Team and One-to-One Sales

Scaling: The Four-Person Squad and the Associate Key Person of Influence

Closing the Loop: The Path to Financial Freedom

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

[A Step-by-Step Blueprint: Building and Scaling Your First Business to $1 Million]-[The Proven, Reliable Path to Earn $1M (Step By Step)]

📋 Summary

The Apprenticeship: The Foundation of Commercial Awareness

The 90-Day Side Hustle: Validating Ideas with Speed

Founder-Opportunity Fit and Idea Generation

The Two-Person Scout Team and One-to-One Sales

Scaling: The Four-Person Squad and the Associate Key Person of Influence

Closing the Loop: The Path to Financial Freedom

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🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

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