Running a business today is more challenging than ever before, especially with rising costs in every direction.
As a business owner, I've seen first hand how crucial it is to streamline operations and reduce expenses wherever possible.
That's where our podcast sponsor next week comes in.
Next week is the number one cloud financial system integrating accounting, financial management, inventory and HR into one platform, one source of truth.
It's been a game-changer for us.
No more juggling multiple systems, everything unified improving efficiency and slashing manual tasks and errors.
You can join over 37,000 companies that have made the move.
NetSuite has extended its unique flexible financing program for a few more weeks.
If you head to netsweet.com slash Bartlett, that's netsweet.com slash Bartlett B-A-R-T-L-E-T-T, you can check that out.
Let's talk about money.
Let's talk about it. We're in a cost of living crisis in the UK and many countries around the world are either in or on the brink of recession.
So one of the most popular questions we've had at the DiroVACIO in the last three to six months is about money.
People's concern about their own money, spending, finance and saving.
If I'm someone out there now that has, I don't know, $100 or $100 worth of disposable income every month or if I have a thousand or 10,000 pounds, what should I be thinking about as it relates to creating more money and making myself financially free?
The first thing is you just want to earn more.
People massively settle for how much they could earn.
So the first place to I think to invest is in yourself.
But here's the first principle.
The first principle is income follows assets.
Income follows assets means that the more assets you have, the more income you'll earn.
If I want rental income first, I need a house.
If I want dividend income, I need chairs.
If I want to be paid as a brand ambassador, first, I need a brand.
So essentially the more we can accumulate assets, the more easy and effortless the money flows.
So we have to figure out what assets could you accumulate and what assets could you formalize and own.
I wrote a book called 24 assets and I listed out all the different digital assets that are new economy assets that people could have, things like brand and positioning, things like databases, things like company culture is an asset now.
So I talk about how do you formalize those things?
If someone's just starting out and they've got 100 a month to be perfectly honest, trying to invest 100 a month or any of that, it's not going to do anything.
It's not going to change your life.
But if you put that into your own skills and your own development, let's say you don't have negotiation skills.
Well, there are courses that you can take for $100 that give you negotiation skills.
Let's say you don't know how to close sales.
You can take a course on how to make sales.
Let's say you don't feel confident public speaking.
You could do public speaking course.
So there are things that allow you to gain your skills.
The other thing too is money is relationships.
So if you don't have a lot of money, you typically don't have a lot of relationships.
You might have a limited number of relationships or a limited number of relationships with people who have a flow of money.
When you have a high degree of relationships with people who've got money flowing, it's very effortless for that to flow to and from you as well.
So you might have to invest in relationships.
When I arrived in the UK, I knew that one of the places that I would meet interesting people would be private banks.
So I didn't qualify for private bank, but I went into a private bank and I said, I'm going to be launching a business.
Of course, it's going to be great and successful.
I want to bank with a private bank.
Do you have an entrepreneur's program?
Oh, yeah, we did. They start selling me joining the entrepreneur's program.
It cost me 600 pounds to open an account with that private bank, but they immediately invited me to dinners and they invited me to networking and all these sorts of things in the private bank.
One of the things that I've recommended a lot of people do is host dining dinner parties and reach out to people who you don't know.
Here's a silly story. I was just into buy and I know someone who has a hundred foot yacht.
So I said, Jeremy, can I borrow your yacht for the evening?
I'm going to be putting 15 really influential people for a dinner party.
We're going to have burgers on the boat.
And he said, oh, great. Can I come?
And I said, of course, you can come and see your boat.
Right. So he said, great.
That'll be exciting. So he basically said, you can host this party on my hundred foot boat.
So I reached out to all the people who I didn't know and I said, hey, we're putting together burgers on the boat.
Would you like to come along and have some burgers with interesting people?
And then they came along and I made the investment into relationship.
Now, the funny thing is a lot of people say, oh, but you know someone with a hundred foot yacht.
Funny thing is I think plenty of people who have a boat, especially in Dubai, it sits empty most of the time.
You could reach out to 30 people and say, we're going to do it on someone's boat.
Would you like it to be your boat with or without your energy?
So making investments into relationships is a really powerful thing for a hundred dollars a month.
Personally, what would I do with a hundred dollars a month?
Take people out to dinner.
That would be my number one investment.
I'd probably be taking people out to dinner.
Why? The investment into the relationship.
So I would be inviting the most interesting people I could possibly invite.
If I had the ability for a hundred dollars a month, I guess that's one dinner.
So I would reach out to someone interesting and say, I've seen your story.
I've seen what you're interested in.
Can I take you out for lunch?
Can I take you out for dinner?
It's my shout. I'd love to get to know you a little bit better.
Obviously, don't do that with someone who's famous.
You get a hundred of those a day.
I get plenty of those a day.
Reach out to someone who's not famous, but who's accomplished, who's successful, who's a mentor-esque type person, not necessarily a superstar, but someone who's a few steps ahead.
Take those people out to lunch, take them out to dinner.
Would you say in that message that you talk about calls, I talk about emails?
What would someone have to say to you, considering where you are in your life now, with all the inquiries you get, for you to actually go for a coffee with them?
So... I'm not going to mind everyone's going to email you and say, yeah.
Well, it happened today, actually.
Someone said, Daniel, I noticed in the background of one of your photos that you have an amazing Fender Strata Caster, I teach people how to play guitar.
I would love the opportunity to do a guitar lesson with you and help you to shred on that guitar.
And it was really nice. He had watched my podcasts in the past.
He had noticed the guitar.
He reached out with something that was valuable for me.
And he said, I'd love to have a chat with you and teach you how to play some guitar.
Obviously, I'll have a chat with him while we do that.
But that was a really...
It was a very... It felt like a good connection.
I also had a look at his profile and he looked like a really lovely person, who's getting on with doing stuff.
There's a bit of wither without your energy as well, in terms of...
I can see this person's up to stuff.
So I look at that and I go, he did some research on you.
He offered you value in an area where you were potentially seeking all of the food, the value.
Oh, that's definitely true if you've seen me play guitar.
But that's like the cool component.
I feel the same way that I try and figure out why sometimes I reply to these cold outreach messages, but 99.9% of the time I don't.
It tends to be the case that the person will say, they'll show that they've done some kind of research on me, which is good for your ego.
Like everyone has an ego.
You want to feel like someone actually cares.
And then they'll offer me something in return for the part where you're doing.
No, I did this to you. I don't even know if you remember.
You and I were both speakers at a conference.
And we were in the elevator and I prepared for you a really nice leather briefcase.
And it had your... I created the happy sexy millionaire thing.
And we gave all the speakers one of those.
You weren't that special.
We had we had some fun. But anyway, it was interesting because I actually have done that with you.
And we never ended up following up with you and you never followed up with us.
But here's a thing. I want to share that.
No, I want to share that because sometimes it doesn't work.
Right? Sometimes you have to send out like when I sent out 3000 cold DMs to launch a business, I didn't expect 3000 people to respond.
I expected 30 or 40 people to come back to me when I gave that to you.
Do you remember it? I remember getting a briefcase and I'm trying to...
I do quite a lot of public speaking these days.
We only had like a two minute interaction.
I said, hey, this is a little gift for you.
Inside we've created something for you.
Have a look. Was it something to scan?
Was it something scanable in there?
Yeah, we'd built your little landing page campaign.
Yes, I remember. Yeah. I'm beginning in the current thing to my team.
Oh, this is cool. Yeah. And then of course it gets past the team and they're like, yeah, fair enough.
Yeah. We put that on the pile of cool things.
The point is, I'm saying that to say, you don't want to get hung up on the idea that one person's...
In that same event, we gave that same thing to another really well-known person.
They've gone with it. And they're like, millions of followers and they're one of our clients now.
So we have with or without you energy, which is when my team do this, we pick 30 or 40 people who'd make amazing connections and contacts in our VIP outreach team.
And then we reach out to them and we expect maybe two or three of them to get back to us.
So it's that idea of... If someone messages you and you don't message back, it's not the end of the world.
There are other people you can message and there's a...
And look what happens. There you go.
It comes around again. It always comes around again.
If it's meant to happen, it'll happen.
So what about people...
So many members of my teams beat to me and ask me about investing.
They might have tens of thousands to invest or whatever, but I'm curious about your personal investment thesis with a capital that you have spare.
What do you do with it to create more money?
So... What does your portfolio look like?
It's extremely boring.
I just stick any available capital into S&P 500.
Well, the S&P 500 for anyone that doesn't have it.
Yeah, the top 500 stocks in the US.
So essentially any government that inflates its currency anywhere in the world, that money will hit the economy and it will eventually make its way back to the top 500 companies in the US through spending.
Or that capital will end up being put into the S&P 500, which inflates it.
So one way or another, it's going back to the top 500 companies in the US.
So it's almost impossible to beat the S&P 500.
I hate investing. It's not my thing.
I like expansive business creation.
I'm an optimist. Great investors are often pessimists.
They're very good at thinking what could go wrong in the analyzing risk.
I hate that shit. So for me personally, I want to as much as possible expand the portfolio of businesses that I think should exist in the world.
And I've always made my money by just saying I romantically like the idea of this business existing.
And I'm going to pull my energy into it and it's going to become worth millions.
Rather than thinking about where I want to invest money, I want to create something that's investable for other people to put money into.
Because that's how you really make money.
So the exciting thing is not placing my own chips.
The exciting thing is creating something where others want to place chips into that.
Running a business today is more challenging than ever before, especially with rising costs in every direction.
As a business owner, I've seen firsthand how crucial it is to streamline operations and reduce expenses wherever possible.
That's where our podcast sponsor next week comes in.
NetSuite is the number one cloud financial system integrating accounting, financial management, inventory and HR into one platform, one source of truth.
It's been a game change for us.
No more juggling multiple systems, everything unified, improving efficiency and slashing manual tasks and errors.
You can join over 37,000 companies that have made the move.
NetSuite has extended its unique flexible financing program for a few more weeks.
If you head to netsuite.com slash Bartlett, that's netsuite.com slash Bartlett B-A-R-T-L-E-T.
You can check that out.
