Transcription
A personal brand is 20 times more powerful than a business brand. If you don't use your personal brand, you're paying a 95% attention tag.
>> I'm excited to have back on the department, business expert, bestselling author, and serial entrepreneur Daniel Priestley.
There's 8 billion people, and there's this algorithm that is going to find people who are talking about this thing and people who want to know about this thing. And it could be anything. Do you feel like there is value in posting multiple times a day or does it become kind of a mute issue at some point?
>> A lot of people we think that our story has to be so impressive in order to be worthy of views, relationships, connection and actually in many cases you just have to be relatable. Relatable beats impressive.
>> So how does one in 2026 or at the time of watching this or listening to this build a relatable personal brand as a business owner? Well, let's start one step even before this and I'll we'll finish up with a strategy that's just crushing it at the moment. But there is this there's an understanding before we get to that and the understanding is that
>> it's good to be back.
>> Yeah. So, yeah,
>> this is my third time.
>> This is your third time. How many times have you been on the Diary of the CEO?
>> Eight times.
>> Eight times. He is the most invited back guest of all time. one of the top podcasts and uh I'm just grateful for you and your friendship and even just
>> I appreciate it and um yeah I don't know how I ended up on the Diary of a CEO eight times 40 million views
>> collectively. Yeah, that's that's one way to build a brand.
>> It's a good way to build a brand. Thanks Stephen.
>> But for the rest of us uh you know, you've been
>> that's my new advice. People like how you build a personal brand. I'm like just go on Diary of a CEO eight times or Joe Rogan or something like you know, whatever you want.
>> Yeah. But as someone who has exited three companies, you just told me in the back, and you are at a place, which by the way, anytime you can hear from somebody that doesn't need to do what they're doing, there's a there's a level of magic in this moment because you don't have to do this. You don't have to give value. You don't have to do any of this. You want to.
>> That's true.
>> And it's there's very few people that are maybe the words privileged or have the ability to do that. And so I just want to say thank you. But for someone who is sharing this message of like CEOs, you need to build a personal brand. Could you tell us why that is so important?
>> So I wrote the book Key Person of Influence 15 years ago and um and at that time it was such a weird thing to do like no one was interested in personal brand. The idea that you would as a CEO build a personal brand was just radical. um you know, kids were going on Facebook and you know, people were arguing with a few people on on Twitter and like not a lot of activity in that space. It certainly wasn't a strategy. Fast forward to today, the only trusted brands are the ones where you've got a personal brand. A personal brand is 20 times more powerful than a business brand. Um I tell people all the time, uh do you like paying tax? No. Do you want to pay 95% tax? No. I say if you don't use your personal brand, you're paying a 95% attention tax
>> because the personal brand gets 25 times uh 20 times more uh attention. It's more trusted. It gets noticed. Uh, you know, founder growth, you know, the companies where there's a founder who is going into the marketplace with their personal brand, they're just eclipsing the traditional brands that have been around for 50 or 100 years. Uh, Haley Bieber decimated the you know, the Revlons of the world by coming in with a personal brand builds a billion-dollar business in three years.
>> Yeah, it's crazy. Well, well 15 years ago when you said Key Person of Influence, at the time, what did that look like and what principles from 15 years ago are pertaining today?
>> So I never wanted to talk about being an influencer. I didn't think it was the right thing for a business person to try and just simply get fame for fame's sake or attention for attention's sake. Um, so the idea of just purely and simply, you know, documenting your whole life or trying to drape yourself over a Ferrari or uh, you know
>> Porsche 911
>> or Porsche 91. Yeah. Like, you know, who would do that? Um, so those those kind of things I've never said like try to be an influencer. Um, but I did say like you want to become the voice of your industry. You want to be one of the like in every industry, they're a small group of people, their names keep coming up, they are at an epicenter, they know each other really well, um, they're super highly connected, and if anything's happening in the industry, they get looped in, and I'm like, you want to be one of those people. You want to be one of the people who gets looped in, uh, to conversations, and everyone kind of follows along, and they want to know what you're up to, and they trust automatically. If you're launching a new product, they want to know what it is, and there's automatically some trust there. The principles that I talked about 15 years ago was five principles, which is pitching, that the entrepreneurial journey is the journey of a thousand pitchers. If you do great pitching, you will open up a lot of doors. You will have a lot of luck. Um, you know, the more people you tell clearly who you are, what you do, what your value proposition is, uh, the more uh, lucky breaks you end up with. So pitching was the first one, publishing, which is getting your ideas out of your head and putting it freely available in the public domain. um, productization, so your time is not linked to how you make money, so that you can free up the the the one-for-one link between time and money. Um, profile building, so getting on other people's platforms, getting more and more people to know who you are and to clearly understand your value proposition. And then joint ventures and partnerships, uh, so that you are not trying to recreate every aspect of the business. You're partnering with people who've already got some strengths.
>> So good. And um, you've seen it evolve and maybe what would you say the last, would are you, would you think of your personal brand as like the last three years it's boomed? You, well, I've been talking about it for 15 years and I thought that I had a personal brand, right? I had like 20, 30,000 followers, which was pretty, pretty cool. Um, I got invited to speak and I got paid to speak, which was amazing, like the idea that you get paid to speak is incredible. Um, I got, you know, I got to launch a group of companies and the group of companies succeeded and I sold a couple of companies. Um, so I thought like, hey, I'm on to a good win here. Like, I'm doing really, really well. What could possibly happen next? And then the Diary thing started. So, I'm out skiing with my family in Switzerland and I get this message on Instagram from Steven directly. I've just been watching some of your content online. Do you want to come on Diary of a CEO? Um, is everyone familiar with Diary of a CEO? You know, yeah. So, it was I'm like, what? You want me to come and Diary of a CEO? And I thought it was a scam. Um, so I I like I showed my wife and I said, "Do you think this is a real text message?" Like a real. She's like, "Well, it's got 5 million followers." I'm like, "Yeah, that's a very elaborate scam."
>> Uh, and um
>> yeah, so I I ended up going on Diary of a CEO and a couple of million people watched the the episode and then life began to just really take off. um when when a few like it's hard for the human brain to get your head around a couple of million people knowing who you are. I'm from a country, Australia, where we had when I was growing up, 20 million people. So 2 million people, like one-tenth of the population. 2 million people is a big city. There's probably, I don't know, what's the population of Vegas?
>> A little over two million.
>> Yeah. Like everyone in Vegas watching it. It's like a it's it's it's quite extraordinary. The like the if you were to break it down, it would be 20,000 people watching it every single week for two years in a row to get to 2 million.
>> Like it's a it's a big number. And it was like all of a sudden deals and opportunities and friendships and debates and all this stuff starting to happen at scale. So that was that was incredibly wild. It was also very unexpected because I genuinely thought my episode would bomb. I really thought it would go badly. And I didn't think it would go badly because I was insecure about it. I thought it would go badly because I looked at the data and in the lead-up to my episode, two iconic CEOs and founders had been on the show and their episodes had bombed. Not bombed, but gone flat. The founder of Spotify, the founder of Airbnb, both couple hundred thousand views each for an episode that normally gets a couple of million views each or a million views each at the time. And I thought, if the founder of Spotify doesn't get many people to engage, if the founder of Airbnb doesn't get many people to engage, I'm toast. Like, this is embarrassing. I'm like, well, at least no one's going to see it, right? Like, this is going to be bad.
>> Um, and then I went on I went on the show and uh a couple of months later we hit 2 million and I sent Stephen a text message cuz I can. And uh and I said to Stephen, "Hey, look, I'm really surprised because I've I've not done anything that's that impressive compared to Spotify and Airbnb."
>> Yeah.
>> And he texted back and he said, "Relatable beats impressive."
>> Bar.
>> Right?
>> Gem.
>> And relatable beats impressive is really a powerful message because a lot of people, we think that our story has to be so impressive. We think we've got to launch a rocket. We think we've got to cure cancer. We've got to do some amazing thing that's like, you know, super super super impressive in order to be worthy of views and worthy of relationships and worthy of uh connection. And actually, in many cases, you just have to be relatable. People have to relate to your triumph, your disaster, your story. The fact that you're a few steps ahead could be more relatable than being a hundred steps ahead.
>> Yeah, that's good. The CEO who's done a $10 billion startup isn't relatable to a lot of people,
>> right? A lot of people are like, "Well, good for you, man. But I'm not going to start Spotify. I'm not going to start a unicorn."
>> Right.
>> But then they go, "Oh, okay. So, you went zero to a million in your first 12 months." Well, that would be cool. Maybe I could do that.
>> So, it's like it's not right. So,
>> um,
>> and yeah, you look at a lot of his biggest episodes, they're relatable. They're they're more relatable than they are impressive. So it's a good
>> that's really good.
>> It's a good heuristic.
>> So how does one in 2026 or at the time of watching this or listening to this build a relatable personal brand as a business owner? What would you prescribe them?
>> Well, the first thing you need to do is you need to identify what's called your intellectual capital. Your intellectual capital is your valuable asset from your story. So what is the what is the valuable asset that that comes out of your story that arises out of your story? So imagine that you draw a line of the last 10 or 20 years and you just map the high points and the low points and you say when when did I have a triumph? When did I have a disaster? Uh, when did I help someone? When did I solve a problem that that I was really shocked that I was able to solve it um for myself or somebody else? You may want to go through and ask, there's a question that I think is a useful question, which is um, when did I do something special for a certain type of person? Could be you, could be somebody else. Um, we got a remarkable result. Remarkable just means it's worth talking about. Um, I could quantify the outcomes and I could explain how we did it step by step. So there's a bit of a mouthful to that, but it contains a lot of elements that it's got all of the elements of I did something special, so it was something worth talking about. For a certain type of person, there's it's going to be relatable. Um, we can explain the high points and the low points. We can explain step by step. We can quantify the outcomes and the results. All of that's in there. And if you can go and document those stories, then you've got the building blocks of intellectual capital. Uh, in the world where we're all distracted and we're all looking forward to the future and we're all flicking through our feeds, it's actually worth being one of the very rare few people who sits down in nature with a pen and paper and just writes down your stories, like write down those little those things. And what you're looking for is intellectual capital.
>> And we live in a time where AI knows everything, but it's never lived through anything.
>> Yeah.
>> So it it can give you the answer to any PhD question, but it can't tell you what it felt like to to go high or low. So the competitive advantage that we have as humans is the relatability. That is our asset. So we got to start with that asset. So the first thing is, do you have an int some intellectual capital? And everyone does. Of course, the answer is yes. But it's not intellectual capital until you capture it. You got to document it.
>> So good. All right. And then what platform are you choose? What medium are you choosing?
>> Well, as I said, just go on Diary of a CEO. That's it. After that,
>> just hit up Stephen.
>> Let me just text him real quick. Just wait for him to send you a message while you're skiing, right? And
>> well, then that that shows value because
>> can that be recreated in different contexts? And the answer is yes. You can get on other people's stages.
>> Well, yes. So, that was not the first podcast I've been on.
>> Yeah. Um, I I recommend doing something called uh climb the podcast pyramid. And climb the podcast pyramid is that there are 600,000 podcasts out there and many of them are getting 100 views to a,000 views. Start there.
>> Yeah.
>> You know, if you look at some of the biggest comedians in the in the world who are the highest paid comedians, when they've got new material, they don't go to the big stage. They don't go to Netflix and say, "Let's do a Netflix special." They go to little comedy clubs >> in little areas and they go and see if they can make 30 or 40 people laugh and then they go to the slightly bigger ones and they see if, okay, can I make a room of 100 people laugh?
>> And it takes them a while to build up to those bigger and bigger audiences. By the time they get to the big audience, they've probably delivered that comedy set >> 50, 100 times. By the time they get to a Netflix special, it's probably hundreds of times. Those those jokes just they're just coming out.
>> So, you want to do the same thing that musicians and comedians do, which is build up, right? Go on the little podcasts and and build up to to bigger and bigger ones. So, that's a big part of it.
>> That's cool. How do you not, personal question, how do you not get bored along the way of saying the same thing?
>> I do get bored.
>> Okay.
>> Totally. But I'm I'm I'm a total believer that boredom is a big part of success.
>> Boredom is a key ingredient. I I just watched this great documentary about, actually, it wasn't a great documentary. It was an average documentary, but it's a great story, right? It could have been a much better documentary, but it was about John John Bon Jovi Bon Jovi and the early days of Bon Jovi and like he did something like a thousand concerts in the first 5 years. It was insane. It was like three a week, every week for five, six, seven years, non-stop. And there is there's footage on the bus of the band members talking about how sick they are of "Bad Medicine." All right. They're so sick of singing "Bad Medicine" because like from their point, like when you go and see a concert, you're like so swept up in the moment because for you, this is a one-off event,
>> right?
>> You've not you've not done this for the artist. It's three times a week. They are doing that show, like arrive in a new city, set up, 20,000 people arrive, stand on stage, sing the song, same song, same set,
>> right? Pack down, go to the next city,
>> get on stage, do it. 20 thou, like, go and have a look at how many gigs Dolly Parton's done. Go and have a look at how many gigs Metallica have done.
>> Like, this is like it's thousands.
>> Yeah.
>> It's like two a week for decades.
>> So boredom is just a big part of success. You got to be okay with boredom.
>> Yeah.
>> Like like like Feder is sick of tennis,
>> you know.
>> Yeah.
>> Metallica is sick of "Master of Puppets."
>> Bon Jovi is sick of "Bad Medicine." Comedians get sick of their own jokes.
>> Yeah.
>> You know, but you're not playing for yourself. You're playing for the audience.
>> Hey, Department fam. Pausing the podcast to talk about this life-changing sponsorship. It's me. I'm sponsoring the podcast. And the sponsor of this podcast is the Content to Cash Challenge, which is a 5-day live coaching experience I put on for creators, entrepreneurs, coaches, consultants, and service providers. If you feel like you're stuck in business or maybe there's more to business than to revenue, I'm telling you that you don't have an offer problem, you don't have an industry problem, and you probably don't even have a sales problem. What you have is an awareness problem. And this is why I have the Content to Cash Challenge because I believe transformation happens on a two-way street. And how do you know if you're the right person for the Content to Cash Challenge or you're in the right season? You're listening to this podcast. This is for you. This is your moment. So to take the challenge or jump on the waitlist, scan the QR code on the screen or check out the link down in the description below. Let's get back into the conversation.
>> So good. I think that I think there's something to say about from a creating a creator standpoint. I got you.
>> Oh yeah, you got a broken thumb.
>> Look at my little thumb over here.
>> How many times have you told the story? Are you bored of telling the story?
>> No, it's just traumatic.
>> I feel like last time you came, like a broken something.
>> I was skateboarding through the house on Christmas just after Christmas to impress my children and I broke my wrist and then they put metal in there and then the metal cut my tendons and then I had like this year has just been multiple hand surgeries and it's been horrible.
>> Sorry about that.
>> Yeah. But anyway, we're there. We're fine.
>> Well, I opened the app for you. Uh, so no. Yeah, I think you know, I do a presentation in my business and it's the same presentation. You I like what you call it an introductory event. Yeah.
>> And it creates um a feeling of maybe I want to go to the next step with Omar. You know,
>> I've done probably an average of three or four introduction events about a Key Person of Influence per month for 15 years.
>> So good.
>> Yeah. So, I'm going to say about that.
>> Yeah.
>> Uh, you were telling me in the back about if I were to start from scratch to to build my brand, you were you said something like long short.
>> Yes.
>> Or like how to build your business behind your
>> Well, let's start one step even before this and I'll we'll finish up with a strategy that's just crushing it at the moment. But there is there's there's an understanding before we get to that. And the understanding is that the fundamental nature of social media changed in the last year, like big time. And it's a it's a change that is so big that it will literally change the way the world works. It will change politics. It will change humanity. Um, like it's a humanity level change, and we don't even think about it, and it's it's massive. Behind social media is something called the recommendation engine. And the recommendation engine is an algorithm, an AI algorithm that says, what are you going to see in your feed? And if we go back a long time ago, we're just going to see our friends, what they're up to in chronological order. And then they came up with uh another way of doing it, which is people who saw this also saw this or people who liked this also liked this. And it was like, oh, okay, we can sort of like sort based on like stuff that's being liked. And then the next era of social media was engagement-based sorting. So the algorithm didn't know what it is that you were posting, but it saw that lots of people were liking it, long watch time, people shared it, so it must be good. So we'll show it to more and more people. And then they added some layers to that. They said, "Oh, okay. We can see that it's popular, but we can see that it's popular with women over 40, so we'll show more women over 40." Right? So they just started figuring out how to show people stuff. But the the the really important idea here is that the algorithm itself had no understanding of what the content was. It could just see the information around the content and it was making judgment calls based upon what it what it could see around. So it's almost like
>> you could see the shadow of something. You could see the silhouette of something, but you couldn't see the thing. And that's how the algorithm interacted with content up until recently. And as you know, AI in the last couple of years has become smarter and smarter and smarter. And if you've ever had a conversation with Claude or with Chat GPT, it's pretty profound how quickly you can have a deep conversation with an AI.
>> Yeah.
>> So, what's happening is that there's the rise of two powerful AIs at the moment. One of them is LLMs that you can talk to, and one of them is what's happening with the recommendation engine, that the recommendation engine now understands the content, and it's when you post something, it's reading it. It's understanding it as much as an as much as it can, right? But it is actually uh the the way that the LLMs can understand all the languages. They can understand French and German and Japanese and Chinese and English and all that. They can the AIs have developed a language for understanding video, for understanding social media posts, and it's a deeper language than humans can even understand. So it can understand a piece of content at a deeper level than humans can understand it, and it knows who should be seeing that content. So imagine try like to try and give you an analogy, imagine for a moment that there's a magical phone, and if I pick up the phone, it will auto-dial someone somewhere on the planet who really, really wants to talk to you. They really want to know what you know, and they really want to like geek out on whatever it is you talk about. And if you just pick that phone up, it'll just auto-dial that person, and you'll just be connected with them, right? Because it just knows what everyone on the planet's up to, and it's going to connect you with a person who's very interested in what you have to say.
>> That's kind of what's going on now. That never used to be going on.
>> I feel that.
>> Right.
>> I feel that doom scrolling for sure.
>> Yeah.
>> Yeah.
>> Um, weird stuff can happen now. So you could start with a completely blank canvas of a social media account and provided you're clear and on message, you could be in front of a 100,000 people a week just because you're talking a particular topic, very clear, very on message. The social media algorithm, the recommendation engine's picking up on it, and it's putting it in front of people who are interested.
>> Right. Now this seems like a small, subtle thing. It's this is going to be human-changing. Like consider there's 8 billion people, and there's this algorithm that is going to find people who are talking about this thing and people who want to know about this thing.
>> Yeah.
>> And it could be anything. Like randomly, the I don't know why, but the other day I got interested in, I I saw some piece of content about a guy who's restoring antique lighters and he's like fixing them and they're not working and he like scrubs them and fixes them and I for whatever reason I'm watching this and now I'm like in in a whole community of antique lighter repair people, right? But but but the po the point is, is the algorithm, when it figures out, okay, this is something we think you're interested in, it can find the content from anywhere. But it doesn't need you to be a friend. It doesn't need you to connect in any way. It's just matchmaking, and it's getting stronger and stronger. One of the things about this algorithm is that it is scaling in line with Anthropic's um philosophy around scaling laws of compute, which means just add more compute and add more data, and it will get smarter. And that means it scales. And that means that fast forward 2 years, 3 years, four years from now, it will be you post a perfect piece of content that is perfect for these 27 people who live in different cities around the world. It knows that those 27 people want that piece of content. It's getting that content to them.
>> Yeah.
>> The implications of this is that a lot of a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of business owners, a lot of people on social media, they're going to they're going to see their view count drop a lot, but it's going to be a way higher quality of view.
>> Yeah.
>> That's good. I mean, and I I say it's good because I've been creating content for a long time, and whenever, you know, you see the pendulum swing, you just play the game that's happening. And you're you're seeing a lot of people who've built audiences over the years not get the views they used to. And maybe that's, you know, both sided. There's a little bit of disappointment from the consumer because you forgot like, oh yeah, why don't I see their stuff anymore? I'm subscribed. But the reality is is that's not going to keep you on platform. What's going to keep you on platform is watching things that you're consistently interested in. The number one question I usually get asked by people like you is, "Omar, how the heck does your videos look and sound so dang crispy?" Well, the reality is, it's the equipment I use, and you'd be surprised how inexpensive it could actually be. So, I've compiled all my gear and I've updated the list, and I want to give it to you. So, if you're listening or watching this, just hit the description box below, and I'll send you my gear guide for every budget. Now, let's get back into the conversation.
>> If we go back, LinkedIn changed its algorithm in a big way in March this year. You go back before that change, and here's a cool strategy. Post an inspirational quote by Steve Jobs and just say, "I totally agree with this. What do you think?" And then get 10 of your buddies to go, "Awesome quote, bro." And that would have like a year ago blown up the algorithm. And you'll get a ton of views, ton of engagement. The alg the algorithm now is just like, that's that's lame. We're not letting you have that.
>> Yeah.
>> But now you do a long post and you do, look, there's seven things that I've learned from being in this industry for the last 20 years, and here's what they are. And you do a really decent, thoughtful post. The algorithm is like, "Okay, now you're talking. Let me put you in front of the right thousand people."
>> It's good.
>> Right. So little accounts with a thousand people will massively outperform big accounts with 100,000 people in terms of what turns into sales. That's good.
>> Yeah.
>> Do do you have a distinguishing definition between brand and marketing? Because what's happening in my brain is it's getting polluted. Like the type of content I make, cuz like when I make content for social media or YouTube, uh, that's going to build brand, I'm I'm not being so direct in my communication. But if I throw money behind a paid ad, I'm going to be very clear at calling out who this is for. And so yeah, so this is this is a different reframe around top of funnel. There there was a lot to be said for top of funnel. Just go for views, go for go for scale. Um, and do it at the expense of of uh, like being clear.
>> Mhm.
>> Um, just talk about something political, talk about something broad, trending topics, all of that sort of stuff. Um, regardless of what it is, just to get the views. Um, and that's not really going to be part, it's not going to be necessary. Um, now I'm not saying that you do non-stop calls to action, but also the people who you will connect with will be ready for a call to action a lot sooner
>> because they've their behavior in the lead-up to seeing your content, their behavior has already told the algorithm that they are interested in doing something related to this. So take a fitness example. Someone's responding to uh all all posts that relate to high-intensity training, right? So it's like anything HIT training, they've already been they've been been engaging it. The algorithm has figured out this is a really important to you at the moment. You're interested in HIT training. It's like, all right, there's a personal trainer who's doing some really great deep content on HIT training. Let's connect you. Let's put you in touch with you. And and of course, that person's ready for a call to action sooner.
>> Yeah.
>> They don't like they've already done half the journey by the time they're seeing your your content.
>> That's good. Yeah.
>> So, you can kind of let other people do the warm-up content,
>> and then you can come in as the person who's doing the deep content.
>> I like that. I could see like the meta version of what I'm seeing in some people's cases is they've built, not everyone has the opportunity to do this, but those that have been creating, they built their massive audience channel and then they've created one to be more specific. And it's in actually the intent is not to get a ton of views on it. It's to get specific views, the right views because there's
>> and multiple channels. There's no rules that say you can't have multiple YouTube channels and different, you know, different angles and each YouTube channel can be its own very focused thing and you can you can yeah, you can do all of that. Um, yeah. So, it's yeah, it's it's changing.
>> Thanks for bringing that to the table. What is your approach to creating YouTube videos? I feel like you're you're at like under 20 videos or do you have, have you passed 20 videos? You're around 20 videos and you've passed 100
>> 200,000
>> 200,000 subscribers. Really cool.
>> Yeah. Um, there was probably a lot of latent like demand for me to do a channel. Yeah.
>> Um, but the um, so I'll I'll talk about the the main strategy that I'm using across all my businesses. So I run a group of companies and we've got a simple strategy that scales, which is which the strategy is called short form, long form, lead form. So short form is short form content, short posts, long form is explainer videos, explainer content, deep posts, and then lead form is fill in this form to engage. So everything is built around short form, long form, lead form. So, if I was to take any business, I'm going to say, "All right, what are short, snappy, fun, easy ways to tell people who we are, what we do, what's the value proposition, what what is it we're about?" Things that can be engaged with in under a minute.
>> Um, it could be written, could be diagrams, could be videos, right? Anything that is just that short on message post. Um, and some of the things that I like is uh talk about a pain point, something that's painful. Talk about a prize, something people want to achieve. Uh, talk about a problem, something that holds people back. And then turbocharge that by talking about any of those three things and mix it with something that's in the news or something that is an example people have heard about
>> that brings it to life. Yeah.
>> Um, so all of my short form content, pain, prize, problem, news is like a major recurring theme for short form. When we then go to long form, the three most important things in a long form piece. Now, long form is like 6 minutes to 60 minutes. It's a it's a piece that you have to absorb. It's a video, it's a long article, it's a report that maybe someone wants to download. So it's a long it's going to take it's going to take six minutes to 60 minutes to absorb that. So the three big things that we want to have in a long form piece of content is number one, a proof story. So we we lead with proof. What is it that you've done that makes me believe I should be listening to you? So tell me the proof story. And then number two, tell me the principles that underpin that proof story. Like how did it happen? What are the three big things that hold that up? What are the three pillars or the three scaffoldings that are holding up that proof story? And then process. What specifically would you do to go through, how would you go through a process to actually get a proof story like that if you wanted to replicate it? So proof story, principles, process.
>> So good.
>> And that's a good piece of what I'd call explainer content. Now, when it comes to most businesses, um, you mentioned it before, we get bored that we get bored talking about our thing. We imagine that people are mind readers and we imagine that they know what we know. We imagine that if they've heard it once, they must know it.
>> Yep.
>> That like that they only need to hear it once.
>> Um, and none of those things are true,
>> right? People are you have to imagine that people are pretty dim when it comes to understanding other people's worlds or other people's businesses. If they understood it, they'd already have done it.
>> Right.
>> Right.
>> They wouldn't be in the audience.
>> Yeah. Like exactly, like they'd be, you know, they'd be an expert like you are. You've got to go through the process of explaining it in simple terms uh again and again and again from many different angles. And you just got to explain it and explain it and explain it and then just trust that it might take people 2 to 7 hours, and then the penny drops, and they now I get it.
>> And sometimes an angle that you attempted that you didn't attempt before to say the same thing, but just sitting behind a different angle just goes through their. Like one video that I love because I know you have scorecard, but you entit you titled a video, uh, "The Million-Dollar Landing Page."
>> Like that's an angle, but you were talking about the same thing.
>> Exactly.
>> And it just hit and it connected.
>> And people don't think of a scorecard or a quiz as a landing page, but more people understand a landing page. So, it's like, okay, let me just describe this as a million-dollar landing page.
>> Yeah.
>> And then it's like, aha, now I get it. I'm going to set up a landing page that does this. And it's like, yeah, that's like simple, different angles. Yeah.
>> Explain it. Explain it. Explain it.
>> Short form, long form, lead form,
>> lead form. But I question is lead form or introductory presentation?
>> Well, to to attend an introduction presentation, you got to fill in a lead form.
>> Okay, there you go.
>> Right. So the you got to so a lead form is where people engage and reveal themselves
>> and they do that because they want to engage with uh an initial step.
>> So there are many things that people will fill in the lead form for. They'll join a waiting list for something that's coming. They will pre-register for a new product. They'll uh fill in an expression of interest, uh, if they if they're really interested. They might uh enroll for an introduction workshop. Uh, they might enroll to be part of a discussion group that's popping up.
>> Yeah.
>> Um, they might um decide that they want to get a free trial for a particular thing. So there might be a free trial,
>> but in exchange for the thing, you got to give me some info.
>> Yeah. So it's got to. Yeah. This this is now time where you fill in the form.
>> So good.
>> And it's a lead form. So short form, long form. So I'm going to hook your attention with some short form. It's going to and we're going to do now the cadence here is really important. Short form has to be every single day. I know this this people like people hate me for saying this. The the research says that people will see you for the first time when they see you for the 11th time and it has to be within 90 days.
>> Say that one more time.
>> People will see you for the first time. I'm going to say this 11 times. People will see you for the first time when they see you for the 11th time within 90 days.
>> Crazy.
>> It's crazy.
>> Yeah.
>> So, you imagine someone sitting there scrolling and they're they're scrolling on their way to work or whatever it is they're doing, and they're scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, scrolling. They just overlook you the first 10 times. It's the 11th time where they go, "Oh, yeah. I've seen you before. You keep popping up in my feed.
>> What's your name? What is it you do?" like they notice you at the 11th time. If I was to if I was to show you photos from your uh feed, let's say I I got your Instagram or your your YouTube shorts and I go through and I say, "Who's this? Who's this? What do they do? What does this person do?" And you go, "Not sure. Not sure. Not sure. Oh, wait a sec. That's Laya Hozi. I know what she does."
>> Right. Because you've seen her 11 times.
>> Yeah. So they see you for the first time and they see you for the 11th time inside 90 days. It sucks, but that's the research.
>> That's good.
>> It doesn't suck because you're telling us exactly what to do.
>> Well, what sucks is that the implication is you got to post every day.
>> Yeah.
>> You're going to have to you're going to have to be out there posting every day. Um, you know, there was only one time in my life where I got really, really fit. And this guy, he said to me, "You just got to work out every day." I'm like, "Every day?" He's like, "Every day?" I'm like, "What about on the weekend?" He's like, "That's part of every day, isn't it?"
>> All right. That's one of the days. Yeah.
>> I'm like, "Ah, every day. Okay." So, I did I worked out for every day for like months and uh and I got the fittest I'd ever been. And he said, "I don't want you to break that cycle. Not one. You're not going to take one day off. Every day, you're going to do something. Um, and you're just going to work out every day." I was like, "Ah, okay, fair enough." Same thing with blowing up your personal brand. You post every single day.
>> What about Saturday? Yep. What about Sunday? Schedule it. Just stick it in the schedule. Have it have it go out. So, every single day and you'll start getting a lot more engagement because people more people will see you for the 11th time. The only people who really notice you are the people who saw you for the 11th time. So, it's very hard for people to get there. So, every single 90 days, it's only going to be a small group of people who see you for the 11th time.
>> They're the ones who are going to go, "Okay,
>> you've got me. You've got my interest."
>> And the algorithm is working for you to try and get that result. It's trying to help you with that.
>> So then they they notice you. Now they want to get to know you. Now they want to know your value proposition.
>> So I noticed you on short form. Now I want to know you. So now I got to do the six minutes to um
>> Yeah. Now the the thing that sucks with this is that when it comes to understanding a value proposition, the research says 2 to 7 hours. 2 to 7 hours. So, like what's a what's a purchase you've made recently?
>> A purchase I made recently was a pair of shoes.
>> Pair of shoes. Maybe probably closer to the 2 hours than the 7 hours. But you actually you was telling me about these new microphones you just bought that were like a new set of microphones.
>> Oh, yeah. Yeah. My bad. That that was a good one. Yeah. The little headset.
>> Yeah. So, like you or somebody else would have researched them to try and understand the value proposition of these microphones
>> 100.
>> And you would have geeked out on it and run down the rabbit hole. Why am I buying these again? What are they going to do for me? It's a 2 to seven hour experience for your brain to go from I don't understand why I would buy these microphones to I'm going to buy the microphones.
>> That's facts.
>> Yeah.
>> Yes.
>> Can Did you go through the
>> 100%. I mean, I knew that we this day was coming and you know, instead of lavs or handhelds, we wanted headset mics and I don't want to buy the worst ones, but I also don't need the greatest ones. And and so I'm like, "Yo, Art, can you like ask somebody and then go on YouTube and watch some reviews?" And he sent me a couple and it was like, "I think these are good." I was talking to Neil. He's like, "Yeah, let's go pro." You know, like it was a whole thing. And then we even even having somebody come to dial it in yesterday. Like I mean, it was a whole thing.
>> There you go. It And I bet you if I measured it all, somewhere between two and seven hours was invested into that.
>> 100%.
>> Yeah.
>> Yeah.
>> So, everyone's customers are exactly the same as that. They they want to spend two to seven hours geeking out on something before they go ahead and buy it.
>> Yeah.
>> Um, so you have to give people enough explainer content that they understand it, that they get it.
>> Yeah. That's so good. Okay. So a lot of what you're saying sounds like a lot of work, but
>> the money's worth it.
>> Okay. Well, I mean, but you have but you recently released your book, The Lifestyle Business Playbook, and there is this concept that we want to build a business that gives us the time freedom and the money freedom that we've all dreamed of. And uh, yeah, what So, how do you weigh that tension?
>> Well, business is a bit of a flywheel. You need to get it going and then it starts to escalate.
There's smart ways to do this. I do a filming day once a month, and in my filming day, I hit it and I do lots of short forms. I do three or four long forms, and we, you know, we just get an entire day, which gives me a month's worth of stuff. When I go on a podcast, that gets turned into 30 or 40, right? Um, that's a month's worth of short forms. If you go look at all my social media profiles, you know, they're all, um, podcast clips. Um, so all of that sort of stuff.
The other thing too is I want people to think about the difference between created value and received value. So, created value is how long did it take you to create this. Received value is how long did it, uh, deliver value to others. So, if I sit down and I do a podcast, let's say, let's say this, right? We do this for an hour, and the created value time for me is an hour. But let's say 10,000 people watch it. And let's, for argument's sake, let's say 10,000 people watch it all. Yeah. So, one hour of created value is 10,000 hours of received value. What's that going to do for the business? So, a lot of people are like, "Ah, gee, there's a lot of time involved in doing this." What you're trying to achieve is ultimately getting to the point where the created value is a fraction of the received value.
Yes. And that doesn't diminish the received value. Like, I think about this in offer creation. Yeah. That, like, the offer that they buy doesn't necessarily mean the, the delivery that I, or like the fulfillment. It's, you know, like there's so much experience time that distilling down what they're getting, but what they buy is different than what I'm giving, if that makes sense. I mean, yeah. So, uh, I like to classify that as, you know, identifying one-to-many business opportunities that every time I show up, I want to make sure I'm not just showing up for this one time and it, and then it ends at the end of this.
And the reason for that is because it's a very low ratio of created value and received value. You know, if I'm delivering it personally, it's one-to-one. And that's, that's a very difficult, that's very hard to have a lifestyle in a digital world. It needs to be, you know, the ratio needs to be much bigger.
The other thing too is a lot of entrepreneurs, they try and do everything on their own. The sweet spot with the lifestyle business is somewhere between 3 and 12 people. So, you need a small team of people working together. The magic happens when you've got 3 to 12 people. Um, less than three, and there's too much riding on your shoulders. There's just too much work to be done, too much stuff. Um, once you get three, four, five people, everyone's got a bit of a specialty. So, my teams are always initially structured. Now, it's changed since AI, but my teams are now: we have a key person of influence who's the face of that business. We have a head of growth who is responsible for leads, marketing, sales, all of that. We have a head of delight who is responsible for making sure people love what they bought. And we have a head of performance who's running the business as a high-performance business. They're responsible for what we call the rule of 40, which is the growth rate and the profit rate add up to 40.
Okay. Um, so we put those four people around an AI system. So, imagine a diagram where there's an AI at the center helping to run the business, key person of influence, head of growth, head of performance, head of delight, and the AI supporting that. And that's my four-person super team.
So good. And and and that's very rapidly turns into seven figures to eight figures of revenue, and we're away, and we're we're doing great things.
Can you speak to the young Daniel Priestley who is afraid to make their first hire because there's a thought and it's, "I'm going to get, I'm going to lose money by hiring somebody"?
Um, well, for starters, I'm very, very lucky that I was, I've, I was a first hirer, and I made a lot of money with my mentor, and I made my mentor a lot of money. And I recognized, "Oh my goodness, you can hire an idiot 19-year-old who will, who will make," because I was the idiot 19-year-old, right? So, I went, "Wow, an idiot 19-year-old can make you a lot of money." So, I'd been on the receiving end of that deal. I went, "Okay, this is cool. I need idiot 19-year-olds." Um, so I was 21, so it wasn't hard. There were there were plenty buzzing around. But, um, look, I, I, I always, I like to use the example of a bank robbery. Um, there's some great movies about bank robberies. And the movie always starts with a group of people getting together over a beer and a pizza, sitting there thinking, "How would we rob this bank?" And it's not one person thinking it through, it's the gang thinking it through. And then they're sitting there going, "Okay, let's go sit and watch the bank for a bit, right? And we'll we'll see if we can figure out how they change their guards and how they move the money around." They're sitting in the car and they're doing a stakeout. And then they start to formulate a plan, and they get the, like, Matchbox cars and they build the little Lego City. They drive it around and they, like, do the stopwatch and they see how long it does it take. And, you know, they got their little bags that they're going to swap at the park, right? And they're like role-playing it and figuring it out. Startup is very much similar to a good bank robbery.
It's like, you, you want to start with a beer and a pizza and a few people and saying, "All right, here's the plan. We're going to launch something and it's going to do this and we're going to try and achieve this and we're going to, the goal is that we want to do 100 grand a month within 12 months, and we're going to do this." And it's like, "Oh, we could never do that." Well, let's see if we can figure it out, right? Let's let's go on stakeouts. Let's go and find someone who's got a successful business and we'll stake that out a little bit. We'll see how they're doing it.
I love that. Yeah. Right. So good. I think about Fast and Furious. I don't know why that's where my Wait, where? I see I'm in Vegas. I'm thinking of Oceans 11. Oh, yeah. I mean, then there's that classic. Now, mind you, Oceans 11 is what is it? 11 people? Is that why it's called 11? Yeah. So, so if I want to launch a business that's going to be really big really fast, I'm hiring 11 people on day one as well. Like that's my mindset.
I once had someone come to me and he had 12 people on the team. He said, "Daniel, I really want to go big." I said, "Okay, we're going to need a board of directors. You're going to need an executive team of about five. We want to have three or four people on the board. We want an advisory team who lend their reputation to it." And I mapped it out and said, "Here's your executive team of five." I said, "Then you're going to need 12 people on this sales and marketing team, four doing this, right? Another eight doing that, and then you're going to need about 12 consultants over here doing the delivery work, and you're going to need this." He goes, "How long's it going to take to get there?" I said, "Three or four days?" He said, "Three or four days?" I said, "Yeah." So, what we did is we put on a conference and we invited 70 people along who were the right people who should be joining that team. And we stood up in front of the group and we delivered an amazing 3-day conference, and we said, "We're going to be going from 12 to 40 people," and we're going to be inviting people in this room to come and join the team. And we just put on a big conference where we shared the vision and the mission and the plan and the time scales. We had boards around the room. People came and put their ideas on the board. Then we had, like, apply for the different roles. Where do you think you fit within the org chart? People came in and said, "I want to be on one of this, one of this." Three days later, we had an organization with 40 plus.
That's crazy. So, we just went from 12 to 40 like that.
How do you sell a business?
Um, well, definitely you should sell a business. It's a great thing to sell a business. It's, uh, it's 10 years' worth of work in one transaction, which is kind of cool, um, when you, when you get to the point. So, anyone who's, anyone who's thinking of selling a business should definitely think about it seriously because it's a, it's typically a life-changing moment. You also get your time back. So, you, you now, you get a level up of understanding, you get a level up of time, and you've got money. So, suddenly, like, you, you become, you, it's a, it's a leveling up moment for every entrepreneur. I think it's a, it's something that more people should actually just out and out say, "Go ahead and sell a business." Like, do a, do a sale. Um, it's a process. It's like a marketing campaign. Um, you want to bring in some specialists in that marketing campaign. So, depending on the size of the business, you might bring in a consultant who's like a CFO consultant specializing in this. Or, if you're a bigger business, you bring in what's called an M&A firm, um, who is like an agency that helps sell businesses. Um, or, if you're even bigger, you bring in something called an investment bank, and they underwrite it, and they do all sorts of stuff to to make it a really good sale. So, you, you would definitely need either a person or a team of people to help support that process. Um, the business, they're going to want to see the history of the business. They're going to want to see the future of the business. Mostly the future. A lot of people when they sell the business, they want to talk a lot about the history, but actually, it's the future that you're selling. So, you've got to do some financial forecasts. When you sell a product, you should have a brochure, beautiful brochure that shows people the product that they get. When you sell a business, you should also have a beautiful brochure about that business. So, one of the companies, the IT companies that I saw sold, we put together a beautiful brochure about the whole business. So, it had a bit about the past, and it had a bit about the team and the top clients that we had, but we printed that out as a beautiful, like, high gloss, really, like, great thing. Financial forecasts that folded out, right? Printed up lots of documents so that people could really get their head around it. We created a video about the future of what's happening in the next 5 years and the plans of what the business is going to do. Um, created slide decks. We had the entire team trained on how they, how they would share what their role is and what their plan was for the future. Um, uh, we documented all of the assets of the business. A lot of things that people take for granted. So, we documented the database size, and we documented the awards that we won, and we documented the content library that we'd built, and we do, like, all of it was super documented. We left nothing to the imagination. It's like, here's all the assets that you're buying. Here's all the amazing people that you're buying. Here's the future forecast of the business, and we just put it in beautiful documents, and, um, you know, we treated it as putting together a really lovely partnership where we want this business to go to the next level by by you buying it, and we're going to support that in every way that we could, and that came across, and, uh, and yeah, so I've sold a few businesses, and we put, we kind of think it through in those terms.
And then when you sell a business, are you still involved?
Or are you? So, some people, they think that selling a business is like selling a house that you kind of like list it with an agency, and then someone sells it, and then you walk away. Here's the keys. And it's a lot more like having a teenager who grows up and becomes an adult. And it's a process. It's more of a, um, it's more of a passing a relationship forward or a set of relationships forward as opposed to selling a thing. So, it's often the case that the business needs to hit a level of maturity that it can be sold, that it has a life of its own. Um, and also, when you sell it, you don't necessarily want to cut it off from its founding team or its founders or any of those sorts of things. So, for me personally, the best sale is one where, in my mind, I'm thinking for the next 12 to 18 months, like, I'm there to make sure it succeeds. Um, now, what does that look like? It could be that I commit to speaking at conferences that they do. It could be that I commit to helping with supporting the social media channel, uh, that I sit in on key meetings, that I attend a quarterly strategic advisor meeting. I charge for all these things.
Yeah. When you told me that, that broke my brain. That, like, you start businesses, hire the people, and if you guys want me to add insight and consult, I'm going to invoice the business.
Yeah. Well, of course, my time, you know, you can't, like, you can have the business. You buy the business, and then as much or as little of my time as you want. So, I have a speaking fee. If you want me to speak at the conference, I'll do a discounted speaking fee as part of the deal. Yeah.
Um, Richard Branson sells businesses all the time, and he gets paid a really great speaking fee to do the ads or to, um, be associated. They have a license fee that goes back to Virgin. So, if you want to keep the name Virgin. So, Delta Airlines bought Virgin Atlantic, uh, or the, or the majority stake of it, and then they pay a license fee for Virgin. They pay Richard Branson to do certain activities.
So cool. Yeah. So, um, yeah, like my dream scenario is that I sell the business and have 18 months, 20 months' worth of relationship runway ahead.
Like, happy days. Cool. Awesome. Well, I'd love to get like two, three questions from the room if you guys have any questions to Daniel in regards to anything.
Good afternoon. My name is Abby, and I wanted to ask a question about when you mentioned posting every day. So, even though you have your content days, what are the types of content that you either encourage or your team produces for you all to hit that every day in a sense like cycle to be able to get those 11th view for the first time in a 90-day span?
Okay. So, the way that I do this is that I created a folder of like all my posts, all my stuff, my story, and I just put it in the folder and I connected it up with Claude, and then I just basically said, "Every day I need stories to talk about. These are the, like, we want to identify the main pain points." So, we asked Claude, "Who is my ideal customer persona?" And we gave that person a name. And what, uh, every, like, every day we want pain points, prize points, problem points, news stories, and just give me the lines, give me the hooks. So, then on a filming day, my team will be sitting behind the camera and they'll go, um, "Talk about the frustration of hiring someone, training them, and then they leave." It's like, "Okay, blah, blah, blah." So, I'll go, go into that. Board. Talk about the prize of, like, getting an inbound sale of someone you've never heard of. They've just seen your content. They want to buy. So, we'll, like, we'll go through and we'll just talk about this stuff. Um, and we'll just record and record and record and record, and you get used to it. You get good, good at it, and then you get sick of it, and then you say, "Let's do a long form." So, we'll get in and we'll do some long form. Um, the truth is that what I will tell you is probably going to be overkill for most businesses. I've got multiple eight-figure companies I've got to feed. So, I've got like hundreds of people, and, uh, we've got seven companies in the group, and they're all growing, and they need, like, one of my businesses needs 12,000 leads a month, every, like, 12,000 warm leads a month. That's just one. So, I've got to create enough content to create to get that happening. And then another one wants like five or 6,000 leads a month. So, like, I'm under a lot of pressure to produce for a group of companies. If I was running just a small business and I needed 10, 20, 30 customers a year, you know, I can just, you know, just talk to that, talk to the right person. What's their problem? What's their pain? All that sort of stuff.
Now, the other one that's fun as a good way of doing a little bit of daily content is set it up to look like a podcast and just have someone who's like interviewing you as if you're a podcast guest, and they just rapid-fire the questions at you, and you just give your fast, punchy answers.
So good. And you look like you're, you look like you're delivering a podcast. It's got that authority framing. It's, you know, it kind of looks like, you know, "Oh, Abby must have been on this great podcast, and they're asking her all these questions." Boom. Right. So, that can work really well.
I love that.
Knowing that the formula is that they see you for the first time when they see you for the 11th time, do you feel like there is value in posting multiple times a day if you truly post with value, or does it become kind of a mute issue at some point?
So, some platforms still punish you for this. I've noticed that LinkedIn doesn't like it. My second post of the day like off a cliff. So, I might do a post and like, post one, 140 likes, and everything's going great. Post two, LinkedIn's like, "Don't do that." I'm like, "Okay, sorry, LinkedIn." Right? But X, on the other hand, if you go to the other extreme, X is like, "Oh, you want to post every day? Yeah, let's post every day. Why don't you post again? Post again. Start a fight. Why don't see what this guy's saying? You should disagree with him. Get on there. Disagree." like, you know, uh, so X loves you for for like every, every, every day, more, more so. Um, so you've got to pick your platform. If you're going to do multiple posts a day, I think I would say something like Instagram. Probably like, see, Instagram is like 20 or 30 products bolted into one. Instagram Lives is a very different product to Instagram carousels, Instagram posts, Instagram stories. Um, like, you've got, if you list out all the things you could do on Instagram, it's something like 20 products. I think it's probably more than that. And you can go and do a bunch of those products in a day. So, you could say, "Okay, if I really want to ramp this up, I'm going to go a story, a post, a carousel, a live." Um, by the way, Instagram Lives, like, unbelievable how effective that is. I, I would say I've probably watched two of yours start to finish because it's just really good. You're talking about the political climate and the financial, you know, I, I don't know. It's really cool.
Yeah. Um, so like I'll go for a walk and just do a history lesson on, you know, like, like that was the probably the most recent one you saw. You might have seen the history, the history that I did. So, like, I did the history of the limited liability company. Um, and I was doing, I was doing a history of, um, I did this whole history lesson of the decade of 2025 to, sorry, 1825 to 1835, where it was a very tumultuous 10 years where there were six prime ministers in 10 years. Same as what we've got now. We've just had six prime ministers in 10 years. Um, and I said, "It's not unprecedented. Let's go back in time to another time where we had six prime ministers in 10 years." And I talked through, we had a pandemic. It was the cholera pandemic. We had a banking crisis of 1825. What caused that? Right? So, I just kind of pieced together, and I was going through and and and telling this thing. 67,000 people watch it, and it's so, yeah, completely separate product to to, uh, to this other one. So, um, if you're geeking out on a topic and you feel confident that you could do a really good 15-minute chat on that, and you've already posted two or three times in other formats, go for the live.
Yeah. Mixing up the format and the delivery.
And and the way that social media companies think of their platforms is they think of their platforms as multiple products stacked on top of each other. So, internally, they think they have a team called Instagram Live just working on Instagram Live, and they have a team who are optimizing carousels, and they're all competing internally to get more oomph for their product team. So, you see it as Instagram, they see it as 30, 40 different things that are. Yeah. And they're all wanting their thing to be, you know, loved and adored. So, the more you put out different stuff on on the thing, they're loving it. Uh, you may also notice that sometimes they'll put something new out, and that thing will have priority for the first six weeks. So, Instagram recently put out these stupid weird little instant photos, right? They're just testing this thing for the next for six weeks. That'll be a big thing. And you can hack it if you want to hack it, and it'll it'll go out there because they're trying to see whether people like it or not.
Hi Jenny Bolivar, you talked about how to hire a team. Can you tell me a little bit about how that idea came about and how you conceptualized the execution of that? Because my jaw dropped in a way that I was like, "What?" And I want to know more.
So, the way I think about it is, um, it's it's a process that I think of called reverse engineer the future. Reverse engineer the future is not forward engineer the past. So, forward engineer the past is, "Oh, I'm a one-person business today, so I guess two people would be doubling the business, and I better wait until I'm ready to double the business, and I better do this." And like, so you're kind of like trying to say, "Where have I come from, and where do I need to go to next?" And the other way of thinking about it is, "What would the model of excellence look like?" So, what is a snapshot of the future that would be highly successful? So, I create these snapshots and I go, "Okay, so six people doing these roles with this ad spend, with with this product, and we've got this brochure, and we've got this landing page, and we've got this ICP, and we're at this price point, and this person does this, and this person runs this, and this person does this, and then the phone call goes to this person who takes that call and does this, and then this person gets looking after that." So, I'm creating, I'm trying to create a future state snapshot that I think would be a model of excellence that would work. So, if I'm going to draw, try and create a car, I'm thinking about what does the car look like when it's finished, right? What I see most entrepreneurs doing is like, "Oh, I can only afford wheels, so I'm just going to get wheels, and I'm going to run around with wheels, right?" And it's like, "Why isn't this a car? How does these wheels turn into a car?" It's like, this is not going to work like that, right? We're going to have to reverse engineer the future state. So, the f, the, what I've also found is that entrepreneurs think it's it's safer to go slow and to do one thing at a time. And I've found it's safer to go fast and do all things all at once.
So, like rather than, "I'll add one salesperson, and then I'll add one marketing person, and then three months later, I'll add it." It's like, "No, no. I'm going to get you all around a dinner table tonight, and I'm going to get you all to commit right now that we're working on this for the next 3 months, and this is what the, this is the future state that we're trying to get to, and we're starting tomorrow." Like, that's that's my ultimate goal. How do I get everyone in one place doing it all together at once?
You like that? It's wild. And now here's a second part to that question. When you're starting and you don't have capital to entice people to be part of this?
Okay. So, is there capital on the planet? Yes. Somewhere, right? Um, is there an aircraft carrier? There is. There is an aircraft carrier. So, if you wanted to make a movie about an aircraft carrier, would you build one? No. What would you do? You'd find who's got the keys to it and you'd say, you'd say, "Can we borrow this for..." Richard Branson with his first plane? Yeah. "Can we, can we like, we want to make a movie about like aircraft carriers. I've heard that you're the admiral and you've got like an aircraft carrier. Can you like figure out, can we just like, we don't want to have to build one from scratch. Can we come and just use yours for a bit?" So, the same thing is, who's got capital, right? And how much do they want to put at risk and for how long? And like, it doesn't have to be some VC. You know, when I was early 20s, I slept for the first time on a foam mattress as opposed to a spring mattress. And I thought I got it in my head that I'm going to start a mattress business. And, um, well, it's something to fall back on. Um, and, uh, so like I went to this factory that made foam mattresses, and this guy's been in business for 40 years. And I said, "Hey, I want to start a new brand of this and blah, blah, blah. I don't want to manufacture them. I just think I'm going to be really good at selling them, and we're going to launch this thing." I said, "Would you be able to like manufacture me like 30 of them, and I can see if I can sell them?" And he's like, "Yeah." And I said, "And also, like, would you be interested in like putting in maybe 10 or 15 grand to our ads and our marketing so we can take out two ads in the paper, and we will just pay you a lot for those first 30 mattresses, and you'll get your money back if we can sell just the first 30. We won't make much, but we'll have tested the the thing." "Sure, let's do it." And he was sitting on tons of cash, and it was not like some massive financial VC deal. So, it's just like, "Okay, who wins if I win?" So, if I've got four people, and we're doing a million of revenue, and we're, and we're like kicking the door down, who would win? Oh, okay. I guess this company might win, and this company might win, and okay, maybe they'll put some money in. Um, also, maybe the four people would win because the other thing too is, for an early-stage startup, you're probably not going to hire someone who quits their job at Microsoft and comes and works for you. You're probably going to hire a rebel or a misfit. So, you might say, "Hey, Sarah, like, I know you took a year off for maternity leave, and you're thinking about getting back to work, and, um, I know that you want like loads of flexibility, that you want to be able to just work when it suits you, and I know you only want to do three days a week, and all that sort of stuff. I can't really afford like big money for the next 3 months, but here's my project. Maybe you could come and do like 3 days a week with me, and at the end of 3 months, like, if it succeeds, you'll not just like, we'll loop you in on bonus payment and all of that sort of stuff." And Sarah's like, "Totally, like, that perfectly suits, you know, that that's what I've got in mind."
That's good. I feel like you believe and you've adopted a belief early in your business entrepreneurial journey that you don't, it, it can't, it's never going to be perfect. Like when you say, "I'd rather just test it all at once," what you're saying is there's no such thing as perfect, and there's no way of arriving to an outcome unless it is tested. Like, it is a backwards way of thinking where most people, to include myself, that you have every desire, and you, and you have a picture in your mind of what perfect looks like, and you think you could arrive at that without testing.
The, the two beliefs I want to share that really come up for me is, number one, business is a team sport. It's not a solo game. Like, everything great is a team sport.
Yeah. Whenever you see someone who does something extraordinary, you bet your ass there's a team behind them. Like, you know, the, the guy who just won Wimbledon, or, you know, he's out there on the court, you can only see him. But what happens immediately after he wins? "I want to thank my team." Well, who's on the team? Oh, a load of people. There's all, there's the person who does the money, and the person who does the, my assistant, and there's the person who's like my coach, and there's my physiotherapist, and there's my, the, it's like they've got, you know, this person who's playing a one-person game is actually, there's six or seven people in the box just cheering them on because that's a whole team sport. They're full-time working with that tennis player. So, like, business success is a team sport. So, idea number one is, you, you need a team. Every, your next level of success will involve a next level team. If you're just getting started, your next level team is three or four rebels and misfits. If you're a 30-person organization, your next team's probably 40 or 50 people who are next level up. Um, but it's, it's always a next level team that takes you there. Uh, and it's the alignment. The magical ingredient is the alignment, right? I know you're, you're a man of faith. What was the first thing Jesus did? Ran around? Assembled a team. He assembled a team, right? Got his, got his people around him. Um, so, so business is a team sport. Success is a team sport.
The next belief that I have is, if there is a resource on the planet that already exists, I am allowed to have a conversation about how it gets used.
Right? I'll say that again. If there's a resource that exists on the planet, I'm allowed to have a conversation about how that resource gets used. It's okay. I'm allowed to have that conversation. So, I say, "Oh, okay. I want to do a launch party, a rooftop penthouse. Does a rooftop penthouse already exist?" Yes. I'm allowed to have a conversation about the use of that to see if there's any way that we could structure a deal where I can launch my business at that rooftop penthouse. It's okay to have a conversation.
It's good. So, it's just, it's a very simple idea. If there's an aircraft carrier that exists, I can have a conversation about using it if I want to. They might say no, right? I might not be able to find a way. Cash is only one way of bridging that gap. It's, it's a, it's a very simple way. It's great if you've got loads of cash, but it's only one way of bridging the gap.
Wow. So good. Come on. Can we clap it up for Daniel Priestley? What a treat, bro. Appreciate you. Thank you.
Uh, awkward handshake cuz that was awkward. Let's do it again. Let's do it again. There you go.
I wanted to just end with the thing cuz I'm a golfer. Come on. Like the caddy and the. That's it. That's it. Just like that.
What are you potatoes? Potatoes. French fries. How you know you got young ones. What are you talking about at 40? And, uh, yeah. Well, the thing I want to talk about at 40 is this. I'm like, I'm geeking out on this algorithm. I don't think people are going to realize how much this is going to change the world. Like, I know that it's so weird and geeky. The recommendation engine, this slight change that happened earlier this year, it's it's going to f like for 10,000 years, we have conversations with people who we meet in the real world, who are geographically close to us. Then we slightly start engaging around certain people, and now there's going to be this wild matchmaking on steroids where the algorithm understands what you're trying to achieve without you even trying to talk it through in the background, and it's going to go and find your people for you. It's going to be wild.
Dang. You know what I think about? I think about people are going to be disappointed more. Like disappointment is going to happen more because everybody wants to just work with the person they believe is right to work with, but not everyone earns the right. Everyone earns the right to do business, but, you know, do you know what I'm trying to say? Like, like, are you actually good at what you do?
Well, there, there will be that, but bear in mind, the person who's really good for you to work for might be really different to the person who's really good for me to work for, and the AI algorithm will pick up on the tiniest little subtle details and just say, "Oh, look, for whatever reason, I want to matchmake you over here, and I want to matchmake you over here." One thing that is definitely going to happen is that every single one of us, if you do this right, you will find the audience that is right for you, or that the algorithm will find you that audience. So, I might put some content out, and it will find the thousand people who really resonate with the Daniel Priestley approach. You put the same sort of thing out, and it just goes, "Uph, I'm going to find you a slightly different audience, but they're going to be just perfect for you."
Wow. That's that's what's going to happen.
Sweet. Well, one more time. Let's clap it up for Daniel. Let's go.