Transcription
And it's live. I just launched a business which is going to earn $5,000 a month, and I'm going to show you my exact 10-step blueprint so you can do the same with any business.
In my 35 years of business, I built 19 companies and invested in 79 startups, and I've made more money than I'll ever need. I've been offered tens of thousands of dollars to share this knowledge, but instead of charging, I'm going to give it to you for free. So sit down, grab a pen and a notepad, and take the next 5 minutes to learn what I'm about to teach you; because if you can't, I've got some news for you: you're probably not going to make it.
And thanks to Shopify for sponsoring this video. This video will cover 10 steps in total, taking from idea to revenue to reinvestment and growth. So let's get started by coming up with an idea.
So the first part of building any business, of course, starts with what we probably would call an idea, but I prefer to call it a concept. An idea can be a bit flaky and actually have no direction. A concept is an actual physical thing. So in this particular example, we're going to make a clothing brand as our first step into building a business. To be honest, the process I'm about to give you—you can learn to use this process for any business, absolutely anything—but today I'm going to anchor it in a clothing brand product. It's one of the top things that people ask me; they want to launch a clothing brand business. So let's launch one today, for real. I'm going to actually launch this business today using this blueprint to try and help you not just hear what I'm saying, but see how to do it.
So we've decided we're going to do a clothing brand. First thing we need to decide is what are we going to call it? Now, naming a business is really tricky, and I sometimes say to people there are two frameworks for naming a business. The first is something abstract, so think like Google—a brand new word, a brand new thing that doesn't exist—that makes it very easy to trademark and hopefully means things like website addresses are available. The other way to go is something that matters to you. It can literally be what we call "what's written on the tin"—bake beans. So if you're selling baked beans, it's "Bake Beans" written on the tin, and that's the brand, right? You can keep it really simple. For this particular example, I'm going to run with something called "What's Your Dream," because that's my tagline. Most of you probably know that; for new viewers here, maybe you don't. I go into the street and I ask people what's their dream. I've even got a book with the title "What's Your Dream" in it. So why not anchor your business in something that matters to you?
Now, I've seen businesses get launched with people's personal names. So David Ogilvy launched one of the largest agency businesses in the world; he named it after his surname—name David Ogilvy, so now Ogilvy—if you ask anybody the word "Ogilvy," they think of the agency. But, of course, that was once his name. So you can anchor it in something personal, like your name; you can anchor it in a word you can just make up to give it a meaning; or you can do what I'm going to suggest that we do for this particular exercise—anchor it in something I ask people every single day. Good news is, and we're going to come on to this stuff a bit later, I already own the trademark for "What's Your Dream." Trademarks are a very important part in this first stage. You can have an idea; I've seen many people launch a business on the back of an idea, but because they didn't do a concept, they only did an idea, they've gone to market, it's launched, and then they find out it's actually owned by someone else.
So right, we decided we're going to do a clothing brand; we've picked a name, "What's Your Dream"; we've made sure we own the trademark. So now, why are we launching this business? It's very important to make sure that any business you do has a purpose. In my opinion, that's how new businesses are going to beat existing incumbents. If you think about big brands today that are out there, and I could name many of them—Nike, Umbro, whatever it is—your company competition—what is their meaning? Why are they there? So I think the future of any big business is to actually decide what you're going to do with your profit. What are you going to do? You going to invest in your people? Are you going to make sure that you back sports? Are you going to ensure that you back going to the gym? You're going to back people eating healthy? What is the reason your product exists?
Now, for my real-life example that we're going to launch today—this clothing brand—I'm doing it to fix the education system. I want every time we sell a hoodie or sell a t-shirt, whatever we decide to do—and I'll go through that in a minute—when we sell them, the profit that we make after all our costs is going to fund people's dreams, just like yours. So I've anchored it to a purpose. Now there's a couple of reasons why that's really powerful. One, it will allow people who work with you to get excited about the business beyond just making profit. We need to make profit so we can pay people well; we're not a charity; we don't want to be. I think a charity model can actually leave you in a hole that won't allow you to scale. So we're a for-profit business that does good. Now your staff will want to work there. The second thing is, is people will probably want to buy from you. So if you're listening to this video right now and you have a dream, by buying our hoodies, buying our tops, you can fund your dream or you can fund someone else's dream. And won't the world be a better place if we're helping people do what they love? If we're funding dreamers, right? Think of the problems in the world that can get solved if we actually fund dreamers.
So in this first stage, this concept stage, it's also important to start securing all the URLs and website addresses, because again, you don't want to have a brand, even if you have the trademark, where you can't control the messaging on it. So you want to make sure you own the X handle, the YouTube handle, the Instagram handle, the TikTok handle—it's all free—you have to secure all these things to make sure that your business has the longevity and the ability to market in all levels for free.
Now we have a concept, we have an idea, we have a product, we have our why, we have our purpose. So now we move on to stage two of the blueprint.
So stage two of the blueprint is, in the case of a garment business, is find a supplier, right? But any business, you need to find partners; doesn't matter what you launch. I launched a creative agency, so I needed to find people that were good at creative design. I even partnered up with brands that had too much work and could give it to us. I also partnered up with software companies who gave us the software. So you might need to find partners. In the case of a product company, we need to find the supplier who's going to make the product.
Now a lot of people will tell me it's really hard to find a supplier; it's not, it's really not. Now the truth is, to find anything, to do anybody, to do anything in this day and age is hard in general, because people are busy. The good people are doing their own businesses; the good people are busy. You have to really do a methodical process to get a supplier. So, for example, first of all, list out exactly what it is you need from your partner or your supplier; be as detailed as you can. So let's say, in the case of our particular product launch, we want high-quality hoodies. I'm going to get on to why high quality is important in anything you do; doesn't matter if it's a product business or not. High quality, in my opinion, is where you should always start. If you look at any successful business, they start high quality and they go down the food chain. You look at Apple, they start with an expensive product and they get cheaper. You look at Tesla, they start the most expensive car and then they start to do cheaper cars. I think it's an untold hack: if you want to build a really successful big company, start high-end and come down. You very hard to go low-end and come up. Some brands have tried to do it and fail; it's much harder.
Now, in the case of, say, a manufacturer, there are loads of portals out there that actually allow you to order goods—Alibaba, for example—example, of course, online and Google; you can find a million suppliers and different platforms that will allow you to order product. In the particular case for my example today—this genuinely happened, I'm not just saying this for the video—but I literally said, right, I'm going to make hoodies and t-shirts; did a post on LinkedIn, I did a post on Twitter, I did loads of emails to people I know; I said, "Do you know someone?" And literally, while I was waiting for all of that to happen, I went to the local coffee shop near me; I was having a coffee and I was talking to the guy who serves me coffee. I said, "I'm looking to make really high-quality hoodies that I can perhaps sell to show people in a video how to start a garment business." The guy behind the counter said, "That guy over there who's drinking coffee, that's what he does; he has a massive manufacturing plant; he can help you." So that's it. I went over to him and said, "Look, hi, my name is Simon Squibb; I'd like to make some hoodies; how much you charge? How does it work?" This guy then stepped me through the whole process; he went back home, came back to the coffee shop with samples to show me there and then. He didn't know me, so it wasn't because I'm famous; he helped me, he just helped me, right? And of course, he was hoping for an order. It is easy to find what you're looking for if you're looking for it. You will never hit a target unless you know the target you're going for. And then started to get into negotiations with the supplier.
Now this is where I want to make it useful to you, right? I'm assuming you've got no money, but if you've got a little bit of money, it does make it easier. So if you've got $4,000, then under the model I was originally doing, you can go buy 200 hoodies, or you can go buy the computer, you can go buy the software, whatever it is you need to make your business work. If you've got a little bit of money—in my opinion, $4,000 gets you mostly what you need to start any business—but I'm going to assume you don't have any money. So what you can do—and I didn't need to do it in my case because I've got $4,000—but what you can do, and I did discuss this with my supplier, is "Is it possible that you give me the merchandise and then I sell it, and I'll pay you even more than the asking price you're asking for right now for your product?" Now my supplier said yes to me. Now I know when you hear that you might think, "Well, it's okay for you, Simon; maybe they trust you; maybe they can do a credit check on you." You'll be surprised: if you don't ask, you don't get, but you can ask the supplier to back you, and you can ask the supplier to be your investor; invest $4,000 in you, have an equity stake in your business; that's another way to go.
Now, ideally you have the money to do it, and I always love the story of brands like Airbnb. When they launched their product, they didn't have the money to do the tech development, so they went and sold cereal boxes—Obama reels—at conventions where Barack Obama was at, and they made money from those cereal boxes to pay for their tech development. Of course, they also rented out their spare room—the irony, right? At the end of the day, how can you get the money to pay for the product that's going to make you money? You got to be inventive about it; you got to wake up, not be lazy; maybe even go and clean some cars, go clean some windows, do someone's garden, get that $4,000, and stop making excuses.
Now, if you can get $4,000 and you've got the first stage right—you know exactly why you're doing it, you know exactly what the product is, you know exactly who you're targeting—now you can make a sample. Now a lot of people, when they launch a business, they go too big too quick. I launched one of the most successful marketing agencies in the world; in the end, I had a couple hundred people working for me, but at the beginning, I just had one person working with me, and I paid them based on the project that I'd won, right? So I think with the garment business, this is how I'm doing it: I've ordered 200 pieces, and then I'm going to sell 200 pieces for a profit, and then I'm going to take that profit and I'm going to buy 400 next time instead of 200. And once I've sold 400, and with that profit I'm going to buy 800. I'm going to show you how to sell in a minute; I'm going to show you how to market and brand a business in a minute, but I want you first of all to understand the economics. The first few steps do not have to be big steps; if you make them too big, you won't climb up the ladder, right? So I'm making 200 units; I'm going to allocate the $4,000, which is all we're going to spend in this whole process, this whole blueprint I'm going to give you today; we're only going to spend $4,000.
Now we have a product, supplier, now have a minimum order quantity, we now have the money to make that order. Now it might seem strange that I'm inserting this particular point a little bit late in the process, but now you need to be really clear on your demographic: who's going to buy this product and why? You know, if it's a service business, what companies are going to work with you and why? Why do you want to not work with certain companies? Like, for example, when I launched my agency business, I didn't want to work with tobacco companies; I didn't want to work with sin-related businesses—my decision; I'm not making any judgment on other people and what they want to do—I didn't want to work with those businesses. I actually wrote down who was not my customer, and that helped me define who my actual customer is, because most people, when they launch a business, they don't actually know who their customer is, and they definitely try to be too broad. They'll say, "I want anyone who's between the age of 18 and 60 to buy my product or services, or I want any company to use my product and services." No. I said I wanted Fortune 500 companies to use my agency. And in the garment business, I'm going to pick a dreamer demographic—graphic—which, in my opinion, is people before university, just before they go into university, up to the age of 30. Now that doesn't mean to say that people over the age of 30 don't have dreams; they definitely do. I meet thousands of people every month that have dreams and they're over 30, but for this particular exercise, for this particular business, for this particular product, I have decided to pick the 18-to-30-year-old bracket, because it helps me to find, in the fashion case, what is fashionable to that age demographic, what's important to that age demographic. And if I design something that's for everyone, then no one will buy it. I can always end up designing something later for the older demographic. And again, this applies to any business you do. So being really specific, somewhat selective, and very, very careful in your demographic breakdown will help you ensure success.
So we're now, together, launching a fashion brand called "What's Your Dream" that's going to service the 18-to-30-year-old dreamers, and the profit we make after our costs is going to fund those dreamers. Got it? Because the next step is going to get complicated, and I want you to understand the foundation you need for any business. We understand what we're doing, why we're doing it, how we're going to do it, and we've got our partners lined up. So the next step is designing the product.
Now, for some people, this stage is really easy; perhaps you're a designer; you know exactly what you want. And what I probably say is—I'm saying "design the product" because we're launching a fashion brand—but maybe I'm also—if you're talking about a service business or a product business in general—I would say you're also designing a brand, right? You're designing the meaning of the business; just by visually seeing your imagery, people should be able to associate with what you do. So we're really not just designing a product; we're designing a brand.
Now I have a little bit of an advantage in this particular case because my wife is a graphic designer. So to keep my cost down, she's helping. Plus I work with Penguin on this book; they actually designed "What's Your Dream," so I already have a general image that I like and I know works for my brand. But I think that you'll be surprised how many people can help you with this stage if you don't have the talent yourself. And if it's really important to get deep into this, a couple of hacks in the fashion business: you can actually go to an existing fashion designer and say, "Would they like to do a collaboration," right? So example is Kanye West worked with Adidas, right? And they did a collaboration. So he was the designer; they were the distribution partner; it went pear-shaped. And maybe that sounds too highbrow to give you as an example, but you'll be surprised how many designers might collaborate with you; they might do the design with the promise that they can get 10% of the profit you make. So you can get yourself a designer and help you with your business. So again, I'm lucky; I have a graphic designer as my wife, so she can help me with it, but the people who made my hoodies—the high-quality manufacturing partner I had for this—they also offered to do the designs to help us, right? So there's loads of different ways to get the product designed, and it's important to get that right. Now, because you have the demographic in mind, you know exactly who you're targeting; you should remember to design for them. And I'll tell you what we did to make sure we designed for them. And by the way, I don't think we've got it right at the time of making this video; I don't think it's perfect yet; it will still make $5,000 a month profit easy, and we haven't even got it right yet. So you don't need to get this perfect from day one. And sometimes shipping something that's 80% good is better than never shipping it at all. I'll show you what we've made so that you can see the evolution literally in a week from the first idea to the second idea.
So this is the first design we did—very simple; in fact, in this particular case, printing one side, not the back side, actually reduced cost in this particular example. I think for version one, this is what we thought would be popular and matches the brand we already have, and this, this is therefore what, what we, what we initially created, and we made 200 of them. Now I'm going to go into marketing in a minute, but very quickly, while we're on the design: when we put these units into the market and shared them with different people, we got quite negative feedback quite quickly; people saying that they didn't really like it. Now what was interesting is anybody in my community who saw the top loved it, because they know our mission and they feel aligned to it, and they want to ask people what their dreams are and help people with their dreams. But as a fashion product outside of our core fan base, people didn't like it, and they'd make comments like, "It, it doesn't look nice," they don't like the, the, the sentence; it doesn't resonate with them; it feels a bit corporate merchandise. So we took that feedback, which was instant as soon as we made the tops and put them out in the market, and we redesigned it, and we made new ones. And these are the new ones we made. We went from this product—which, by the way, once you've made one, you can feel the quality and you can see if it's good enough, matches what you want the demographic to feel when they hold the product—this is what we had, right? One-sided printed.
Quality was good, but people didn't nearly like this, so we switched to a more subtle branding—give about take. Now it might seem now like we've switched the name of the product, but we haven't. We went deeper. When we actually gave the first product to people, we asked, "What is the mission of this product?" And they said, "Well, it's to ask people their dream." We're like, "No, it's to fund people's dreams, and we do it without any expectation of anything in return."
So then, when talking to people from the first product, what they thought of it was like, "Well, what does that mean?" I'm like, "What it means: give without take." We learned very quickly to iterate and change the messaging. Now we still own "What's your dream?" It's still part of the book, but this is the essence of what the brand is about: it's about helping people. We always said in marketing, "It's sell the sizzle, not the steak." This is the sizzle, right? And it feels less like merchandise. And on the back, we want everybody to become a Founder, so we decided to put "Founder" on the back.
Now this time, when we showed this product to people, they loved it. Now some people still didn't like it in the 18-to-30-year-old bracket, for different reasons—everyone's got different fashion tastes—but the concept that people buy this and they fund Founders, and they can be part of a Founder community, and the messaging is subtle—give about take—meant that people wanted this top. So now we have what we call product-market fit. We have an idea of a product, and the market wants that product.
So number four on the blueprint is build the store. We have to build a platform—think about it almost like a physical location where people can go and buy the product—and it has to be frictionless. So what I'm going to do is I'm part of Shopify, and I'm going to build a Shopify store right now, and I'm going to show you how to do it. If somehow you don't know what Shopify is, it's a commerce platform that allows you to start, grow, and manage a business. Shopify is really, really easy, and the setup can look so professional. Um, it really is a simple drag-and-drop features, so it means no coding. So don't let anyone sell you that this is really hard to build; it's not. Um, if I can do it, anyone can do it.
In this section, you can list your products. Look how beautiful it looks; it's just so simple. You need to come up with a good description for your product. So in my case, I'm going to introduce the Give Without Take hoodie by influencer Simon Squib: A Perfect Blend of comfort, style, and purpose, crafted from 100% organic cotton. This hoodie is as soft on your skin as it is on the environment. Every purchase supports Simon's mission to give back; we proceeds going directly towards funding dreams and helping aspiring entrepreneurs achieve their goals. It's important that you really emphasize why people should buy, right? So in this, now we've made the mission clear, the quality clear, and the purpose of the business. Oh, I really like this theme; this is really cool. Now you can pay, but I'm I'm going for this free one for now—got to keep your costs down when you're first starting a business. You can see it already looks like a store; it's so simple. I'm not tech-savvy at all, so if I can do it, you can do it. I'm just going to change the text here and add the official Give Without Take logo, so I'm just going to upload that. Looking good.
A lot of people think you need to do fancy product shots. I don't think it's really that hard these days to take pictures, but anyway, any business that's selling a product, I tell people, "Don't overthink it too much, right? Better to get it live 80% perfect and update it over time than make it perfect from day one and never launch." Now this is really important: you keep an eye on this, and look, it's laid out super simple, right? Here are your analytics. You need to be constantly checking these, as this is what will let you know what's working and what doesn't work. Use these tools. So I managed to get Shopify to give you a free trial as well. If you go to shopify.com, you can have a free trial of this; it's easy—go do it now.
Number five is actually planning distribution. Now, in of course a garment business, that means retail shops, that means online stores, and we're lucky enough in this particular video to be sponsored by Shopify—that's a great platform to get your product out there in the world. Now I actually asked Shopify to sponsor this video to show you that you could also get these partners to sponsor you. Sometimes your distribution partners can be your sponsors; they can help you fund your partnership with them; can be a part of sponsorship and can help you get your product out there. Now distribution can come in many forms. I'm going to talk through different ways that you can get your business out there. If you've got a service company, distribution is super simple: you just get one happy customer and you ask them to recommend you, right? That is a distribution model. I love it when people build up email lists around their personal brand because you can email people to buy your product, buy your service; it's low cost; it's a distribution model. I always think the low-hanging fruit with any business is always getting your friends and family to buy your product. Of course, in the hoodie case, I can literally get my wife to buy a hoodie; I can get my team to all buy a hoodie; I can get all their friends to buy a hoodie, right? I've got a team of 15 that help me make these videos; if they all sell three, we've sold 60–70 hoodies just in our small network within our company portfolio. Now if you've got product-market fit, you can of course scale this up now, but distribution can start small. Everybody thinks distribution has to be from day one you're in all the Waitrose, or you're in all the Tescos, or you know whatever—you don't need it to be big straight away. Moving it forward with a small group of people first can create a community, which I think is a power-up in any marketing; having a community that then promote you is more powerful than you promoting you.
I'll quickly show you behind the scenes of what we're doing right now: we're packing 100 hoodies to 100 people; we're including a book; we're including some sweets. You can see how we get these hoodies out to influencers, to partners, and distribution can come from their awareness of the product. We also managed to secure some free spots at Carfest and other festivals around to distribute and sell our product. Now a lot of these locations, if you ask them, will have spare spots; most Sunday markets have a spare spot. Sometimes you can do revenue shares; sometimes there's an amount of money to put down to actually have those market stalls, but it's worth asking. Sometimes for small businesses, a lot of these places will let you start for free—you never know. One of my favorite distributions, of course, is social media, but we're going to get more into that in a minute when we talk about marketing.
Now an interesting thing: when we're doing a market test at Carfest about how much people pay for our hoodies, we were looking to sell them for £85; our cost of goods is around £35, so of course we have marketing, management, distribution, so we have to sell them for £85 to make a profit. And when we were asking people at the event what they would pay, they were saying around £50–£55, which sounds absolutely reasonable. We analyzed why people were saying that: it's one, at a festival; some of the demographic were not in love with our mission; they didn't know our mission. So when we ask them how much they pay, they pay a certain amount; they'd never tried on the hoodie; they'd never checked the quality; and they didn't know our mission. So we failed to prove value, but once we explain the value, quality, and why we were doing it, then people were starting to say, "No problem with £85." So as soon as I tried it on, for example, no one no one questioned the £85. When we actually did the display of all the goods initially, we put it all piled up, and there were too many tops around—it didn't look like a premium product, 'cause it was all jumbled together like a secondhand shop. So we tidied up the display; we made it look cleaner; we made the product look nicer; we put the product on wooden hangers. And by the way, this is true for every single business: if you've got a service business and people go on your website, which is often the distribution network, and you put your low-end client work on your website, then your pricing will instantly be seen as low-end. So on my agency platform, we used to always put CNN, estate order—all the big products where we pay big money—will always front and center, so value was obvious from day one. You want to work with the people that help CNN become famous, then we're not going to be cheap, are we? And I think sometimes people decide pricing based on what the customer said instead of making sure you bring the customer up to the value of your product. Apple are brilliant at this. Everybody said, "No one's going to pay £1,000 plus for a phone," nobody—all the other companies—no, Kia were going down in price; they thought people wanted to pay less—it's not true. You add value; you can add on the price. If you bring people more, they will pay more. If you wear this hoodie and it doesn't fall apart in two months, people are happy to pay more for it because it lasts longer. So you have to make sure that your communications and your distribution partners are appropriate for your brand. If you're putting this hoodie in Tesco's, then it's probably not going to sell for £85, but if you put it in a premium location with the mission clearly stated, with the ability for people to try on the product and realize the quality, you'll get the price you want. Now maybe you don't want to price your product high; that's fine; there is a whole different economic model around doing things cheap and mass—totally get that. Personally, again, my philosophy is always have a premium product, and you can always come down in price over time, and distribution partners will determine whether or not your product is seen as valuable or not.
So in marketing, there are a lot of different methods to promote a business. I've done a video on marketing that's got a million views on YouTube already that goes really deep on this subject, okay, but I'm going to tell you two important things to launch any business. There are some things I think you should avoid, and in my opinion, when you're first launching a business—and not everyone will agree with me on this—but try to avoid paid ads, why? Because it's very competitive; it can get really expensive; and even if you manage to find a niche initially, if there's a niche it will make you money, I drive sales to your site, it will just become a bidding war, and it will become very difficult, and there's not much of a learning curve in mastering it. I think the better way to market any business is learn to make content, and maybe initially if you don't know how to make content, which is bloody easy—I'm sure you're consuming a lot of it—you just need to look at what's popular and in some respects replicate it. Like street content right now is really popular; that's what I'm doing; it's hugely popular. You know, sometimes you just need to innovate on what's already out there; you don't need to reinvent the wheel. But there are two methods in marketing that I think everybody should know in and out, and it's really simple: influencer marketing. And you can be an introvert or an extrovert and do influencer marketing. Create a list of influencers that you want to work with, and even the big ones that you think, "I can't afford them." The way to work with influencers is one, align with their purpose. So if you came to me with a business and you said, "Simon, this business will help fix the education system," "Simon, this business will help people's dream beam happen," I'd be really interested in helping you make it happen, and if you're a small business, I wouldn't charge you. Now I do charge big brands because they've got the money, but I do not, as a rule, charge people who are starting a business money to help them market their business, and you'll be surprised how many influencers are the same. Now if there are some influencers out there that still need to be paid, and everyone needs to earn a living, so that's perfectly normal. You can link sales to income, so in other words, if they sell a hoodie, you can give them a percentage of the profit. So make a list, be bold; the strongest people ask for help; tell these people why you need their help; you'll be shocked how many people will help you. Now you can also build an economic model in there that will also increase your chances of having even more influencers, but influencer marketing is the most underpriced attention in the market today, and despite everybody knowing about it, it's shocking to me how many people don't actually try and do it.
The second thing in marketing, if you don't want to go watch my very long video on marketing, is strategic marketing. So strategic partnerships are one of the most underrated ways of getting your business out there. So an example: I work with Tide banking right now. If you sign up with Tide and you get £50 when you spend £100, and I put the link down below. Now I've mentioned it, you can even get your company registered for free through them. So I work with brands that create a win-win for my audience. Tide banking have a huge client list, and I say to them, "Would you mind promoting these dream hoodies to your audience who might like to buy one to be a part of the founder community?" Be mindful we got "Founder" on the back of the tops, but also at the same time, the money these hoodies generate will allow people to open up a business, which allows them to open up a bank account, so it creates a win-win for brands like that. People don't realize that these brands need innovation and need partnerships. Quite often the way to think about it is, okay, which partner out there has a database for exactly the demographic that we discussed earlier? So who has the demographic for the people you want to work with already? And if you have a product that doesn't conflict with them, then they will be happy to team up with you, especially if there's a share revenue and certainly if there's a mission alignment. I call this 1+1=11, and I will never stop telling people about this because I see so many people spending money on ads and not enough money spent building relationships with companies that already have all your clients in their email list. There is one other strategic partnership that you can have, and that's with your existing customers. So we've now sold 80 hoodies in the last 8 hours; those people we can now say to them, "If you sell the hoodies, we can give you a commission." This is called affiliate income. So making your community benefit from selling your product is another thing a lot of people don't do; they're willing to give the money to Mark Zuckerberg, a billionaire already at Facebook, but they're not willing to give profit or income to their community. Don't make the same mistake I see so many small companies make every single day. Learn to reward your community for helping you.
Number seven on the blueprint is product launch. Now, in many respects, a product launch isn't a final thing. A lot of people think they've launched their product, that's it—it's worked or it hasn't worked. Airbnb launched their website eight times before it worked. So a product launch—it's very important to think about timing. So, for example, we're doing hoodies; it's just coming into autumn now in England where we're initially launching our product. Hoodies make sense. Actually, at the festival we were at, it was sunny, so we sold less hoodies because we were off slightly; we were a little bit early, just before the autumn season began. So timing is everything. You'll see a lot of hit songs, for example, if you're a singer and you release a song—a lot of hit songs initially weren't hits, and then they were released a little bit later at a different moment in time, and they were hits—"T-shirt Weather" by Circle Waves, for example—go Google it. The point is that timing is everything, and a lot of the time people will decide whether a product is a failure simply by product launch without actually realizing that it might be timing, okay? So make sure your timing is right. Of course, in our case, we're launching hoodies—no one's going to wear them in the summer. Then be creative in your launch. I always am shocked when people launch a business and it's just like a crappy event and they don't don't really do anything fun. I think business and fun need to work hand-in-hand. So what can you do when you launch your business that's fun, that's on-brand for you, that's going to be engaging? So in our case, we go into the street and we say, "How much would you pay for this hoodie? If you can guess the price, you get it free." Do something that relates to your personal brand and that can be enjoyable for you and of course matches the purpose of your business. I still really like things like flash mobs, you know, like just getting attention. I bought a staircase that was went up for sale—the first ever staircase in London that went up for sale—and it was in all the news the next day because, "Why did this millionaire buy a staircase in the middle of London?" Right? So you know, leveraging whatever you can, whatever assets you've got to do something unique to get you PR, which is press relations, and doing whatever you can to get communities involved in what you're doing and make a noise. I mean, we went on the London Underground and put up fake ads when we launched our helpbank.com platform, and we took empty spaces on the Underground and we put ads in that said, "We didn't pay for this space, so you don't need to pay for help," and that got a lot of noise, a lot of controversy—some people didn't like us for it, some people thought it was brilliant—it doesn't matter; we were doing it for a purpose; we're doing it to help people, and it got us lots and lots of media coverage. The staircase I bought got us £2 million with free media coverage. I didn't need it as a millionaire to go spend £22 million to get media coverage; I got it for free, and you can do the same. Now, in a case of something like a hoodie, I I think people wearing it naturally is a really good thing to do. There was this whole thing where Samsung paid the Kardashians and other people to do a tweet about how much they love their Samsung, and it turned out the tweet came from their iPhone. So you don't want to get caught out like that; you don't want to have someone say they like your product but they don't genuinely like it. So the thing to do is what we call social listening. Once you've done this initial launch, you want to understand what person may actually love your mission and your product, and then try to get them naturally engaging with it. I'm not even wearing my own top today, right? Like what does that say about me? I should be wearing it today, yeah, and I think that's important—people naturally need to be wearing it, and I will wear it in a minute just to prove I do love it, but I don't want to be too commercial in this video, right? The point is people will wear it naturally if they like it, and they're the people to really double down on when it comes to product launch—people that genuinely believe in your business, genuinely believe in your service, and genuinely believe what you're doing is important and they want to help you do it. Back those people; work with them on the launch stage. All right, now I'm going to live the brand because in my case I'm a key person of influence, right? But you you you need to live the brand, and you want to work with people that live the brand, and so I will be wearing this everywhere I go. That's another reason I wanted to make it super high quality; it's why it's got furry lining, 'cause I want it to be a good product because I'm going to wear it.
Next is building infrastructure. Now I have a strange way of building a business; I don't think it's strange, but some people think it's...
Strange, my idea is always get out to the market, see the demand, and then build infrastructure around it. Now I've got the resources to buy a warehouse right now. I mean, I bought a bloody staircase! I have the resources to go and build out trucks and delivery folks and all the stuff that is needed for a business like this.
In the long run, we're going to have our own stores. In the long run, but you don't need to do it at the beginning, and I don't do it at the beginning, even though I've got the resources to do it. Why? Because you want to find out demand first. You want to find out the market fit is perfect. You want to find out what people are willing to pay for the product long term, or what other products they want. So you don't want to start building all this expensive infrastructure, even if you've got the money, until the time is right.
So what is the infrastructure for this early stage? In my opinion, it's good product, right? Baseline. Second is delivery, right? So if someone goes into the link in the comments down below, buys one of these hoodies right now, which you feel free to do, I want it getting delivered to you quickly, promptly, and professionally. So infrastructure for me in the early days is a way of getting your order into my system, and then that order getting translated into a delivery. In between, my personal opinion is you want to package it up so it's nice. So in a hoodie's case, that's obvious: you put it in a nice box, you wrap it, you put a note in there that's personalized. You try to make it as unique as possible and as nice as possible. In a service business, that might simply be telling people clearly when you're going to deliver the service, when you're actually going to bring them the results that they're after. Whatever it is that you're doing, whatever is a product business or a service business, in this stage infrastructure is about delivering on the expectation of what you have launched. Right? Make sure you have built enough, but not too much that it cost you a lot of money to maintain it when you're not totally sure it's going to scale yet.
So what have I done in our case? And and this is why I wanted to actually launch a business today and not just tell you how to do it. Because even as a multi-millionaire with all the resources I've got to hand, all the knowledge I have, I still wouldn't go out there and build massive infrastructure. So what have I done? I figured out what it cost to post a hoodie with the Royal Mail. I went on the Royal Mail website, and they're not the best brand in the well, but I went on their website and figured out what will it cost to post one hoodie, two hoodies, two hoodies with a letter, two hoodies with paper wrap, two hoodies with ribbon. What does it cost to send these out? And I've worked out the most cost-effective way to do it. Actually, sending two hoodies cost the same as one hoodie, so I could do shipping free if you order two. Right? By understanding the infrastructure it's already out there, I haven't had to recreate the wheel and build a a logistics system. I can literally right now put your hoodie in a bag, write a note to you personally, which I want to do for now—that might not be scalable—and then literally have the post office come and pick it up when it's ready for delivery. That's all the infrastructure I've built for this business, and I don't need anything else. If I've done all the other things I've just told you about—the influencer marketing, the the the product launch correctly, you've got the why right, you got the brand right—then all I need is that. Now, of course, if I suddenly get 10,000 orders a day, I need to also think about what is my limits. Actually, initially, I only have now 120 hoodies left. I will sell those hoodies before I order more, but what I have done infrastructure-wise is I've checked with my supplier: how long do they need me to order more tops for them tops to arrive? So it's basically 3 days, so I can put up more and I can get more to people if I want without having huge stock on my system and huge cost to buy that stock in advance. That's all the infrastructure I need at the beginning, and and and honestly, like any business, this supplies the same. Like when I built my creative agency business, we had hundreds of people working for us towards the end, but when I first started, I just had one designer who was a contractor. They weren't even on full-time, and I got a client who needed service. I would then hire that contractor to do the work, and then that contractor became a partner in a business, and then I married that partner, and then we had a baby together, which sounds a bit weird, doesn't it? But that's kind of sometimes building a business becomes personal. I'm joking a little bit. I did marry my first ever graphic design hire in the agency. But joking aside, you don't need to marry people to make this work. The point I'm trying to make here, that that businesses start step by step. You can get one person initially as a contractor, you can get one product and then sell that one product. You don't need to overthink it. I can ship thousands of products if I want, but I don't need to at the beginning. Let's see what the demand is, and I'll scale up based on demand. You should do the same.
Now, number nine on the blueprint is sales. I I put this as a separate subject from marketing and even product launch because sales is an ongoing process in any business. A lot of people don't spend enough time building a system for sales, and I don't care what business it is. I love building sales systems, and anyone can build a sales system. Everyone should know how to sell. In fact, I would argue today every business is built on the back of sales. If you can sell, you can build any business, and anyone can learn sales. Now I've done a very long video on sales, which again you can go watch if you want, but I'm going to give you the most important highlights with any launch business right now. The first is: what is your sales strategy? Let's take the garment industry again. If we sell one hoodie and we've sold 80 hoodies, then we need a system, a sales system, to ask that person if they'd also like a t-shirt or they'd like a different color hoodie. Sales doesn't have to just come from an external source. Marketing is better at generating an external source of sales. Sales comes from internal processes. So now those 80 people, we ask them if they want to buy a different color, right? We ask them if they want to buy a T-shirt, and then we also understand them. Maybe we do a survey, and then we ask them if they wouldn't mind telling their friends about us, and maybe we give them a referral code or a free something, whatever that is. And so sales is a process that people just don't flush out enough, and that's why I put it in here as a separate thing. It it's not part of marketing. Okay, marketing will create inbound; reactive sales is outbound, proactive. Right? You need to make sure that, for example, in our merchandising range, maybe we'll get brand sponsors, right? So we need someone that's going to go out and talk to brands and say, "Hey, Pipedrive, would you like to sponsor some T-shirts?" And we need to speak to 30 brands to get six meetings to get one client saying yes. Now I really like, love sales, and I get really excited about it. It's a very deep subject, but I want you to really think about your sales system. Now you've launched a product; it's out there in the world. You can be thinking about this now because now you can start to understand who your clients are and who you can sell to at scale once you've got that. So, for example, maybe in the hoodie business we'll go target all the people that have sold a company, and we'll ask them, "Please buy these hoodies to support other people that one day want to sell a company." And there's lots of people that have sold a company, and then maybe they will also promote it because a lot of these people have sold compan comp become quite successful on social media themselves. So maybe that's our our sales strategy: to go to existing successful founders that got lucky, had help, were successful, have a great life, and they now want to give back and help other people do it. Maybe they even buy a load of hoodies and give it to people that they're investing in, give it to people they want to help make their dreams happen. So having a sales strategy, whatever it is for you—I mean, my agency business, my service business, my sales strategy is I wanted to work with Fortune 500 companies, all the top most successful business businesses. I wanted to work with those companies because I knew they had money, I knew they had power to do cool things, and I knew that if I got through to the right person, I can make a difference in their business. What's your sales strategy? Be very careful about this; don't overlook it.
Last but not least is the financial management and potential growth of your business. Now I would say one of my personal weaknesses in business is I don't really care about money, and I don't really care about the finance department generally speaking, but you cannot overlook the financial mechanism in which your business will grow. What I suggest, and this is what I did for the first six years of Fluid, I didn't take any money out. All the profit we made—and we made profit every single year—I put it back in to growing the company. I hired people, got a bigger office, made the world better for my team by having good equipment, good software. I think people take money off the table too quickly, and the reason I made so much money is because I took no money off the table for such a long time. Every time you take money off the table, I literally think you're you're harming the value of your business a year from now, right? So understand your numbers, and and and actually it's very simple: what does it cost you to deliver the product to the customer, and what's your profit margin? I've seen many restaurants go bust that are full up, absolutely packed, and they gone bust. Why? Because they filled up based on what clients said they would pay, but they didn't actually work out what it was costing them to run that business, so they had a full restaurant but no profit. You have to be disciplined about this, and so what are your cost of goods? What does it cost you? Be very clear, even electricity that you're using at home when you're working on your idea costs money. Work it out, even if you don't like numbers and you don't like accounts. This stuff is common sense. Learn it, figure out exactly what it cost you to make that product, exactly what it cost to deliver that service, write it down, stick it on the wall, and make sure you never sell below it.
Now, cash flow-wise, the business that I'm launching here with you today, sure there's a little bit of a cash flow problem in this business because I have to make the product and then I have to pay to ship it to you, and there is a, you know, in general, like it sits in escrow. Different companies do different things; credit cards hold the money, but there can actually be a cash flow delay before I get payment, right? I have to sell all the product before I get all my money back, too. Every business is different. In the service business, I always recommend to people: got the best cash flow business ever because what you should do is charge 50% deposit in advance, as soon as you sign an agreement to do any sort of service business, and that 50% should be your cost and the final 50% payment is your profit. But not enough people implement that. Now, in product businesses, a little bit different, but again, we made hoodies, we took them to a festival, people gave us cash, we got the money back quite quick, right? Some people pay by credit card; the credit card takes 30 days or so to pay us, yes, and we lose 3%, depending on which credit card that is. All costs you need to put into your financial system. You need to know exactly if someone pays my credit card, what's the cost; if someone pays cash, what's the cost, because actually you still got to take the cash to the bank, right? What's the cost of getting in the car to the bank to put the cash in the bank, right? Understand every single element; don't be lazy, be clear, because this part of the business, if you don't manage it well, will not allow you to grow because you don't know exactly what you're making. You may have money coming in and not even realizing you're losing money, and I see that time and time again. Sounds like my god, really, people are losing money and don't realize it? Yes, because they don't spend the time figuring out exactly what their cost is and being very clear.
Targets are the final thing I'll say: if you want to grow, you need to set yourself ambitious targets. Now, maybe you don't want to grow; maybe you want a lifestyle business, which is absolutely fine. I believe a big business is easier to manage than a small business, and honestly, you want to plan for growth, and to plan for growth you need to set targets, and it makes everyone feel excited if you reach those targets. If you don't set a target, you won't hit it. I've said it before; I say it again: set targets so that you can grow. So what is it you want to do? Maybe that's the thing for you to go away and do now and figure out what is it you want to do. I hope you enjoyed today's video, and let me know where you're going to set up. I really love to hear it. I'm have to have some chicken now, so I'll see you later.