How to start a 7-figure business in 2025: Advice from 4 millionaires

hey friends welcome back to Deep dive the podcast where it's my immense pleasure to sit down with entrepreneurs creators authors and other inspiring people and we find out how they got to where they are and the strategies and tools we can learn from them to help build a life that we love in this video we're looking back at previous episodes to take the best business advice from some of our previous guests so without further Ado here we are to what extent do you think it's useful to join an existing startup versus just start your own and have a punt and kind of do it anyway it's it's massively useful to join someone else's startup like I would highly recommend that to absolutely anyone so here's what goes wrong with a lot of young people they go to careers fairs and all that sort of stuff it's only big corporates that exhibit so they end up being funneled down the big corporate uh uh path now you can start a business that doesn't exist you can go to a big corporate so in the UK there are 7,000 large companies that have more than 250 employees there's 5.5 million businesses in the middle that already exist but don't have 200 50 employees so and the vast majority of them have 10 people or less right so it's huge hugely stacked between two and 10 people is the small business landscape so when you join a big corporate you have no idea what the whole business does you have no idea what everyone else does um they don't bring you in on strategy or any of that sort of stuff you are just completely in the dark and they say this is your job go do that job and if you can't do it we'll find someone else who can is the subtext but when you join a business that's four people five people six people you know exactly what the whole does you often know the revenue you often know theit you often know the weekly activity of the entire team so you get this kind of feeling and experience of what an entire team does and what an entire business does and I I would highly recommend anyone who wants to start a business first do two years working inside somebody else's small business oh interesting so like a lot of people um sort of in in our team when I talked to them about this or people who've done internships with us feel like say that oh yeah you know I I I feel like I'm learning a lot and to me I'm always a bit confus like like what is what is there to learn like cuz we're just like doing stuff but I guess for someone who doesn't have experience running a business or being in a or yeah it's completely different to life in Amazon HQ corporate and it's also not too different to what you did with medicine where you know you do your study and you do your education and then you go and work in a hospital and you're working around experienced doctors and you and like the theory is all well and good but like the two first two weeks on the job when you realize oh this is the dynamic between the nurses and this is how you request a scan and this is how you do all this other stuff that you never and and here's how long this actually takes and you know these little things that like in a business context flipping back from medicine which I know nothing about uh you know just things like uh well how do you send out like a big bulk email to a list or where do you get a list from or like how do you sit down and have a lunch and negotiate a joint venture so for me my two years doing that when I was 19 to 21 I actually got to sit in on those meetings so when John was negotiating to do a list swap you mail your list for our product and we'll mail our list for your product I'm sitting in on that meeting quietly and going oh wow that's how that happened that's the thing yeah yeah and when John was proposing oh here's what we'll do with the revenue we'll do a revenue split and we'll actually this will be the first chunk for costs and we'll take that out first and then this will be and here's how we'll measure it and it's like oh right okay that's just a meeting that you have and you just agree that in the meeting and then you write it down and confirm it and then you put it in the heads of terms okay now I get it yeah I think there's so much stuff like this where until you've had experience in a thing it's just it's hard to even fathom what goes on like this weekend I was I was at this like pH philanthropy conferen type thing where there were people from like nuclear policy making and like Grant making and I was I was asking basic question I was like like what does it mean to like Lobby a a congressman and they're like oh you literally queue up and then you literally give them money for it and wait what that's a thing like how how do you contact a government official do you just like Google their name and they're like well no it's opaque for a reason and you have to do this you have like it's just completely mind-blowing that this whole world of like government and policy and grants and philanthropy that I have zero experience in and like I can read all the books but I I wouldn't know how to contact a government official yeah unless I know someone who is literally doing the thing yeah and you hear these fancy titles it's like oh I'm an analyst with um KPMG or Goldman Sachs and it's like but what do you actually do oh I get given a list of these people and then I have to go and put these spreadsheets together oh okay yeah okay so you're 21 you've started your own I guess lead generation company okay so is this like let's say I am an estate agent and I want to sell houses I'll give you some real examples we worked with um financial planners we worked with franchise one of the biggest deals we did was with franchisors who wanted to sell franchises and what we' do is a road show of events introducing their franchise to potential franchises um now as a $60,000 franchise we would get uh 15% of the franchise success fee um as our marketing fee okay so they paid us um an amount that covered costs first and then we got 15% successfully on on top of that so that was a great deal they had put a lot of energy and effort into creating franchise we um they when when I met them I went to a franchise Expo and there were 300 franchise or all trying to say that they had the best franchise franchise or as in like five guys McDonald's KFC would be a franchise or yeah exactly and like those are like McDonald's is the biggest well-known franchise they sell you the rights to run their business but there's all sorts of little franchises like um mortgage broking franchises and even things like gardening franchises and franchises so um you you basically I go along to a franchise Expo and I see that there's 300 franchise or trying to stand out and be different and I go this doesn't work for anyone cuz if you're a customer thinking about buying a franchise you've now got way too many choices and if you're a franchise or you're just standing right next to 300 competitors so it's just feeling too weird like too you know too um uh it feels too saturated so we just basically approached one that I thought was great and we negotiated a deal and we did a road show where instead of them being shoulder-to-shoulder with competitors we would put them in front of 50 people who were potential customers how would you find these 50 people so we'd advertise do Direct Mail campaigns we would do um uh there was something called fax broadcasting at the time fax broadcasting okay let's not even go I'd have to I'd have to even begin by telling your audience what a fax machine is I'm going to make up a random offer so let's say I lose everything on my YouTube channel I get canceled overnight but I still have the skills I'm keeping in mind that my business ideas have to be something I can sell for ideally 2K ideally five sales a month mhm I might be thinking either web design agency type situation potentially but I've kind of been outside of that market for a while or I'd be thinking uh video content just quickly you've being outside of that market do you know someone who's credible web development do you know someone who's a web developer yeah yeah sell them H yeah that could work yeah in in my head I was defaulting to oh I guess I'd have to do it myself so I need to learn quite a lot of stuff no you don't you can find someone who's good at web development and you can just go running around selling two grand packages for them to build oh okay that could work too there you go there's 10 grand a month what if I was like uh hey I know how to use a camera I know how to do video editing uh therefore if I do personal brand video content for startup Founders who I know have money or business owners like you who I know have money and I could be like Dan you have books you want to be on all the social platforms I'll show up to your house once every month and we'll film a bunch of stuff I'll just ask you the questions I'll chop it up content for Instagram Facebook LinkedIn etc etc sign me up yeah rock and roll of course so that's that's a great example yeah and um and you just sign me up and you might say it's initially 2 Grand and see if you like it and then it's 2 Grand a month after that um now you might say uh by the way I've got a whole team I got an amazing team of people uh I've actually found um I've got lead uh content uh creators here in the UK I've also got an international team so that we can do um an initial style guide and some signature content and we can also do Brute Force content you know through our team in the Philippines and then we've got a team in Ghana and actually we send all the raw footage to them and they create lots of videos and we then put that on Tik Tok and all that sort of stuff we see what it sticks and bring it all together I'm like wow that sounds really great so yeah that would be like I'm really big on the idea of the entrepreneur's job is to be the organizing force not to do the work so like you keep getting into like oh I know how to edit videos it's like it's like that's doing the work you you're not being an entrepreneur you're being a video editor so the the entrepreneur's job is to be the organizing Force you're the organizer I don't know how to do anything like Ju Just just on that I I've built multiple $10 million plus companies I don't know how to do anything like as in I don't have any web development skills I don't have video editing skills I don't have design skills I don't have any skills like I can write all right I can write books but um and I can speak but that's it I'm an organizing Force I'm the guy who just organizes it I bring together talented people and I say hey you're good at video editing you should join my team a video editor and you're good at designing you should be part of our team so all I'm good at is enrolling people in stuff so the sort of person who enjoys organizing people who enjoyed like organizing University societies back in the University days and like organ bringing people together and like the entrepreneur's job is to be the organizing Force it's not to do the work damn I still keep on thinking it's like yeah you know what skill do I have what what skill can I offer that's the schooling system that's that's the schooling syst yeah you're component labor you're like which component do I fit in it's like none you're not in the business you're the entrepreneur you're building the business um your job is to get really clear about what the customer is trying to achieve and then be the organizing Force to fill that for them um and bring together all the people that you might need in order to do that so that's your first 10 grand concept audience offer sales that's all you have to do it's cheap to do you can do it with Microsoft Word you can do it with Apple Pages and Keynotes okay before we go into to the next stage let's talk about sales so sales s sales are scary sales is a dirty word I don't want to be a Salesman uh I feel that like emotional response of the even the word sales uh how how do we how do how do I approach sales for my web design agency or for my assuming I'm not doing the work I'm just going out there almost everyone's had a positive experience with a salesperson and a negative experience with a salesp person but that could be true for any profession I've had negative experiences with bookkeepers I've had negative experience with lawyers I've had negative experience with doctors fairly um there are good doctors and bad doctors there's people who've got amazing bedside Manner and people who are really not um that great so when it comes to sales the word that everyone says about a good sales person is professional they were professional um they they approached it professionally so what does professional mean it means that they ask great questions they give you guided advice they are not pushy but they also do give guidance um they've done their homework they've done their research they've got great product knowledge they listen they understand they're trying to get on your side to figure out what it is you actually genuinely need and they're making sensible recommendations so all of those things are professionalism so sales is a science and it's a very valuable skill that you can use in any profession it doesn't matter what you are or what you do a sales skill is a powerful skill because sales is listening understanding and then creating a good argument for the right solution and being able to marry up this is what you this is what you're trying to achieve this is what I think you need and here's why right so you're creating a path of least resistance here's the mental model you should have with sales there is the current reality that the person has that is their current situation there is their desired reality that's what they want and then there's the obstacles and criteria that are in the way right these are all the things that stop them from getting what they want and then there's you who says this is the path of least resistance here's what you need to do you need to go and do this this this and this and that is going to get you from your current reality to your desired reality and it's a lot like being a doctor so if you're a doctor you're actually it's so similar to sales when you see someone who's not happy with their current reality you ask them ask them a loot of questions what's going on right you ask them a load of questions and then you might say the first thing I want to do is a diagnosis I want to do some sort of assessment y right so then you do an assessment and then you say okay so I think I've got a treatment plan which is just a path of least resistance or a solution oh okay what do I have to do well you're going to have to do some antibiotics but you have to take these every day for seven days okay what else do you need to do well you need to do this thing with this thing okay great what else do you meant to do well you have to stop doing this okay great so that's the treatment plan and essentially you are recommending a treatment plan so in there you you're talking to them you're asking a lot of questions you're doing an assessment you're figuring out where are they now where do they want to be what's in the way what's stopping them and then you're advising them about a treatment plan and that's sales that is sales that's great sales I guess when I think of sales I think the combative adversarial relationship that I go into a used car dealership with thinking they're going to try and get me to spend Ser have you actually ever had that uh like have you actually ever had a used car salesman do that to you no I haven't but I've I've been yeah I've been imagining and expecting it like and I've been to these dealerships with my mom and she approaches it that kind of when you went and bought your Apple stuff yeah and the Apple Genius came up and asked you like what are you going to use it for and you know what like what do you do and all that sort of stuff here's what I recommend was it a positive or A negative experience it was a good experience yeah right do you know they do 40 minutes of sales training every day what 40 minutes a day 40 minutes a day oh wow it's like pelaton they have a central sales trainer who does video uploads to the iPads they do 40 minutes of sales training every day oh wow they do a combination of product knowledge and they do uh Rapport build buing objection handling and they actually make suggestions as to things you can buy right now today that's part of their process they want you to walk out of the store with something but it's positive they're professional right they're not pushy they are making recommendations they're trying to solve your problem if you go in there and say I'm a professional speaker and I like to give talks they're going to go okay so you use a lot of keynote yep okay did you know that this thing here this is like a touch bar and it actually shows you your slides as you're going through and you can see your slides when you're speaking and you can jump to slides from slide it's like oh that I would use that all the time yeah that's that's a really good thing that you might want to use I want that great let's back let's box it up okay so they're doing 40 minutes of sales training a day right and it's a positive experience Everyone likes Geniuses yeah but they're sales people okay so it sounds like to go from 0 to 10K all we need to do is come up with some kind of concept that we can charge ideally 2K for yep and find a way to land five clients a month through a sales process through sales process I will say one more thing about sales you need to learn how to do laps leads appointments presentations sales so you just keep a little spreadsheet who are your leads who are the people that might buy can you book an appointment to speak with them right actually get their their commitment to just focus yeah can you present them with a solution can you actually do a presentation or or an actual conversation um and then can you ask them whether they would like to go ahead or not and those are the four steps lead appointment presentation Sal so great sales people do a rhythm of weekly laps they do leads appointments presentation sales and they just have a a good good salesp person has a dashboard digital or physical and they just have a a set of leads appointments presentations and sales so laps laps laps laps laps and entrepreneurs need to do that as well when they're launching something you know getting to six figures is literally just like sell something to someone like that's it it's all you have to do to get to six figures like one channel one product one Avatar like that it you don't have to do anything else and then you know when you get you want to get to Seven figures then you just do that and then add the word consistently which is you do you know you input put the inputs in the system in a way that's consistent so that you get a consistent output so it's whatever way you acquired those customers whether it was reach outs whether it was content whether it was paid ads whether it was Affiliates whether it was referrals whatever the thing was that got you the customers cool do that consistently and you'll be a million you know what I mean which is which is still only 20K a week it's not like a huge number you know 1 to three is usually uh increasing output of that that main thing to a small degree um and really just like Baseline efficiencies and building out the core team so usually at that point going one to three is getting the person out of delivery um to a large you know to a large extent and usually they get their first kind of first follower first like one or two uh I'm trying to think the right word to how to say this um competent individuals uh who are helping them out and then you know a handful of front line and so it's usually like companies that 3 million they're like 5 to 15 employees and so and there's usually really only like two-ish good ones um and the rest are okay right and so at that point you know going from 3 to 10 is usually where we can it's the minimum level that we take people on and it's not because there's something magical about 3 million it's that 3 million typically checks two boxes box one is that they have product Market fit at some level people want something from them like something they're selling is resonating enough that they can generate sales and the second thing I guess there's three boxes one is that the second is that they have at least one reliable acquisition channel that they're currently doing and the third is that they have a core team in place so they've demonstrated product Market fit they have a reliable acquisition Channel just at least one uh and they have a core team a place which may be relatively dysfunctional and have very few key players but at least they have some semblance of structure and so if they have if they meet those minimum requirements then we can at least start from at Le some level of Leverage um to start helping them grow okay so I'd love to talk a lot about that that initial bit that you sort of threw away with like oh one product one channel one one avar avar yeah um so for a bit context a a couple of weeks ago I I happened to be on on vacation on some Greek island and I posted an Instagram reel of like hey this is the creator life I'm working on my iPad and and stuff and there were a few comments from people being like I'd love to live this sort of Lifestyle but I just don't know where to start and that sort of that idea of I'd love love to be able to you know if if we imagine 99.9% listening of people listening to this if you told them they could make six figures a year doing what they love they'd be like mind blown would absolutely love that so I wonder if we can kind of explore that 0o to six figure jump uh or sort of process let's say someone has got a full-time job let's say they're working in I don't know consulting or some Something Corporate and they love the idea of I want to make a living doing what I love how how how would we break that down and this is under the assumption that they hate doing what they're doing yes as because I I always like to be I was like I've got employees that make million bucks a year plus so like you can absolutely become filthy wealthy and that's income right and so a lot of businesses that are at $10 million a year the owner might only take a million bucks in income depending on you know margins Etc and so like a lot of a lot of employees will wish for they see Topline as income which is just a very employee mindset um they're like oh if I make six figures a year I'll make six figures a year it's like Well if you really want to make six figures a year I probably make 500 Grand a year um you know I mean revenue wise at least if you don't want to have just bought your yourself another job right cuz so let's let's talk through this transition so if you're an employee when you make the switch you're still an employee you're just employee of a different business that you happen to own and you are basically 100% of the expenses and so the business itself actually makes no money you as the sole employee of that thing and the boss um gets to call your own shots but you were still the employee right so you're wearing all the hats Etc um and so it's relatively nuanced you know what I mean like if you had a sixer consulting job and then you start Consulting on the side for example through your own LLC you have the same job you just got rid of the person who was giving you Direction and now you are responsible right the thing that most people have to do is they have to go get money right you have to go make money and the way you do that is you sell stuff right and the way that you can even begin the conversation to sell stuff is that you have to have people who show interest in the thing which means you have to make your products known and we do that through advertising right and there's five ways to advertise which I which I just went over earlier um and so it's like pick one of those five ways start doing it on a consistent basis bring people in what do you sell them that's what the $100 million offers book is for it's like this is how you figure out what to sell um and then you sell them the thing and then after that you'll have some delivery now usually if you have a consistent method of advertising and selling with a with a what to sell from the offer then you can start getting people to help you uh on the level of delivery you have which comes down to Breaking the delivery into chunks rather than holistically and saying how can I specialize the labor because you trying to say I just need somebody to do what I do is silly right you need to figure out how can somebody do how can I get how can I get five people to do 20% of what I'm doing and do it consistently right and then you could increase your advertising sales is a very high leverage thing in the beginning if you spend all day selling just you you would have enough for five people to do work right and so then you would have a business you know so let's say someone's listening to this and they're thinking all right cool I know I like i' I've read Alexis bur he's telling me I've got I've got a seller thing I don't I don't know what to sell I don't know if I have any skills I don't I don't I don't know what I could possibly offer to the world yeah how do we how do we break that down yeah this is actually a topic that I um I cover more in the leads book that's coming out soon uh soon relative terms six months-ish um everybody knows something all right and so the idea is what do you have like everyone has unique depth of knowledge in certain areas because you've been alive and your eyes and ears have taken inputs period right and so I like to think of of people starting like so if you look at have you familiar with Y combinator yeah why see yeah so yeah yeah so Y combinator is one of the most successful F you know uh I don't know if they're technically VC they're you know seed Capital startup um investors in Silicon Valley and they have a very standard deal structure and they have criteria for what they look for in companies and one of the most important criteria that they look for is past experience and so they're okay with somebody who's super young Etc but they want to they want you to have experience in the industry because there's just so much ignorance debt that you have to pay down if you literally know nothing about an industry like there's just so much like if your dad was a mechanic you know so much about cars just by osmosis of being around a mechanic for 18 years and so I like to think past jobs you've held you will know stuff about that industry um the jobs of your parents are things that you will know about that industry and then you've got personal interests and so I think that if I had put those into three buckets it's like parent stuff past jobs of self and current interests and so it's like of those three things which of those three buckets do you think you could help someone do a thing better and so the idea is you want to sell the most valuable thing right and so the most valuable thing is what is the problem that I can help somebody else solve that I could charge the most money for or in reverse that could make them the most money um and then I will be able to charge a percentage of the money that I'm able to make somebody else in this thing now that's in a B2B setting in a b Toc setting it would be how valuable do people perceive uh the problem that they have as right whether it's like I can teach music tons of people want to be able to learn how to and if you're better you know because you've had a side interest in that awesome maybe you have a side interest because you're really good at editing the songs well there's tons of musicians who would love who hate that part and would love to have that so it's like we all know how to do stuff and all we have to do is package the thing that we're doing and I think the big problem is that people expect that they're going to have a perfect business but if you look at the track record of all of I can't think of an entrepreneur besides Chef Bezos who's a freak of nature whose first business becomes the most valuable business in the world is most people have a a graveyard of failures behind them and so the idea is you start not with the intention of saying this is going to be the one thing for the rest of my life which is the fallacy that employees have uh that whatever they pick is going to be the thing they're going to do for the rest of the lives when in real it's I just have to do a thing that I'm good enough at that I can learn the game and the thing is once you start taking steps the The Next Step becomes illuminated you trying to think 100 steps into the future when you have no context is is irrelevant because chaos is going to break your plan anyways and so do what you know exchange I like service businesses to start because they are the in my opinion the lowest risk to start because you're just it's just your time right so service businesses meaning do stuff for money like Mo the lawn or cleaning windows or service clean houses like whatever like all of those are just service businesses right and they're fine and a lot of people think they need to have some novel idea to start a business when I mean the best in my opinion if you're if you're getting into it the best way to start a business is just look at what everyone else is doing and just try and do it better like I mean and there's obvious holes like if you've if you've gone to if you've gotten your dry cleaning it's like can I do this in half the time as this guy if I do the lawn care what are the things people hate about Lawn Care a they leave the the the trimmings are around the edges they're all all shitty the person doesn't speak English that well like well cool then I've got advantages right so it's like what are things that I already know how to do or I have past experience in what things because I have past experience I know that other people struggle with that sucks about this thing and then I will solve that specific problem and it could also be a problem that other people solve too you just try and do a little bit better like it's it's just not rocket science you know what I mean and then you exchange you start selling your time for money so yes you're still trading time for dollars you don't need to readr D Port just yet right you're still trading time for dollars right but the point is that you're you're you're trading that time for money in order to learn not to earn you need to earn in order to pay your pay your rent eat Etc but the the major thing you're doing is you're paying down ignorance debt so the vast majority of your income is coming in the terms of in the form of Education rather than earning just a quick message from one of our sponsors and then we'll get back to the show so if you are making money online or saving up and wondering how to grow it you might want to check out trading 212 who are very kindly sponsoring this episode trading 212 is an amazing app that I've been using for the last several years now that makes investing in stocks and shares and funds simple and commission free one of my favorite features that they've got is the pies and autoinvest features now these tools make it easy to create a diversified portfolio that helps you automate your investing with this feature you can automatically allocate assets based on your chosen asset diversification you can reinvest dividend seamlessly and you can fully automate this process with scheduled deposits and monthly contrib utions you can even automatically rebalance your portfolio now this is a feature that's usually reserved for high net worth individuals using investment Banks but 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you'll find all the details in the video description and on the trading 2 on2 website cool so thanks trading to2 for sponsoring this episode and let's get back to it one of the things that I um I took away from your first book happy sexy millionaire we can talk about the title of that in a moment um but one of the things I really took away was the quitting framework yeah um I wonder if you can talk through that for people who might not have come across it I feel like you know it better than me because but I'll but I'll but I'll pop it so the reason I wrote the quitting framework is because I realized in hindsight that I was able to quit things e easier than most people let's take one step back why is quitting important in life we glamorize starting right but my observation was that the advantage I've had as I've said was being able to quit fast and with peace and ease and when you just think logically about starting something right or saying it's also the same with like saying yes and no to things in order to start something in life you actually first need to quit something else so you can't start a new relationship unless you quit the last one you're not going to start a new startup unless you quit the last one um you're not going to start a new career career unless you've quit the last job so quitting and starting should be held in equal regard and there should be acknowledgement that they have a two-way relationship with one another they're both the actions of winners people say quitting is for losers and they say like starting is for winners in fact quitting and starting are both for winners that and the the most successful intelligent people I've ever met have an unbelievable ability to quit things that make no objective sense your quitting that high-paying job to go and deal to go and do card tricks at a table in Bristol Darren Brown you're quitting that amazing career as a lawyer um that your parents are now so proud of you of to go and spend the next 10 years going up and down the country in pubs and cracking jokes Jimmy car it just it objectively seems to make no sense but subjectively they've reached a certain level of ease so I I could relate to myself in the same way in the regard of if you look at what I've quit from like stop going to school cuz I realized that that wasn't going to be the the paper that I got at the end of the process wasn't going to be enough especially compared to my brothers quit University after that first lecture quit my first startup after 2 years quit my second one after about six years um and lots of little quitting in and amongst there um why was I able to quit with with peace in at times when objectively you would think I was a mad man for doing so when I was leaving so much apparently on the table and so I tried to make a framework a framework that other people could use to try and make their quitting decisions through so at the start of the framework you ask yourself am I thinking of quitting see the you know yes or no so if you are thinking of quitting the framework begins and I created these two subcategories which you can Define for yourself which I think is important to do you're either thinking of quitting something because it's something's really hard like it's difficult and then which would be you know you're running a marathon and you're on the 23rd Mile and you're doing it you know to raise money for a charity but it's really it's painful it's difficult it's it's causing discomfort all you thinking about quitting something because it like it sucks and that's more of like an emotional mental thing it's just it just doesn't feel good to you on an emotional mental psychological level so let's go down the hard route I'm thinking of quitting because it's hard the first question you should then ask yourself is is the hardship worth the rewards on offer so you're running that Marathon you're raising money for that leukemia charity you're on the 23rd mile but it's worth it the the hardship is worth the reward at the end of it if the hardship is worth it don't quit if the hardship isn't worth it then you should quit because the the worst thing to do in life is to do something that is hard and meaningless like those are those are where all the problems happen when I think about studies of the impact of not having autonomy in your work and working on a production line and not having meaning and purpose in what you're doing every day and how that impacts your health and disease rises in your body that is the worst situation to be in let's go down the other side of the framework by the way do correct me because you know this framework better than I do sp okay we go on the other side of the framework so you're thinking about quitting something because it sucks you're in a relationship you're husband you know the the magic has just left the relationship you're in a company and there's problems at work but you you know you haven't yet had the conversation with your boss the next question becomes do you believe you could make it not suck right so in the context of a marriage um that might mean going to marriage counseling and having a difficult conversation crashing it out with your partner and you know going through those issues if the answer is no it so it sucks and you think you can't change that quit if you believe you could make it n not suck the next question to ask yourself is is the effort that it would take to make it not suck worth the rewards on offer so like you look at how that marriage might look if you were to resolve it you believe you can is it worth it is Dave worth it is the is the reward on the other end of that process to fix it sucking worth it if the answer is no quit you believe you could make it not not not suck anymore but the effort it would take is not worth the reward on offer quit if you believe you can make it not not suck and the effort it would take is worth the rewards on offer stay and fight for it and that's my simple framework which is intentionally ambiguous productizing yourself so so turning your knowledge in whatever domain and using writing as has the ability to scale yourself and productize yourself so we did this with ship 30 for30 which is our course right so it's all the things that I and uh my business partner Dicky talk about in terms of writing and then we scale it through an education course that's writing based you know you can also do that with ebooks and you can do that with other assets but the goal is instead of providing whatever you're doing as a service so being like I'm going to be a ghost writer for you or I'm going to be a consultant for you or a editor for you right it's all one to one you're you're using time as your measure now you're just packaging it digitally and that allows you to scale it the the beauty of productizing your service is that you like we were talking about earlier you're removing the constraint of uh being paid for time that's the whole that's like the biggest challenge is as long as you're being paid for your time and not the outcome it's really hard to have some sort of exponential jump in income you need to divorce the two yeah but I guess like you know it's it's very useful to start up being paid for your time because I think another mistake people make is jumping to let me create a course and it's like uh no one's going to buy it like and that's that's why one of the things that I often encourage is start by providing a service so it's like start for free prove you can do it when you can do it people will pay you trust that that will happen and they'll pay you well for it and then use the paid work to learn what questions do people have what problems are they facing what are your unique Frameworks for solving those problems right once you get paid to learn all of those things then when you go to productize yourself you are you're not sitting in a room going well how do I magically come up with all these answers right you already got paid to do it so now you're just transforming your service into a digital product and the whole model for this going back to free work is give away 99% of what you know for free right what the mistake everyone makes is they go I'm going to productize myself and before I tell you anything you have to pay for it well it's the same mistake as providing a service right you don't walk up to someone and go hey before you know what I can do here's how much it costs they're like get out of here but if you start by going here's everything here's here's here's how to think about it here's how to solve the problems here's the interesting Frameworks to frames frame the solutions here's everything you need to know the person then goes well if all the free stuff was so great then what's in the paid stuff right and what most people don't realize is most courses most books most uh like paid membership communities all that you aren't really buying information what you're buying is implementation you're buying accountability you're buying access to the person that you want to learn from so you can use all the information in your course as your free cont content it's just when someone pays they're not buying just the information right it's that you packaged it you're saving them time you're giving them access to you you're answering their questions that's what someone's paying for all right so that's it for this week's episode of Deep dive thank you so much for watching or listening all the links and resources that we mentioned in the podcast are going to be linked down in the video description or in the show notes depending on where you're watching or listening to this if you're listening to this on a podcast platform then do please leave us a review on the iTunes Store it really helps other people discover the podcast or if you're watching this in full HD or 4k on YouTube then you can leave a comment down below and ask any questions or any insights or any thoughts about the episode that would be awesome and if you enjoyed this episode you might like to check out this episode here as well which links in with some of the stuff that we talked about in the episode so thanks for watching uh do hit the Subscribe button if you aren't already and I'll see you next time bye-bye

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