30 Years of Business Knowledge in 2hrs 26mins

I am good at only one thing: business. For the last 30 years, I built 19 companies and invested in 78 startups. People ask me every day to be their mentor and to help them, and they’ve even offered me £10,000 to help them just for one day in business. I don’t want to charge people for help; I want to give you the knowledge for free. And today, I’m going to give you everything you need to start a business, to grow a business, to maintain a business, and to sell a business.

But if you can’t stay on this video for 5 minutes without clicking off, I’ve got some news for you: you’re probably not going to make it. I’m now going to list all the things I’m going to go through in the next 45 minutes to change your mindset, give you the tools you need to be successful, and hopefully create new pathways in your brain that give you the chance to be successful. The very thing that the education system does not want you to be is free, working for yourself, controlling your own destiny.

So today we’re going to cover:

• How to start a business with no money.
• How to win, and the secret to it all in business.
• How to lose—important.
• How to do a mind map, which is much better than a business plan—much more liquid.
• How to find purpose—very important to motivate you to get up in the morning, to motivate your team to get up in the morning, and to motivate customers to want to work with you.
• How to find a co-founder—something that I personally believe is like having a relationship; a partnership can change everything if you have the right co-founder and can give you that accountability that we all need.
• How to sell—everybody can sell. There’s no such thing as people that are good at selling and people that aren’t good at selling; they’re just people that haven’t been taught the system of selling. Everyone can sell; everyone must learn to sell. It is the key to unlocking freedom.
• How to market your business.
• How to PR yourself and your business.
• How to get an investor—and I’ll go through many different ways around that subject; you can get an investor.
• How to get sponsors—often an untapped secret source to making a business grow without needing an investor, so we’ll get into that.
• How to build a company brand—because I honestly think value comes from building a brand, not a business, and we’ll go into what a brand is and how to build one.
• How to build personal brand—which in this day and age, without doubt, is vital. You can’t really build a company today without having a personal brand. And I’ll get into personal brand on a public stage and personal brand within your industry.
• How to hire, how to grow, how to build.
• How to go global—which is easier than it sounds and probably very important so you’re not stuck in one market and leaving yourself vulnerable.
• How to get a mentor—there is a way to do it, and nearly nobody does it.
• And how to avoid big mistakes, but accept luck into your life, make luck happen in your life.
• And finally, how equity works and how to sell your business.

At the end of this article, you will know everything that’s taken me 35 years to know. You will be changed if you read this, and I promise you, at the end of it, it will cost you nothing and you’ll never regret it.

How to Start

Now, most people tell you to start a business when you have an idea. That’s not where a business starts. A business starts with a feeling, an instinct, that perhaps you need to make a change, and then applying yourself to learning what is the best way to build something that you love.

Now, everybody tells me that starting a business is filling a market gap or finding a niche. That is not true. One of my most successful early companies was a company called Fluid. This company turned into one of the biggest agencies in Asia, which I sold to PricewaterhouseCoopers for more money than I’ll ever need. And when I launched that company, there were 500 other businesses doing almost exactly the same thing. So how did I manage to win? I didn’t have an original idea, like everybody tells you you’ve got to have to start a business. You don’t start with an original idea. You start with what you like doing.

Now, I love helping businesses and people succeed. I love marketing. I can spend all day long studying and understanding marketing. Every time someone launches a new business, I want to understand how they made it successful. I’m obsessed. I enjoy it; it’s my hobby. There is no work-life balance. There is only syncing up your life with your business. And so I believe the first step in starting a business is following your passions.

Now, everybody tells you that that’s not the way to start a business because often your passions initially don’t necessarily generate revenue. But that’s because you haven’t applied a business mindset to what you love. So I loved marketing, and I started a creative agency called Fluid that helped people come up with marketing ideas to make their business successful. Now, there were many companies doing it, but not many of these people doing it loved it like I did. So I evolved my marketing abilities, pushed the boundaries of what was possible, used new technologies like, at the time, email marketing and direct marketing that no one else was doing because I was obsessed: “What is the latest thing?”

And for you, the way you do it is: you’ve got to write down what you like doing, and you’ve got to write down what you don’t like doing. What you love doing, you’ve got to get really good at. And what you don’t like doing, you’ve got to outsource and not do it. The school system has taught you the wrong thing: that if you’re not good at something, you need to spend more time getting better at it. That is a lie. You’ve got to spend more time getting good at the thing you love to do. Get obsessed by it. And that’s actually where a business idea begins, because once you have figured out what you like doing, the next step is the idea.

Now again, people will tell you that you need to come up with an original idea. That’s not true. The second thing is, when it comes to an idea, you can actually combine forces with other people. So back to my example: when I launched Fluid, I loved marketing, and I met someone who could take my marketing ideas and turn them into graphic illustrations and brilliant presentations, with abilities to help that company in a visual way understand my ideas. So I teamed up with her and created a 50/50 business partner—I’ll come on to equity later in the article—that was literally the springboard to one of the most successful companies in Asia in this space.

So the key is not coming up with an original idea and trying to do it all on your own. The key is coming up with something you love, linked to what you do, and perhaps if there’s a gap within your ability to execute on what you love, find a partner. So, for example, if you love writing, then write a book, and maybe you need to find a partner that can edit that book, or find a company that will publish that book, or get someone to help you like an agent, find someone that will publish that book. And that’s where it really begins in the idea phase. It’s got to link to your passion. And I’ll come on to purpose later, but it’s key: you won’t be able to follow through and probably won’t be successful if you’re not willing to do the thing that you’re doing more often and all the time compared to other people.

So you figured out what you love doing, and now you have an idea. Now, the idea itself can evolve. From my point of view, when I started what I’m doing today, which is a platform to help you for free, the first thing I did was, in fact, a podcast. So the step after idea is step one: execution. And execution involves: what is the first thing you can do to make your business idea come to life? And for me, in my example, it was a podcast. But for you, it might be a blog; it might be a LinkedIn post; it might be setting up a social media handle and starting to post up your photography. Whatever the first step execution is, do not make it too hard for yourself.

In my case, sitting down, interviewing people I found interesting, recording it, and putting it up would serve the purpose of giving people mentorship in a podcast for free, which was my first step in my mission in my recent business. So all I really did was get a microphone, sit down, and record conversations. Now, if you go back and look at those very early podcasts, execution was not brilliant. The guests were good; the execution was not great. I had a rubbish microphone; I had a rubbish camera, and I slowly improved. Step one is: come up with a simple execution plan.

Step two in starting a business is: consider where the revenue is going to come from. Now, some people say you need this within the idea phase, and yes, you can put it within the idea phase, but sometimes revenue doesn’t actually make itself clear to you at the start.

So an example: if you’re a photographer and you think you’re going to make your money charging by the hour for your photography skills, you’re probably limiting yourself right there. So you’re probably better off initially taking pictures of things you love and putting them up online, and seeing if people would buy them, seeing if people would license the pictures, experimenting with revenue models, and seeing what sticks. Sure, maybe people will book you by the hour, but why would you start off with a revenue model that limits yourself?

So I think when building a business, the thing to really think about is not necessarily revenue, but experimenting with different ways to make money from the thing that you are doing. So again, when I launched Fluid, most companies charge by the hour for their marketing consultancy service. We didn’t. We charged by the outcome of what we did. So if we helped a company be successful, sell more product, we took a percentage of those sales. Now, that was not part of most companies’ business models, because most people start with an idea, and then they do a revenue model, and then they start.

A famous quote is: “Everyone’s got a plan till they get punched in their face.” And the truth is, when you launch a business, you just want to keep yourself nimble, like a boxer. You want to see what is going to be the best punch combination for you to make your business work.

And finally, when starting a business, step three is: you’ve got to make sure your purpose is strong. Now, you’ve made sure that you enjoy what you do, and that’s great because that’s going to help you get up in the morning. But actually, I believe new businesses today need to think about what they’re going to do to make a difference in the world. How are you going to make sure that people want to work with you? How are you going to make sure that what you’re doing isn’t just for profit? Because if it’s just for profit, everybody that works for you is going to want more money; everybody that’s working with you is going to want to pay you less.

But if you have a purpose bigger than yourself, and you identify that purpose and install it in your business, I promise you, you won’t be managing people anymore—one of the biggest stresses of building a company. You won’t have to manage people because you only have to manage purpose. Now, I’m going to go into more depth how this all works, but a lot of what I’ve talked about here already has cost you no money. You haven’t had to spend any money.

Now, even if your idea is to launch an app that costs a million pounds to develop, start off with a service business. Start off with a revenue-based model that can get you there. So an example is Airbnb: when they launched, they actually sold cereal boxes at conventions. It was enough to be similar to Airbnb because the first accommodation Airbnb ever sold was at conventions—people go to see Obama speak, go and see different politicians speak at these conventions, and they would rent out rooms online later. But initially, they sold cereal boxes at these events to get to know their customers, connect to their customers, have a conversation with their customers, and make money. And that is the money they use to initially get the business going.

So I will come on to other steps later in the article about raising money and other ways to do this, but if you do these first few things, your business is up and running. It’s cost you no money, and I promise you, because it will have purpose, because you like it, and because there’s a revenue model behind it, you will do it; it will happen.

How to Win in Business

Let’s say you’ve already got a company; you’re not winning and you want to win, or you want to know the secret formula to winning. Having built nearly 19 companies—I’m on my 19th business now—how to win in business is actually very simple. Now, I mentioned earlier having purpose and you personally being passionate about it; that’s definitely going to give you an edge because most people are not loving what they’re doing. So if you are, you’re already winning.

But there is a secret formula to winning, and that starts with a couple of things. Number one: delayed gratification. (Spelled completely wrong, but get what I mean, though, right?) Delayed gratification is the number one reason that businesses win. You don’t rush to charge customers, for example; you let them help you succeed. So the first customer I ever got in my agency Fluid, I actually did the work for free. Now, a lot of people say don’t do the work for free. I don’t agree. I built up a relationship with that customer, over-delivered when it was free, and that meant once they were happy, not only did they use me forever for the 16 years that I ran that company, they also recommended me to everybody. They felt like they were part of my early journey.

Getting your customers on side is another element of winning. But realizing that if you delay getting gratification, you will make more money. And there’s so many examples of this: if you look at big businesses, they spent years making no money, and then when they had the system all in place—huge databases, for example—then they can monetize. And people don’t wait long enough.

The other thing you can do is have a very strict moral code within your business—a culture. Culture will eat strategy for breakfast every single time. You’ve got to make sure that your culture in the company is client-centric. A good example of this is Amazon—I’m just saying that they do actually focus on their customers as a culture. And I think that a lot of people are too busy, for example, thinking about how they can get money out of their customer and not thinking how they can bring value. And if you want to win, bring value. You want loyalty? Bring value. You want them to follow you, promote you, share you on their stories, care about you, talk about you when you’re not in the room? Then show them some love. It sounds simple, but people don’t do it because they’re too busy not waiting for the payoff and too busy not installing a culture of patience, a culture of caring about your customer.

And then the final thing is luck. Now, luck is not a subjective thing. Luck, I have discovered, is hackable, and you can hack luck three ways.

• First, be persistent. And what I mentioned earlier about purpose and loving what you do will help you be persistent. You have to outlast other people. When I launched my company Fluid in Hong Kong, I had so many competitors, but slowly but surely, they all shut down, went bankrupt—they didn’t care like I did. And I think that whole luck thing is about persistence. That’s number one.
• Number two in hacking luck is: know your destination. What is success for you? What will make you happy? What do you want—big company, small company? And by the way, a big company is much easier to run than a small company. Aim for a big company is my recommendation, but that’s my opinion; it might not work for you. So I suggest you find success for yourself today. Success for me is having the time to take my son to school and be able to pick him up, is having time to do the exercise I want to do. That’s how I define success. So I never sell hours—and we’ll come to that in a little bit why you should never sell hours. But luck is hackable. You have to be persistent; you have to know your destination.
• And finally, you have to learn to take risk. Be careful with sayings out there trying to trick you into options that are not true. So the worst one is: “The harder you work, the luckier you get.” That is not true. That is a lie, a lie designed to make you work hard. If it was true, every nurse in this country would be a millionaire. It is not true that working hard equals success. What equals success is taking risk. You have to learn to take risk. Lean into fear; learn to love fear; embrace it. And then you can take more risk, and the more risk you take, the luckier you get.

Learn to build culture into your businesses about the long term, and learn to hack luck. You will win. The secret to it all is learning to accept that you could lose everything, and it doesn’t matter. You’ve got to be willing to risk it all, take a chance, and go for it. Do not rush. Do not see this as anything but a marathon; it’s not a sprint. Enjoy the journey. Don’t rush. No one can beat you if you do it so. Delayed gratification is key. Brands like Facebook and Instagram—although I’m not a fan necessarily of these platforms—they personify this concept. They did build massive, massive user bases, but they didn’t monetize them at the beginning. They waited. They just kept building value in their platforms for the users, and more people kept signing up, and they didn’t actually monetize for a very long time. I think Facebook was near 10 years before it started making money.

And although I’m not suggesting you wait 10 years—and those companies have different investment structures which we’ll talk about a bit later—it is important to understand how important this is to building a successful long-term business. Do not think about making money straight up. Build a brand, not a business. And those businesses like Facebook and Instagram—they waited a decade before they started monetizing. And as soon as they started monetizing, Facebook in particular, it started to decline as a brand. Less people liked it: too many ads on the screen, too many annoying buttons that didn’t have any relevance to them because they were suddenly trying to make their client happy—the advertiser—and no longer focused on the user in the same way. So be careful, but that is how you build massive economic moats. People like Google, similar at the beginning—no revenue. YouTube at the beginning—no revenue. Focus on building something that has value for people. Delayed gratification is one of the secret weapons in building a sustainable, large, and successful business that you love.

How to Lose

Next up: how to lose. It might sound like a strange title, but it’s the number one thing I’ve noticed that people don’t learn to do that doesn’t allow them to be successful. This all stems back probably to school, where you were told that success was getting an A. It’s not. Success is actually accepting failure, learning to bounce back from failure, embracing failure. Having learnings from the businesses that I have been in, involved in, that have failed have allowed me to be successful. I guarantee you, if I hadn’t lost a million pounds on a doomed comic book business, I wouldn’t be rich or successful today. I needed to learn how to fail. I needed to accept losing. It’s key.

And so, how do you build the stamina and the ability to lose? The first thing you realize, number one: don’t let things own you. If you let things own you, you are controlled by the very thing that’s meant to bring you pleasure. You have to learn to lose those things and not care about those things.

The second thing to lose: you need to let your short-term ego go. Now, ego is actually a very powerful motivator, and there are different types of ego. The ego I’m talking about here is driving around in the right car to give an image to people that don’t care about you that you are successful. Do not worry about this. Learn to enjoy looking like you’re a loser. Let people underestimate you. It is so powerful to be underestimated by your competition, even by your customers, because if they think you can’t deliver and you do, then brilliant. Do not worry about losing. Learn to be a D student. Love to fail. That’s why 80% of A students end up working for D students, because A students are scared to lose. They don’t want to lose; they always want to get an A; they always want to be seen as the smartest person in the room. Don’t worry about it. Learn to lose; learn to embrace getting a D.

Getting a D in business means: take your time. Don’t let someone else decide whether or not you’re successful or not. Do not let anybody else tell you how to do things. And ironically, power up your ego in a different way: an internal ego that tells you you’re not a loser, you know where you’re going, no matter what people judge you based on the car that you’re driving or where you’re living or what you do with your day. Don’t let them decide that you’re a loser. Let them think whatever they want.

Learn to love losing; learn to embrace failure. I promise you, if you think that the worst is if you try something and you lose everything, it doesn’t matter. You can go again; you will succeed. I guarantee it.

How to Do a Mind Map

Next up, I want to teach you something practical: how to do a mind map. So many people teach you in business to do a business plan. Forget that. There is no use for a business plan. What you want to do is map out where your business could go, how it could go, and understand the different directions in which to take your business. And I’m going to go through how to do a mind map next.

Now, I have never seen anyone teach anybody how to do a mind map. And the reason I think that no one teaches this is because there’s no template to sell you. There’s no product to sell you around. A business plan has a million ways to make money out of you, and none of it works. These business plan things actually kill companies. I’ve seen people who have massive business plans stick to it and die. A mind map, however, will cost you nothing to do and actually leaves you nimble and free to explore where the business can go. And it’s so simple.

It starts in the middle with your hobby, whatever that is—what you love to do. Second part of a mind map is the business. (I can’t spell, but don’t judge me for that—luckily, I know I’m doing a business.) What is the business? So what is your hobby? What do you love to do? And ideally, it now links to the business.

Now, with the business—and I’m going to use my company as an example; hopefully it translates into what maybe your idea is—but in my business, which is what we call Free Humanity (the name probably gives it away what we want to do; we want people to be free to do what they love)—within Free Humanity, this is what I did when I first started the business four years ago: I looked at different ways that I can make the business work. So off here, I wrote “Podcast.” Right—actually, as I mentioned earlier, this is one of the first things I actually did. So from a podcast, what comes off it? Well, I build a network. Right? I’m now doing a mind map of something I actually have already done to illustrate how a mind map works when you’re building out a business of value.

So one of the benefits of doing a podcast was a network. In my case, I managed to interview over 200 of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs, which are now part of my life and help me with what I’m doing—help you on helpbank.com. That was one of my… and it was on my mind map: Network. The second thing was Brands. I realized if I did a podcast, I could probably make revenue from brands. Now, with a mind map, you can get bigger and bigger and bigger. With mind maps, there’s no stopping how big a mind map can get. Just like your brain is infinite in its ability to think, a mind map is also infinite. And when I wrote the original mind map out for my business, I thought Brands. And then I started listing them. So, in my case: GoDaddy, Tide, Banking, Adobe—these were brands that I felt were a fit with what I wanted to do: give people the ability to start their own business, be free, do what they love. So I listed out all the brands that I could work with.

I also listed in my original mind map—and I didn’t do it at the beginning, but it ended up becoming part of what I did—was an App. And an app that would focus on free help for people. Now, at the time, I didn’t have the name that I now have, which is helpbank.com, but I knew that I needed to build a scalable way of giving people knowledge.

Now, what I didn’t know back then that I know now—quick bit of insight—is that “app” is overused as a word. It’s actually not an app that you need to build at the beginning for most platforms; you need to build a web-based platform. Why? Well, if you build an app, you have to go in the App Store or in the Google Play Store; you get restricted by one of those two locations. So people that have a Samsung phone can’t access the Apple Store to download your app. Why would you, when you launch something, restrict people from getting access to it? Plus, if it’s web-based, people can just log in straight from a web browser, any web browser.

That aside, I realized in my early days I needed to do an app, and from that, I would do free help. And from that, I would be able to connect the network that I built in the podcast to the free help. The people that I had interviewed in the podcast, the knowledge that I was capturing in their case, I could connect. Now that network being built via the podcast to the help on the platform—this is how it’s actually played out.

The next thing I spent time thinking about was Team. And on a mind map, I thought about who I actually need. Now, because I knew I was going to do a podcast, I knew that I needed an Editor. But I also know my weaknesses, so I know I need an Accountant—someone that’s going to take care of the admin. These are things that I don’t enjoy doing. So I know what to do. But I also realized with the network that I build through the podcast that I could have Partners. So it’s not just employees, but Partners. I could link to the team again, working with the people that I’d spoken to on the podcast. I could connect them. People that were going to work on the app, I could connect them. Although they’re not necessarily on my payroll, they are people that perhaps are connected to my mission, want to help people, and they can become part of my extended team.

Now, within the team structure, I can also start thinking about things like: if I have an editor, maybe that editor hires editors, or I hire editors. But you can start breaking down what you actually need within your team, right? Now, as a mind map, you start, in my opinion, with what your hobbies are, what you enjoy doing. You’re then building a business around it, and then you’re thinking about different things that this business is going to need.

Now, one of the things that I spent a lot of time thinking about that I haven’t yet done but will be coming soon in my platform was what else I could do that would scale the business, give it what it needed resource-wise without necessarily me being involved in it. And at that time, back four years ago, the word was Merchandising. So I wrote down Merchandising. Now, I think it’s actually evolved now; it’s beyond merchandising. But from that, I wrote down, of course, what everyone was doing four years ago: t-shirts and caps—that sort of stuff, right? Stuff that you know, maybe the word “Free Humanity” would look pretty cool on. And I thought about in those days things like sweets and products that perhaps we could launch. And I wrote down basically any way merchandise-wise we could make money.

Now, what’s interesting is I’m about to launch a sweet brand called “Buss’s.” It’s taken four years to get to this part of the mind map, but it was on there. It was always on there. And ironically, when I was building team, if anyone said to me when I was interviewing them they had some experience with sweet business, I made a note and kept them as someone maybe could help us in the future. Same with merchandising: anytime I spoke to anybody that was perhaps looking at starting a t-shirt brand or working on building product, I’d see if perhaps they want to work in the future.

Because once you know in your mind map one of the things that’s going to come up in the future, you can look out as you’re building other things for the very thing that’s going to help make that happen. So this is a mind map: it’s literally mapping out all the different things and different ways that your business can go. It’s fun; it’s simple. There’s no template you can download and pay someone for; you don’t need it. And the beautiful thing about a mind map is you’re not fixed. You can start adding bubbles and adding things as things evolve, as people and the world change. You can start adding things and adding connecting the different dots between parts of your business—something a 20-page document will never let you do because it’s too linear.

So that’s a mind map. I hope it’s a useful, practical tool for you going forward.

How to Find Purpose

Now, this word “purpose” might sound woo-woo. They don’t teach you it at school, in my opinion, for a reason, because if you understand purpose, you’re very unlikely to work for someone else. Purpose is a very personal thing. You can find other people with purpose; you can find your tribe; you can be free. But finding purpose is not an easy thing, and it’s not something you’ve been given any of the tools in which to make happen.

So what is the first step in finding purpose? And it’s a very obvious step that people do not do: you think about it. Now, the problem is if you say you’re thinking about purpose, people might laugh at you. Other people try to throw silly jokes out there to throw you off. Or purpose will get so complicated in your head because you’ve not really thought about it before, you’ll give up and go back to your old ways.

You need to think about purpose. What is your purpose? We used to live in tribes of 5,000, and we used to work on a method called “give without take,” not “give and take.” We used to help each other because it would make our tribe better, not because we’d make money from it. You ask me for help; I will give it to you for free. The world will be a better place. I get better at giving you that help for free; I’d become an expert at giving that help for free. Eventually, when I’m not in the room, people will talk about me and what I do because I become so good at helping people.

But I think today, that doesn’t fit the narrative of working at a call center and picking up the phone and doing what you’re told, in a factory that Henry Ford created. So when the school system was developed, the word purpose wasn’t included in any of it. They asked the wrong question of you. “What are you going to do when you grow up?” is what schools say. That’s not the right question. What you should be asked is: “What problem are you going to solve?”

So the second step in thinking about and finding, hopefully, purpose is: what problem matters to you? Now, at first, nothing might spring to mind. If something has jumped into your mind, then great. In a minute, I’m going to explain how you action that. But if it hasn’t jumped into your mind, start thinking about what problems have actually affected you, big or small. Now, it can be really simple, like the banks aren’t open early enough for you, or the swimming pool you wanted to go to doesn’t let you swim the time you want. It might sound silly, but you start thinking about problems that bother you, and your brain wakes up the entrepreneur muscle in your brain that helps you figure out how to solve that problem. Now, it might be that the bank’s not opening on time isn’t a problem you’re going to solve, but if your brain starts thinking about that problem and how it can solve it, you might begin to understand how to find purpose.

The third thing you can do is start breaking down how to make your life and that purpose match. Now, matching what you do in your day and your actual purpose is often easier than you think. I’ve met hundreds and hundreds of people who tell me what their dream is, and it turns out that their dream is often just 3% difference from their existing life. You know, between chimpanzees and humans, only 3% difference in the DNA. And often, for example, I met someone that wants to do their own catering business; they’re working in someone else’s catering business. They’re just missing this video in their life to figure out how to turn what they feel is their purpose—to make cakes for someone and make them smile and own that business—into that business. They’re just missing knowledge. They’re also not realizing that actually, their purpose is nearly there. In fact, I would argue that the system sometimes wants you to feel like you’re getting enough satisfaction that you don’t need to make a change.

So, in other words, if you are working for someone else baking cakes, even if they’re not using the ingredients you would use or they don’t care about the customer the same way that you do, at least you are baking. But you got to break free from this thinking. You’ve got to realize that if you’re going to do your purpose, you have to learn what I said earlier: take risk. But most importantly, to truly know yourself.

I once interviewed a billionaire on my podcast, and I asked him, “How did you build your intuition?” And he said to me, “I used to go on and ask my mom or my dad a question when I was young, and they both used to say to me, ‘You know the answer. You know it.’” Never gave him the answers, so he had to go away and figure out the answers for himself. And that in itself is the point I’m trying to make here: you have a purpose. Yes, I can help you get there, but you need to ask yourself: what is that purpose? How are you going to make it happen? How are you going to get there? And you do it by thinking about it, asking yourself not what you’re going to do when you grow up, but what problem you want to solve, and then matching your life to that problem.

The final thing I’ll say: you don’t have to do this thing on your own. Let’s say you care about climate change—and I would just say, we don’t need to save the planet; we need to save humans. When the humans are gone, the planet will be fine. But let’s just say you care about saving the planet; you can go and work with other people doing something in this space. The only thing I would say to you is: make sure you ask for equity wherever you work. I’ll come to that a bit later—how you do that and why you should do that. But that can be still a way for you to have the life you want. You can find your purpose and then go work with someone that’s actually doing it.

So in my organization, behind the camera right now, there’s a whole group of people, talented people that care about the same thing as me. So they can go off and help people in their own way like they want to, or we can come together as a team and solve the problem together—that people don’t have the knowledge they need to do what they love.

What I have noticed is that once you find your purpose—and this is what you need to be careful of—is that you don’t think that it’s such a big purpose, like solving the world’s problems, that you don’t do it. You can team up with other people to do it. And I will tell you: 1 + 1 equals 11. Remember that. Once you know your purpose, you can seek out people and communities and, in old days, tribes to help you go and fix this problem with other people. But if you don’t know what that purpose is, you won’t do this, and you will get stuck working on someone else’s purpose, someone else’s destiny. And I promise you, it’s harder to work for someone else than work for yourself, despite what you have been told.

How to Find a Co-founder

Now, if you’re someone that likes to work alone, you can skip this bit. But I would say to you before you do, make sure you understand the power of a co-founder. Sometimes we get caught in our own ignorance bubble; we think we know what we know, but you don’t know what you don’t know. So be cautious before you skip this section if you’re absolutely sure that a co-founder cannot bring you value.

I will tell you first off why a co-founder can bring you value: it’s a bit like if you get a gym membership, you probably don’t go to the gym. But if you have a buddy who goes to the gym every morning, you often have accountability and you go. For me, that’s one of the number one reasons I love having a co-founder.

Now, there is a counterargument to having a co-founder you’ll hear from many people, which is: “Well, why would you give up 50% of your company to have a co-founder?” I personally would rather have 50% of a business I enjoy that’s successful than 100% of a nightmare and a failure. And I honestly think with all my heart that if you get a co-founder, your life is better.

How do you get a co-founder, and what should you look out for is something I’m now going to cover. But I want to say: you have to think carefully about the equity structure, and later in this article I’m going to talk about equity, and it’s going to be important; it’s going to connect back to this. But for now, I’m just going to talk in this bit about how to get a co-founder.

Now, the first step is to identify what I said earlier, which is: what do you love to do, and what do you hate to do? Be honest; be clear: hate and love. Right? Hate and love. Now, once you’ve identified what you hate to do and what you love to do, you can identify what is the perfect co-founder, because you want someone that has the opposite skill to you. But—and this is very important when looking for a co-founder—I’m going to put it as number two: has the same moral code.

This process of finding a co-founder is pretty much the process of probably finding a partner in life. You’re going to spend a lot of time with this person. This person is going to become literally your business life partner, and if you do it right, it is for life. Like I have in business done businesses with people, and even when I’ve sold that company, I’ve done another business with them. If you get it right, it is a lifelong partnership. And so you want to make sure you’re honest and clear about what you hate doing and what you love doing, so that the person comes in and works off you, one doesn’t question you, crossover with you, lets you run your area, and gives you respect. Equally, you have the same with what they do.

You write down exactly in detail what this person looks like. And I would go as far as to say: you write down how tall they are, what they look like, how they speak, their background, where they’re from—everything you can possibly think of, just as if you’re picking a partner in life. What is it you’re looking for? Write down every detail. The reason I say the more detailed you are with it, the more likely you are to manifest it. You aren’t going to be looking out for something unless you make it very clear what you’re looking for. I mean, it’s the red car theory, right? If I suddenly tell you the words “red car,” you’re probably going to see a lot of red cars. But if I don’t mention red cars, you probably haven’t seen one at all today. You have to list out what you want.

So you’ve identified what you love doing and what you don’t love doing. You’ve identified your own moral code. And a moral code—I can go into it a little bit more; it’s quite a complicated thing—but there is one quick hack on this I can give you. Whenever I’m trying to find out whether or not someone’s good, I don’t care about money; I care about reputation. So I don’t want to accidentally end up working with someone that all they really care about is money. And I have this test to check. I will say to them: “What if, from this day until you’re 70—so let’s say you’re 30 now—in the next 40 years, you’ll have the most amazing life: three houses, one in New York, one in Hong Kong, one in London; anywhere you go people will love you; private jets; everything you need for the next 40 years. That’s your life. And in 40 years’ time, however, there is a catch: you’ll get to 70, and then everyone will find out that you’re a financial fraud, that you tricked people to get here, and that your life generally will be very different. People will look at you differently; maybe then you’ll die, and maybe it doesn’t matter. But that’s your life. Do you want to take the deal?”

I’m surprised how many people say yes. I would say 50/50 people say yes. They take that deal: they’ll have 40 years of a good life for a bad reputation at the end. Be careful. People like that—that is what happens in my brain right, because that is the Madoff story. That is what Madoff did. His sons committed suicide; his name is in the dirt; no one ever wants to hear that name again in their life, and a lot of people were hurt.

So I use open questions and philosophy to figure out whether or not it’s someone I want to work with. And you should do it too, because you don’t want to be in partnership with someone that doesn’t care in the same way that you care. I’m not here to judge what is right and what is wrong; I’m here to tell you how you can check that what’s right for you aligns in your business, in your culture of your business, and, more importantly, in your day-to-day personal life.

So you’ve identified what you love and what you don’t love. You’ve checked the moral code in every way you can of the person you want. You’ve drawn lines in the sand what you’re not willing to do, and you know what this person looks like. The final thing is: post it. Now, post it is very simple: you start telling people you’re looking for this person. You post it on LinkedIn; you post it everywhere. You ask people. You make it clear: this is what you’re looking for. You look out for it in cafes, when you’re out having dinner, when you’re at the supermarket. You look out for this person because they’re out there; you just have to have your eyes wide open.

Of course, you can go on helpbank.com and ask people if they know someone like this. You can use the tools around you to get what you need. But ultimately, you’ve now set yourself up with every chance of finding a co-founder. Now, you’re going to have to sort out the equity structure and get that right. I’m going to come to that in a minute, but that is how you find a co-founder. And in my opinion, it’s one of the most powerful things you can do to ensure success in your business.

How to Sell

Next up: how to sell. Now, anybody can sell. It’s a system; it’s a philosophy, and anyone can do it. I don’t care your background; you can be an introvert; you can still sell and understand the systems of selling. And if you are presently selling, I promise you, you are missing a few tricks I’m going to try and help you with now.

First up, how to sell: it’s not what you have been taught. It is not: “Here’s my product; this is how much it is; and this is what it does.” The first thing in sales that you need to learn, and the number one thing I learned through the hard way of doing it, is: sell the sizzle, not the steak. So what does that mean? Well, let’s pick one of the best products ever sold: Apple products. Steve Jobs used to always set up events where he’d invite 3,500 people into a room—all the right tech reporters, all the right people—and he would then present to them the sizzle. He would not say, “Here’s a phone with an Intel processor that has this and has that.” He would talk about how this product was for the game-changers, for those that wanted to do things differently, for the creative types. He was very specific about what the sizzle is. He didn’t sell the steak.

Now, in that process of selling, there’s a couple of other lessons that Steve Jobs teaches us. Of course, he doesn’t sell to millions through social media; he picks a community: 3,500 people in a room. He sells to them; he connects to them; he talks to them, and they go and talk to the rest of the world. Getting someone on your side selling for you is one of the most powerful ways to sell.

The number one salesperson in my last company was my accountant. Why? ‘Cause I gave her the tools to sell. I told her what we did and how we did it. I showed her the sizzle through the numbers: we helped clients be more successful; we helped businesses stave off bankruptcy; we made sure companies did well. And she was proud of that. She would sell the sizzle. She’d sit with her other CFO friends at lunch, and she’d say, “We saved a company from going bankrupt; we made one company an extra million pounds a month they didn’t expect.” She would tell people the outcome. She wouldn’t say, “Oh, I work for Fluid, and we have marketing ideas.” That’s not exciting. She talked about the results; she talked about the philosophy—the sizzle.

The second element of learning to sell is understand the process of selling. So many people don’t. So many people start on what I call the third step, and you need to do two steps first before you ever start implementing the third step in sales.

So the first step in any sales is: understand your customer. Now, it sounds so obvious, and I’m shocked how many people don’t do it. I often get emails that say “Dear John” or they say “Dear Simon, I really love what you’re doing, X,” and they haven’t actually researched what I’m really doing. However, when someone sends me something and understands what I’m doing, it’s clear on how they can bring value to me, I sit up and I listen. And that is the number one thing that people don’t do in the first step of sales enough: research. They do not spend enough time understanding if the person they’re talking to actually needs them. They spend way too much time selling to people that don’t actually need what they got to sell. Don’t waste your time with people that don’t need what you’ve got. Focus on the people that do need what you’ve got. First step is: do they need you? Get to know them.

The second step in this three-step process to get any sales done is: understand the person you’re working with in the context of: do you like them? This element of sales is so powerful. If you can have a real connection with a person you’re selling to—a genuine connection, not a fake connection—it is something that will help you get through all sorts of difficult times in that relationship. You need to like each other. You need to genuinely like each other. And if you meet someone who needs what you need, but they don’t like you and you don’t like them, one, the sale probably won’t go ahead, but even worse, the sale might go ahead, then you’ll be working with someone that doesn’t like you and you don’t like them. If they’re rude, they’re abrupt; you go out for dinner, they’re rude to the waiter; if it doesn’t appeal to you, drop them. Do not work with these people. It might be hard; you might want the revenue, but I promise you, you will not build a business that will last if you sell to the wrong people.

So first step: do they need you? Do you need them? Second step: do they like you? Do you like them? If you do these two things well, the final step—and let’s call it “the deal”—it will happen. Because if they like you and they need you, they will work with you to make a deal happen. I have done enormous deals every single time in my career I’ve done the first two steps right; it’s no problem. In fact, I have said how much I would like for, say, example, a contract, and that client’s come back to me and given me even more, told me the budget, gave me insight into how to make sure we get the work. So it’s so important not just go in there cold with what you’ve got to sell, but go in there understanding the person and making sure it lasts.

If you follow these three steps, I promise you, you’ll get every single sale done. Now, there’s one more final thing I want to tell you about sales: you’ve got to think long-term. There was a study done by Harvard. They analyzed the best salespeople in the world, and the top 50 salespeople in the world would, on average, approach someone to get a deal done five times. They would send them an email, for example, and then a few weeks later they’d send them a follow-up email, and then maybe they’d send them a brochure or contact them through social media. They would basically contact maximum of five times before they would actually consider that lead dead. And that was their mistake—and we’re talking about the leading salespeople. But the top 1% of salespeople—which it turns out I am one of these people; I didn’t know it at the time; I now know it looking at the research—the top 1% of salespeople do something very different.

When I started Fluid, I wrote down all 50 companies I wanted to work with in the building of this business. And there were big names on there. And from day one, I built a system to reach out to them by hook or by crook in some way every single month. For example, at Christmas, I would wish them a merry Christmas, send them a card. Chinese New Year, I’d send them something. When I learned something about their industry that I thought could be useful to them, a bit of research, I would send it to them. I would always make sure every single month I made contact with them in some way—not to sell necessarily, but to build a relationship, to get to know what their needs were.

In some cases, I got those clients quite quick, but in the majority of the businesses, it took me, for example, 9 years to get some of those companies on board. Every single month for nine years, I would approach those companies. And that’s the secret to it: it’s a long game. You have to apply yourself; build a system in sales that lasts. It cannot be one email they don’t reply, or one email and they say no. You’ve got to keep staying in contact with them.

Building things like email lists are still very powerful. I know it’s not as cool these days as being popular on TikTok, but I promise you, having an email list where you can contact that person regularly, keep an update of what you’re doing, keep up to date what they’re doing, will ensure a sale at some point in the future as long as you’re politely persistent. I promise you, you follow these rules in sales, your life will change.

I will add: in sales, people don’t bring their personality into the mix enough. You’ve got to be yourself. Be honest; be authentic in sales. It’s not about selling someone a car that doesn’t work. That is how people are projecting what sales looks like. Sales is about selling someone a car they actually need. I have seen in my own life when I’ve gone to buy a car, the best salespeople tell me, “You don’t want this car; you want that car in another showroom,” where they don’t get the commission. I’ve actually had that happen. And when I saw that happen, I hired that person, because that person is thinking long-term. They’re not trying to sell me a car to make the commission; they’re building a relationship with me. And that is what you need to do to be successful in sales.

How to Market

Next up: how to market. This is a deep subject, but I’m going to try and give you all the knowledge I’ve gained in decades of building some of the most complicated marketing structures there is. Now, marketing is one of the most important pieces in making a business work. And I, when I think about this subject, it’s so complicated. I honestly think, because I know everything about this subject, it’s like rocket science.

I will start off perhaps by teaching you that in marketing, 50% of what you spend will probably be wasted. So if you’ve got a million views but the wrong views, it’s wasted. So marketing is about really experimenting. Now, I mentioned earlier when I’m talking about sales: sell the sizzle, not the steak. Of course, that applies in marketing too. But marketing is actually about connecting with people over time. The biggest example is branding. If you get the branding right, people will resonate. You’re probably a victim of this: you would rather buy an Apple than an off-brand, right? You’ve become a victim of good marketing.

And when, for example, the iPod launched, product people all thought the product did the selling. It was such a good product; that’s why it did so well. No. When they launched the iPod, they spent more money marketing that product than any company had ever spent on marketing a product ever. Marketing is not one thing; marketing is a complex structure combining PR, brand messaging, product-market fit—if you don’t know product-market fit, I can cover this later—but basically, you’ve got to make sure that the people you’re talking to will resonate to the product that you’re selling or the service that you’re selling.

Marketing, in my opinion, is actually number one thing: it’s understanding who your customer is. Now, often in business build, you’ll see businesses focus on niches to start with. Now, it doesn’t have to stay in that niche, but it’s a great place to start. So, Facebook, for example, it started off in universities and by connecting people in universities. Of course now, it became connecting everybody all over the world. But they understood their customer; they knew what that customer was looking for. And in the early days of Facebook, they put a feature on there called “single” or “available”—I can’t remember the exact terminology—but they basically created a feature that let you know if that person was in a relationship or not. And that was designed to help the university students understand the dynamics between their fellow university students. And so they knew their market audience, and they then marketed that feature. People would then go around saying, “Did you see Sarah? She’s suddenly single.” And that would be the marketing for their product. They built a tool in the platform that became what people spoke about; that created the marketing for you. And in my opinion, that’s the Holy Grail of marketing.

And this brings me on to point two. I call this the staircase philosophy. So the best way for me to teach you this is to tell you what I have recently done. So, weirdly, a few months ago, a staircase came up for sale in London. It’s the first time a staircase had ever been for sale in London. It’s ridiculous. And I heard it on the news that this staircase was for sale, and I told my brain instantly: we’re going to buy it. Now, I didn’t have an exact plan of what I was going to do with the staircase, but what I knew was that staircase symbolized something for my business, which was: step by step, you can get anywhere you want. But also, I knew I could newsjack that staircase. It was a sensation; people didn’t know why someone was selling a staircase. And 2 days after hearing it on the news, I owned it. I spent £26,000 buying it at auction.

And then we did a couple of clever things that hopefully symbolize how marketing works. First up, as soon as we bought the staircase, the news channels that had reported it was for sale jumped on us. I knew they would. And they wanted to know why we had bought a staircase, and that gave us an opportunity to get on the front page of the New York Times, on the front page of the BBC, in every single newspaper around the world—millions of dollars’ worth of coverage for our platform because we bought a staircase. It doesn’t seem relevant, but doing these wild things, these crazy things, can actually make a huge difference. One of the things that I always loved in marketing was when flash mobs were a thing. And what happened was, suddenly you’d get a whole shopping mall—people would start dancing, and everyone would wonder what it was, right? That is brilliant marketing. Now, it might not sell your product exactly in that exact moment, but over time, it allows you to have a reach and expansion and uniqueness to you that will help you stand out. Because that’s what it’s about: it’s about standing out.

So by buying the staircase, we then evolved it. We got all this PR—millions of dollars’ worth of free PR for a staircase. Then we put a doorbell at the bottom of that staircase, and we said, “If you’ve got a dream, press a button; we’ll then upload your dream to our 4 million following and get you free exposure.” Well, that was what the press needed to do a follow-up story on it. “Once you bought the staircase, what did you do with it?” And they wrote all about that. But also, we built a whole new way of helping people on the back of a staircase that was for sale. I knew it symbolized helping people step by step.

And then the final step in marketing: we all need partners. Marketing isn’t about promoting something on your own. We want to get a partner like Ring doorbell or Amazon, who own Ring doorbell, on board to sponsor the doorbell, to sponsor the staircase, to help us reach even more people. And then suddenly, they pay for our marketing.

And so marketing isn’t a standalone thing; marketing isn’t a non-living, organic product. You have to see it as living; you have to see it as evolving; and you have to see it as something that you do that pushes the envelope.

Now, marketing is connected to sales. If you have a sales team, in a way, when they ring someone up, how they speak to someone, how they treat someone, that is also marketing; that’s brand marketing. However that person receives your phone call, receives your interaction with them, will affect your brand. And that is marketing.

Nike, for example: how do they do marketing? Well, they endorse the very best athletes in the world. Of course, in some cases, they make shoes with those very successful athletes. They’re aligning themselves up with these people that are incredibly successful. What does Apple do? Apple links to creative people. So therefore, everybody wants to have some sort of creativity in their life, beauty in their life, so they buy a product they think is for the creative people, right? IBM notebook was a better product, but people didn’t want that; it didn’t symbolize something cool and sexy and creativity.

So I think marketing is about again, similar to sales, selling the sizzle. But it’s also about understanding who your customer is, how to reach that niche, and then how to work with that niche to expand into the wider world if you want to scale. It’s the staircase method. What’s your staircase? What’s going to make you stand out? How can you evolve that thing that makes you stand out and go even further?

Number three is systems. When you’re doing marketing, it is such an overwhelming thing. There’s so many different ways you can do it: you can do email marketing; you can do social media; you can do PR; you can do branding; you can do events. I mean, the list never ends. So how do you decide which one to do? Well, first of all, whatever you do, you’ve got to build a system to do it. So if it is email marketing, then you have a good data collection system; you have a good data management system; and then you have a good way of pushing out the content to that database. And whatever one of these things you do, if you do all of them or you do one of them, do them well. Do not do all of them and order them badly.

I see so many people with on their website Twitter and Facebook and Instagram links, and then you click through to them and they’re dead. You’re better off doing one well. Now, I think marketing is something where you should spread your bet. You want to do many different ways—what I call entrances into your business. You want to do as many of them as you can. But do not overstretch yourself. It’s better to do one platform on social media really well than try and spread yourself thin. But if you set up a system for doing your social media, there is a chance you could do all of them well with the same amount of resources doing one of them well.

So, for example, on my social media, I have one core video, and then we edit it in-app for each of the channels. So we don’t have to record separate videos for each of the channels, but we do in-app edit them so they’re actually tailored to that particular platform’s nuances, be it their font or their image. So you can actually set up a system to do all of these marketing things. But the key, of course, is not only just systems, but making sure you pick what works for you.

Now, when it comes to marketing, one of the big mistakes I see people get taught is marketing is about having the staircase only. It’s not about having the staircase only. It is about applying what you like to do as a founder, or maybe what your team likes to do, into your marketing strategy. As an example, if you don’t like talking on camera—that’s not your thing—as long as you’re not hiding away from learning something new and you genuinely don’t like to do it, but, for example, you love to write, then doing an email marketing strategy is probably right for you; posting on LinkedIn is probably the correct platform for you. Sure, you’ll hear people talking about how good TikTok is and how much benefit they’ve got from it, but if it doesn’t work for you, it’s not sustainable for you; it’s not something you’re going to enjoy. And marketing is something fun. This is something I want you to take away: no one talks about it, but marketing is meant to be fun.

I took my son to buy that staircase; we had a laugh. Once we got the staircase, we had a laugh cleaning it up. We had a laugh putting a blimp on top of it. We had a laugh putting a doorbell on the front of it. We enjoyed the whole bloody thing. And if you don’t enjoy it, what’s the point? Marketing is about enjoying it. That’s why I see brands do well.

I give you an example: Starbucks marketing in the early days was two things. First, they would take good locations, sometimes quite close to each other. So instead of getting a billboard advertising Starbucks, they’d open up another Starbucks. And even if it was loss-making, as long as it wasn’t more expensive in its loss than a billboard, they were better off having a store. Then people could have the experience. They never did any billboards—it’s changed now, and I would argue it’s not as good a brand anymore—but they opened up locations; that was one of their marketing strategies.

The second thing that they did that was really clever is they looked after their staff—which sounds really obvious, doesn’t it? But they did. They talk about their staff as partners. The baristas are partners. In some respects, the internal training manual talked about their baristas as the customer. And it worked. In the early days of Starbucks—say what you like about them today—but in the early days of Starbucks, when I used to walk in there, a barista would know my name, they’d know what drink I wanted, and they were just working for Starbucks, but they cared because they were looked after. They were given medical care, for example; they were given full-time medical care even if they were part-time staff. They were given insurance and looked after, and they were given days off if they didn’t feel very well. They were looked after. And I think that this is also part of marketing. It might not sound it, but if your people don’t represent you, then good luck making everything else represent you, because those people will create all the things that represent you.

So do include fun into your business. Do look at the nuances of your business and figure out what is going to be your staircase. And ultimately, apply your marketing love to something that’s sustainable, that’s going to be enjoyable, that’s going to be able to actually deliver the very thing that you want to deliver, which I think should always be the promise of a better future for your customers.

How to PR Your Business

Now, some of these things are interconnected, and sales and marketing all connect to how to get PR. But I’m going to give you some hacks and some insights in how PR works. And it is quite a complicated subject, but it’s something if you get right can be a game-changer for your business.

Now, first up, I’ll say getting PR has to be very targeted. I know plenty of people that have got PR for the money they’ve raised in their company, and it will go out to platforms like TechCrunch; it will make them feel good, but it had no impact on their business other than to make them feel good—which is fine, I guess. But I do think PR should be more strategic. I’d rather spend time reaching the press and actually getting a tangible result and not just playing to ego.

So recently, for example, I was featured on the BBC news. They talked about what we were doing at the doorbell where people could pitch their dreams, and this led to hundreds of people finding out about it, going to our staircase, pitching their dream, and helping them make their dream happen. Now, that, in my opinion, is targeted marketing. Equally, I have done recently an article in a business journal that got zero reaction. Now, I was proud to be in the business journal, and I don’t want to say which one it is so I don’t insult them, but ultimately, it actually led to no value as far as what I want to do, which is help people do what they love and make sure people know there’s a service out there for free to help them do what they love.

So PR is very important to be targeted. And so I’ll write that down first. Now, targeting can also be subjective because, a bit like marketing itself and sales, of course, sometimes you do need to cast the net wide and get as much coverage as you can. But if you do start to target your actual needs, it’s much easier to get PR.

I give you example: if, for example, you want to let people know that you are now selling cherries on the side of the street, the best thing to do is get some PR in the local area that you live. Now, as much as it might be nice to say, “You’ve started a cherry farm selling cherries on the side of the street,” to make that farm work, you probably could get you in a mainstream news channel, but it won’t necessarily lead to sales in the location in which you sell those cherries. So targeting and understanding exactly who you’re trying to reach is actually the key. And it’s more likely that if you are selling cherries in East Sussex, the East Sussex Times will cover you. It’s more relevant, more chances of actually getting the PR than, say, for example, the BBC covering it, because it’s not necessarily going to be that interesting. You could spend a lot of time and money reaching those people and then not cover you.

The second thing I’ll teach you about PR is: journalists are lazy. So if you understand this and understand if you provide everything for them, then they don’t need to do any work—more likely to get the press coverage. So what I always do is I actually write the press release like it’s the actual story you want written, with a good headline that makes them happy that they’re not selling you. That’s journalists don’t want to write and sell you; they want to write something that’s interesting for the reader. So making a good subject line that’s good for the reader, making the story good for the reader, I do all the work for the journalist.

And then things like photos: I take high-resolution photos, and I send them with a press clip to make sure they’ve got everything they need. All they have to do is say yes to the story and then put their own touch on it; job done. They’re human beings; they want to go out for lunch if they can. So if you can make it possible for them to go out for lunch and do their job, then you will win in PR. Too many people are lazy; they send press releases that are generic, and they don’t tailor it to the journalist they’re writing to.

So the other thing you need to do is research that journalist. Back to the targeting, you need to understand what that journalist writes about, what that journalist is interested in, and almost write in their style if you want that particular journalist to write about you.

The third thing on PR I’ll tell you is: there is a lot of companies out there that will tell you they can get you PR. Please be careful. Now, as much as it might be nice to just pay someone to do this, I have discovered doing the PR yourself, especially if you’re a small business, can pay huge dividends. Why? Because you can make a relationship direct with a journalist. And how do you find these journalistic contacts? That’s what the PR companies tell you they’ve got. You can go to a newspaper and find them; you can Google them; you’ll find them quite quick.

One big hack I’ll give you is Twitter, in particular, is really good to get hold of journalists. If you start following the journalists that you want to write about you, and you start engaging on their posts, I would say that’s one of the best ways to start building up a relationship with a journalist. Most people will reply to a comment or read a comment that you’ve made on one of their posts. And weirdly enough, often journalists don’t have big followings, and they don’t actually have a lot of comments. So you can start making a relationship. Start commenting on something. If they post something about global warming and you’ve got a product that’s helping reduce global warming, then you will get noticed if you start commenting on a story they’ve done about it. Start being part of their thinking when it comes to: “I need someone to help me write this story; I need someone to give me a quote to make the story better.” Start becoming part of that journalist’s life. And it starts with just following them on Twitter or replying to one of their comments, engaging on one of the stories they’ve already written—even online things like Daily Mail: the journalist will read the comment on their own story. So engage. Engage is the number one thing I can tell you when it comes to getting PR from journalists.

And finally, I have been involved in many conversations where I know brands have not worked with someone because they saw on someone’s social media that they posted something obscene or rude or stupid. Remember that you as a business owner will always be the number one PR engine. Whatever you post up, be conscious; be careful; think about your brand; think about the image that you’re projecting. And I can’t tell you enough how important this is, because if you do the first few things I’ve just mentioned—you connect with the press; you know who you’re targeting; and you’re not lazy; you help them do it—if a journalist sees that you are out of control or inappropriate, they will not risk their job to write about you. So learn to be disciplined. Learn to be the brand. PR starts with one person having respect for you, so make sure you’re disciplined; don’t be lazy yourself.

How to Get an Investor

Next up, one of my favorite subjects, one of the questions I get asked the most: how to get an investor. Learning how to get an investor can dramatically change the trajectory of your business. Equally though, just before I go into how to get an investor, I want you to think carefully about whether or not you need an investor.

Now, I have invested in 78 companies—you can go on my website simon.com and look at some of the companies I’ve invested in—I have seen it all. And sometimes, if you get the wrong investor or get an investor for the wrong reasons, you will have a new boss, and your life will become a nightmare. It will be easy at the beginning when you get the money, and will get harder over time if you do it wrong. I will try to teach you how to not get it wrong. But equally, please ask yourself: is there another way to make the business work? And I’m going to touch on other ways that you could make it work even if you don’t get an investor within this “how to get an investor” chat.

Now, there are quite a few different ways to get an investor depending on the stage of your business and how much you’re trying to raise. If you’re trying to raise money in the early days of a business, I would say to you: the more traction you have in your business, the easier it is to get an investor. Now, that does not mean to say if you just have an idea you can’t get an investor; you definitely can. There’s just less people that will fund it. So just like the sales stuff I taught you earlier, it’s probably better to make sure that you actually know who you’re targeting when you’re getting an investor. What is the profile of the person you want?

So if you’re going after someone that perhaps will fund a business that has no traction, it’s just an idea, then remember those people’s profile: they probably want quite a lot of equity; they probably want some involvement in the business to make sure it works; they probably want some sector relevance, industry relevance to your business so they can add value. Because no investor—I don’t care who they are—just wants to feel like money. Everybody wants to feel like they’re bringing some sort of value. In fact, I would argue you shouldn’t invest in a business unless you can bring value. You’ve got to make the value the thing that gives you the edge to make that investment work. Otherwise, you might just invest in the stock market. If you can’t bring value, you might as well invest in the stock market. And I don’t think you make money from the stock market; middle-class people make money from the stock market. You make money like Warren Buffett makes money: you own a piece of a company you can influence; you can help make sure it’s successful. So do your research.

But these are the types of profiles that are often the best:

• Family and friends. Now, I know family and friends can be difficult for a lot of people. A lot of people don’t have family and friends with money, and I totally understand that, and I’ll come to other methods. But I just want to touch on this first because family and friends—the reason it’s such a good thing to do is because they know you. You don’t have to convince someone of your personality, your profile, your dedication; they will know all of that; they’ll know the true you most of the time. That could be really powerful and speeding up the process of getting the money you need. Now, of course, we all know it can get messy if you take money off family and friends and you don’t pay them back. So tell them the truth: they could lose all their money. That’s all you need to do. You tell them they could lose all their money. In the wish to get investment, we sometimes go down the road of overselling it, and that’s totally normal, but please be careful with this, especially with family and friends. If you tell them, “You invest in my business; it could all go wrong; you can lose everything,” then after that, it’s up to them. But you make it clear; don’t oversell it that it’s a guaranteed win; it cannot be a guarantee, where nothing ever is—unless you’ve watched all of this article, of course, there’s a high chance, but you know what I mean. Please, please be careful. But I have seen it work, and often family and friends can also help you, which in the early days of any business, if that’s the stage you’re at, then getting help is probably more valuable than money. But I’ve seen it work, so do give it serious consideration. And of course, friend of a friend can also be the way to raise money. If you don’t have someone in your family that’s rich, maybe you’ve got a friend who has a family that’s rich. Learn to leverage the network, because your friend recommending you to someone who’s rich will be powerful. And it also saves you time in the VC world, which I’ll talk about in a minute. Getting a recommendation is the only way to get investment; they don’t take applications online despite what their websites say. I’ve seen it; they don’t. They take it from recommendation. So start really networking.
• The second thing I’ll say—and I’ve never seen anyone else talk about this when it comes to getting an investor—and that is: consider the people you want to work with you in your company as potential investors. So sometimes, when you’re profiling the people you want in your business, you will look at it and say, “Right, well, I can’t afford the best, so I’ll get this person,” right? Which is fine; I understand that. But the smart people think differently. The smart people think, “Who are the best?” And let’s say I’m building right now a competitor to LinkedIn—helpbank.com. So I think, “Who’s number two at LinkedIn? I want them to come and join me.” They’re never going to be number one at LinkedIn—not for a long time—but maybe they want the chance to build their own LinkedIn and come and join me. Now, the great thing about the number two at LinkedIn: they definitely got some money in the bank, right? Some money to invest in the business. So I can—and I’ve done this many times, so this isn’t just a theory—but look at your team, look at your team members as potential investors in the platform. I’m running today helpbank.com; the people that are involved in this business have invested in this business. Callum, who’s behind the camera right now, has put his own money into this business, and he’s got equity because of it, and he’s taken a lower salary initially. So there’s all sorts of benefits to actually doing it this way: you can get your cost down; you can get the best-in-class involved in the business; and you can bring money in to help make the company work. And it’s much better to have money from people that are actually working in the business than people externally who are asking you for a report of when they’re going to get their money back.
• The third thing you can do—and of course this is more traditional, but it is very complex, so I’ll try to explain how to go about getting this type of person in your business—but it’s an angel investor. Now, you might have heard the term many times; you probably watched rubbish shows like Dragon’s Den and thought that getting an investor is: the dragon or the angel sits there with all the money, and you are desperately trying to get that money off them by making them see your vision. That is the wrong way to get an angel investor. The best way to get an angel investor on board—once you’ve identified them and done the research to find out who they are, you’ve been very clear about what you’re going to give them if they invest—all of that is common sense, right? I don’t need to teach you that right now. Of course, you need to know how much you’re going to give them and why, and I’ll get into equity in a little bit later in the article, so you could try to work that bit out. But once you’ve established who you want as an investor and what you’re willing to give them, the way to get an investor is completely the opposite to what you think. You think getting an investor is: “Hi, I’ve got a business; this is this business; would you like to invest?” No. The best way to get an angel investor is not ask for money. The best way to get an angel investor is ask for help. Because you’ve identified the right investor; they want to feel value. If they can’t bring value, they don’t want to invest. And often, if you do it right, it’s not like Dragon’s Den. I’ve invested in 78 businesses; I always feel honored and lucky when I get to invest in a successful business. They do not treat me like a dragon; they do not treat me with awe. They treat me with respect, but they also identify why they’ve approached me, how I can bring value, and make me feel special. And ultimately, I then feel lucky to be involved in that business if they do that right. If you ask me for advice, you’re more likely to get money out of me than if you straight up ask me for money. Now, I’m not saying don’t build “ask” into the process; of course, when you do pitch an angel investor, you should definitely put in there you’re looking for money. But the best way to put it is: “We’re looking for money from the right people.” Make it a little harder for people to get involved in your business; that’s how you get an angel investor. You create FOMO, right? FOMO—you probably heard it, but in case you haven’t, it’s probably one of the most powerful things: fear of missing out. You make people understand—and you do it sincerely—that if they don’t invest, they’re missing out. That is the key to getting an angel investor. Now, of course, treat an angel investor with respect. If you can prepare a correct and appropriate amount of equity they’re going to get, make it clear why, explain your long-term investment plans, how they’re going to dilute—because angel investors often get diluted. So if you’re offering them 5%, it might sound like a lot, but if you get another investor and another investor as things go down the line, that person could end up with 1% of the company or half a percent of the company. And remember, most angel investors will be involved in the business, so make sure you actually need them to help you. Don’t just pretend that they need you; you need them. Because once you get them on board as an investor, you also need it to go well. So it’s not just about convincing the person to get on board; it’s also convincing yourself that the right person to have with you on this journey in the long term. Make sure you do that.
• Now, the fourth way of getting an investor, more traditional: VCs, venture capitalists. Now, these types of profiles are often a little bit further down the line in your business model than just a startup or an idea. Most of the time—nearly all VCs, although things have changed a little bit when there was a lot of money in the market—but most VCs will genuinely want a business that’s proven that needs capital to scale. So the way to get a VC on board: a couple of ways. First, you identify: have they got money? Now, what happens with a lot of VCs is they’re raising funds, and they’re deploying funds, and then they’re raising funds again. And they won’t necessarily tell you; they’ll take a meeting with you; they might meet you and understand your business, but they won’t necessarily have the funds. And they’ll tell you—what we joke in the VC world is: “You’re too tall for radio.” So you go for a job interview at a radio station; they reject you in that job, and the interview rejection reason is: “You were too short for radio.” In other words, they don’t tell you why. But you can find out if they’re raising; you can Google them to find this out. Don’t waste time approaching VCs that are raising money; they won’t deploy the capital; they will waste your time. The other thing you can do—and I think it’s very important—is see who they’ve invested in before. And there’s a good chance if they’ve invested in a similar business to yours, it’s one of two things: it’s either bad news or good news for you. If it’s good, then they will invest in many different companies. So, for example, there was an investment company that invested in all the Uber-type businesses. They invested in Uber; they invested in Lyft; they invested in all of them. They hedged their bet that one of them was going to win. They want to be a part of all of them to make sure that they didn’t lose. Other VCs will only invest in one company in that category. So just make sure you understand that. But if it’s bad news and they only invest in one company in that category, then you can go to the competitor of that VC and create a rivalry between the VC firms. I’ve seen it play out many times. You make them feel like, “Well, they’ve invested in Uber, but I’m Lyft, and I think we’re going to beat Uber. Would you like to invest in us?” And it’s primal, but it works. So think about, again: have they got money? Don’t waste time selling to people that don’t have it. See the investor companies they’ve invested in before; understand that. And then three: try to get connected to a previous company that that VC has invested in. It’s much more powerful for you to get introduced by one of the other portfolio companies of that VC than you personally approaching that VC. So try to make connections. And it’s also good due diligence, by the way. If you speak to the company that got investment from that VC, you can find out whether that VC was decent or not, because some of these VCs are awful. So you can do your due diligence at the same time, hopefully make a relationship with a founder that can introduce you to the VC when the time is right.
• Now, the fifth way—again, I’ve never seen this way explained to people before, and it’s not traditional, but I have done it many, many times—and that is: work with your brand partner or client to fund your growth. So I had an office in Hong Kong, and a client wanted us to open up in the Middle East. And I was a bit reluctant, which is why I think I found out about this hack, ‘cause I originally said, “We don’t want to open up there.” I think they just wanted us open up there and then service them, and they didn’t want to spend any money doing it. But because we said no, and they really wanted to work with us there, they offered to pay us to open up there. So this is a hack I learned, and I will use it many, many more times after this: that sometimes your client who wants your service, or the brand that’s sponsoring you, will pay for your expansion. Sometimes it’s easier for them to do that than go out and build it—sales, for example—or work with a new partner that doesn’t understand their philosophy. So your existing clients can be your investor. And it can be really powerful if you do it right, too, because that client then feels invested in your success. They’re not going to make you go for a tender every year; they’re not going to chop and change you as a client or partner or supplier because they want you to succeed because they own equity in you. Now, of course, you have to do this carefully. So, for example, if one of your clients is a bank and they invest in you, it can get very messy suddenly on the legal side. Equally, if you are working with a particular provider—let’s say, in my case, I work with lots of different online service providers, but I partner with GoDaddy—but if GoDaddy invested in my business, it means all the other online suppliers probably wouldn’t work with me, which would not help the people I’m trying to help, which is people starting businesses. So I think it’s quite important to make sure you get the right client or the right brand to invest in you. But it can be huge money, and brands do have investment divisions—Google Ventures, Google; ironic: they invest in businesses. They invested in a coffee shop called Blue Bottle, a coffee shop. So it’s possible to get Google to invest in your business. But you have to understand, again, the motives. Go back to my sales point I made in the article earlier in the article: if you want to understand how to sell to these brands, use that sales system again. But ultimately, it’s a way to raise money.
• Now, there’s one final way I want to quickly flush out with you to raise money to make your business work. Now, it kind of touched on what I said at the beginning of this part of the article, and that is: make sure you need an investor. Sometimes when people are asking me for money, I will ask them what they’re using the money for, and most of the time—not always, but quite often—it’s to get more sales, to grow the product, to make sure more people can buy the product, and so on. But when I dig in, it’s not money from me that they need; they just need a better sales system. So often, when it comes to raising money, you’ll find that if you can actually go look at your business, and you might say to yourself, “Well, I need the money to buy the product,” well, you can do crowdfunding, for example. You can find methods of selling your product ahead of time through platforms like Indiegogo and platforms that will pre-sell your product to get you the revenue you need in advance, and you’re not giving away any equity when you do that. You can pre-sell your product on certain crowdfunding sites before it’s made, and then you can go and use the money you got from that pre-order to go and make it. And that is often a much better way than raising money from an investor. Of course, crowdfunding is quite big across the board now; you can raise money crowdfunding; you can do equity crowdfunding; and there’s plenty of sites that do that. I’ll put some links down below in the article if you want to check out who they are. But ultimately, you want to figure out whether or not you really need the money: from a customer pre-buying it, or from an investor who’s going to help bring value, or from a community that’s going to support you in the future. You can do crowdfunding where you sell your product; you can do crowdfunding where you sell equity; you can do crowdfunding where ultimately it’s just a loan; you can do crowdfunding where people will just support you, like GoFundMe. Crowdfunding is definitely one of the ways I think today you should leverage before going to the more traditional routes of, say, a VC or an angel, of course family and friends. So crowdfunding is powerful, and don’t overlook it.

How to Get a Sponsor

This is something I get asked all the time. I’m going to give you the code; I’m going to give you the cheat code, I guess, on how to do it. And I want to first of all say, if any sponsors are listening to this, I have applied this technique on you, so forgive me.

The first is understanding why sponsorship deals happen. We can get into what sponsorship deals structures are, and that’s quite complex in itself, but I want to give you the tool today to get a sponsor on board. And the way to understand a sponsor, there’s two things that makes a sponsor come on board.

• One is value return. Right? What they invest in sponsoring you, they get back in some form—right?—be that in views or be that in sales; they get value back, ideally trackable value. So billboard companies—which I think are a joke, really, in what they value-wise give back to a brand—sell because they show how many people walk past that billboard, how many people are looking at that billboard each day, and brands love that stuff. So proper ROI on their investment.
• The second way—and this one’s a bit more tricky, but very powerful if you get it right—is the emotional sale. Right? So you see this quite a lot in, like, local football clubs in England: big brands sometimes are sponsoring small local football clubs. Why? Because the CEO plays football there, or the CEO grew up there playing football. Basically, the emotional sale. Now, I have used both of these to get deals, and both of them can actually work together; they’re not mutually exclusive. Frankly, sometimes the emotional sale with the value return is probably the Holy Grail. If you can make it personal for the brand and the people running the brand—don’t overlook them—if you’re going to make it emotional for the person who runs the brand alongside bring proper value, most of the time you can get a brand deal.

Now, where people fall over is not structuring value for a sponsor or—and this is probably the third thing I highlight that’s important to get a sponsorship deal—you’ve not understood the brand. Now, I have made this mistake many times. I launched a business called Coaster Ads, and it was brilliant marketing. I took all the bars in Hong Kong, and I put ads on coasters. I took out the Carlsberg coasters and the Heineken coasters, and I put in coasters with ads on them. And it was brilliant because you put your drink down on that coaster; you look at it for an hour at least as you’re putting the drink on it and picking up; it was brilliant retention, brilliant engagement; people saw the ads every time they’re brilliant. But I tried to sell that service—that coaster ad service—to a jewelry business. And of course, they laughed at me. In fact, I lost them as a client on the agency side because they thought I didn’t understand their brand. I was so sure that that jewelry brand would get traction—which they would have done—but I didn’t remember what their brand philosophy was. And they’re high-end; they’re fashionable; they don’t want a beer sat on top of them. I made a mistake; I didn’t understand the brand. And this is where you need to get really, really clear: what is the brand value?

And so in that case, in the jewelry case, they want to sponsor, you know, 007 movies with James Bond’s girlfriend wearing the jewelry and looking sexy. You know, they want to be involved in things that are not linked to beer, that are not linked to somebody drunk putting their beer down on their brand. Now, I did eventually sell Coaster Ads out to airlines that wanted to promote going from Hong Kong to Singapore and so on and so forth, so I eventually did really well with that brand. But initially, I learned an important lesson: understand the brand; understand what their values are; understand how they traditionally advertise. So Visa, for example: Visa advertise at the Olympics. They not only sponsor the Olympics, then they spend a lot of money promoting the fact that they’re at the Olympics. Too many people go to Visa and ask for sponsorship without understanding the probably the biggest activation that Visa ever do is the Olympics. So you’re better off going and selling some value linked to the Olympics as opposed to saying, “Please sponsor my event,” because they’re saying, “We sponsored the Olympics; we sponsored the biggest event in the world. Now you want us to sponsor your event?” Brand values and understanding what that brand wants is key.

But I mentioned it briefly a second ago, but I want to highlight it is important: don’t forget the people in these brands. Research who they are; understand what their motives are. Some of the brands that sponsor me today—GoDaddy and Tide banking—the people that run those brands care as much about entrepreneurs as the brands themselves. So when they see that me and my team are helping people—genuinely helping people have a better life—not only do the people buy in to becoming a sponsor for us, the brand alignment is there, and it happens. Right? Now, this does tie into the emotional sell somewhat, because, for example, one of the people I work with at GoDaddy had a small business; she knew how hard it was to make that business work. So when she sees what we’re doing alongside what GoDaddy does—this isn’t a sponsored article by the way, but I’m just highlighting the example so you learn—ultimately, these people make a difference in that brand. That brand is made up of people. So as long as those people don’t get fired for sponsoring something that has no relevance to their brand, you can actually end up having champions inside these companies for you to help you get the sponsorship. And I’ve had that many, many times.

Now, the fifth way to get a brand to sponsor you that no one talks about—I don’t know why; maybe it’s some sort of industry dirty secret—but it’s a very, very powerful way of getting a brand sponsor on board is: work with someone that’s already working with one of these brands. An agent is often one way to describe it, but there are two types of typical agents that brands work with.

• There is a media buying company. This is a company that will go out and buy all the ad space for that brand. They’re paid by the brand to go and get the best deals possible and buy up ad space. You can talk to these media buyers, and often it can be better to talk to them than go direct to the brand, because the brand is too busy with its day-to-day to deal with you as a media owner. They would prefer to deal with the media buyer: one contact, and then that media buyer will deal with everybody that wants to sell media. So recently, someone came to me and said they’ve got a fleet of vans, and they want to get brands to advertise on their vans, and they tried going direct to brands and brand said no, gave them a contact of a media buyer; the media buyer said, “Great,” and they bought all the ad space. It’s much quicker. The media buyer has a relationship with the brands, and often they hold the money; the brands already allocated the money to the media buyer. So stop trying to sell to the brand; sell to the media buyer.
• The other way to do it is via the agencies. So I used to own an agency; it’s one of the reasons I know this subject so so well. But a brand will have a company that will come up with a campaign idea for them. Now, often when you’re coming up with a campaign for a brand, you’re also looking at how the campaign will be applied in the real world. So it might go on taxis; it might go on a bus; it might go on a coaster. So you can actually tap into these agencies—examples without showing any preference: there’s people like M&C Saatchi, Ogilvy, Leo Burnett. These agencies already have the relationship with the company, and if you get in there with your idea or your product, they can often insert it or even come up with a campaign to sell it into the brand for you.

Now, I personally prefer to deal with brands direct many times, but do not neglect: media buyers are your friends, and agencies can be your friends, and it can be a much quicker sale to get them on board as a sponsor.

One of the best hacks to get a brand as a sponsor is to be personally really vested in that brand. So, for example, we recently—as you know, I mentioned it earlier—put a doorbell on the bottom of our staircase that people could press, that doorbell pitch their dream, and we would help them. We decided the best product for us to do that—the most economical product that worked on the internet—was Ring doorbell, owned by Amazon. Now, we didn’t ask Ring to sponsor us; we didn’t ask Amazon to sponsor us. It was just the best product; we believed in the product and suited what we were trying to do. So we installed it, and we marketed it. And of course, guess who’s seen it? Ring and Amazon. So now, who are we now working with? Amazon. Now, of course, what I’m talking about here is just using the brand in your life, and therefore it being a natural fit for the brand to work with you. When I wear Whoop out on the street, it’s natural; I’m wearing it because I like the product. And then Whoop will see me with millions of views on my videos wearing a Whoop, and they will contact me. So I think that just leaning in to a brand relationship and not initially thinking about the money—back to some of the points I was making in some of the other areas earlier: delayed gratification. In sponsorship, it can also be very powerful. Just work with brands that you love; it will always be easier than forcing a brand into your ecosystem. But also, just doing stuff with that brand as part of your day-to-day business life can lead to sponsorship.

How to Build a Brand

Now, this subject is complex and exciting. If you get it right, a lot of the things I’ve talked about earlier like sales and marketing will happen naturally. But it is complex. Now, there’s lots of videos out there about what is a brand, so I’m not going to bore you with that. It’s obvious; it’s ultimately a statement about what you are doing. You want people to look at it and know. I love the images I’ve seen; many you can take away the logo; you can take away everything, and you still know it’s that brand. It’s not about the actual logo, the design. Branding is about the purpose of the business, the essence of what you’re doing. Nike is about supporting athletes; Apple is about supporting creativity.

Ultimately, when you’re coming to figure out your own brand, I would start with your personal brand, because it’s a really good way of figuring out how to build a brand. Why? You know you, right? If you’re honest about yourself, you can make a brand persona. And you start with writing down your values. What do you care about? What are your non-negotiables? What would you say no to? What would you say yes to? Understanding your personality; understanding what it is you want to do—that’s what your brand is about; that’s who you are. Now, you will already have a personal brand. And anyone that doesn’t want a personal brand, I’m sorry, you’re going to have one no matter what. People will talk about you when you’re not in the room. You need to embrace personal branding. And by understanding how others perceive you, it can literally change the trajectory of your life.

Now, I have some real gripes with personal brand, and it’s not very scalable. Only in certain exceptions around people like Kardashians and so on can you actually scale a personal brand. As someone that’s built a personal brand, as someone that’s got 4 million followers that spent four years building a personal brand here in the UK, I can tell you, it is sometimes a pain in the ass. I am responsible now, no matter what, to do videos like this and post up stuff even when I’m tired—like now, I’m actually tired, and I still have to do this video—because if I don’t do it, you probably won’t take it seriously. I could give this knowledge to my colleague and give it to you, and you probably wouldn’t listen, so you need to hear it from someone that’s been there and done it, like me. And I understand that, and I actually do love doing these videos and helping you. But I’m just trying to highlight: the personal brand side is dangerous if that’s all you build. You have to take personal brand seriously. You have to identify what your personal brand is. And by the way, I know people that have made their personal brand not being on social media; their personal brand is they don’t get back to you in email. That’s actually sometimes what makes them unique; that’s their personal brand. I don’t reply to DMs; I want to make videos like this that bring you value; I want to do lives that means I interact in a real world with real people. I have my rules; I have my values. I’m dyslexic, so I don’t like reading DMs. But having those rules and having that discipline will ultimately help you define what people say about you instead of people saying it without you having defined it.

But brand values of your own can teach you how you need to do exactly the same for your company. So let’s take my brand, HelpBank. Right? HelpBank has a lot of the traits that I personally value: honesty, openness, authenticity, value. These are all words in my personal brand persona that have translated into my company persona. However, HelpBank’s long-term future also involves helping people with finance. Finance is not a word I use on my personal brand. And also, supporting people to get the funding they need is something I have personally done many, many times, but as an organization, as a platform, it’s going to be a much more serious thing for HelpBank. So when the branding was designed, we said it has to look a little bit more serious than the Simon Squibb brand, because ultimately, we’ll be funding people’s dreams at scale, and people need to trust if we tell them we’re going to fund their dreams, it’s actually going to happen. So the HelpBank branding is a combination of the Simon Squibb branding and our competitors, potentially, in the future. We want to make it look serious; it has some element of fun, but ultimately, it has its own brand persona.

And all you need to do initially to get the brand right is write down all the different brand values. Now, I want to teach you about how companies apply brand at scale, and there’s a few different ways it generally plays out.

So let’s take a brand like Canon. And Canon run a brand method which we call reference. Right? And reference is when they leverage someone else’s brand to make their brand look good. So Canon, for example, work with a photographer called Peter McKinnon, who is a brilliant photographer; I’m a big fan of his. And by sponsoring him, by supporting him, they don’t need that person as a CEO and their company—like Apple have done—they have it external. Nike also do this. I mentioned earlier: Nike will sponsor top-performing athletes with nice personalities that have values, and that therefore becomes part of the Nike brand. So they use this reference model to make their own brand look good.

Now, Apple, as I mentioned earlier, they use a different method. I call this the leadership method. And the leadership method is basically where you have a person in the company that represents the brand values. Now, in HelpBank, I am that person. Probably in your business, you are, if you’re a small business owner: the person that is the leadership value brand ambassador for your company. You’re probably the one that has to go on stage and talk about your business; you’re the one in sales meetings; whatever your business model is, you’re probably the one representing the brand. Of course, your staff will represent the brand; your office environment will represent the brand; like I said earlier, the days when you go out have a party and post on your social media will represent your brand. But when it comes to making your brand values clear, you do it by these two methods: you either have a reference model, which means you sponsor certain people that represent your brand value, or you have a leadership model, which is you personally in the company leading the charge to make sure people understand your brand.

And I think when it comes to brand building, there are some risks in both of these models. Now, in the reference model, if a celebrity that’s supporting your brand does something bad, that can affect your brand. Now, this happens a lot, and they often get fired quick. I think one of the most famous cases: Kanye West, who of course got dropped by Adidas and then lawsuits galore. But what I’m saying is though, what’s good about the reference model is you don’t have to spend four years building up social media presence like me. I’ve spent every single day four years doing a post, building up a community. You can just leverage all of that hard work, and your brand can have the halo effect of working with me. But the downside is: what if I do something bad? Then your brand is at risk. So you need to have mechanisms in place to make sure you’re protected as a brand. But that’s how you scale brand.

And of course, the leadership model also has its weaknesses. We all saw this a little bit with Steve Jobs. When Steve Jobs left Apple, Apple had a real problem for a long time. They put so much of their brand value in the Steve Jobs brand that when he left, the magic left, was often what people said, right? So you have to make sure that you as a leader, it’s sustainable for you to be that leader and lead that brand effort, and/or there’s a good transition model in place. And again, when Steve Jobs went back to Apple, he did have a strong transition model with Tim Cook. Now, Tim Cook’s an interesting one because he’s not Steve Jobs, of course, but he is Mr. Data. He’s someone you trust with your data, right? They’ve picked him in part because he looks trustworthy; he talks in a very trustworthy and transparent way. And in Apple’s process of building a brand today, that is more important to them than a maverick leader telling you about a brilliant product. In fact, the Apple iPhone hasn’t changed much since Steve Jobs died. But the point I’m trying to make here is: if you want a brand to be successful, you’ve got to pick one of these two strategies. Now, you can do both, of course, but you probably double the risk of having some problem in your business. And whichever path you choose, make sure you think it through right to the end. Have the ability to cut that influencer out of your business if anything goes wrong. And equally, if you’re running the leadership model, make sure that that leader has a transition plan because at some point we’re all going to die—now, hopefully we’re all going to live forever with Elon Musk’s help, I’m sure that’s true—but I will tell you now, the final thing really important in brand: learn to say no. If you don’t say no to the wrong relationships, the wrong brand partnerships, the wrong clients, your brand will get damaged.

I have had this experience myself. I spent 10 years building up a brand; it had a fantastic reputation, and then I got a bad client that didn’t understand how the world worked and made my brand tarnished with their big mouth and their lies. And this can be hugely damaging. We all have probably heard the saying: “You can spend 30 years building a reputation; it only takes 5 seconds for it to go to shit.” I tell you from experience that saying no to things is powerful. If you have an inkling, spider senses that someone isn’t good or a brand isn’t good, don’t match with your morals; do not take their money; say no. Your brand is the most valuable asset you will ever, ever build. My company got sold for a lot of money in the end because I had a good brand image; I had a good brand value. They told me they bought the brand, not the business. Build a brand, not a business. And I promise you, that brand will live forever.

How to Hire, How to Grow, and How to Build

Next up: how to hire, how to grow, and how to build. These three things are intertwined, and if you get this formula right, your business can take off and forever give you the income you need, be a brand you love, and ultimately not be a management nightmare that a lot of people have when they build a business.

So first of all, how to hire. I always tell people: if your business has a purpose, and the people you hire believe in that purpose, you will never have to manage anybody. You will be managing purpose, not people. One of the big things people complain to me about is managing people, and often when I look at their business to see why, it’s because they have not installed a purpose in their business that resonates with the people that they have hired. Sometimes, some businesses later install a purpose, but then that purpose just becomes a slogan on the wall because the people they hired in the early days weren’t hired around purpose. You have to have this at the center of hire.

And when you hire someone, always check that they genuinely care about that purpose. Some people will play you lip service to get the job, so there is a few hacks that you can do to make sure that person really cares. First of all, go check out their social media; go see what that person really cares about. You will see it. If they care about the planet, if you see them driving around in some gas-guzzling car, they probably don’t care about the environment. So actually doing your research on your hires, being careful about the people you bring into your purpose, matters. Check their history; check for references. I don’t know why people don’t do this; people don’t ask for references anymore; I don’t know why. Now, I know in England it’s illegal to give someone a bad reference, but if you ask right… I don’t want people to have a bad employee in their life; if I had that bad employee in mine, it’s important that we share these things to help that employee get better. If they had a bad reference, they’d act better; they’d do a better job. Now, ultimately, I think when hiring people, the key is: give them equity. Now, I’m going to talk more about equity a little bit later in the article; it always comes up. But if you give your team equity, they are aligned with your success. Now, any owner of any business knows that the real value in a company is not its turnover; it’s in its brand. And if over 10 years an employee helps make that brand grow but are only taking an income, they’re never getting their true value. You have to own equity in the business that you are working in. Now, there’s many different ways to do it. So if you’re working for someone today, of course, you can go ask for equity in that company; you’ve got nothing to lose. They’ll probably laugh; they might say no; I promise you, they’ll respect you more, especially if they’re a founder.

The second thing is, you can build a business where you work with that company, but you own equity in it. So you can start your own company but have equity in that company and then work for that person. Now, the point I’m telling you here is that: give your employees respect. If you want to keep people and you want them to be motivated, have this conversation openly; talk about this subject. You should be saying they should have equity. Now, it might not be possible to give people equity straight away; it might not be something you feel comfortable with doing straight away. But I promise you, your turnover will be less; your stress will be less; your company will be stronger if that person in your company has equity. And most people don’t have the guts to do it, and they then spend years stressing they can’t find anyone, or that they can’t find anyone that actually cares. It’s because they don’t own what you own. Give them a piece of the business, and you’ll have loyalty. Of course, it comes with its risks, but in my opinion, high turnover, high management, high stress is a bigger risk than any equity problem you could have. If someone leaves, for example—and ironically, most of the time, why would people leave if they have equity? In fact, I had a case recently: someone who worked with me for four years; I gave them equity in the business, and then they left. But because I treated them with respect and because I treated them well and we had a good relationship, when they left, they let me buy that equity back at a very low rate. They were very reasonable; they did not hold me blackmail. Now, of course, if you’ve hired the right person under purpose and you’ve given them equity, most good people will not hold you over it to get that equity back; you can be reasonable. But if you’ve done the right thing in the beginning by giving people equity, it’s so easy.

Now, the third thing I’ll tell you—and this really links to how you grow your business—you can’t grow a business without people. I would say that today, with AI and all this technology, you’ll be able to grow a business with less people, but you won’t be able to grow a business with no people. So you need to grow a business through growing its culture. You need to make sure that this business has values.

I had a business called Fluid. This business went on to become one of the most successful creative agencies in Asia that I sold to PricewaterhouseCoopers for more money than I’ll ever need. And one of the things I did in the early days of that business, which was a big mistake, is I built a business to make money. Now, that might not sound like a mistake, but what happened: first year, I hired people; they were new; it was exciting. Second year, people started to leave. Why did they leave? Because the values of the business were wrong. I changed the values in that business. We went from a business that was designed to make money to a business that would protect the staff from bad clients. I had a creative agency; often designers were treated badly: “Do this by tomorrow at 12; I need it,” instead of understanding that creativity is a process. So we switched our whole model. Instead of working for clients, we worked for the creative people and help them manage clients. That transformed our business and helped us grow by thinking about things differently instead of traditionally. You will grow your business by looking after your people. It’s cheesy, I know, but you can grow much easier.

Now, when you grow—assuming you follow my advice and you grow your business—this is the important thing: you need to identify what is your destination. What are you actually growing for? Now, I have a lot of people recently approached me and say, “Please invest in my business; I want to grow it.” My first question is: “Why? What is it you’re trying to do by growing your business? What’s the real reason you’re growing your business? Is it ego? Do you really want to work more? Or is it you want to make the business bigger so you can bring in management so you can not have to work so hard? So you’re working hard now to grow it?” That’s fine. I think you need a reason to grow it.

Now, I want to grow the biggest platform in the world that helps people for free learn business, so I want it to be big. I know my destination: I want to help 10 million people for free start a business they love and never feel alone doing it. So I know my destination, and therefore I’m growing both from a hire point of view, from a culture point of view, in that direction. But I have had points in my life and the early days of Fluid where actually I wanted to work three days a week doing cool stuff with brands and two days a week going to the beach with my girlfriend, having fun. And so I didn’t grow the business too much at the beginning; I actually had a different ambition. And there’s nothing wrong with that. And if you want to grow your business, brilliant: follow this formula. Have purpose; bring people in that have value and own value in the business, and you will grow if you look after them and your customer base.

The final thing I’ll talk about when it comes to really building a business and making a business successful: first of all, take risk. Make sure that you build MVPs—minimum viable products; try things out. If you really want to build a company, you can’t stay stagnant. No company today is around when they stay stagnant. Think about Blockbusters or any of these businesses that just sat on their technology, like Kodak, and didn’t do anything with it. You can’t sit still. Kodak invented the digital camera. You can’t sit still; you have to put these things into the market. Kodak didn’t want to put their film—uh, camera, digital camera—into the market because it would have meant film was gone, and film was their core business. You’ve got to disrupt yourself if you really want to build a business that’s going to last. If you really want to build a successful company, I’m going to use a dirty word—a word that I personally hate but has saved me—you need to build systems. You need to move from what is often in the early days of a business what I call a generalist mindset, where everybody can do everything, to a specialist mindset. You need to allow people to be specialists in certain areas.

Now, when I was younger, I’m a generalist. I can do kind of everything. I can clean the toilets in the company when they’re dirty; I can help people get their car loaded up and get to the site to do the pitch; I can do the pitch; I could do everything. But I became a specialist in marketing. And I think as you grow a business, you have to take away the generalist people and build out specialist people—people that do a particular thing well to help the business grow. And that involves building systems that allow people to do that: in your hiring process, in your growing process, and in your mindset. Even you as a founder, potentially, you have to make sure that you learn a skill set; otherwise, you become redundant—which, by the way, is fine. I have often got myself replaced in a company that I have built. I think that’s actually pretty smart. Unless you can become a specialist, it’s probably the best thing for the company, too. There’s likely to be a CEO out there that’s better than you when you’re at scale. I found that to be the case many times; I replace myself at Fluid 11 years in by someone who is a better CEO than me.

So hopefully, if you know your purpose and you give purpose to the people you hire, you have equity both for your team and for the wider growth of the business, you know your values and you apply them, you know your destination and you apply this very important point of systems and removing generalism, you will have a business that is easy to hire people that will scale and will build into something that lives without you.

How to Fire Someone

Now, let’s talk about how to fire someone. Now, I have fired hundreds of people in my career, and I’m going to teach you how to fire someone and also when you’re likely to be getting fired. So one of the things I hate to do is fire someone. It’s a very necessary skill if you want to survive in business. I’ve often built up large companies that needed to get small again quick for various reasons. You have to learn to fire people; it is not nice.

But one of the most difficult things about firing people is understanding when to do it. Now, I think when it comes to actually firing people structurally—like, for example, doing it legally, sending the appropriate warnings, doing the proper paperwork—all of this stuff you can get off a lawyer. I’m not going to waste your time telling you the law in your country; wherever you are, it will be different anyway. I’m going to talk more about the actual act and also what’s involved in making the decision as to whether or not someone should be fired.

I learned long ago a system that I call the seven and eight rule. It’s very simple and obvious when I first start explaining it. Now, if someone’s in your company and they are really good—like, you love them; they love you; they’re obviously a nine and ten—you want to keep them, and you want them to stay, and they want to stay. Most of the time, those people are nine and ten because they’re enjoying it. Now, of course, like I said earlier, make sure you give these people equity; make sure you look after these people over time. But you know you want to keep them, and they want to stay; it’s a no-brainer; it’s cool.

Then you have what I call the ones and twos. These are people who are at their job; they know they’re at their job; you know they’re at their job. And most of the time, they either quit or you fire them. It’s a no-brainer; everyone feels it. They don’t turn up on time; they don’t care about the purpose of the company; whatever it is, it’s obvious that relationship comes to an end naturally.

The really difficult thing for any employer and for that matter any employee is if you are a seven and eight, which means you’re almost good enough; you’re almost able to do the job. And sometimes as an employer, you’re desperately hoping they become good enough; you’re waiting for them to become a nine and ten. And some days they are, but then they slip back to a six; some days they’re a seven. And there’s various reasons why people are seven and eight, and often it’s not because they’re crap at their job; it’s because they’re in the wrong job with the wrong team doing the wrong thing. I have often seen a seven and eight and actually move them to a different department or a different role, and they become nines and tens. But that’s not always the case, and sometimes the hardest people to fire are the seven and eights.

So how do you do it? Well, I think first of all, you put proper structure in place to identify what is success for that employee. You want to understand how they work, what’s going on in their lives. Instead of walking into the room and saying, “You haven’t performed,” you walk into the room and you say, “How can I help you perform?” There’s things that you can do as a leader to check whether or not that person can get better at their job and if there’s anything you can do to support them. But in the end, learn the seven and eight rule. And I have seen this: I have kept seven and eights in my companies in the past, and the nines and tens leave. If someone can surf, get away with it, and not do their job and no repercussions, then why would a nine and ten stay? Why would a nine and ten stay? A nine and ten, if they can get lazy and not work as hard or cut corners and not get fired, then you’re going to have a problem. Nine and ten will not stay in your business, and you’ll have a company full of seven and eights. And seven and eights are hard to manage; take up nearly all of the conversation; any HR conversation. You have to learn to grow a pair of balls and fire these people. And you know what? When you do, this has happened to me many times: they’re grateful. Because those seven and eights, if you fire them, can often go on to find a job they like where they are a nine and ten and are appreciated. It’s your responsibility to fire seven and eights.

So how can you identify if someone is a seven and eight? Well, the rule I have is: how many times a day are you talking about them? If they come up too much in any conversation amongst your team members, even your customers—more than once or twice in a week—you probably got a problem. Second thing is, you often are running a system in your brain where you are fearful of not finding a replacement, so you don’t want to fire them because they’re better than nobody. And I’ve done this myself many times: a seven and eight is at least a pair of hands helping you when you’re building a business; sometimes that’s a relief, and the idea of having to find someone new is painful. So you need to get strong. You need to realize and maybe even line up your next hire before you fire. Now, I promise you, that employee—and I would be the same—is also looking for another job. So maybe what you can do is help them find that other job. I have done this many times. I’ve gone to someone who’s a seven and eight and said, “You’re not happy; I don’t think you’re completely doing the job the way you should. I’ve helped you get an interview at this other company.” It has actually built relationships with people that weren’t happy in the company but are now my friends outside of work. You can help that person. Even though it might be frustrating that the person’s in your company and not performing, the best thing you can do is work out a solution for them and for you. And you can build a great relationship with that person even though that it’s perhaps not a great relationship in the company right now by helping them move on.

So following the rule: identify seven and eights; be honest with yourself; do not have fear that you cannot replace them and find a nine and ten; you will help that seven and eight find a new job; and always be honest with seven and eight how you’re feeling. It will be better for you and for them. And there is a chance—and it’s happened a few times in my career—that that person becomes a nine and ten. And it can often be when you give them equity.

How to Go Global

Now, why is going global one of my main points? It’s because a lot of people don’t realize that they can go global. A lot of people don’t realize that they’ll probably remove a lot of the risk in their business if they do go global. Why? Well, if you’re in more than one market and the market you’re in is in trouble, you spread your risk. I’ve had this happen to me many times in my early career with Fluid: we were just in Hong Kong, and it was risky. Hong Kong had a lot of ups and downs, and when we had the downs, I was subject completely to that down; I had no counterbalance with a business potentially in another market doing well. And going global, it turns out, is not difficult anymore. Often people don’t realize there are a few steps to allow your business to go global when you didn’t think it was even possible.

So what are those steps?

• First, identify whether there’s an opportunity for your product or your service in another market. So research. And even if you don’t want to open up that second office or sell that product in that market, once you understand what markets where this could work are, there’s a couple of opportunities for you. Now, I could reverse back to raising money: if you’re able to say to someone that you can open up your product in other markets with their investment, it can make an investor happy. That’s just one example; it can make an investor actually go ahead and invest in you. Equally, like I mentioned earlier as well, if a brand wants to sponsor you to open up another office, this can be a way for you to grow your business, and you reduce your risk under the dime of a brand partnership. Research is key at this stage; find out where your product could be sold even if you don’t want to do the work to do it.
• Second, you can basically set up models like franchising. So if you don’t want to set up that business in another market, you can set up a brand franchising arrangement. So someone else will open it up, and someone else will do the work, but you can make money by doing nothing. I hate passive income; I don’t think that exists, but this is the closest thing to it in my opinion: someone else running your brand in another market under a license. So I think that franchising is a real opportunity, and it’s a bit of a misunderstood word, franchising, because a lot of people kind of think of like Subway or McDonald’s, but franchising can apply to a service business. And many, many companies are built on partnerships under a franchise structure.
• The other thing that’s really important about going global is making sure your business can stand the test of time. And if you have a business that is thinking globally, ironically, you’re more likely to survive in the long term. You’ll learn an important lesson, which is: it’s easier to run a big company than a small company. Far too many entrepreneurs—and me included at points in my career—have made my business too small that I am the only one that can run it. I can’t afford senior management; I can’t afford to get help; I can’t afford to actually stop working for a week. I’m telling you now, by thinking global, you give yourself a chance to grow a big business, and it’s easier than having a small business, despite what you’ve been told by other people. Get a big business if you can. Now, it does link back to what your mission in life is; maybe you don’t want a big business. But do not decide to not have a big business because you think it’s easier to have a small business; it’s not. Small is not easier. I have run big businesses and I have run small businesses, and I had an easier life once I’ve made the business big. So do not trap yourself in any market; do not subject yourself to any market that could disrupt your business; and make sure you always give yourself the chance to be free of your very own business not trapping you.

How to Get a Mentor

This is the single biggest question I ever get asked, and it’s so simple to answer; no one seems to listen to me, but I’m going to try anyway. If you want a mentor in your business, I totally understand why; that sounds cool. But the reality is, people have built businesses around this concept that you need a mentor, and they’ve sold you it as the solution. It isn’t. What you actually need is not a mentor; what you need in reality is someone who can answer the questions that you have and perhaps even give you the answers to questions you didn’t know to ask. And this can all be done without a mentor. In fact, I would argue, if you got me as your mentor, it would be pretty annoying, ‘cause a mentor will tell you their experience, but it might not be relevant to your life. This article today, in a way, is all the knowledge I have anyway. So of course, you can still have me as your mentor, but what you’re really saying, if you’re honest about it, is you’re looking for a coach; you’re looking for someone to keep you accountable. And you can actually break down what that means into what you really need. If you want someone to work with you in your business and keep you accountable, get a co-founder. If you want someone to help you with sales, hire a salesperson. If you know the question you want to ask, then ask it.

Now, I say all that; I still want to deliver on a promise to help you get a mentor. And this is how you get a mentor.

• Number one: you research what matters to that person. Someone reached out to me yesterday asking me to be their mentor for a property development business they want to run. Do you not know who I am? I hate the property industry and everything it stands for. I think property should be a basic human right, and the present ballot system has screwed the world up. I don’t want to help someone do that. Now, they were very nice and very polite; I won’t name who they are, but I’m telling you right now: do your research before you ask someone for help. Of course, I’m not going to reply to that—in fact, I did reply saying no—but I’m saying that most people won’t reply. You don’t want to ask someone to be your mentor and have not done the research on them.
• The second thing is: don’t just say, “Please be my mentor.” Now, there are plenty of people that don’t take my view that you don’t need a mentor and do want a mentor, and they will mentor you; some will charge and some won’t. I’ll get on to that in a minute. But when you ask someone to mentor you, remember, it’s a bit like saying, “Would you like to get married?” You need to define what it means. So define what you mean when you say, “Will you be my mentor?” Tell people what that means for you: “I would like 10 minutes of your time once a week,” and perhaps consider, if you do start defining what it is, what sort of questions you’re going to ask. And often, if you ask a question, you will get a mentor; if you ask for a mentor, you’ll get no reply at all. Because no one can commit to an open-ended question, especially from a stranger asking for mentorship. You need to define it. In an ideal world, I suggest you ask a question first. That’s actually why I built helpbank.com, so you can go and write a question to 100, 5,000 potential mentors.
• Now, if after all this you’re still set on getting a mentor, another way to get a mentor is change the word “mentor” to “advisor.” And when you’re looking to build a company, for example, and maybe you want a mentor to help you build a company, look for someone that has specific knowledge that you’re after, and ask them to join your advisory board. Now, advisory boards, a little bit more glamorous for most people; a mentor isn’t something you see on many people’s LinkedIn profile, but “advisor to this company” and “advisor to that company” often is. So reframe it as advisory. Now, if you’ve got a business with purpose and you followed the other things I’ve said in this long article today, you’ll know how important things like process and systems and structure and goal will lead you to decide what type of advisor you need. And it’s much easier to get an advisor than it is a mentor, and much easier to structure what the relationship is like. If they’re, for example, one of your board advisers, they’d probably have equity in your business. So you’re no longer asking someone to hang out with you and give you a bit of advice and motivate you; you’re asking someone to give you specific knowledge around something they love and believe in, and it’s much, much easier.
• The next thing you can do to help yourself get a mentor is connect to the people that they are connected to. So referrals are the best way to get help. Many times, someone I know for a long time that’s helped me out has asked me to mentor someone to help them out, and I have done it without question. And so that referral—a bit like in sales and the other things I’ve mentioned today—referrals are so powerful. Try to get someone to refer you to the mentor that you want. It’s also much easier for someone to say yes when they’ve got some reference point of someone that knows you. Now, be careful: don’t go become friends with someone just to get them to refer you; it’ll be transparent and actually hurt you. So do it genuinely. But if you can get a referral for the mentor that you need, it’s very powerful.
• Now, the final way to get a mentor, if that’s what you want, the best way is to give value to the person you want as a mentor. Some of the people I’ve helped in my past have helped me first. I didn’t ask them to. So, for example, someone redesigned a website for me and made my website better. Of course, after someone’s gone and made all that effort to support me and help me, I’m going to give them time. And I think that time in the early days allows us to work together to define the questions they’re asking and define the things that that person actually needs. And so go and give value to the person that you want as your mentor. Don’t just ask them for something; try to bring them something, and it will make a huge difference. And I think that that’s one of the things that people never do; they just want to extract value. And this goes back to my personal philosophy in life: it’s not give and take; it’s give without take. If you follow give without take when trying to get a mentor, if you follow give without take when trying to get a mentor, I’m pretty sure you’ll get that mentor. But don’t expect anything. Don’t expect that person to become your mentor. Give them value; give them respect. Clearly, you respect them; you want them to be your mentor. Make the effort, and over time, it will come back to you, even if it isn’t in that person becoming your mentor.

How Equity Works

This is such an important subject. If you don’t get the equity structure right in your business, you will fail. I have been involved in many, many businesses that didn’t do this right and collapsed, not because they weren’t good businesses, but because they didn’t know how the structure of equity works.

Now, just before I get into the detail of how to structure your equity structure in the future correctly, I will make sure that you understand one important point: most people don’t want to drop below 50% equity in the company because they think it means they lose control. That’s not true. You are able to control your company under the operational agreement. Now, in each country—US, Britain, different market—you have different terminology for this, but you control your company by the shareholder agreement. You don’t control your company by the amount of equity that you hold. So if, for example, you have a 50/50 equity split with someone, you are actually potentially in joint control as far as equity is concerned, but you can still allocate one person to make all the decisions and have actual control. So do make sure that you understand that equity ownership does not equal control. Right? It does not equal control. Keep an eye on this mindset, because you often make big mistakes around equity ownership thinking it means you lose control if you drop below 50%, and that is not true.

The second thing to keep in mind with equity is understanding where you’re going with the business. Everything I’ve already discussed in this article is intertwined, but if you don’t know where you’re going, you don’t know how much equity you need to get there. Too many people sell a large chunk of equity at the early stages of their business only to realize later in their business they don’t have enough equity to get to the finish line. If your model is like tech company model and you intend to raise a lot of money, you have to be very cautious with the equity in the early days. Now, there are all sorts of graphs and information on the internet that will explain to you this point, but I’m highlighting it to you so you can go and research it; it’s a very deep subject. But do not sell too much equity at the beginning. Having said that, the best thing you can ever do is sell no equity at all. I know it’s cool to raise money; I know it. But it’s cooler to run a business where you don’t raise money. A bootstrap business, in my opinion, is healthier; you can retain 100% control and 100% own equity; it’s always probably going to be better.

Now, there’s a lot of exceptions to that suggestion, and one of them I would say is: make sure you don’t make this one big mistake I see a lot of people make. I have seen people start businesses, and when they start businesses with a partner, they do 52%/48%, and often for no other reason than the person who came up with the idea believes that they deserve 2% more. This has happened time and time again; it’s a huge mistake. I’ve seen arguments ensue two years later between those two people because they didn’t just do it 50/50. Do not assume, again, control—52% means anything; if anything, it’s detrimental. So if you have a co-founder, my instant recommendation is: you do 50/50. Do not belittle the other partner by giving them less. They will instantly psychologically think they will do 48% of the work; you will do 52% of the work. It does not bode well in the long term.

Now, there is a danger with 50/50: that danger is decision lock. If you’re making one decision and your partner’s making the other, and you haven’t put a shareholder agreement in place to decide who has the deciding vote, you have a problem. So the way around this is often to have a third party help you make big decisions—someone you both trust, ideally—but you create a 50/50 ownership structure with a board of advisers, for example. And this allows you to make decisions, especially difficult decisions, without major argument and avoid conflict with your partner. Now, the best way to avoid conflict and avoid even needing to turn to your board of advisor is to be very clear about where you’re both going. And I’m using at the moment in this equity example a 50/50 partnership; it could equally be a 1/3, 1/3, 1/3 or 1/4, 1/4, 1/4. I’m just using this as an example that you all know where you’re going.

I have seen problems in the business, for example, where someone is building the business, the money’s coming in; one person wants to take the money out and put it in their pocket as profit; the other person wants to put it back into the business to help it grow. One person wants to stay in one market, the UK; another person wants to expand to the US. You need to try and work out all of this stuff ideally before you even start the company within your mind map that I taught you earlier: you figure out where you’re going and why, and therefore you avoid conflict when it comes to major decision-making later. Again, I have seen companies fall apart because one person wanted to take the money out and one person didn’t, and literally the business collapses because the two don’t agree, don’t get along; the business fails.

Equity ownership under this system I’m now teaching you is not about control, as I’ve mentioned, but it is about understanding what the equity is there to do. Now, depending on your structure—if you’re a charity, this won’t matter so much—but if you’re a limited company that’s looking to raise money, please make sure your cap table has the right people on it. I have seen many people not get investment because they gave 2% to the wrong person that the other investors don’t want associated with. Equity ownership will tarnish your reputation. Understand how equity is structured; it’s showing who is involved in the company. So you need to make sure that you align your brand—I talked about branding earlier—to the equity ownership. And whoever owns that company, whoever owns a part of your company, will affect the brand image. So make sure that you’re aligning your brand values with your equity ownership.

Now, there is a lot of talk by me and anyone that actually knows what they’re doing in business about giving equity to your staff. I really believe in this. Now, there’s a couple of ways to do it. I honestly think if you want to build a business that scales, you have to give equity to your people. But there’s two types of equity structure: there’s what we call share options, which technically isn’t actually equity; it’s a percentage in the future of the company, but it can often be in what are framed as earn-outs, or there’s straight-up equity. Now, there is a hybrid in this model, and I don’t want to get too technical now because I’m actually not a lawyer, but I want you to understand the difference. Most of the time, people are buying stocks and shares in the stock market; they have share options, which means that yes, they’ll get given shares, but those shares have no class level, so they have no decision-making power. So you can own shares in the company in the stock market but have no influence over that business or no control. But that is one way to incentivize people: you give them share options. My preferred method—and everyone on my team had this—is actual physical equity in the company, not share options via the stock market listing, but real-life equity in the company. So if the company was sold today, they would get paid out. Whereas often with share options, it’s some link to the stock market listing, or in some cases, if it’s already listed, to you selling the shares on the stock market. But if the company decided to take the company off the stock market, wherever that price was, you’d have to sell out. Again, there’s some legal obligations around this; it has to be more than 70% of the shareholders agree. But the point is, I have owned shares in the stock market of a company that I believed in, and then the owners of that company—actual equity owners of that company—decided to take the company off the stock market. I had no choice but to sell my shares. That company de-listed, became worth a billion dollars, and I could have owned it, but I wasn’t allowed because I only owned the share option side, the stock market side, not actual physical equity in the actual company. And I think it’s important if you’re even thinking investing in a company to understand the difference. Of course, if you’re going to work in a company, understand the difference. And if you’re building a company and you don’t understand the difference, you’re going to have a major problem in the future.

Now, this subject of share ownership, understanding the different classes—please spend time understanding the different classes. Go Google how it works; go Google share options; go Google stock market shares; go Google equity ownership. This stuff is complex; it’s going to be too; I’m not a legal advisor to go through all with you now. But this structure of share ownership can literally make or break a company.

I would also finally say to you: depending on what your end goal is is how you should reverse-engineer your share equity ownership. If you are looking to IPO your business, then you want to make sure that the IPO process is fully understood, of course, but your stock is reversed backwards. So when you start the business and you’re looking to list it one day, you need to know that when you’re starting the business ideally, because if you don’t structure it early on to eventually get listed, it probably won’t. Now, I learned this the hard way with a few businesses that I was involved in: the share structure was so complicated, we couldn’t get all the shareholders to agree to even do an IPO. Some shareholders wanted to keep it private; other shareholders wanted to do an IPO, and it gets so messy because they didn’t know where they were going in the early days. So learn to structure what I call reverse engineering: know what your end goal is, and reverse the share equity structure from day one under that premise.

Now, there’s one final thing I’ll teach you about equity: sometimes it’s hard to determine the value of your company to sell equity. So one thing you should look into and perhaps use is products like a SAFE (Simple Agreement for Future Equity). Now, platforms like Y Combinator—one of famous accelerators out there that help businesses grow—use a SAFE to help determine a business and its long-term potential for value. There’s many different ways to structure a SAFE, but the beautiful thing about that model—and go and Google it—is you don’t need to determine the value of your business now. Someone can invest in your business on a discount of the value in the future. Now, again, there’s many different ways to structure that concept, but the concept of SAFE I have found to be very useful, especially in the early days of building a business, to take away the conversation about “what is your business worth?” and move towards “invest in this business, and this is what we’re going to do.” It’s much, much easier to get an investor, for example. Frankly, it’s much easier to incentivize your employees with it; you’re not determining a value on the stock share now, so it doesn’t cause tax implications as well. I really think it’s useful, and not many people know about it.

So I hope this overview in equity gives you a good understanding of how it works. I am going to do a whole article on this much more detailed; I’m going to get some lawyers involved too to show you the different agreements and how it works. But if you go do a little bit of Googling, you’ll get most of the information you need that I haven’t provided here. And if you have any questions about equity, feel free to drop them in the comments.

How to Sell Your Business

How to exit a company. I have done it a few times in my life. There’s loads of different ways to do it. I’m going to share with you how to exit your business. Ultimately, selling a company is often a dream of a lot of entrepreneurs. I have done it a few times; I’ve done it a few different ways, and I’ve got some interesting insights to share with you.

And one of the things I’ll start off by saying: if you really want to sell your company, the best way to sell your company is not want to sell it at all. The most amount of money I ever got for a company was because I didn’t want to sell it. That’s the strongest place to negotiate from. So the number one thing I want to tell you in an ironic twist when coming to sell your company: the best thing you can do is build a business you love, and selling it will accidentally happen. This has happened over and over again; history always repeats itself. Mark Zuckerberg was offered a billion dollars by Yahoo to sell his company, and he said no, so now it’s worth a trillion. And I think there’s something really powerful in this process; it’s kind of sales, like I was teaching you earlier: it’s kind of sales; you don’t want to sell it means you can get the most for it. It’s a very hard thing to actually be truly not interested in selling it if it is actually your goal, but it will ensure you get the maximum value out of a business if you do it this way.

The other way to think about selling your business—and the way I’ve sold my last company—is: I partnered up with a company that could buy my business. So Fluid partnered up with PricewaterhouseCoopers, and we worked on a project together. And in that process of working on a project together, PwC realized that they should just buy us. Now, at the time when it was first mentioned, I didn’t want to sell—great negotiating first step—but in the end, I did sell it. And I’ll tell you all about that process in a minute. But I’m trying to highlight that another way to sell your business is partnership: work with the company that is likely to want to buy your business; build the relationship up, and you’ll be surprised how that can lead to an exit. Again, don’t lean into it wanting an exit; lean into it wanting to build a partnership that works for both parties, but it can be a great way to sell your business.

The third way is to work with agents that actually sell businesses. And there are a few; I’m not going to recommend any because this isn’t a sponsored article by them, but you can Google them; there are many companies that do it. Sometimes it can be quite useful to get one of these companies to do it because, of course, if you’re busy trying to sell your business, you’re not busy growing your business. But I honestly feel like that these days, these agents—there’s a lot of them, and they all have their own different agendas. So just make sure you do your due diligence; ask the previous company that they work with what they were like; make sure that the legal structure is very clear because you don’t want to get conned by these companies when you come to the exit actual fee.

The fourth way to sell your business is more a merger. So your competitor is a way to exit. And it might seem odd; you probably spent 10 years hating your competitor. I spent most of my early career making friends with my competitor. I originally thought I was going to sell Fluid to Ogilvy; I made a lot of friends at Ogilvy; I used to sit next to them at the awards dinner on purpose to connect to them; I did projects with them; I thought they were going to be the exit, but they weren’t. And so I think merges, however, are very common, and two businesses coming together is the easiest that do the same thing is often the easiest way to sell a business. And I will, however, caveat it with: most of the time, you don’t get the most value. So I sold my company Fluid to PwC; PwC are an accounts business; they’re not a creative agency. So they saw more value in us than if I’d merged with Ogilvy that think they can do what we do. So sometimes selling to a non-competitor is more valuable. But if you want an easy sell, merges often the way it works. And it’s not always true that you don’t get the true total value; I’ve just from experience learned that sometimes selling outside the industry, like I did with Fluid to PwC, can lead to more money than selling to someone in the industry, like Ogilvy. But that doesn’t mean it’s always true.

And finally, if you want to sell your business, one of the things that you can also think about is allowing the management in your company to buy it. So I have also done this; I let the leadership team at Nest buy that business. And there’s many different ways to structure a buyout over time—percentage of profit—but in the end, it can be a really good way allowing you to sell your business without that business getting hurt, and by also giving the people that worked in the company a chance to really step up and own what they’ve been building with you. I personally really was happy to sell Nest to my team, and I think it’s a really powerful way of building an exit strategy for yourself while at the same time giving the people that run it the love and success that they deserve.

So they’re the main ways. Now, I will add that when it comes to selling a business, the key thing—like anything—at the beginning when you’re building the business, never ever pitch to an investor or yourself that you’re building a company to sell it. And in fact, I would argue, if you’re building a company to sell it—and I’ve seen this many times—be careful; you might end up getting stuck with a business you don’t love. Do not build a business to sell it. Do not pitch to investors that you’re going to sell it. Build a business you love; investors want to invest in that. Build a business you never want to sell; people want to buy a business like that. That’s the key to being successful in business in my opinion. Do not build something you don’t love; do not build something that doesn’t have purpose.

If you got value from this article, I’d really appreciate it by you asking a comment down below or even telling me what I’ve missed out in this article that you want in the future so I can make it for you. And don’t forget, we’re following people’s dreams every single week on this channel. If you want to hear what happens to the people we help, hit that alarm button so you get the latest update as soon as the upload button is hit. Good luck, everybody. Goodbye. I’m going to eat chicken now. See you.