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The School of Greatness
Top Money Expert: How To 10x Your Income & Turn Your Passion Into A Thriving Business | Daniel Priestley
01:12:35
UK entrepreneur Daniel Priestley shares his military-inspired business scaling model and reveals why a Christmas Eve health scare forced him to restructure his entire approach to wealth and success. He breaks down the coming AI revolution that will split society into hyper-consumers versus hyper-creators and provides the exact framework for building businesses that scale without burning out.
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- [00:00]
Lewis Howes
Welcome back, my friend. I have been quietly away for this past month. I've been in Spain, actually, and I haven't been posting what I've been up to, but I'm going to be sharing everything I've been up to behind the scenes here. Very soon. I'm going to be talking about it on social media, on Instagram, all my social channels, and I'm going to be launching a new YouTube channel to actually show kind of like a lifestyle documentary behind the scenes of a big dream that I've been working on and pursuing. And I'm so excited about it. There's been a lot of exciting moments. There's been a lot of downs as well, some highs and lows all mixed up in this past month. And I just wanted to remind you that whatever dream you have, it's worth pursuing, it's worth going after, it's worth taking the next step, it's worth seeing how far you can take it. And it's really not about whether you accomplish the goal or not, but who you become on that journey, who you're becoming through all the adversity and the pursuit of that thing. And if you feel like you've just been kind of on this hamster wheel of doing the same thing over and over again, and you haven't been exploring the parts of you or the parts of your mind or your heart or your soul that are telling you to work on that art project that you have, or create music or publish a book or whatever it might be, or just go travel, I encourage you and I empowered you to start taking those steps. And a lot of times we feel stuck or trapped is because we're just doing things that we're not fully excited about. And if you do those things all the time that you're not excited about, and you never have time on the weekends or nights or take those holiday trips to actually pursue those things on the side, then you're going to feel like you're stuck and like you're burnt out. So we need that time, that space to pursue those things. And I get it. A lot of us have responsibilities. We don't have all day, all month, all year to do everything we want. But you do have some time. And when you start taking those action steps, nights, weekends, holidays, whatever it might be, on the thing that your heart speaks to you about, man, life just gets so much richer. And I want you to live a richer life. That's what this is all about. It's about creating abundance in our life. And we've got a powerful episode today with a wealth expert, someone who's lived a rich life and he's actually talking about that there's more to life than money and business success and how to really create a fulfilling life in a ever changing world. His name is Daniel Priestley. He's one of UK's top entrepreneurs and successful business builders with seven thriving companies. And he breaks down the myth that entrepreneurs have to be exhausting themselves and shows how following a certain principles can dramatically increase your chances of success. He also shares his strategic frameworks with a refreshing perspective on wealth and fulfillment from other areas of life. Again, if you're trying to make more money but you feel like, ah, this money's been stressing me out or I'm just working so hard and it's so hard to make the money, this is going to give you tools and a different framework on how to scale that time that you're putting into your business, your career, and also make sure you're having a life worth living outside of money. Because it doesn't matter how much money you have in the bank or how much net worth you have, if you don't enjoy your life, you aren't living a rich life. There's so much in this episode. I hope you enjoy it. Make sure to share it with a friend as well. Tag me over on social media. Let me know that you're listening to this or that you're watching it. I'm so grateful for you and I hope this has been a friendly reminder that you deserve a rich and abundant life. And it just takes some shifting in the way you think, how you act and how you feel about what you have and where you're heading. One of the best parts about my job as a podcast host is getting to know people on a deeper level, and I love discovering the interests my guests have that they don't always talk about. You know, the world class athlete whose favorite pastime is painting, or the billionaire who still plays a weekend garage band. And the truth is, everyone has layers and people are rarely as simple as they appear on the surface. For marketers, that complexity can make the job even more challenging. After all, how can you reach your customers if you don't really know them? That's where TransUnion's marketing solutions come in. TransUnion brings clarity to marketing chaos by delivering a 360 degree view of your customer, helping you deepen your insights, accelerate your decision making, and better measure the impact of every marketing dollar. Visit transunion.comclarity to learn more. This podcast is Sponsored by Northwestern Mutual. Everyone wants to feel good about their finances, right? Well, that's why I've had life insurance with Northwestern Mutual for years. Their financial professionals ask the right questions, truly listen, and help uncover opportunities most people miss. I've seen it firsthand, and Northwestern Mutual has been a part of my journey from the very beginning, providing the security and peace of mind I need as a human and an entrepreneur. Find a better way to money@n m.com the Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company, Milwaukee, Wisconsin Paid testimonial by a Northwestern Mutual policy owner Fuel your greatness with wonderful pistachios no shells Wonderful pistachios is a great source of protein with zero guilt. Each 1 ounce serving has 6 grams of prote protein, giving you over 10% of your daily value. Pistachios are known for their protein, power, fiber and better for you unsaturated fats for a combination that may help keep you feeling fuller longer. And now there's a new way to snack strong with unsalted no shells holding the salt, not the flavor for a snack that packs a protein punch. Visit wonderful pistachios.com to learn more. Daniel, welcome to the show. Very excited that you're here on the School of Greatness.
- [06:13]
Daniel Priestley
Thank you for having me on the show.
- [06:14]
Lewis Howes
Very excited. You've got, you know, a lot of an Entrepreneur, one of UK's top entrepreneurs, money experts, and I believe you have seven successful businesses right now. I'm not sure how many unsuccessful businesses you've developed, but for people in America, the stats are crazy. With the failure rate around businesses within the first year, I think it's over 20% of businesses fail. By year five, it's over 50% of failure. And it just seems really hard. It seems really hard to. It's easy to launch a business, but it seems hard to make a business profitable.
- [06:49]
Daniel Priestley
Yeah.
- [06:50]
Lewis Howes
Where you're actually able to save money. Invest money.
- [06:53]
Daniel Priestley
Yeah.
- [06:53]
Lewis Howes
And even the 50% of businesses that don't fail within five years, it doesn't mean they're thriving.
- [06:59]
Daniel Priestley
No.
- [06:59]
Lewis Howes
It doesn't mean you're not grinding 80 to 100 hours a week to just keep the doors open. You're managing stress of employees coming and going, onboarding, training, processes, products, failing, all this stuff. How can someone watching or listening right now who has no desire to be an entrepreneur or run a business be convinced that starting a business isn't going to exhaust or kill them? Or if someone's not interested in starting a business, how can they double, triple, quadruple their income, whether through investing or some other element.
- [07:37]
Daniel Priestley
There's a lot to unpack there.
- [07:39]
Lewis Howes
Yes.
- [07:39]
Daniel Priestley
And what you've said is true. Entrepreneurship is really hard. So like at the other end of the spectrum, you know, you talked about the failure rate. Only 5% of businesses hit a million or more of revenue.
- [07:50]
Lewis Howes
5%?
- [07:51]
Daniel Priestley
Yeah, about 5% in America, in the number one place in the world to be an entrepreneur, only 5% have hit.
- [07:58]
Lewis Howes
A million or more.
- [07:58]
Daniel Priestley
About 5%. It might be 6 or 7%, but it's about 5%. It's not in the UK, it's about 5%. So 5% get to about seven figures of revenue or more. So what you're saying is absolutely true, that it's not something for the light hearted. And to be honest, I don't really convince people to do it. I help a lot of people who are doing it. And if they're already an entrepreneur and they want to be an entrepreneur, then we talk. If someone says it's not for me, that's, I completely respect that. Entrepreneurship is a team sport, as you know, and one role is the founder, the guy who starts it and takes on the most risk at the beginning. And then another role is the, you know, the people who come and be part of that entrepreneurial team. And being part of an entrepreneurial team can be incredibly rewarding financially and intangibly. And I think entrepreneurship, that shared experience of building a business is forever, is for everyone who wants that. That's definitely a thing. Being a founder, not necessarily for everyone, but here's what I'll say. Have you ever built Lego?
- [08:59]
Lewis Howes
Back in the day? Yeah.
- [09:00]
Daniel Priestley
Okay, so get a box of Lego and you look at the front of the box and you see the, the front of the box and you see the picture and you go, oh, that, that'd be fun. And then you, you tip out all the Lego on the table and it's just a big mess. And you think, how on earth do I put this together? Fortunately, they put instructions in the, in the box and they say, put this one on this one, this piece, by this piece, by this piece. And if you follow piece by piece by piece, it's actually incredibly easy to build what looks like the front of the box. Now what happens with entrepreneurship is people see someone's life on Instagram and they go, oh, I want that. Right? That's the front of the box. But then they look at all the things that you need to do for entrepreneurship and they go, oh, I got to hire people and create products and have a website and set up a LinkedIn post every day, and I've got to do all these things, and then they feel like total overwhelm. And what, what actually is needed is a piece by piece, step by step approach where it's like, okay, first do this, then this, then this, and then you go through and actually you can build something that's on the front of the box. To use another analogy, we, you and I, we would jump on an airplane without even thinking twice about our safety. But 100 years ago, it was one of the most dangerous things in the world to do. But they figured out the process. They figured out aerodynamic principles. And the combination of knowing the principles, knowing the process means that it's the safest way to travel. So, you know, I think entrepreneurship is the same. There's a process, there's principles. If you follow process, if you follow principles, you can actually safely build a business.
- [10:25]
Lewis Howes
What's the mindset of someone who can succeed at launching a business?
- [10:29]
Daniel Priestley
The mindset is curiosity. So it's all about conducting fast and cheap experiments. So what you're really trying to do is you're trying to have a dance with the marketplace, and you're trying to come up with a bit of a hypothesis like a scientist would, and you see what the market, how the market responds. And then if you get a good response, you double down on it. And if the response is not so great, you adapt and you change. So you got to stay curious. You got to be a bit like a scientist. I'll give you an example. So about a year ago, my team came to me and they said, we want to build a new piece of technology as a product. And I said, I don't necessarily want to launch a new product. I'm spread too thin. I don't want to launch a new business, actually. And they said, well, can we test it? And I said, okay, let's test it. So we put up a landing page that was called a waiting list. Landing page. And the waiting list is essentially, we're going to build this product. We mock up some designs, and we say, if you're interested in this, join the waiting list and answer five questions to be on the waiting list for when it launches. I put a post on my LinkedIn and I said to the team, if 150 people fill this in, then we'll explore this as if this is a good idea.
- [11:42]
Lewis Howes
Right? But that doesn't mean they're gonna give you their credit card. It's like they might say, yeah, this is some cool, interesting idea. Here's my email.
- [11:48]
Daniel Priestley
We just want to set a low first test, fast, cheap experiment. Because if they did give us a credit card, we'd have to do it. So, like. Yeah. So we just asked five questions and we said, you know, which best describes your current situation, which best describes what you're trying to achieve, what best describes your biggest obstacle? How much would you be willing to pay? And what else do you want us to know about you? So we asked those five questions. 750 people filled it in. I was expecting 150. And I was like, okay. Not only did they fill it in on the price data, we were expecting 29amonth would be the subscription price for this product. And the price that came back Most common was $59 a month. So we're sitting there going, oh, okay, we're onto something with this idea.
- [12:30]
Lewis Howes
Now, did you give them options for price?
- [12:32]
Daniel Priestley
Yeah, we did.
- [12:33]
Lewis Howes
Okay. Yeah.
- [12:34]
Daniel Priestley
And of course I'm expecting that everyone's gonna click the lowest $5 a month. Yeah.
- [12:38]
Lewis Howes
Yeah.
- [12:38]
Daniel Priestley
But no. 59amonth was, of course, the way we worded the question was which price point best describes your budget? Bearing in mind lower price would be less features and higher price would be more features.
- [12:49]
Lewis Howes
And how many price.
- [12:50]
Daniel Priestley
What was the price point? I think we did 29, 59, 99, and 129.
- [12:56]
Lewis Howes
Yeah, 59 was.
- [12:57]
Daniel Priestley
59 was the most common. Yeah. Interesting.
- [13:00]
Lewis Howes
So 750 people opted in. It's a waitlist. Said, I'd be interested if this product was out there.
- [13:05]
Daniel Priestley
Yeah.
- [13:06]
Lewis Howes
And this is a software.
- [13:07]
Daniel Priestley
Yeah, it was a piece of AI technology to help people write books. So it's like, acts like a creative editor and a creative. It uses some AI tools to help you structure your thinking around a book. So, you know, so that's. That's called a fast, cheap experiment. Launch a waiting list. So a lot of people, when they think about launching a business, they think about huge commitments and it's like the stress and anxiety. I've got to have an office. I've got to pay a registration fee. I've got to hire five people. You know, I've got to do all these things, and if it doesn't work out, I've lost $100,000. That's not how I start business.
- [13:40]
Lewis Howes
And six months of my life and time wasted. Yeah.
- [13:43]
Daniel Priestley
I start businesses with lead generation first. Can we generate leads? Can we collect data? And if we can't generate leads and if we can't collect data, then we just don't even make any progress with the idea.
- [13:55]
Lewis Howes
Why, when you have seven businesses, would you even want to launch new businesses, why not just say, hey, let's double down on the business that we're making. Let's, they're already making seven, eight figures, let's get them to nine figures. As opposed to putting all this time, energy, resources, thinking, hiring, recruiting to say let's launch some new idea and put out a, you know, minimum viable product and you know, scale it from there and then hire teams around the world and manage those teams and create processes. Why not just 10x the businesses you have?
- [14:28]
Daniel Priestley
Well, the businesses I have are incredibly fast growth. Like in software and technology, there's a rule of 40, which is that your growth and your profitability should be above the number 40. So 20% growth and 20% profit margin would be 40. So essentially this is called the rule of 40 in software companies. Our software company, scoreapp.com is 127. So we grow at 100% a year and we have 27% net profit margins. So it's growing, it's super fast growth. And my other company, Dent Global, 15% quarter on quarter growth for years now. And it just keeps growing and growing, growing. My core competency is getting things started and putting great teams in place and launching those. Now I'm with you. I'm probably, I'm probably getting a little bit, it's, it's a little bit ridiculous. The reason that I've got so many businesses is because AI came along and I owned a group of agencies and I said, strategically, we're going to spin an AI product out of each agency.
- [15:31]
Lewis Howes
Interesting.
- [15:31]
Daniel Priestley
So each agency has its own intellectual property.
- [15:34]
Lewis Howes
Yeah. If you're like a design company, like how do we build AI within this? Exactly. Be a software or a tool that we could sell as a standalone product versus a service.
- [15:43]
Daniel Priestley
Yes. So I owned a publishing company which was the one that did the book software that came out. And then I own a PR agency and we're creating a piece of AI technology for pr. So because of that technology that came along, we said, hey, let's, let's do it. Let's lean into this and do it. There are different ways to get businesses. So a lot of my businesses I bought, I didn't start them, I bought them and we've started stuff out of, off the back of them. So I have a lot of fun starting businesses and pretty quickly I put a team in place and the team runs with it. Yeah. And we've got a game plan. We have Playbooks and we just execute the Playbooks.
- [16:26]
Lewis Howes
But how do you find great People to hire for your team?
- [16:31]
Daniel Priestley
Well, in the early days, you just work with whoever's there. You make them great. The commitment is not that you find great people, it's that you make great people. When I first started my first company, I was 21 years old. No one great was going to come and work with a 21 year old. So I had a spotty 19 year old who came and joined the team and I had a friend from school who came to join the team. And we were not great as a team and then we became great together. So, you know, I'm a really big believer that when you start, you find whoever's willing to be part of the team. You find someone you know, you go down to Starbucks and start, say, are you ready to quit your job and come work with me to the person who serves you and see if you can do it.
- [17:13]
Lewis Howes
If you could give an entrepreneur or someone that wants to launch a new business three pieces of advice, and if you only did these three things, you could set yourself up for a lot of success.
- [17:25]
Daniel Priestley
What would those things be in the very early days? I want chaos. I want chaos. C A O S. Right. So I want a great concept and I want to test the concept. I want a really clear understanding of who this is for. We call that an audience. Whose attention do we want? Who do we want to be the audience for this product offer? How do we create something that really speaks to their needs and desires? And then a sales process. So concept, audience, offer, sales. Those are my first four things that I want to get right when we're launching. And you know, we can go through some of those. But like, concept is I want something that you're passionate about. I want something that solves a problem in the world and I want something people are willing to pay for. I want those three things to have a good.
- [18:12]
Lewis Howes
A lot of entrepreneurs launch something that they're not passionate about, but they see an opportunity to make a lot of money.
- [18:17]
Daniel Priestley
Yeah.
- [18:18]
Lewis Howes
Is there anything. What's the downside of that approach or.
- [18:21]
Daniel Priestley
Thinking, well, if you're chasing the money, it's very hard to beat someone who's genuinely passionate about it. So money will attract all sorts of people. So if you imagine there's this big pile of money, people are coming at that from all angles. The person who's ultimately going to win is the person who recognizes there's a lot of money and they're passionate about it.
- [18:43]
Lewis Howes
They love it.
- [18:44]
Daniel Priestley
They love it. They've got an origin story for it, they've got a vision for the future of it. They've got a clear mission about what they want to do with it right now. And it tends to be that people who are chasing the money, they don't have origin, mission and vision. They don't have a background that says this is what they should be doing. They don't have a vision for the future as to what they want to do with it next. And they don't have a clear mission as to the highest value things they could do today. They're just captivated by the money. And I get that money is important, but ultimately the best opportunities, you need all three. You need passion, you need a real problem that people want to solve and people want to pay for that. So those are the three. It's sometimes the case that you can open any one of those three doors, you can just spot a problem that needs solving and you can get yourself passionate about it. You can cultivate the passion. Sometimes you do notice that there's a new lucrative thing that's going on and you can, you know, you then find yourself like you get bitten by the bug and you know, yes, you're excited by the money, but then suddenly you start researching it and you realize it really lines up with who you are and it really lines up with what you've been doing for the last 20 years. And you go, this, this is the opportunity I've been waiting for. So. But you can enter the room through either of those three doors, but ultimately we need all three of those doors open.
- [20:07]
Lewis Howes
And what if someone's not looking to be an entrepreneur, but they want to make more money?
- [20:12]
Daniel Priestley
So I'm a big believer, as I said, that entrepreneurship is a team sport. And in the first 10 people, there's a lot of magic and there's a lot of opportunity to make money, whether you're the founder or whether you're one of the first 10. So sometimes you can get in an early stage team that has equity that's being shared. Sometimes you can get performance bonuses that are pretty high. So and sometimes the knowledge that you gain from being part of a small 10 person team can actually set you up for a lifetime of opportunities as well. So for me personally, I was 19 years old, I dropped out of university and I got invited to go knock on the door of this guy who's starting a new company. And he's 37, I'm 19, and it was the biggest house I'd ever been to. And it was like this beautiful big house and, and I knock on the door, I've got 30 minute meeting and I end up talking to him for three hours and he becomes my mentor. And basically I was employee number three or something like that. We're in the kitchen, we end up building 60 employees. We built, you know, multimillion revenue. And those two years taught me so much about myself and about the realities of business and how to access resources and I got all of that. And then at the end of two years, I went to John and I said, John, I'd really like to get equity in this business. And he said, you know what he said? He said, if you want equity in a business, you go start your own.
- [21:49]
Lewis Howes
He was like, I put up all the money, I put up all the risk, I put up.
- [21:53]
Daniel Priestley
You were a snotty nosed 19 year old kid when I met you. So what was funny?
- [21:57]
Lewis Howes
Is there something wrong with that mentality from him?
- [21:59]
Daniel Priestley
Nothing wrong, no, it's totally his prerogative. He was trying to sort of like say, hey, not yet. That was his way of saying not yet. But what I heard as a 21 year old is, oh, go start your own. I just go start your own business. So I actually did so at 21, I went and launched and because he had mentored me so well, we did 1.3 million in the first 12 months. We did 10.7 million in the third year. So it was just a amazing. Yeah, I built my own team and I learned a lot. I learned about how to generate leads and how to make sales and all of those sorts of things and how to build a team. So from being part of that small team that, that set me up. The problem with being part of a large corporate is often you have no idea what that whole company does. I don't know if you ever. You've never worked in a large corporate.
- [22:48]
Lewis Howes
Never have.
- [22:49]
Daniel Priestley
No.
- [22:49]
Lewis Howes
Yeah, I mean, I worked odd jobs like in college and after college, but I was like a truck driver. I was like a bouncer at a.
- [22:57]
Daniel Priestley
Nightclub and me neither. Right. I've not done it, but I hear consistently that you work for a large corporate, they shove you in a corner, they get you working on some spreadsheets, you have no idea how much you're charged out at or whether the company's making profit or how they won that client. None of that. It's just go do this little component. So being part of a small business, an entrepreneurial business, gives you this complete picture.
- [23:22]
Lewis Howes
Yeah.
- [23:22]
Daniel Priestley
So much better.
- [23:23]
Lewis Howes
You do so many different jobs, you see what other people on your team are working on you. You know, you're collaborating a Lot more. And you hopefully become more resourceful.
- [23:31]
Daniel Priestley
Yes.
- [23:32]
Lewis Howes
You become more entrepreneurial when you're in a smaller team.
- [23:35]
Daniel Priestley
That's it. Yeah. You have to. You gain self awareness, you gain commercial awareness and you gain resources. So those are good reasons.
- [23:43]
Lewis Howes
Yeah. And usually, you know, the team is all talking about what they're working on together. Or like, hey, we're after this big project within the next few months, so we've got this launch and we're all working on this together. And what do you need? And what do you need? It's more of like a team effort.
- [23:56]
Daniel Priestley
It's like a sports team. It is. And it's crazy how transparent small teams are. Like, it's often the case that you know the revenues, you know the profits, you know how many customers are coming through each month. Like all of that stuff tends to be in full display in small businesses. Or a lot of it.
- [24:13]
Lewis Howes
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- [27:42]
Daniel Priestley
Yeah.
- [27:42]
Lewis Howes
But when we get to the next level, it takes a different part of us that we haven't developed.
- [27:46]
Daniel Priestley
Yeah, that's, that's true. The. There's two things that really change the game. One is having a key person of influence at the front of the of the business. So this is someone who is going to be the voice of the business, the face of the business, and obviously that should be the founder.
- [28:06]
Lewis Howes
And why is having a key person of interest so important for a business?
- [28:10]
Daniel Priestley
Okay, because in the early days you pitch one to one, but then to scale, you pitch one to many. So like in the early days you might be doing sales meetings one to one. And then there comes a point where the best way to scale is to put videos out to put Ads out to do group presentations or events to create social media content that gets a bit of cut through. So all of that stuff is massively amplified by a personal brand. Online, we don't really pay attention to business brands. So, like Richard Branson has 12 million followers on X and only quarter of a million followers for Virgin. Even Tim Cook has twice as many followers than App.
- [28:52]
Lewis Howes
Wow.
- [28:53]
Daniel Priestley
Right. So I think LinkedIn did some research and they basically found that if you were to start a business brand and a personal brand on the same day and you post exactly the same time, exactly the same day, by the time the business brand gets a thousand followers, the personal brand will have 20,000 followers. So it's 20 times more powerful. So when you scale up, you need to be one to many. You've got to get your message out to a larger number of people. And people underestimate, you know, you need something like, you need something like 2 to 20,000 people to really know what your business does in order for it to start that up. Upward curve. So, so personal brand is a huge growth driver. Especially from six to seven figures of revenue, you want to go from half a million to 5 million. Personal brand, key person of influence brand. You build that personal brand and you're going to see some growth because you're going to be hitting larger numbers of people who know who you are. The next thing is digital assets. Digital assets means that you take all the stuff that's happening and you digitize it. So if there's a happy customer, you get a video of that happy customer and put that on the YouTube channel. If there's a system or a process that is your signature method, you create a diagram of it and you make sure people can see it and they can find it.
- [30:11]
Lewis Howes
Like some of the stuff you have here in your books.
- [30:13]
Daniel Priestley
Yeah. Creating your own IP entrepreneur. Yeah, exactly. So that's my entrepreneur journey method. And you know, there's different ones here, like the entrepreneur sweet spot and all of that sort of stuff. So everything that I talk about, I create digital assets like books, videos, diagrams, because that's, that's the stuff that scales on the Internet. We're living in this incredible time where the Internet gives us access to 70% of the world's population who have fast Internet, 1.8 billion English speakers. So you only need the tiniest little fraction of people to discover you. And if you've digitized what you do, including the value and the product and the delivery, you can have incredible scale. We are living through the most unbelievable time. Like this is this is a, this is the equivalent of the industrial, the, the agricultural age turning into the industrial age. We're going from the industrial age to the digital age. So, you know, this is where we start to surf these big trends that are happening.
- [31:18]
Lewis Howes
But I've heard you talk about the dying economy versus the new economy. Yes. What is that? What is the dying economy and what is the new economy coming?
- [31:26]
Daniel Priestley
The dying economy is the economy that you were prepared for in the schooling system. So in the schooling system, they had this vision for you and they said you're going to work in an office or a factory or a construction environment. And basically they said, here's our vision for Lewis. Our vision is that you're going to do 15 years of school and then you're going to do 25 years as work as a worker. Then you're going to do about 10 years as a manager, five years as a leader, and then you're going to do 15 years of retirement and die. Wow. All right, so that was the plan, whether you, whether you were aware of that or not. And for a long period of time, the industrial age, that was a good plan. From 1850 to 2000, those 150 years, that was a pretty decent way to approach what was possible for most people. But since the 2000s and especially since 2020, when we had the pandemic, the way that the world works no longer sits like that. So we're now in this digital age. So, for example, geography is not a big dictator of value anymore. So it was almost always the case that where you grew up was probably where you would work and live and you would be basically within a 10 mile radius and that was you. Now you could be contracting for a company on the other side of the world. You could be selling to customers in 150 countries. Your boss could be someone you've never physically been in an environment with. Your best team member could be someone who's in Brazil. Like all of this, you know, all of this geography gets removed. Physical products used to, Physical products and directly delivered services used to be the main engine of the economy. Now it's intellectual property, media, data, software are the main, and finance main engine rooms of the economy. So we need to recognize that the future of the career looks very different to the previous one. So what's happening for the future is we're moving into a very high velocity economy I.e. fast action loops and these little loops, you notice a problem, you put together a small team to explore it, you launch something to test it, you scale up the Team. You scale up the technology, you formalize it, you exit it, you move on to the next problem. And these are the kind of careers that we're seeing in the future. I don't know whether you're seeing this as much as I am, but I might ask a high performer these days tell me, like, what are you doing for work? And they'll give me like five things. They'll say, I'm writing a book, I'm doing some podcasts, I've launched an agency, we're spinning out an AI software product, we're organizing a festival, we've got a live event that's coming up. Right. And you know, and you go, how many hundreds of people are on your team? And it's like, no, it's just me and five other people. Right. We're just a little group of five. And these fast dynamic value loops get created and you can have several of them on the go. You can have, you can be a leader in one and a supplier to another. You know, you might, on any given day, you might be a paid speaker at a conference, but also leading a team, running your own conference.
- [34:36]
Lewis Howes
Right.
- [34:36]
Daniel Priestley
You know, so, yeah, I mean, we.
- [34:38]
Lewis Howes
Have an annual conference called Summit of Greatness for the last nine years. But I also speak around and at other people's events.
- [34:44]
Daniel Priestley
And you're writing a book and you know, so. So it's this kind of like plural career. And I don't know, can you relate to this idea of these fast little loops? Things happen quickly.
- [34:55]
Lewis Howes
I mean, for the first 10 years of, like running my business or businesses, I guess I was doing that constantly to the point where I had, I don't know, 15 different revenue streams within a business. And it got to the point where about five years ago, I felt like I was a seven out of a ten with everything.
- [35:13]
Daniel Priestley
Yeah.
- [35:13]
Lewis Howes
Because I was doing too many things.
- [35:15]
Daniel Priestley
Yeah.
- [35:15]
Lewis Howes
And it was almost like this fast action loop. Yeah. Everything was exciting and I took every opportunity, which led to me getting to a certain level financially and opportunity wise.
- [35:25]
Daniel Priestley
Yeah.
- [35:26]
Lewis Howes
But then I didn't feel like I was able to break through because I was spreading my time bouncing around thing to thing every day to the next internal project. Yeah, that. Wow, there's money here. Let's go do this.
- [35:37]
Daniel Priestley
And people need.
- [35:38]
Lewis Howes
There's a need, there's a problem. And it's something I'm interested in. And I like this too. And I like that too. And I'm passionate. Do it all.
- [35:44]
Daniel Priestley
Yeah.
- [35:45]
Lewis Howes
But that only works for so long until you get kind of burnt out and Resentful of your business.
- [35:49]
Daniel Priestley
Yeah. Well, it's not a permanent state.
- [35:51]
Lewis Howes
Yeah.
- [35:51]
Daniel Priestley
You feel that you've kind of like taken yourself and spread yourself too far. So then you dial it back and you say, all right, I'm just going to focus on the highest value things. But what will predictably happen with you is that you'll get, you'll get really strong at a few key things and naturally that's going to scale back.
- [36:08]
Lewis Howes
Yeah, I'm kind of at that point where I'm ready to attract the next bigger things. Right. It's like maybe it starts small and it scales. I'm ready to take on and it doesn't mean ready in the next day if it's a year from now. Cool. When I'm ready, when it feels like this is alignment and it doesn't mean it's going to work, but it's like, yeah, this feels like it has the potential to really be exciting, be sustainable energy, renewable energy, serve and impact people in a meaningful way and bringing in meaningful revenue where it's like a win win.
- [36:43]
Daniel Priestley
And it just feels like a perfect fit.
- [36:45]
Lewis Howes
Yeah. And I'm like, I'm right at that stage where, you know, I feel like we're ready to do that, but it has to be the right opportunity. And we're also, I mean, I'm turning down a lot of financial opportunities that.
- [36:57]
Daniel Priestley
Are big, not the right fit.
- [36:58]
Lewis Howes
But I'm like, ah, it just seems like too much of my time.
- [37:00]
Daniel Priestley
Yep.
- [37:01]
Lewis Howes
I'm like, that's not scalable. Yep. If I'm just doing it for a certain amount of money for the next six to 12 months, that's not where.
- [37:06]
Daniel Priestley
You'Re at right now.
- [37:07]
Lewis Howes
So much of my time I'm like, just doesn't feel right.
- [37:09]
Daniel Priestley
Yeah, well, that's, you're doing the right thing and that's what, that's, that's kind of what's going to happen. So contrast that with the old model of you literally just get put into a job and you just only do that job and then you've got a hobby on the weekend and like, you know, you kind of just on somebody else's path, you know. So that was the old industrial revolution system. In this digital system, you've got to develop a sense of feel as to, am I taking on too much? Should I dial it back a bit? What should I say yes to? What should I say no to? So part of the new skill set that we need is the ability to be discerning in an AI driven world where anything's possible you can speak your ideas into existence at light speed. You need the ability to have taste and discernment. So you can say, that's not to my taste. It's not to my. It's not. It's not the thing that's the perfect thing for me. You know, big skill is knowing what to say no to now.
- [38:03]
Lewis Howes
It's huge. And it's hard to like turn down money, you know, you don't want to turn down financial opportunity in a world of, you know, just money as a tool to support you in your lifestyle.
- [38:14]
Daniel Priestley
And there's different phases in life, you know, so there are times in your life where you definitely wouldn't have turned down money. No. And then there are times in your life where you have a bit more discernment, which is, okay, this is short term money and it's not long term scale. And what I'm looking for is something long term. Games with long term people.
- [38:30]
Lewis Howes
Yeah. And listen, I'm all for like creating incredible financial wealth. I'm all for it. Like if it comes to me over my lifetime, great. I want to be like a steward of that wealth and I hopefully want to do the right things with it to serve in the right way with that money. Not just for me alone and my family, which yes, I want to provide and create experiences that are unforgettable moments. That doesn't mean you need lots of money all the time to create these unforgettable moments with family and to feel like you're living a healthy lifestyle with the right foods and having the right housing and you know, you don't need.
- [39:09]
Daniel Priestley
Yeah.
- [39:10]
Lewis Howes
Like tens of millions of dollars to live a good life.
- [39:13]
Daniel Priestley
It's interesting because you've sat down with 1700 people who are living amazing lives. So you've picked up on this theme that there's got to be a bit of balance.
- [39:22]
Lewis Howes
Yeah. I mean it's just kind of like what is the end goal? You know, how much money will make you feel like you are enough?
- [39:30]
Daniel Priestley
And what number did you arrive at?
- [39:32]
Lewis Howes
For me, I don't think I've arrived at the number because it's not like when I'm a billionaire, then I've made it or when I've exited a company for nine figures, then I'll be enough. I've.
- [39:46]
Daniel Priestley
Yeah, your enough is already. The enough is built in.
- [39:48]
Lewis Howes
I feel enough right now. And I'm so grateful and blessed for the abundance that's come to my life.
- [39:53]
Daniel Priestley
Yeah.
- [39:53]
Lewis Howes
For the, the peace I have internally. Yeah. For the health that I currently have for my marriage, for, you know, everything that I'm creating.
- [40:04]
Daniel Priestley
Yeah.
- [40:04]
Lewis Howes
And the opportunity to wake up another day. I'm blessed. It's a great space and there's so many people that I've met or I've known who have struggled so much and they have all the money in the world. So if all the money in the world isn't going to create inner peace and fulfillment.
- [40:22]
Daniel Priestley
Yeah.
- [40:23]
Lewis Howes
Then what's the point?
- [40:24]
Daniel Priestley
That's a great point.
- [40:25]
Lewis Howes
How can. I'm not saying don't go after building extreme wealth. Yeah. Something you're excited about, but at what cost, what price? And are you gonna have regrets of like, oh, I wish I would have spent another 10 years building more companies to make more money and become a higher net worth millionaire instead of becoming a self worth millionaire. And how can I develop more love, more peace, more inner expansion rather than focus on external expansion. And there's again, I'm not saying there's a right or wrong, good or bad. Stripe is the go to choice for AI companies. From early stage startups to scaled enterprises, 78% of the leading AI companies use Stripe to go to market quickly and scale globally. That includes pioneers like Nvidia, OpenAI and Perplexity. Stripe has developed cutting edge tools to improve everything from fraud detection to checkout optimization. Whether you're aiming for incremental gains or planning for enterprise transformation, see how Stripe can help@swepe.com expand your intellectual horizons and delve into great works of literature, philosophy and social thought at the University of Chicago. Graham School. Our online basic program of liberal education for adults will immerse you in timeless texts from Aristotle to Plato to Shakespeare to Lincoln. Register for our courses at Graham uchicago. Edu using promo code podcast for 15% off your first course.
- [41:56]
Daniel Priestley
The one thing I would say is entrepreneurship is the most incredible personal development journey. Like, it really teaches you so much about yourself. It challenges you and it brings out your inspiration. It forces you to explore, you know, your edges and your limits. It gets you to be creative.
- [42:15]
Lewis Howes
Yeah.
- [42:16]
Daniel Priestley
So entrepreneurship is personal development in motion. It's, it's like you can go from reading a book, which is academic, to I'm going to bring something into the world which is like, okay, I'm writing, I'm, you know, you can't ride a bicycle. You can't learn to ride a bicycle by reading the book. You got to ride the bicycle. Yeah.
- [42:31]
Lewis Howes
Yeah.
- [42:32]
Daniel Priestley
So I feel like entrepreneurship is just this personal development journey that is unfolding in real life. It's a way of living A personal development journey. It really does take you on that.
- [42:44]
Lewis Howes
What's the number for you?
- [42:46]
Daniel Priestley
So for me it's all about am I in line with my passion? Am I in line with what I'm meant to be doing? My work life mission is to develop entrepreneurs who solve the world's most meaningful problems. And what I want to do is I want to build out a community of people who are solving meaningful problems in the world, who are elevating the world. Right. They're standing out, they're scaling up, they're solving problems, they're having an impact. And for me personally, I like creating businesses that help entrepreneurs to stand out, scale up and make an impact. So like for example, the book writing software is bookmagic. AI is a example of helping people to express themselves through writing a book.
- [43:27]
Lewis Howes
Yeah.
- [43:27]
Daniel Priestley
Because that allows them to stand out, scale up and make an impact. So I'm very much like only doing things that are in alignment with my personal mission. And I do stuff that's fun. The crushing thing about having too much money is that if we want to go down the crushing party.
- [43:45]
Lewis Howes
What is the crushing thing about having too much money?
- [43:47]
Daniel Priestley
The crushing thing is that you go from being highly creative to being a money manager. And this is a real problem because the thing that gets you the company exit is that you poured out creativity and it was all about expansiveness and it was all about building something that belonged in the world. And you saw it before everyone else saw it. And you just wanted this thing to exist. So you almost willed it into existence. You enrolled members of the team, you took something that didn't exist and you brought it into the economy and you made it real. And then someone else saw so much value in that that they buy it for nine figures. The problem then is that if you do get a check for a lot of money, you then become what's known as a wealth manager or money manager. By default. You've gone from this fully creative, expressive thing called your business to this thing that is all about risk and caution and not breaking it and not doing.
- [44:40]
Lewis Howes
It, as opposed to holding it and risking and putting it out there. And how many people do you know who've exited? 8, 9, 10 figure businesses that then go depressed within weeks after having all this money in the bank. It's almost like you hear more stories of billionaires exiting companies who are depressed for two years than people are like, I've made it and life's amazing now. It's like there's almost a depression from it.
- [45:07]
Daniel Priestley
Well, I'm not going to say that happens all the time. I also know, I also heard more stories than not who have some great times post Exit and that, that actually they live a very great second chapter as well. So it's like, it's, it's not a.
- [45:22]
Lewis Howes
It'S almost like takes a while to get.
- [45:24]
Daniel Priestley
It's almost like, yeah, it's the next personal development journey. Yes. So like I've got plenty of friends who have sold for hundreds of millions and their second chapter is even greater than their first chapter. And it's a new form of expression, it's a new form of creativity and they, and they, you know, they're ready for it and it's, it's great. There's always the morning and the loss of selling a business. Not always. I've sold businesses. I've been super happy to sell. I sold a business, I bought a business, grew it, sold it, sold it to a New York public listed company and it was a great deal and I was like, sweet, fantastic, onto the next thing. Right. So I've had times where that's happened. For me personally, what I've noticed as a common theme is that you want to sell a company for enough money so you can do anything, but not enough that you can do nothing, you know. So like a lot of the happiest people I know, they sell companies for like 10 to 50 million and they've now got capital behind them and they can do big things, something else with it.
- [46:18]
Lewis Howes
Yeah.
- [46:19]
Daniel Priestley
But they're, but they're still like energetically in the game. I've got some friends who have sold money for like, you know, closer to a billion. And that's kind of weird because almost nothing becomes like mean. Like everything's meaningless at that point.
- [46:33]
Lewis Howes
So I'll just buy this bend there. Yeah.
- [46:35]
Daniel Priestley
Like I'm just going to have houses around the world and I'm going to travel in private jet and like, and it's like, oh, and everyone's busy. Like I can do anything but everyone else is busy.
- [46:44]
Lewis Howes
I'm always trying to make a living.
- [46:45]
Daniel Priestley
Yeah, yeah. And then you scroll through. You know, I was talking to a friend of mine who had that situation. He said, you know, you scroll through the news or you scroll through Facebook and it's actually quite painful because you kind of know in the back of your mind you could take action on this, you could solve that problem, you could help that person and then it becomes overwhelming. So you then have to develop a crust, you know, so interesting. Yeah.
- [47:09]
Lewis Howes
And you can't help it. You can't save everyone.
- [47:11]
Daniel Priestley
Yeah, but mind you, let's not throw a pity party.
- [47:14]
Lewis Howes
It's for the billionaires of the world.
- [47:15]
Daniel Priestley
Yeah, exactly. You know, here's the cool thing. These days it's totally possible for really normal people to start a business that is a lifestyle business that does six and seven figure revenue, six figure, maybe seven figure profit, and you have fun, freedom and flexibility and it becomes a vehicle for being able to live and work from anywhere. Like, let's not discount the real opportunity at the moment. The biggest opportunity at the moment is that small, dynamic teams of less than 10 people can have a really significant impact in business. We live in a time where small teams have infinite leverage. They can have a YouTube channel, they can use AI tools. You know, they can have a software stack and that, that whole team can live and work from anywhere and be earning incredible money. I have countless examples of people who are doing 1 to 5 million of revenue, half a million of profit to a million of profit. And they don't have to be anywhere in particular at any given time. No one's disappointed with that. Right, right. That's a good lifestyle. On this, on this entrepreneur journey here we talk about one person to three people is the wilderness. This is really tough time in business where you're figuring things out, figuring out your value. Three to 12 people is the lifestyle boutique and then 12 to 30 is the desert. Too big to be small. Too small to be big. And 30 to 250 people is your performance zone.
- [48:45]
Lewis Howes
So 12 to 30 is the worst place to be in terms of.
- [48:47]
Daniel Priestley
That's a hard, that's a hard 1.
- [48:49]
Lewis Howes
Having 12 employees to 30 employees.
- [48:51]
Daniel Priestley
12 to 30 people on a team is too big to be small. Too small to be big.
- [48:54]
Lewis Howes
Why is it so hard? And how do you break, how do you know that you should break through to 30 plus or stay under 12?
- [49:00]
Daniel Priestley
Well, if you want a lifestyle business, then it's the 3 to 12 person team. That's where you want to be because it's a self organizing team. You've got a core team of about 10.
- [49:11]
Lewis Howes
Yeah. Here. Some virtual team as well.
- [49:13]
Daniel Priestley
Yeah, yeah. But that core team, like I bet you find that it's just very self organizing. Like people just figure out what needs to be done and they're doing it and all that sort of stuff. What's weird is about 13 people splits the team into two or three sub teams. So when you hire the 13th person, now you've got a sales team who don't talk to the finance team who don't talk to the ops team. And now there's dramas. When you get 17 people, two of them start dating and it gets weird. Has that ever happened?
- [49:43]
Lewis Howes
Not that I can think of, but I was just thinking of how it could.
- [49:45]
Daniel Priestley
Because you kept it under 12.
- [49:46]
Lewis Howes
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. It's like I'm interested. I mean, I don't think that's ever happened unless it happened without my knowledge.
- [49:51]
Daniel Priestley
Yeah, well, that happens too, right. Sometimes in your boardroom. Right, Right. So you get 17, 18, 19, 20. You really are. You're too big to be small. You're too small to be big. You're in this awkward zone. When you get to 30, you've got typically a four or five person leadership team who can then lead the teams of teams. And now you've got a proper business, you're in the zone of being able to sell that business for tens of millions. So.
- [50:21]
Lewis Howes
So, I mean, you got to go from 12 to 30. Like, how do you do that so quickly so that you're in more of a high performance business rather than a lifestyle boutique?
- [50:28]
Daniel Priestley
The fastest I ever did it was three days.
- [50:30]
Lewis Howes
How? Oh, if you just acquire a company, well, you can have a team of 20 people. Boom, I'm gonna hire an eight.
- [50:37]
Daniel Priestley
But what we actually did is we had a conference. So we had a three day conference and we invited about 70 people. And we basically said, by the end of this three days, we're putting together a team of 30. And we brought the team together. Yeah. So what was that business? It was. Well, that particular business was a business that I was brought in to take them through it rapidly. And it was a consulting business based out of Boston.
- [51:00]
Lewis Howes
So we just hired 30 people.
- [51:02]
Daniel Priestley
So we just brought. We brought together a team of 30 in three days. And it was amazing. We put up the org chart, we got people to sign on to which roles they wanted, and by the end of three days, we'd organized them into a team and they're ready to go. So it doesn't have to necessarily take too long. When you hear about.
- [51:17]
Lewis Howes
You also need the money to do that too.
- [51:19]
Daniel Priestley
Yeah. Or you just need the agreements. Look, a performance business is a more advanced business. And when you hear Silicon Valley startups, they go out and they secure that first 3 to 5 million worth of capital to go and put together that first 30 people team. Right. So they put together their leadership team and then their developers and their customer success team and their sales representatives. So they kind of like recruit. That's like part of the founding story. In the first 12 months they put together that, that team and that's why they get the 3 to 5 million. But it only works if you intend to sell that business for a lot of money.
- [51:56]
Lewis Howes
If you're trying to get an exit in five, seven, ten years, that's what you need to be doing.
- [52:01]
Daniel Priestley
It's a little bit like sports. There are plenty of people who love playing tennis, but lifestyle tennis. And then there are people who want to tour professionally. And it's very different. It's a whole nother life. Different life?
- [52:10]
Lewis Howes
Yeah, it's a different life. That's interesting. So how many of your businesses out of the seven that you have currently are lifestyle businesses versus?
- [52:18]
Daniel Priestley
So we got two that are in performance and we got five that are coming up through that process of going from their boutique to getting ready for their performance jump.
- [52:29]
Lewis Howes
Interesting. So none of yours are under 12 then? They're always intending to go big.
- [52:35]
Daniel Priestley
Yeah. For me, where I'm at is that pretty much on day one, I want a team of about eight. So if I'm launching anything, it's well, I work on this two person scout team to scout the opportunity. Can we sell it, can we build it? 4 person fire starting team, which is just an initial team to run the launch campaigns and to get those first customers figure out how this business works. Eight person boutique core team which is here. And then when we get the signal that the business is ready, we then jump to our performance team. Got it to 30 to 30. Yeah.
- [53:11]
Lewis Howes
And that is kind of like clockwork, you know that hey, I can only get to 3 to 5 million with 10 people.
- [53:17]
Daniel Priestley
Yeah.
- [53:17]
Lewis Howes
Maybe it gets to 10 if I'm lucky.
- [53:19]
Daniel Priestley
But it's like I learned that from the army scale. I learned it from the army.
- [53:22]
Lewis Howes
Really?
- [53:23]
Daniel Priestley
Yeah. The army, they never send one person off on their own. They call it a scout team. Two person scout team. Then they have a four person fire team. They have an eight person section and then a 30 person platoon. So I've just modeled that straight off the military. It's 248202, sorry, 24830.
- [53:39]
Lewis Howes
How many companies have you exited now?
- [53:43]
Daniel Priestley
Four. Four? Yeah. So four proper exit exits.
- [53:47]
Lewis Howes
When you know it's the right time to exit.
- [53:51]
Daniel Priestley
There's three things that the business has. You know that it's the right time when you don't actually want to sell it. When you want to sell a business that's actually because it's not saleable. There's this horrible point that you.
- [54:04]
Lewis Howes
How do I get rid of this and then trick someone that this is.
- [54:06]
Daniel Priestley
Valuable and that's definitely not the time to sell it. The feeling of a company, what a company feels like when it's saleable is it's like, why would I sell? This is a great company. Because that's the, that's the maximum point where people are going to feel the same way about it. But there's three big things that companies have when they sell. So number one is recurring revenue contracts. Businesses that sell for a lot of money, they've contracted their recurring revenue, they can forecast really far forward into the future. And they have some metrics that are all about like, how much of our revenue is recurring and how much does it churn, like how much does it go down if we leave it over time. So those numbers are super clear. It has a 30 person or more team. So you've got to have 30 people on the team so that when the founder leaves, the business doesn't fall apart because typically less than 30 has what's called founder dependency. And then you need what's called proprietary assets. And proprietary assets are your unique brand, your database, it could be your systems and processes, it could be trademarks, you know, whatever it is that makes that business very hard to compete with. That is your moat, that is your proprietary asset. So Those are your three big ones. Proprietary asset, 30 people plus on a team, and recurring revenues into the future. You get those three things right, you're going to change your life with an exit.
- [55:30]
Lewis Howes
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- [56:45]
Daniel Priestley
Yes.
- [56:45]
Lewis Howes
And what was coming in social media.
- [56:46]
Daniel Priestley
Yeah.
- [56:47]
Lewis Howes
And so I've been a big fan of.
- [56:48]
Daniel Priestley
That was the year Facebook launched. You were super early.
- [56:51]
Lewis Howes
I was on Facebook when it was just for college. I remember when our college.
- [56:54]
Daniel Priestley
2004.
- [56:55]
Lewis Howes
Yeah, 2004 was college. Or was. I was in college and it was like, oh, we're about to get Facebook. Like, it's the next wave of schools.
- [57:02]
Daniel Priestley
2007 was Twitter just launched. YouTube was kind of like becoming brand new.
- [57:08]
Lewis Howes
I opened a YouTube channel in 2007, posted my first video in 2007. I was on LinkedIn in end of 2007 when it was like, I don't know, 8 million people. It was like very, very small. And I wrote a book about LinkedIn. I was one of the first people to write a book about LinkedIn in 2009.
- [57:25]
Daniel Priestley
Yeah.
- [57:25]
Lewis Howes
About how to, like, build relationships in the digital world and then take them in the physical world.
- [57:31]
Daniel Priestley
Yes.
- [57:32]
Lewis Howes
And I was hosting networking events all around the country.
- [57:34]
Daniel Priestley
Awesome.
- [57:36]
Lewis Howes
LinkedIn networking events in 2009, 2010. And I was using the platform to drive people to the events.
- [57:41]
Daniel Priestley
And by the way, going back, you and I are very similar. 2009, I was running events called you blogging Twitface. And it was all about how to use social media for business. And that was my. One of my first things. And it was YouTube, blogging, Twitter, Facebook. That's cool. Yeah. You blogging Twitface. It was cool. That's cool.
- [58:00]
Lewis Howes
Exactly. And it was like all these new events were popping up because it was like tweet ups and meetups and blog world.
- [58:07]
Daniel Priestley
And like, Gary Vaynerchuk came along and we were all like, wow, this guy.
- [58:10]
Lewis Howes
Exactly. And I met gary Vaynerchuk in 2009.
- [58:13]
Daniel Priestley
Similar.
- [58:16]
Lewis Howes
Tim Ferriss and all these different. The four hour worker. Four hour worker work. There's almost like this new wave of how to create this lifestyle entrepreneurship.
- [58:24]
Daniel Priestley
I wrote Key Person of influence in 2009, and it came out in 2010, and it was the book on how to build a personal brand. So you and I lived a very, very similar experience.
- [58:35]
Lewis Howes
Now, here's the thing with AI coming, and it seems like more and more content creators are doing these things to put their message out there, to build awareness, to create more touch points, to have communities and audiences. And it seems like content creation is on the rise. Podcasting is on the rise. Vlogging is on the rise. It is short form content.
- [58:58]
Daniel Priestley
AI tools are churning it out.
- [58:59]
Lewis Howes
And AI tools are helping people amplify their message.
- [59:03]
Daniel Priestley
Yeah.
- [59:03]
Lewis Howes
The challenge is, if everyone's doing it and the tools are more and more accessible, how do you stand out in a noise? In a sea of personal brands now?
- [59:13]
Daniel Priestley
Yeah.
- [59:14]
Lewis Howes
Like, how do you really gain audience when everyone is making noise?
- [59:18]
Daniel Priestley
Totally. Totally. So from 2009 to 2020, all you had to do is show up consistently. That was it. And just showing up consistently, you do this now, you've got to be an A player. You got to really have your A game if you want to show up. So if you imagine an airport and the fog has come in and it's very hard to take off because there's so much fog. If you're already up there, like you are, you've got, you know, millions of people, then you're already above the fog. So you can continue that journey and you're already an A player and you can throw a budget at it. How do you do it if you're starting out? How do you do it if you're actually on the ground and surrounded by this massive amount of noise? So, couple of things, you got to tune out from what everyone else is doing and say, I'm going to be committed to adding value to a small group of people, and I'm just going to start small and keep adding value and show up powerfully. Because think about like this. Your best friend is your best friend. Not because you've got lots and lots of different options and you've selected carefully from all the options. Your best friend is your best friend because your best friend has figured out how to build a relationship with you. So the game is relationships, it's not noise. So trying to build relationships over noise. The other thing, too, is partnering with someone who's already above the fog, like.
- [60:42]
Lewis Howes
You did starting out.
- [60:43]
Daniel Priestley
Yeah, I think. Yeah.
- [60:45]
Lewis Howes
When you got into business, I mean, you were with. The guy was 20 years older than you, was successful and.
- [60:50]
Daniel Priestley
Yeah. When I taught you the ropes, when I launched my first company, I had a guy who was the face of the business, who we paid 5% of revenue to. Really? Yep.
- [60:58]
Lewis Howes
Who had more authority than you. More.
- [61:00]
Daniel Priestley
Yeah.
- [61:00]
Lewis Howes
Credibility, whatever it might be.
- [61:03]
Daniel Priestley
Even today, it's very like, it's very possible to hire someone as a speaker and they come in and they deliver a talk and 500 people shop to see them, but you position yourself alongside them. All right. So you can, you know, you can do those sorts of things. You can do joint ventures and partnerships with people who've already got the face of the business, who can be the Face of the business. But being having your A game, there's five things you must get right. The way that you pitch has to be really on point. You've got to pitch yourself in a way that's going to get cut through. So you got to make sure that when you answer the question, who am I? What do I do? Who is that for? That. That really comes across in every communication. So you've got to get good at pitching. Publishing content, regular publishing, and having a publishing schedule. Publishing a book, one of the best things you can do because it makes you an authority in your space. I had a look at. I had a look at major podcasts when we did a bit of an assessment into this and found that 78% of guests on big podcasts have written a book. Like, only 1% of the population has written a book, and 78% of guests on the podcast have written a book. So authors end up on bigger platforms. You've got to have a way of monetizing your brand. So we call that a product ecosystem. If you don't have products, then you run out of money. Promoting yourself, promoting your brand, you've got to have a monetization method. The profile that you build, you need to do joint ventures and partnerships with people who have profile. So that elevates your profile. And the. The fifth one is. Is joint ventures, partnerships, almost. Think about flying together as a squad. There was a photo I saw of you, and you're in front of a jet, a private jet, and there's you and Tom Bilio and there's Jay Shetty. And you would think, oh, these people are all competitive. But no, they're all collaborative. They're working together. And it was funny that you're in front of that jet and it's like, boom, we're taking off together. And it was. I. I think you know the picture I'm talking about. Yeah. So there's this idea of forming a squadron. And forming a squadron is where you say, we're all going to build our own brands, but we're going to support each other, we're going to help each other.
- [63:24]
Lewis Howes
Mastermind.
- [63:25]
Daniel Priestley
Yeah.
- [63:25]
Lewis Howes
Yeah.
- [63:26]
Daniel Priestley
And it's like I'm going to. When I see you post on LinkedIn, I'm going to like it and comment on it. When I see that you've launched a podcast, I'm going to recommend some guests to the podcast and help you with that. And I know that you're going to do the same thing back. And you can formalize these little squadrons in a WhatsApp group, you can have a monthly meetup. So you can kind of just like get that tight knit collaborative environment together.
- [63:51]
Lewis Howes
Yeah, that's cool. I think you mentioned that there were five things that you need to do to build key person of interest also. And I think we only talked about two of them. Right.
- [64:01]
Daniel Priestley
Pitch, publish, products, profile and partnership.
- [64:04]
Lewis Howes
Okay.
- [64:04]
Daniel Priestley
That's what it is. So those are the big five.
- [64:06]
Lewis Howes
There you go.
- [64:07]
Daniel Priestley
Yeah.
- [64:09]
Lewis Howes
Here's the thing that everyone's talking about, which is AI.
- [64:11]
Daniel Priestley
Yeah.
- [64:12]
Lewis Howes
And everyone's talking about it. People are starting to test it. Part of me feels like it's going to be the biggest thing ever. And part of me feels like it could be the biggest distraction for people ever because there's always going to be a new tool, a new software, a new plug in, a new something that solves some problem. Right. So how do people actually make money in an AI world?
- [64:32]
Daniel Priestley
Yeah.
- [64:32]
Lewis Howes
When everything it seems like you can get for free. And if you launch an idea, someone else is going to launch it for free when you're trying to charge a premium membership for it and they're going to be 10 times better than your thing. And AI is just going to keep evolving. How do you stay focused when it is evolving so fastly and everyone has access to it?
- [64:53]
Daniel Priestley
What's happened is we've invented a technology that is going to fundamentally change the nature of the economy in society. Imagine a couple hundred years ago, 100 guys are out plowing a field on a farm and two young guys turn up with a tractor and they say, watch this. And they drive the tractor up and down and they plow a whole field in a day. That would have taken 100 guys a month. And when that happens one time, that's called a singularity moment. And a singularity means we don't know what the future looks like. Now. We can't see around the corner because every single guy says, well, what are we all going to do? It only takes two guys to plow field. We don't need to plow that many fields. And what actually happened is that 97, 98% of the people who used to work on farms got completely displaced. By the late 1800s, early 1900s, all the farmers had moved to the cities and all the people who worked in agriculture had to move to the cities. We didn't know what the jobs would look like. So like even my grandfather try and explain to my grandfather what is a personal trainer.
- [66:07]
Lewis Howes
He's like, I have fitness back in the day.
- [66:10]
Daniel Priestley
I say to my grandfather, imagine if I said to my. He's passed away. But imagine if I said to my grandfather, well, I don't really want to go to the gym. So I pay a guy to meet me there, and then he counts how many heavy things that I lift and tells me that I've done a great job. And then he makes another time for me to meet at the gym. And my grandfather would go, what on earth? Like, are you guys being scammed? Like, what is. What is going on? It's like, yeah. And he's like, how many people have a personal trainer? Well, lots of people. It's a whole industry. Right. So this idea of the personal training, you know, or a therapist or, you know, all of these couples things didn't.
- [66:45]
Lewis Howes
Happen 50 years ago.
- [66:46]
Daniel Priestley
Yes.
- [66:46]
Lewis Howes
60 years ago. It's like you're just working outside all day.
- [66:49]
Daniel Priestley
Or a podcaster. Right, right. So, like, the idea that you could be creating content and putting it on a free platform and. And anyone can watch it and you don't need permission to do it. So all of this. So we've hit a singularity moment. And the singularity moment is as soon as that AI created the first legal agreement, that's. That was a real life legal agreement. The legal profession, we know that 97% of people don't need to be in lawyers anymore. And as soon as the first AI diagnosed an illness, we know that general practitioners are going to be. 97% of general practitioners don't need to be there anymore.
- [67:26]
Lewis Howes
What are people going to do?
- [67:28]
Daniel Priestley
They're going to do something different. Life is going to look very different. We're going to have the. Unfortunately, I got a bad prediction for you. There's going to be the bifurcation of society in the short term.
- [67:40]
Lewis Howes
What does that mean?
- [67:40]
Daniel Priestley
It means that it splits in two. And what it means is that. I'll tell you what, AI has two superpowers. Superpower number one is the ability to distract.
- [67:52]
Lewis Howes
Huge distraction.
- [67:52]
Daniel Priestley
Huge distraction.
- [67:53]
Lewis Howes
It's like. It's a massive distraction.
- [67:55]
Daniel Priestley
Yeah. And it's actually, in particular, if you're.
- [67:58]
Lewis Howes
Not focused in, like, how are we using this to grow and achieve our goals? You're just like, let me try this new thing and this whole tool.
- [68:05]
Daniel Priestley
Yeah. It's really important to know that AI is really good at turning people into hyper consumers. And do you think there's anyone on earth who could be and beat an AI at chess?
- [68:17]
Lewis Howes
No.
- [68:17]
Daniel Priestley
No. Not one single person. Zero. And in the same way, there's not a single person that can beat TikTok. It's holding their attention if you go on TikTok, it's game over. The minute you open TikTok as an app, it's game over. It's you're done. It is go. If you want it to be there for one minute, it'll keep you for 10. If you want to be there for 10 minutes, it'll keep you for an hour. It is game over. It is going to turn you into a consumer at a much greater level than you wanted to consume. If you go on Amazon, there's a very high chance you'll buy something you didn't intend to buy when you logged in. So if you listen to Spotify, you're going to listen to more songs than you intended to listen to because their AI is, is turning you into a hyper consumer. So the first thing you need to know is that some of the smartest people on the planet have invented AI technology to, to get you to hyper consume and your time is limited, so that's just going to take up your life. On the flip side of the coin is that AI makes you into a hyper creator. And as a hyper creator, you can be doing 10 things at once that used to take 10 people to do one thing. So when you have AI powers, you can have what's called agentic AI, which is having agents that go do stuff for you. So you might say, gee, I wish I knew the name of every doctor in la. You can send an AI agent to go find that. You could say, I wish I could write a personal message to all my followers on LinkedIn. Okay, well we can, we can do that. I wish I could take all of this data and put it into a spreadsheet. We just tell an AI to do that. I wish I could create a software business, but I don't know what software business to create. Well, let's ask the latest O3 model and it'll tell us our options. We'll upload all of our stuff into there and it'll spit out some options. We'll pick one and then we'll go to replit and get them to build it as a software and it'll spit out some software. And what would normally take months now happens in minutes. So when I say society is going to split, this is a warning. A bunch of people are going to be hyper consumers and a bunch of people are going to be hyper creators and it's probably going to be 98% and 2%. So like 1 in 50 people are going to be doing so much money and success and productivity and they're Going to make it look effortless and easy because they're using AI as a superpower. 49 out of 50 are just going to be, get, get dragged under with TikToks and endless this and endless that. And you know they're going to get brain rot from, from AI overwhelming them with hyper consumption. So this is the last moment where you really get to decide. You have to decide and say, am I going to be disciplined and be a hyper creator or am I going to be undisciplined and be a hyper consumer?
- [71:02]
Lewis Howes
How do you make that decision?
- [71:04]
Daniel Priestley
You delete your apps, delete them off your phone, you get rid of, you have an outsourced agency that does your social media for you where it's their job to do it as creative. And you try and you try and set up your life where you can distinguish between creativity and consumption and you can be very disciplined in limiting your consumption.
- [71:28]
Lewis Howes
Have you done this for yourself?
- [71:29]
Daniel Priestley
Of course I have my kids and the people on my team and the people I work with and that's why I'm even sharing it here because I can see that as someone who works with this technology I can see, you know, what it was like for most of human history. We didn't have a lot of access to sugar and then we just surrounded humans with sugar and then like our brain was easily distracted by sugar and we, you know, we end up with too much sugar in our system. So it's the same thing with content, you know, the, it's the same thing that AI is going to do. It's going to hyper consume.
- [72:02]
Lewis Howes
What's the greatest fear you have? I mean you've got three kids, they're about to be, you know, some in their teen years, in a few years. What's the fear you have around where they will be in society and how to set them up for success and be more creators versus consumers when it is so easily in an adolescent brains to do what your friends are doing and want to be on social media because they're on it and then that leads to just more consume, consume and then reflection of how can I look better, how can I become more good looking in the world and get more validation, more attention and go down that slippery road?
- [72:40]
Daniel Priestley
I guess my greatest fear is that my kids stop coming to me to talk about this stuff, you know, that they're dealing with something and I don't know about it. That would be a great fear of mine because as someone who I was born in 81 so I experienced life before computers and phones And I also experienced the shift to personal computing, shift to mobile cloud, now AI. So I have this longer term context window of, of what life can be like and what life should be like and you know, all like enjoyable, you know what's good, like, you know, what has worked for many, many generations. So I would just hope that we always have an ongoing dialogue about this sort of stuff and that they can understand that this stuff can be the greatest asset, the greatest tool. But like any super powerful technology, it's going to be a double edged sword.
- [73:36]
Lewis Howes
Yeah, it seems like school is kind of irrelevant and what they're teaching these days, it seems like just going to.
- [73:45]
Daniel Priestley
Learn math or the genesis of school was to create factory workers. That was that, like this is not some conspiracy theory. That's what it was for. It was the Prussian. The German army wanted to create soldiers. They created the Prussian schooling system. Guy from Massachusetts came out and saw it was like blown away. It was based on a barracks with uniforms and all this sort of stuff. And he was just like, this is what we need because we don't have enough factory workers for our industrializing America. So. So I think his name was Horace Mann. So he comes out and he like says, we're going to get this like militarized schooling system and we're going to adjust it to make factory workers. I think Rockefeller had a famous quote about I do not want a nation of thinkers, I want a nation of workers. And that was the schooling. And he said that in the founding of the school system. So. And that, by the way, I'm not against that because that was probably what was needed to build the world that we now take for granted. Like that's probably the best.
- [74:47]
Lewis Howes
Yeah. With the dying economy.
- [74:49]
Daniel Priestley
Yeah, yeah. So it's just that that system is just not going to serve you because ultimately that system is like training you to be an AI. It's actually training you to be like an AI. It's forcing data into your head and then getting you to hallucinate answers on command, which is what AIs do. You just force lots of. It's just they do it better way better. Force the entire Internet into its head and then it hallucinates answers and then we can tweak it and it does better and better job. So we need kids who now know how to be the prompter, not the prompted. We need kids who know who now have to, they need to understand what it means. What I'm teaching my kids to be is high agency generalists. So a high agency generalist. High Agency means that you get stuff done in the world. You bring things into the world. You're a creator, not a consumer. And a generalist is someone who knows a little bit about a lot. They know about history and geography, they understand a bit about politics, they understand a bit about business, they know a bit about health and wellness and sports and you know, all of those kind of things. And it's like that the person who's going to rule the world in the future is the high agency generalist.
- [75:58]
Lewis Howes
The high agency generalist. What did you say?
- [76:00]
Daniel Priestley
Generalist.
- [76:01]
Lewis Howes
Generalist. British. And you're the generalist. I was like generalist.
- [76:05]
Daniel Priestley
It's British, Australian.
- [76:06]
Lewis Howes
So I apologize. Now, as a parent, what are the three things you wish they taught in school? Moving forward in the school systems, if you can only teach three things, what do you wish all kids could learn over the next decade?
- [76:24]
Daniel Priestley
Yeah. So I think taste and discernment. Developing your own taste, developing discernment. What's not for me? Team dynamics. Putting together high performing little teams. How to use teams to get the answer. One of the things I hate about the school system is this idea that you take a test on your own. You know, in life you take very few tests on your own. You take almost all tests as part of a team. So when you are under pressure here, the first thing you do is bring together your team. You know, if you were suddenly to face a big challenge, you'd have a board meeting about it and bring bring together people in that room out there and everyone would love it. And you would get the answers by discussing the answers. There also wouldn't be one answer. There'd be many answers to most problems. So this is critical thinking. This is ideation and team dynamics and team play. I wish they would teach the idea of a completed loop. What does it look like to discover a problem, to then find co collaborators to do some diligence, to then invent something to scale it up with team and technology, to formalize it and exit it and move on to the next problem. Like the understanding of that loop and the fact that you could, if you want, you can. You get paid for the loops. You don't get paid for the time. You can do a loop in a week, get paid a lot. You can get paid a lifetime's amount of income in a month. If you can do a big loop in a month.
- [77:53]
Lewis Howes
Yeah.
- [77:55]
Daniel Priestley
So like it's not turning up and selling time for money that makes any money anymore. It's completing a cycle.
- [78:07]
Lewis Howes
I have a brand new book called Make Money easy. And if you are looking to create more financial freedom in your life, you want abundance in your life and you want to stop making money hard in your life. But you want to make it easier, you want to make it flow, you want to feel abundant, then make sure to go to make money easy book right now and get yourself a copy. I really think this is going to help you transform your relationship with money this moment moving forward. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and it inspired you on your journey towards greatness. Make sure to check out the show notes in the description for a full rundown of today's episode with all the important links. And if you want weekly exclusive bonus episodes with me personally as well as ad free listening, then make sure to subscribe to our greatness+channel exclusively on Apple Podcasts. Share this with a friend on social media and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts as well. Let me know what you enjoyed about this episode in that review. I really love hearing feedback from you and it helps us figure out how we can support and serve you moving forward. And I want to remind you if no one has told you lately that you you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter. And now it's time to go out there and do something great. Hey, I'm Paul Scheer. I'm June Diane Rayfield. And I'm Jason Manzoukis and we're the hosts of how did this Get Made? A comedy podcast where we deconstruct, make fun of, and celebrate the best worst movies ever made. Have you ever seen a movie that's so bad that it's actually good? That's what we're talking about. From blockbuster franchises and made for TV romances to bonkers 80s action flicks and obscure sci fi musicals, we cover it all. You can find. How did this get made? Wherever you get your podcasts and don't forget to follow the show so you never miss an episode. Idiot. Find what mom will Love at Walmart They've got perfect Mother's Day gifts for every type of mom, especially yours and you. You'll enjoy everyday low prices, shop presents from cool tech to thoughtful jewelry and premium fragrances, and in the end, be Mom's favorite. Find the things you and your mom will love at Walmart, in store, online and in the app.