The Ultimate Guide to Building a Lifestyle Business

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to Freedom Fridays, our ongoing series where we discuss the

books and strategies and ideas and tools that can help us work towards financial freedom

so that we can live life on our own terms. In this video, I would

like to take you through a framework for building a lifestyle business, a type of

business that doesn't optimize for maximizing revenue at all costs, but instead focuses on giving

you the kind of lifestyle you want, incorporating the three Fs of fun, fulfillment and

freedom. Now, before we get into that, there is one thing that I wanna make

clear, which is that a lifestyle business is never going to make you a billionaire.

So if your goal in life is to have super yacht money, then don't watch

this video because a lifestyle business ain't gonna get you there. But if you care

about more than just money, and if you also want to optimize for a nice

lifestyle for you and your family, and you're okay with building a business that gets

you six figures in profit, maybe low seven figures if you really focus, then hopefully

this video can give you a few pointers. A lifestyle business is the type of

business that allows you to be able to build whatever you're building from wherever you

wanna be, with whoever you wanna be next to at any point in time. So

it's a type of business that is extremely flexible. It's not something where you're consistently

worried about deadlines all the time or anything like that. It can run on autopilot

to a certain degree, but ultimately it's at your beck and call rather than it

being the other way around. That's Chris Ducker, serial entrepreneur, founder of multiple seven-figure lifestyle

businesses and the best-selling author of books like Virtual Freedom and Rise of the Youpreneur,

which were both about basically how to build a successful lifestyle business. And I recently

read and loved his new book, The Long Haul Leader, which is all about the

sustainable approach to building a business. And so I asked Chris to sit down for

a discussion about the step-by-step approach that you can take to build a lifestyle business.

Now I've condensed all of this into a simple framework with 14 lessons across five

different levels. So level one is all about the fundamental of a lifestyle business. Level

two tackles the problem of actually coming up with a business idea, which is the

thing that holds most people back. Level three is where you'll understand the skills you

need to learn. Level four is about how to manage your time, be productive en

route to building a lifestyle business. And then finally, level five covers the keys to

building a lifestyle business without burning out. I have seen so many entrepreneurs in our

own courses, in our YouTuber Academy, in our Lifestyle Business Academy, so many entrepreneurs struggle

because they skip one or more of these steps. But hopefully by the end of

the video, you'll have a clear roadmap so that you know exactly what to focus

on if you wanna start your own lifestyle business. So let's get into it.

I think when people think of the word business, they're imagining raising investment on like

Dragon's Den and then building factories in China and the whole like hustle and grind

culture of entrepreneurship. Yeah. What's your take on that approach to business? I mean, if

that's your bag, if that's your game and you want to play it, it's all

good. Who am I to judge, right? But what I do know after building businesses

for over two decades with everything from five employees up to almost

500 is that you can do it the easy way, you can do it the

not so easy way, or you can do it the damn right really, really, really

hard way. And for me, there's no doubt in my mind now, if I was

starting a business today, I would start the kind of business that really allows me

to have the lifestyle that I want first and foremost, rather than me being a

slave to that business, right? So for example, like the hustle mentality that is out

there, right? The hustle culture, all that kind of stuff. I bought into that. my

first business. I bought into that big time. 15 hour days for three years in

a row. Ended up with me being horribly burnt out and having to struggle to

kind of come back from all that and all the rest of it. Now though,

I'm more than happy to be working way, way, way less, even making less, quite

frankly. In fact, truth be told, I'm making less money today than I ever have

done before. Ever. But I'm still loving what I'm doing. In fact, I'm loving what

I'm doing even more than I have done before. I'm making more than enough money

to take care of my family and provide for the future, et cetera, et cetera.

I'm working with the coolest clients that I've ever worked with. And I'm not really

all that stressed out about it. I mean, it goes up and down a little

bit, but I mean, like ultimately, I don't think I've been as happy as an

entrepreneur as I am today. Love that. That's amazing. So why, so there's a lot

of people I'm going to have this real fear when it comes to business. The

word business seems, starting a business seems like this really risky thing. Like, oh my

God, you could lose all your money. Oh my God, what if people sue you?

You're going to be managing all these employees all the time. And the whole stat

around like what 90% of whatever of businesses fail. So how, if you were advising

someone who wants to start the first business and is maybe being held back by

all of those like, oh my God, this feels so risky and scary. How would

we approach that? Well, one thing I do know for sure is that nothing worth

going after is without risk, period, right? Relationships, parenthood,

you know, all those kind of things, right? So I think to a certain degree,

a lot of that can be inside our own heads. Yes, it's true. A lot

of businesses that start up, go bust very quickly. That's generally due to people

trying to run before they can walk nine times out of ten, as far as

I'm concerned. And I think that if you get into business for the right reasons,

rather than just to make a whole bunch of money, you get in the right

business in the right reasons in terms of I want to serve, I've got value

to provide, I've got a solution to a problem that I know I can serve

up. these are the reasons why I'm doing this rather than just let's make as

much money as quickly as we possibly can, right? I think those are the kind

of businesses that stick around, they're sustainable, they are there for the long haul, and

they're the kind of businesses that not only will be around longer, but also they'll

have a lot more impact on the people that they serve as well. But in

terms of like the whole risk thing, like if you really feel drawn to it,

it's worth the risk, isn't it? It's worth the risk, genuinely. We bootstrapped every

one of our businesses from the ground up. I never borrowed a dollar, never got

given a dollar or anything like that at all. It was always, this is how

much we've got. We're going to invest it in here so we can get to

the next point. Then we'll look at how much money we've got in the bank.

And if we want to expand, we'll take money from the profits and we'll do

it that way around. We never overextended ourselves. We never got close to quote unquote

bankruptcy or anything like that. There was a period in about six months or so

in where we were a little cash poor and we really needed to kind of

pull back on the strings a little bit in terms of hiring and things like

that. But we got over it. We got over that little hurdle. And from that

moment afterwards, we've always been great. All right, so my team and I are on

a mission to help you live life on your own terms. And for a lot

of people, that means creating an independent income stream alongside your day job. And while

talking to people on this journey, we realized that one of the biggest time drains

when you are trying to build something on the side is actually the writing side.

And that is where Grammarly comes in, who are the very kind paid partners of

this video. So whether it's crafting proposals for clients or putting together a landing page

copy or writing scripts for your YouTube videos, your content creations, your evenings can look

a lot like your day job, but with more tabs open and a lot less

coffee when you're trying to build something on the site. And Grammarly can help you

with every step of this process. So beyond just catching typos, it actually helps you

communicate more clearly while still sounding authentically like yourself. Grammarly's AI understands context. So when

you're switching between a casual Slack message and a formal business proposal, It adapts to

help you nail the absolute perfect tone. Grammarly also integrates directly into your workflow and

it works directly with platforms like Google Docs and Notion and Gmail without you needing

to do like all the copy patient arrogance from like one tool to another. For

example, Grammarly Pro's sidebars tool lets you make tweaks with just a few clicks instead

of spending hours editing. If you don't like one of their suggestions, you can just

click on the highlighted word and you can choose something that better fits your personal

style. And a feature they've recently added is the AI Editor. It's especially handy for

those moments when you're staring at a blank page and just need a nudge to

get going. The brainstorm with AI AI chat tool, for example, can suggest thoughtful prompts

based on the topics you usually write about, which makes it so much easier to

get into flow. So with the pro features like Sidebar, you can spend way less

time second guessing the writing and more time actually building your dream. If that sounds

interesting, you can sign up and upgrade to Grammarly Pro using my link for 20%

off. That's grammarly.com slash AliAbdahl08. The link is in the description below. And you can

also scan the QR code that is currently on screen. So thank you Grammarly for

sponsoring this segment of the video and let's get back to it. A lot of

people try to run before they can walk. What do you mean by that? Well,

let's say, for example, let's think online business, for example, sake, right? In today's world,

there's so many different ways to build a business online. There is blogging, podcasting,

YouTube, video marketing, social media, growing an email list, speaking on stages, writing a

book, ba-ba-ba-ba-ba, right? So if you're in year one of your business, and let's say,

for example, sake, you're a health coach, right? and there's a lot of them out

there. But let's say you're a health coach and in year one, you start a

YouTube channel, you start a weekly email newsletter, you write a book

and you want to get on as many stages as possible. That is a recipe

for disaster right there. Because number one, first and foremost, it's a lot of work

and the chances are you're probably gonna burn out. But number two, way more importantly,

to a certain degree, all of those things are gonna be spread so thin that

none of them are really gonna provide the value which you should be providing, particularly

in the early stages of your growth, to be able to capture the right type

of audience and get people on your side, right? And people wanna do business with

the people that they really trust, and in a way to be able to gain

trust is to be able to serve up that content, serve up that value consistently,

and if you're spread too thin against all these different platforms or projects or deadlines,

you're not gonna be any good for anybody, anywhere. And so I'm just a really

big believer of doing one thing to completion. You know, like we say, well, I'm

going to multitask. I'm going to multitask these three projects that I'm working on. I'm

going to work on all three of them at the same time. That doesn't work.

Multitasking is a myth. It doesn't work. I haven't seen anybody work

on more than one thing at a time really successfully, even if they've got big

teams in place. So work on one project. to completion, move on to the next

one and do likewise. This is increasingly difficult for people who feel like,

well, I've got my online whatever, health coaching or yoga coaching or guitar teacher

or my web design agency or whatever, and I need to get clients. And so

I mean, there's all this FOMO, right? Like I should be doing Instagram. I should

be doing LinkedIn. LinkedIn is where the clients are at, but like a lot of

them are Instagram as well. And like everyone's trying to do long form YouTube videos.

Like, oh, what if I chop up my long form YouTube videos into short form,

blah, blah, blah. And while we're there, I might as well post on LinkedIn. And

everyone says build an email list. Like there's all of these things are sensible things

to be doing. And while I'm there, why don't I start a podcast? Because then

I can like interview people and it seems cool and networking and blah, blah, blah.

There's all this like fear of networking and blah, blah, blah. Yeah, exactly. There's all

this fear of missing out that like, oh, I'm leaving money on the table by

not like doing this and this and this and that. Like, how would you advise

someone in that position who's like, focus, but also like, oh my God, there's just,

there's too many things that I feel like I should be doing. I remember when

I was learning how to drive and here in the UK around built up areas

are, speed limit is 30 miles an hour. And I

kept going 30, 31, 29, 32, 30, 28, 32, blah, blah, blah,

blah, blah. And my driving instructor, never forget her, Vanessa, her name was, after about

three or four lessons, she pulled me over to one side and she said to

me, Chris, it's a speed limit, not a speed target.

Just because you can do it doesn't mean that you should. And I was like,

huh, okay. I've never forgotten that. And I use that as an analogy, a story,

whatever, example, whatever you want to call it, in this sort of type of situation

because just in case anybody's messed up a little bit here

and things were a bit cloudy in terms of what they should focus on or

not, the fact of the matter is is that just because you can start a

podcast and a newsletter and put together a group coaching program and launch an online

course and be present on all the socials five times a day. Just because you

can do that, because we can, doesn't mean that you should. So I'm just a

big believer of one solution to one very specific problem for

one very specific type of individual in one very specific industry or community.

So to use the health coach scenario, well, I could say, well, I'm a health

coach. Well, a bit vanilla, a bit boring, tons of health coaches out there, right?

But what if I'm a health coach for men in their 40s. Okay, now we're

getting a bit more specific, right? Well, what if I'm a health coach, the men

in their 40s are recovering from major surgery? Wow. So every bit of information I

put out, every bit of language that I use, whether it's written form, video, audio,

whatever it is, that's going to hit hard when that 40 plus year old man

who's just come out of a hernia operation or got a bit of heart operation

or something like that, he's going to say, this is the guy, this is the

guy that helped me. This is perfect and ready to do business with you immediately

rather than just saying, I'm a health coach, I hope you lose weight and get

strong. Okay, so now that we understand the fundamentals of what a lifestyle business is

and what makes it different to other types of businesses, Level two is then all

about coming up with a business idea, which is where a lot of people get

stuck. I find that in my experience, a lot of people, when they're thinking business

idea, they're thinking things like Instagram or Amazon or whatever, but this is actually the

wrong way to think about coming up with a business idea. And the first thing

we need to understand is the difference between your target and your market. So let's

pick up where we left off with Chris's health coaching idea for men in their

forties recovering from surgery. But Chris, objection, objection, Your Honor.

Sustained. If I were to narrow down

to just men over 40 and just men over 40 for coming from an operation,

like surely there's not enough of them out there. And also I can help anyone.

So like I don't want to pigeonhole myself into just helping those people. I love

this. I love this. I love this rhetoric. So yes, it's true. And I think

the big thing here, and this is why a lot of people worry about narrowing

down their markets you know, their target market or niching down, as a lot of

people call it. There is something to be said for that. And you're absolutely right.

When I say I'm a health coach who helps men only in their 40s who

are recovering from surgery, for example, that's a much, much smaller number of the general

demographic out there than it is. I'm a health coach. It helps you lose weight

and get strong. But the fact of the matter is there's a whole bunch of

people out there who are health coaches and help you lose weight and get strong.

But there's not that many people out there that only work with men in their

40s who are recovering from surgery. So again, it's a language thing. When that person

sees you, or more importantly, one of their friends sees you, who then

recommends that they check you out, because we're way more likely to follow the advice

of somebody that we know and trust already, AKA a friend, family member, whatever it

is. When those kind of recommendations take place, the language that you're using is a

lot more personal, a lot more visceral, right? And that's the kind of connection that

you want with people as early on in them coming into your ecosystem as possible.

Will it become a little harder for you to grow your email list or your

following or your subscriber count over a shorter period of time? Maybe. Maybe not harder,

per se, but you might see it's a bit more of a slow burner. particularly

in the early days, but I guarantee you by serving a very direct part of

a very direct community or industry, you will make money a lot easier

in the long run. Now, one of the most counterintuitive truths in business is that

the more specific your target, the broader your actual market becomes. And you

can think of it kind of like archery, right? If you imagine an archer, they're

not aiming for like somewhere over there, right? They're aiming for a target. They're aiming

to hit the bullseye of the target. And the reason you aim for the bullseye

is that because even if you miss the bullseye, at least you're gonna be in

the general vicinity of the target itself. But if you aim for anywhere on the

wall or like, oh, my market is anyone who'll pay me, that's sort of like,

oh, I'm just gonna fire arrows in that random direction and hope they hit something

good. And if you have that approach to business where you're like, oh, my target

market is literally anyone, then you're making life incredibly hard for yourself. but when you

aim for a very specific bullseye, like, you know, rich men in the US in

their 40s recovering from surgery, when you aim for something that specific, then something really

interesting happens, which is that firstly, your message really resonates with rich men in the

US in their 40s recovering from surgery because your message is so targeted to them.

But also as a result, you naturally reach a wider audience as well. So maybe

slightly older men or maybe slightly younger men, maybe men with similar challenges. Maybe it

might be women trying to recover from surgery as well. And this is one of

those immutable laws of marketing from that book however many immutable laws of marketing, which

is that the target is not the market. The target is the aiming point that

allows you to hit a broader market. Now, if you're enjoying the video at this

point, you might be interested in something new that my team and I are cooking

up called the Lifestyle Business Academy, where we're trying to build basically an online business

school for lifestyle entrepreneurs. And our first product is a 12 month mentorship package, where

the idea is that we'll help you build a $100,000 a year lifestyle business in

under 12 months guaranteed. Yes, exactly. We're guaranteeing that particular outcome. If you're interested in

learning more about what that involves, there'll be a link in the video description. Yeah.

One thing I often say to people, I, I, I find myself asking that like,

Hey, if you were hiring a photographer for your wedding, would you hire a photographer

or would you hire a wedding photographer? Everyone's like, well, obviously I'd hire a, hire

a, a wedding photographer and wedding photographers can charge way more money to slap the

word wedding onto the thing. And you can just like 10 extra prices compared to

a general photographer. So I think like, In a world where there was only,

if there was only one person in the world who was a photographer, then yes,

you would just be a photographer. But in a world where there's like five zillion

people that are photographers, you really have to niche down if you want to stand

any chance of getting any sort of cut through in the market at all. So

I've got a great example, personal example, personal story I can tell on this. So

about four years or so ago, I burnt out pretty

hardcore. And my naturopathic doctor, who I was working with on

gut cleansing and supplementation and diet and all that kind of stuff, she said to

me, you need to get out into nature every single day. Your stress will drop

through the floor, et cetera, et cetera. So I went out and I started just

walking in local woods, close to where we live. And I noticed that when I

was out and about, I was noticing all these birds and other types of wildlife.

And I told my wife about it and she was like, well, next time you

go out, Why don't you take the old DSLR that we've got bouncing around that

we only ever use for bloody birthday parties and Christmas and take some photos of

these birds? Okay, fine, I'll do it. So I did it. Now I'm the guy

that walks around with a 600 mil wildlife lens. I've become a amateur wildlife photographer.

Now, here's the thing. I've never really used cameras all that well at all, right?

And certainly my knowledge was very, very minimal. So when I wanted to become a

better wildlife photographer, What do you think I looked for online? I looked for a

wildlife photographer that could teach me how to zone in the settings on my camera

and actually even go one step further. The camera system I use is the Olympus

system. So I went to find an Olympus wildlife photographer, not just a wildlife photographer,

because I wanted to be out in the field learning how to take better photos

of these birds and squirrels and all that kind of stuff, but with somebody who

was used to using my actual camera. In one day, it cost me 350 pounds

to have this guy by my side all day long from about 7.30 in the

morning through to about 2 p.m. And in one day, I sped up that learning

curve. I eliminated the learning curve, actually, by learning all about aperture and ISO

settings and how to get my photos sharper and shutter speeds and all this kind

of stuff, which were incredibly important for me to be able to take great photos

of these subjects. Could I have learnt it all on my own? Yeah, probably. How

would I have done it? I would have maybe watched a bunch of YouTube videos

or maybe looked at some handbooks online or something like that. But the period of

time it would have taken me to get to where I was by the end

of that afternoon with Adam, giving him a name drop now as well,

that would have been much, much, much, much longer. Months and months and months, if

not years maybe. But in one day, because he was a Olympus wildlife photographer, I

was able to speed up everything. So it's the perfect example. One thing that I

have found surprising is I've been in a couple of events in Hong Kong talking

about like, you know, how to start your first business and stuff. And one of

the things I wish someone had told me when I got started was that don't

think of it as like business ideas. A lot of people are like, I don't

have any ideas. I like to think of it as like sort of person problem

solution or like, you know, who is the person that you can actually help achieve

some kind of transformation and then your business is the vehicle that helps them with

that. And that idea seems like mind blowing to people. Like we've seen people come

and be like, whoa, I've never thought of it as like person problem solution, you

know, that kind of thing. How did you first realize that that's what business is

rather than, oh, let me just come up with a business idea and start doing

drop shipping or something. So my first business was a call

center facility, B2B, everything I knew. I knew I could

kill it in that business. And although we had that little hiccup about six months

in when we were a little cash poor for a bit, it only lasted for

a month or two. When I really realized the people, what was it? You said

people, problem, solution? Yeah, or just really solving someone's problem is the thing. When I

really realized that was in 2010, and I was blogging, because blogging was a thing

you did in 2010. And at the time, I was blogging a lot about virtual

team building, VAs, that kind of stuff. And somebody who

commented on one of my blog posts, I'll never forget, his name is Michael, and

he had the little Johnny Bravo cartoon character image for his kind of gravatar,

whatever they called it back in the day, which would be next to his name.

And he said something to the effect of, This all sounds great and everything, Chris,

but I'd love to be able to hire a VA to help me with my

business. I'm a solopreneur. A few years in, I know I could do with a

few extra hours on my hands every day, but there's no one I could really

trust to help me find a VA properly. Like if there was somebody I could

trust where I would invest in that, that would be the easiest money that I

would spend all year if somebody could solve that problem for me. So I was

like, ding dong, ding dong, entrepreneur alert kind of thing. Two weeks later, we launched

virtualstafffinder.com, which was a one-page website. And it was, we can help

you find great VAs in the Philippines, click here to buy now. And the very

first day we put it out there, we had our first order. It was a

doctor in LA. Can't remember what industry he was in now, but, and

here we are now, Virtual Staff Finder was acquired last year by a company called

WorkPod. And, I mean, in the 15, 16 years that we

were serving people, I think we had something like 9,000 VAs hired. Very specifically,

it wasn't the best business model. We made a ton of money, but it wasn't

the best business model because it was a one and done scenario. Are you time

poor? Are you stressed out? Are you an entrepreneur that needs help? There's

your person. A VA in the Philippines who is used to doing these things for

you is available. We can help you with that. Match.com,

that was us in the middle, right? And we did that really, really,

really well. And a whole bunch of people came into the industry trying to copy

us. Nobody could do it. Because number one, we were based there. We had offices

there. We had facilities there. We would hold training events for VAs and everything else.

But number two is... they start trying to go in too many different directions. We

can help your VA do this or do that, and there's a course and all

this. We just did one thing really, really, really well for all those years. And

we just solved one very specific problem. And that was, I'm stressed out, I'm overworked,

I need to find a VA, I don't know where to look, help. And we

were there. Okay, so if you want to make money on your own terms, the

good news is that all of the skills you need are totally learnable. You don't

need to be world-class at any of them, especially when you're just starting out, but

your earning potential basically comes down to a simple formula of like the amount of

money you can make is a product of your productivity skills multiplied by your craft

skills multiplied by your business skills. Now we're going to talk about productivity skills in

level four, but level three is all about the others, the professional skills and the

craft skills. And let's start with professional skills. A lot of people love this idea

of being able to start a lifestyle business that gives them fun, freedom, flexibility, all

that kind of stuff. But let's say they're in their 30s. They've been working on

a bunch of corporate jobs since they graduated university. So maybe they've got like 10

years in the workforce and they will often think, oh, I have no skills. I

have no skills that I can turn into a business like, oh, my goodness, I

don't know how to code. So like, How would you coach someone who's in that

situation? The exact opposite couldn't be any more true, actually. If you've been doing anything

for 10 odd years, you're probably pretty good at a number of different things. You're

just not aware of it due to the fact that you're too close to it.

And the easiest way to figure out what people come to you for is to

exactly look at what people have come to you for. How can you help people

the most? The answer to that question is, well, what do my friends come to

me for? What are my coworkers, my peers, my contacts? What are they coming to

me for over and over and over again? And if you look closely at those

relationships, those asks from those relationships as well, hey, can you do me a favor?

Hey, can I get your advice on? Hey, have you got time? Can I pick

your brain? That kind of stuff. That's what you can start off with. It might

not be the business forever, but Let's clarify that, because pivots and changes are

very, very normal, right? We know that, you've pivoted several times, I've pivoted several times,

but it can be the start, and that's the most important thing. Instead of just

getting stuck in the mud, not doing absolutely anything because of fear of screwing it

up or not being helpful enough or whatever the case may be, all those fears,

push them to the side. Look at what people have asked you for help on

in the past, start with that. You've probably got way more skills than you think

you could do. Okay, cool. So that was professional skills. Let's now look at craft

skills. We have a bunch of students in our Lifestyle Business Academy who are trying

to find their niche. And there's a lot of them that have professional skills, skills

that they use for work, they've already been hired for to help businesses make money.

That's very easily monetizable. But there are a lot that are passionate about personal things

like yoga or guitar or music or wildlife photography, for example. And they always worry

that like, ah, but like there's no money in wildlife photography or there's no money

in teaching photography because it's so saturated. And what I would say to them is

like, there's no money if you're trying to teach photography to like kids or like

students who don't have any money. But imagine like the analogy I sometimes use is

like, how much money do old rich men spend on golf? It's insane amount of

money. They're not professional golfers. And yet they spend an insane amount of golf. You're

an older rich man. How much would you be willing to pay for like wildlife

photography as a hobby? Yeah. Yeah. And the perfect example, you know, that old DSLR

camera that I'd had probably cost, oh, I don't know, four or five hundred quid

or something, you know, when we bought it 12 years ago or whatever. But within

two months of using it every other day, I'm going to drop four and a

half grand on a brand new camera system and didn't think twice about it. And

it's not your job. You don't have an ROI. You're not making money from it,

but you're a good target market, i.e. wealthy older man wanting hobbies. And so you're

willing to spend on their hobbies. You know, if I'm and let's keep with the

wildlife photographer thing for a minute. Right. So if I'm in that industry and I'm

thinking, well, Nat Geo isn't calling me for the cover shoot on a monthly basis.

The BBC might want to work with me every three years for Spring Watch. But

like, you know, how am I going to make my money? Well, I can tell

you right now, there's a whole bunch of different ways. Number one, you can work

with people like me. Number two, you could create prints and sell them limited edition

prints. You could put together an online course teaching other people how to take

amazing photos of birds, for example. Get very specific, not just, but now it's birds

or it's snow leopards, you know, whatever it might be. You could even go

to the point where you put in play a physical game. So let's say I

know somebody who's got a whole bunch of land and there's a beautiful woodland area.

Maybe I converse with that guy and say, hey, I want to build a wildlife

photography hide on your land. I'm going to charge 200 pounds a day. I'm going

to keep the place spotless. It's going to be great. I promise I'll look after

it and all the rest of it. Just need to build a little shed, cut

some holes in there. I'm going to charge people 200 pounds a day to come

and spend an entire day in the hides. And I'm going to give you 20%

perpetually. What do you think? Now I've got another service I can provide. There's a

lot of different ways you can skin any cat in any industry. It's just about

trying to open up your mind and think about it properly. Yeah. One of the

one of the people we had in our course was actually into I think was

landscape photography in particular. And he was like, how do I monetize landscape photography? I

could do a course on landscape photography, but that's price anchored to I don't know,

a few hundred dollars. And we kind of worked with him a little bit to

sort of refine his offer such that it's not it's not that he's selling an

online course of wildlife photography, because you could, but you would need a lot of

volume to make interesting money with a $300 course. But what if he were to

do like a $10,000 retreat for burned out corporate professionals that help them de-stress in

a really nice location, through the vehicle of landscape photography. Now we were like, oh,

okay, that's interesting. And immediately his like sort of neurons started firing around like what

he could do because he's worked with burned out corporate professionals before. He knows a

bunch of retreat centers, he'd be able to do that. He's got a bunch of

cameras so he can get everyone into wildlife photography as a sort of meditative thing.

Because now the value proposition, the target audience has money. They have a painful problem,

which is that they are burned out and stressed and stuff. And they have this

affinity for this thing of like landscape photography. So if you can combine those things,

you now create a different offer than what people might be thinking of like, how

do I monetize wildlife photography? Couldn't agree more. And that's about, I hate to use

management speak, but thinking outside the box a little bit in any industry. I worked

with a client recently who is a architect, very successful one, but he's got sort

of, in fact, actually his business has become teaching people how to sketch. like an

architect, very specifically from a hobby perspective at first, and now a little bit more

kind of professionally with iPads and all the rest of it as well. And I've

known him for a few years, and we started working with each other recently on

being able to scale his business. And he was doing really well already, but he

wanted to bring in more revenue without doing a whole bunch of extra work. And

I said to him, well, have you ever run a sketching retreat? He lives in

Prague, beautiful city to sketch. And he said, well, no, I wouldn't want to do

that. It's way too much work. Or babysit a bunch of people for a day

or several days. It's the last thing I want to do is to be responsible

for a bunch of people for a prolonged period of time. I said, but what's

the difference between doing that and an online membership? Same thing. It's still responsible for

providing value over a period of time. In this case, it's only maybe a few

days instead of every single month you were to show up. So reluctantly, he gave

it a go. and he did his first sketch and retreat in Prague a few

months ago. I think he had 12 people turn up. Now, because this is in

person, it's multiple days, he was able to charge more for that experience he's ever

charged for anything he's ever sold ever before. When it was all said and done,

I asked him how he found it. And he said, best thing I've ever done,

easiest money I've ever made. I rest my case, your honor.

Yeah. I love it. There was... So we ran an entrepreneur's

mastermind like a few days ago, basically modeled after the one that I attended when

I gave a talk at your mastermind. Oh, yeah. Where I was like, that was

so fun speaking at yours. And I was so inspired to like start my own

thing. And so we just put it out to our audience that, hey, if you're

a six figure plus entrepreneur, come join us. I saw some of your social posts

about this. Yeah. Come join us. And we had like 15 people and they all

paid like three grand to be there. Yep. And so I mean, how many? One

day event? Two days? One day event. One day event. And so, you know, we

didn't make an insane amount of money from it, but like it was enough to

cover my the cost of my trip to London with the family and stuff. And

it was so fun. It's like the most fun thing I have done in years.

Getting a small group of people together to do something in person and have one-on-one

conversations with them and have dinner. It was just so sick. When you get sick,

so good. You can tell you we're the younger person in the room when something's

sick. I love it. Here's the thing. When you get people like you and I

who are really passionate about what we do, and why we do it and who

we do it for, that's not work. Did you feel like you were at work

at all? But sometimes, and be really honest here, when you have to plan YouTube

videos and you've got to sit down, you see the grin already? Yeah, that feels

like work. It feels like work a little bit, right? But when you are hanging

out and you're serving clients in a face-to-face way, and three grand for a day

ain't cheap, that's a good chunk of change for anybody, really, right? I would have

to think, even in my position, I would have to think, is 3,000 pounds for

the day with Ali and his team? Is that worth it? How much value is

that going to bring? I would ask myself that question. So all those people have

asked that question of themselves as well, not to mention hotel and travel and all

the rest of it as well. But you show up. You're your own authentic self.

You are all giving, all being, all present. And I guarantee you, every single person

walked away thinking that they got their hour away ROI and some, right? And it

was the easiest work you've done in months probably. I loved it. It felt like

cheating because I was mostly facilitating rather than teaching. And initially I was like, oh

my God, I have to plan like 10 hours worth of content. And then I

watched some YouTube videos from other coaches about how to facilitate events. And they were

all like, don't go overboard on the content. Focus on facilitation, getting connections between people,

getting them to share their own lessons. It was so fun. Well, the other thing

is how often do particularly online entrepreneurs get together in person? Yeah, quite rarely.

Very, very rarely. It's quite a lonely kind of business. It is. It is very

lonely. And I think when you're, I don't think I know, when you are the

person that brings those people together, you are remembered for that

first and foremost. We used to run a retreat event in the Philippines. We did

it for four or five years called Tropical Think Tank. And we had people come

back year after year after year after year. And still to this

day, when I bump into people who came to any of those events, and we're

talking like 10 odd years ago now, they say to me, best events I've ever

been to. I met this person, this person, this person. We had people fall in

love at that event. We had speakers end up going into business

with attendees at that event. It was multiple days, beautiful five-star

resort on the beach. It was very intimate. And by the time you were done,

we had 50 people every time. By the time you were done, you had a

new family that you could call whenever you needed them on your phone. And that

was what it was about. All right, so at this point, we have a sense

of like, okay, we wanna build a lifestyle business and we maybe have a feel

for like what skills, what preexisting skills do we have that can allow us to

target a particular market and help them with a particular outcome. Let's now talk about

the realm of productivity, which is basically, how do you actually do this alongside things

like having your day job or looking after your family or whatever the thing might

be. And in this section, we're gonna talk about consistency and how to actually stick

to the thing. We're gonna talk about experiments and we're gonna talk about the three

currencies you need to manage as an entrepreneur. On the one hand, there's a lot

of people in our audience wanna start their first business, but they're paralyzed with indecision.

Maybe they have been working for like 10 years or whatever. And so they do

have the skills. They just think that A, think they don't have the skills and

B, think they need to have the perfect business idea and that the niche they

start on day one must be their forever niche because they've heard this thing of

like, oh, you know, I've got to pick something, stick to it. And also this

idea of like, oh, I don't want to waste time doing something that might not

work. How do you balance that fear with the thing around like it's OK to

pivot with the thing around? Yeah, but you kind of need to do something and

stick to it for a while. How would you think about that? I mean, you

know, at the end of the day, as a lifelong entrepreneur, I believe it's better

to do something than stay paralyzed and do absolutely nothing because of fear. You know,

entrepreneurs get the big rewards because they take the biggest risks. They walk away from

careers. They put their own money in their time, energy, effort, even health behind trying

to get something up and running and growing, right? So we should get the biggest

rewards. We really should, right? Genuinely. It's not easy to go out and do your

own thing and all the rest of it. But, you know, for examples, let's, Let's

use Amazon as an example, right? One of the biggest companies on the planet. When

they got started, they just sold books. That's all they sold. And they did that

for quite a long time until they started selling other things. Now, they

literally sell everything, pretty much everything, right? And so, what did I say

recently? They started in America. They've just started prescriptions.

So you can do the whole GP doctor thing, I believe, through Amazon now. They

will do the prescriptions through Amazon now. You order prescriptions, pay for them, whatever it

is, through all of your Amazon account, and the medicine gets sent to you directly.

So I mean, they literally do an email, right? When Bezos started that company, he

didn't think one day that he'd be sending people their prescription medication. He just wanted

to sell them books. So you've got to get started, I think. If you're a

little worried about how things might look from a financial perspective at first as well,

let's say you're in a good job and you're making a good living and maybe

you're in your early, the mid thirties or so, you maybe got one kid, maybe

another one on the way, or you'd like to bring another one into the game

at some point in the future. There's responsibilities baked into all of that, right? And

I understand how some people say, I really wanna quit my job. I don't like

my job. Borderline hate it. I've got this great idea to sell this widget

to this particular type of person, but I'm really scared that if I shift over

to doing that and it doesn't work out, how am I going to look after

my family? How am I going to provide? Well, the good news is you can

kind of skate on both sides of the ice for a little while. It's called

a side hustle, right? I'm not a massive fan of that term, but doing something

on the side never hurt no one for a while when it comes to business,

right? Because I remember I started my side hustle when I was in a full-time

employment. I was making great money at a publishing company, but I was also a

really big fan of Hong Kong movies. And so, I know this is out of

left field for you. We've not had this discussion at any point of us hanging

out. So mid-90s, I was a big Hong Kong movie fan. Yeah, yeah. I mean,

like Bruce Lee is my lifelong hero. And... So in the mid-90s, I started a

magazine called Hong Kong Superstars. Why is he laughing? I have no idea about this.

Why are you laughing so hard? This is so random. You always spat his coat

out. It's random. But there's a point to it. Stick with me here. There's a

point to it. So in a matter of about 18 months or so, I went

from being just a Hong Kong movie fan with a full-time job at a publishing

company to then launch my own website, yes, in like 95, 96. And

being able to slowly but surely, and I remember that the catalyst was I started

writing for a martial arts magazine very specifically about Hong Kong action. I think

that the column is called Action from the East or something like that. Pretty catchy

monthly column. And so I started writing about the movies I was watching and why

people should check them out and all this kind of stuff. Slowly but surely, I

launched my own magazine called Hong Kong Superstars. I started traveling to Hong Kong to

meet up with actors and actresses and directors and producers who worked on the movies.

And then I started bringing those actors over to the UK for movie

events. We'd do double bells. We had people like Jet Li came and did an

event with us. Jackie Chan came over. We were involved with Jackie Chan's event when

he launched his for his movie Rumble in the Bronx. I think that was in

97, I think, something, 98, something like that. What I'm getting at here is

all of this was going on at the same time as me working full time.

Did I ever get it to the point where I could leave the full time

job? No, I didn't. We did make a bit of money out of it, but

it was up and down like a yo-yo, right? But it was enough for me

to catch the bug of doing something on my own. And even though I carried

on in the corporate world for a while, I knew ultimately I was an entrepreneur

deep down. I knew it deep down. And so it was enough for me to

be able to just get going and try things out and launch things and create

things and sell things and market things and bring a community of people together. We

would sell out 250 seat cinemas for these double bills in London. And people would

come together and then we'd see the same people come to the next event and

the next event, oh my God, I'm actually building a community now, this is cool.

So then we would go over to Hong Kong and we'd go to all the

markets and we'd buy the VCDs and the DVDs and the posters and the postcards

and the photos and I'd meet up with the stars and I'd get them to

sign everything and then I'd bring them back to England and put a markup on

them and sell them all and we would do all these things. And it was

all because of one idea that I wasn't scared to take action on. This is

great. I have a lot of stories I can tell you about Hong Kong, but

not in front of the video camera. Excellent. A lot of people would be

like, I'm also a very firm believer in the fact that, you know, I'm a

risk averse guy. I was never like, oh, I'm just going to quit my job

and do the thing. I was always like, hey, I should be able to do

the thing as a side hustle. I also don't like what side hustle is. It's

got like some dodgy connotations. What would you call it? Let's talk about this for

a minute. Can we talk about this for a minute? Well, I don't know what

I would potentially call it. I would just call it a, I don't know, like

a, like a project or a thing. I was working on, like, have you got

a better term for it? I've, I've often played with it with, well, like experiment.

I'm just doing an experiment on like, you know, that kind of thing. Um, One

thing I like about this kind of lifestyle business definition of like, you know, it's

a business that serves your own lifestyle is that no one says you have to

work 40 hours a week for this. You could totally scale it down to four

hours a week if you really want to. Obviously, if you're only spending four hours

a week on something, it's probably going to go scale slower than if you're spending

80 hours a week on it, probably. But that's okay. Like anyone can walk 26

miles. It's just a question of how fast, right? If you want to, you can

run a marathon and do it in like two hours. If you're like an absolute

legend, you can just trundle it. You could do it over many days. Like it's

not that hard to get to 26 miles as long as you're not wedded to

the speed. So I think similarly for a side hustle or for a lifestyle business,

you can actually just do it at your own pace. And as long as you're

not wedded to like, oh my God, I have to hit this certain milestone by

this particular time, or I have to get it to a hundred K in revenue

within X amount of months, then The fact that you're only doing it on the

weekends and evenings some of the time when you've got nothing else going on, I

think is a totally reasonable way of getting started. And you don't know what's around

the corner. You don't know how that's going to potentially level up or scale up

at some point in the future. Years ago, I worked with a client. Her name

was Francesca, and she was really kind of sick and tired of seeing her kids

and other kids that she would kind of see on a regular basis just attach

to screens all the time. And she was a big fan of journaling. And so

she developed this little journal for kids called the Happy Self Journal. And it's blown

up and she's been in all the press and she sold hundreds of thousands of

these things and that's a full time thing and she distributes in multiple countries and

multiple languages and all the rest of it. But it all came out of that

one initial idea that she wasn't scared to just try. Yeah. And I think this

is the key thing where it's like, if you think, if you're waiting for this

dreamy idea that lets you suddenly quit your job with complete conviction, it's literally never

going to happen. It's just not going to be a thing. A lot of the

people that you and I speak to who have gotten into business, who are financially

free, who are living the dream lifestyle, they started stuff on the side. They had

a bunch of pivots and eventually they found something that worked. And then once they

validated that it worked and it was able to give them security, at that point

they decided to quit their jobs rather than the whole like, I'm gonna drop out

of university at the age of 17 and just like make it work in my

grandpa's garage. That's like, we hear the stories about that in the media, but we

hear them because they're unusual. We don't hear the story of like, you know what,

I was working a corporate job. I decided I was gonna learn how to do

websites because I like the idea of graphic design and stuff. I got a few

freelance clients on the side and then eventually built my own very small boutique web

design consulting firm or web design agency. And now I'm making six figures doing what

I love. No one's ever gonna write a news report about that because, quote, only

making 300,000 pounds a year doing what you love through this boutique web design agency

that lets you work 20 hours a week. For a lot of people, that's a

dream, but it's not sexy enough to be in the media. But I'm a big

believer now that is going to become more and more

and more normal. I think post the pandemic,

people's mindsets are different to what life is

like, what it can be, so on and so on and so on. I mean,

I know I've worked with thousands of people in the last 15 years of coaching

and speaking and running events and all the rest of it. And I can tell

you, actually, I had one conversation with a client about a year and a half

ago who said she was doing about half a million a year pounds. And she

said, you know what, I'm kind of OK with this. Don't need to make any

more, but I want to work a lot less. So that's my mission for this

year, Chris. How do I make that happen? So we went through systems and processes

and delegation and all the rest of it. So she brought her hours down from

about 50 a week to about 25, 30 a week. So we cut it almost

in half, still making the same kind of money. So that's a lifestyle business now,

right? The type of business where on a Wednesday afternoon, you can go do a

movie double bill with your partner, right? Or as my wife likes to pull me

into the yoga studio on an ad hoc basis. You haven't been in the yoga

studio for a a few days, come on, let's, you know, that kind of thing,

right? Or if I want to go out for a walk with my, you know,

with my son, you know, like right now, we're shooting this in the middle of

the summer holidays here in the UK, my boy's 16. He's become a little bit

of a bird watcher as well. He likes to go out. He's now using the

old DSLR that I used for a while and have given him now. And he's

saying, you know, we've not gone out for a week or so, Dad, you know,

can we go out? And I'm like, well, let me have a look to pull

up my schedule. I'm like, you know, I can move that until later this afternoon.

Let's go out and we'll go out. That's the kind of freedom that I want

as a father, first and foremost, but also as an entrepreneur as well. And, you

know, I've not worked a Friday pretty religiously now for coming on like nine or

10 years. Now, when I say I've not worked a Friday, it's not entirely true.

I want to caveat that slightly. Every now and then I will do a business

call on a Friday afternoon or morning or I'll have to pound into emails for

half an hour or maybe I've got to travel for a speaking engagement or something

like that. But historically, eight, nine, 10 years or so now, there's nothing been on

my schedule on a Friday. And the reason why is because that's my day. It's

my day to be able to do what I want with it. And even during

the Monday, the Thursday now, I generally don't start working till about 10 in the

morning. And I'll usually finish up at around three or four in the afternoon. So

I'm working way, way, way less, as I alluded to earlier, making less money than

I used to make when I was running big multi-million dollar businesses, but never

happier, never feeling more content with what I'm about and what I'm doing and who

I'm doing it for than I am right now. And that I think is more

powerful and it's more important in today's world than it has been for a long,

long, long, long time. Yeah, this is why I like to think of it as

almost sort of this triangle of like, yes, you've got financial freedom on the one

hand, but there's also time freedom and creative freedom. And I think a lot of

entrepreneurs in particular almost over optimize for the financial freedom side of it. It was

like, oh man, if I just do 100 hour weeks at this startup, then maybe

I'll sell for 100 million and then I'll be financially free. And then they write

blog posts being like, I've just sold my company for 100 million and now I'm

depressed because I have nothing to do. And they try and find another business or

they start writing books and starting YouTube channels. It tends to be the two kind

of parts here. Or they do like spiritual enlightenment or whatever. But what I like

about the whole lifestyle business thing is that you recognize that actually sometimes it's OK

to leave money on the table for the sake of time freedom and for the

sake of creative freedom. You could be making more money if you worked Fridays, but

you don't care. You'd rather make a bit less money and live the life that

you want. Yeah, exactly. And that's OK. You should be absolutely fine with that. That's

not something that you should lose sleep over. It's not something that if your friends,

you know, jeer at you about, you have to pay much attention to them. Maybe

get some new friends. I don't know. You know, your friendship group, the people around

you, they should support you, not necessarily kind of poke fun. So let's say when

you're working in publishing and you're doing this sort of magazine stuff on the side.

Some people would be like, I'd love to do something on the side. But when

I get home from work, I just don't have any energy. Any thoughts? Well, that

comes down to recovery. And I think, you know, we were on the train today,

come to the studio. And I observed a few different people on the train.

And I noticed that there was one lady who was working on a PowerPoint presentation,

7.30 in the morning on the train. There was a guy who was like this,

completely out. And then there was another person lady, I believe, to the right, putting

on her makeup and replying to emails on her phone and things like that. Our

workday in the corporate world has gone from nine to five to probably around about

seven to nine. A lot of it is because of our devices that we're carrying

around. But I think also a lot of it has come down to A lot

of companies are now, oh, you've got your phone with you. You can reply to

a quick text message outside of office hours or whatever, like before. And you're too

young to remember this. But I remember it very explicitly. When I

left the office, I didn't do any work until the next morning when I was

in the office. Didn't do it because there was no way to do it. I

didn't have a laptop. Didn't have a company phone or anything like that. There's no

way my boss could call me. and ask me to do something, let alone sit

there doing a PowerPoint on the train while I'm trying to eat a muffin and

swallow my second coffee of the day. There's no way I could do that. Things

have changed now. And that comes down to managing your energy. And I believe, I

used to say that time is our most valuable commodity as an entrepreneur. I'm going

to retract that now, Your Honor. And I'm going to say that energy is your

most important commodity as an entrepreneur. Because without energy, you're no good to anybody, right?

So the question then I would say is, well, I'd love to be able to

work on my side thing when I get home, but I don't have any energy.

I would start looking at lifestyle. What are you doing to capture more energy, convert

more energy, create more energy? Are you eating properly? Are you moving your body properly?

Are you getting a proper seven, eight hours of sleep each day? Are you supplementing

properly? How bad do you want it? I'm not going to go into the hustle

mode here or anything like that. And there's nothing bad with hustle. Hustle will be

required, but hustle's a season, not a lifestyle, right, as we say. So, you know,

you can only hustle for a certain period of time before the tank runs empty,

then you're on fumes. What are you going to do now? Well, I've got to

recover, right? But how bad do you want to work on the side thing when

you get home? If you want to work on it really badly, you'll make sure

that you eat proper food and that you won't, you know, be too reliant on

coffee or sugary things. You'll make sure that you're getting a good amount of sleep

every night. Simple things, right? But unfortunately, because of that hustle mentality that we've been

kind of force fed, particularly in the last couple of decades, a lot of us

aren't doing those things, and myself included. I've been there, I've eaten horrible diets and

not looked at sleep properly and all those things. I'm not that man anymore now.

Like I'm in a totally different ballgame now. I'm the guy actually tells my wife

to turn the light off at night because she wants to carry on reading and

I want to go to sleep. Nice. It's 10.30, it's time for sleep.

And obviously I used to love to watch movies until midnight, 1am. So how badly

do you want it is the answer to that. Now being successful as an entrepreneur

ultimately comes down to being able to manage these three fundamental resources of time, energy,

and focus. And that's to be honest, why I became obsessed with personal productivity when

I was around 18 years old, because I didn't care about productivity for its own

sake, but I knew that productivity would help me on my goal to financial freedom.

Like if you're really good at managing your time, you're way more likely to get

to financial freedom quicker than someone who's really bad at managing that time. If you,

for example, do more of the things that give you energy, like going for a

walk instead of scrolling on TikTok, you're gonna have way more energy to build your

business. And finally, if you have the skill of focus of being able to just

like put your mind to a thing and focus on it and just do it

for at least half an hour, that will get you drastically further ahead than people

who are like constantly distracted and really struggling to focus. And so this is why

if you're serious about becoming financially free and maybe building a lifestyle business to get

you there, just really worth getting better at managing your time, managing your energy and

managing your focus. Side note, there is an app that me and my wife have

recently released called Momentum Energizing Habits. It's available on iOS, there'll be a link down

below. And that's an app that we build to try and solve the energy problem

particularly, because like, you know, a lot of us know what are the energizing things

that we should do. Like, and for me, I know it's if I stretch, if

I go to the gym, if I go for a walk, I'll get much more

energy, but I really struggled in the past with consistency of actually doing those things.

And so we built an app. It's sort of like a habit tracker with accountability

squads built into it. And I've been super consistent for the last like three months

on my energizing habits purely because now I have accountability with this app. Anyway, if

you're interested, it's called Momentum. It's available on the app store and you can check

it out if you like. I learned this term a couple of years ago. I

watched the YouTube video about LeBron James. I'm a big Boston Celtics fan. So I

don't like LeBron because he's on the Lakers. That simple. But I respect LeBron James

for the athlete that he is. Here he is, I think in his eight, 17th

season, I think, or something like that. And this whole video was

about how he keeps the main thing, the main thing. He makes all this money

through endorsements and business deals and investments and everything else that he does away from

the game of basketball. But he is well aware of the fact that it's the

basketball career that has been able to fuel all those other opportunities. So he keeps

the main thing the main thing. And the message of this video was he, I

think he was, the rumor was he was spending like a million bucks a year

on his body. So he would buy the cryo chamber and he would do the

hyperbaric chamber for oxygen and red light therapy and, personal trainer,

personal condition coach, strength trainer, personal chef, personal dietician, personal

supplementation, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, right? But

the man has a plan and he's working the plan. And because of that, here

he is now. I don't know how many seasons he's playing, but I know that

he's a 40-year-old now playing like a 30-year-old in

a... league which has become more and more and more physical in the last 10

to 15 years and he's still dropping 20, 25 points a game

when he's on so there's got to be something in keeping the main thing the

main thing. There's a couple of good books about this. There's Essentialism by Greg McKeown

that elaborates on basically this concept of just do one thing and do it really

well. There's also The One Thing by Gary Keller that talks about basically just do

one thing and do it really well. And I speak to so many entrepreneurs as

part of our Lifestyle Business Academy who are like constantly trying to pursue multiple directions

that like, oh, I want to do this niche and that niche and this niche

and this product and that product. And a lot of what I talk about when

I do Q&As with them is like, you know, if there's one piece of advice

I wish someone had told me when I was starting out on my business journey.

It's like, make the main thing the main thing, do one thing, do it really

well. Once you're making a million a year from that one thing, then sure, let's

expand the product lines and like do multiple things. But like, generally focus is the

way to get to financial freedom way quicker rather than doing like all these different

things. All right, the final level then, level five is all about how to stay

in the game of business because it's all well and good starting a business and

getting it off the ground. But the real challenge is actually in staying consistent. In

staying consistent, avoiding burnout and keeping your business sustainable over the long haul. This in

particular is where Chris's book is really rather good. So if you are concerned about

burnout or if you're struggling with burnout right now, if you wanna build your business

from day one in a way that's actually sustainable rather than hustling and Grindy, then

you should definitely check out the book. That'll be linked down below as well. Friendships,

relationships in general are way more important in business than most people think they are.

When people think about relationships, nine times out of 10, they think about their love

life, think about their family and their kind of initial friend group and that kind

of thing. But I think I probably spent more time in the last two decades

focusing more on business relationships in terms of the depth of them than I have

done my personal relationships because I don't need more friends. I've got lots of

acquaintances, a lot of friends, but I don't need any more best friends. Like I've

got three or four really good close friends that I know that if I ever

needed them in the middle of the night, they'd get on a plane for me

and vice versa, right? But from a business perspective, your Rolodex, to show my

age here, is the one thing that you should never ever stop

developing. Because when you need help from somebody

who has been there and done it before, a perfect example, let's say, for example

sake, I wanted to launch a brand new YouTube channel to start talking about a

new project that I was launching or something like that. Who do you think I

would call? My best friend, who I've known since I was 12 years old, I

played basketball with as a teenager, who I was at his wedding, who now works

for LinkedIn, or you yeah you see what i'm getting at

so the the importance of those relationships should not be it's not about being it's

not about using those relationships it's about deepening those relationships in the right way and

when i write a book for example and i say to somebody like you or

anybody else that endorsed this book say hey can i send you a copy of

the book early uh and if you like it you know, if you could say

a few nice things about it so I can include it to help kind of

promote the book, that would be great. That's not using a relationship, that's going deeper

on a relationship. Now you've helped me with something, if you need my help, I'm

gonna help you. It's gonna be a no-brainer. And relationships should be treasured, they shouldn't

be used. Yeah, no, I love that. I think this is one thing that I've

really, grown to appreciate even more and more over time. It's just that the longer

you do business, the more this Rolodex of contacts develops. And so it's like if

someone is like, I'm 31 now, but if someone's like 40 and has been in

the business for, has been in the game 10 years longer than I have, they've

got a way longer Rolodex. And so for them, raising money becomes trivial. It becomes

like a week long job because they know like 18 investors. So they can just

message people on WhatsApp and within days, raise a few million quid. Totally. Which is

just completely unfathomable. Or if they're launching a new product, they can just message all

of their like influencer-y type friends who they would have met on like retreats and

mastermind and there might have been a holiday together, they might have gone snorkeling together,

they might have spoken to each other's things, they might have done podcasts together. Yep.

Everyone is just like, it's not like a transactional thing of like, oh, you did

X for me, therefore I'm gonna do X. It's actually more like everyone's just trying

to help each other out. And you just know over a long enough timescale, like

the karma works itself out and it all just, yeah. And here's what I know

to be 100% true. The good people hang out with the good

people. The longer you're in the game, the easier it is

for you to sniff out the not so good people. I can see a mile

away now and I don't want anything to do with that. But if you're a

good person, you come from a place of serving first, selling later, as I always

say, serve first, sell later. If you're the type of person, I want to would

I have you to my house for a dinner? Then I know we're going to

be buddies, you know, and the good people stick with the good people. They really

do. You've written this book, The Long Haul Leader, 10 Strategies to Work Smarter, Live

Better and Achieve Lasting Success. The way you said that tagline there was as if

you've got a copy right in front of me. Yeah, like right in front of

me. It's like right here by Chris Ducker. Why is the title like,

what is a long haul leader and how does this relate to our whole like

ultimate guide to building a lifestyle business? A long haul leader is somebody who wants

to be around for the long haul that isn't really particularly interested in quick wins.

Right. Quick wins are loud. Nothing particularly wrong with them, but they're loud

and they come and go very quickly. Whereas if you're all about consistency over the

long haul, it's whisper, whisper, whisper, whisper, whisper. And then it's raw

after a 10 year career and you've served thousands of people and made millions of

dollars. It's not about selling a thousand books in a day or whatever, you

know. A long haul leader is somebody who's doing it for the right reasons, somebody

who is all about serving people and providing genuine value. And it's not about making

quick money or anything else. But most importantly, it's about the entrepreneur that is

very much focused on themselves, keeping themselves in tip top shape. The main thing, the

main thing. And understanding that their entrepreneurial journey is

only as good and only as strong and can only be told with as much

vigor as the way that they lead their life. When you run masterminds and stuff

for other entrepreneurs, what are the sorts of questions or exercises that you get people

to do to help them sort of, yes, grow the business, but also keep in

mind that like, it's not just about work, it's about life as well. Yeah, I

mean, we do a whole bunch of stuff. It's probably, there's

one particular exercise that I do, and we do it, every time we meet up.

And we call it the Stop, Stay, Start audit. And it's a pretty simple one.

Get a piece of paper and we kind of draw two lines down it, create

three columns. And in the first column, we write down all the things that are

working, or rather not working for them, I should say. So all the things that

they're doing that they should probably stop doing. Because obviously, if you carry on doing

something that's not working, how can you expect different results, right? So that stop,

What that does, it allows you, it almost gives you permission to be able to

offload the things that are not bringing you joy anymore. I'm gonna go very Marie

Kondo here for a minute. And ultimately they're dragging you down because you're continually

doing them. They're taking time, energy and effort, maybe even finances out of your day,

out of your work as well. So that's the first column is all the stuff

that you feel like you should stop doing. Second column is the stay column. And

these are things that are doing well But very possibly, where you just spend a

little bit of extra time on them, just tweaking them a little bit, they could

do a little bit better. And I'm all about what I call those micro moves,

right? So those 1% changes you can make. Let's say you've got a group coaching

program, for argument's sake, that's doing 100K a year, right? If you just tweak this,

and tweak this, and tweak this, you could be doing 140 grand a year in

12 months from now. So all those little things are doing really well for you,

but you can make some little tweaks. They stay. We don't want to get rid

of them. So the third column is the start column. And this is the most

exciting one for entrepreneurs particularly, because we love to start new things all the time,

right? But it's also the one where you've got to kind of check yourself before

you wreck yourself kind of thing. And that is that just because you can, as

we talked about earlier, just because you can start something doesn't mean you should also

start something. But what happens is because you're getting rid of a whole bunch of

stuff in your stop column, And because you're tweaking the things that are working well,

and that will create more energy in what you're doing because you'll see the results

a lot quicker, it enables you to start things that you've been pushing off for

a while. Maybe you've been procrastinating for a little bit. A lot of people that

I work with have a goal of writing a book, for example, for...

expert positioning strategy purposes or just to kind of just put their experience out there.

Maybe it's a bit of a memoir, bit of a handbook, bit of a journal,

whatever it is. So writing a book or starting a new podcast or

whatever it might be. And it doesn't even necessarily have to be connected to work

either. Maybe it's I was talking to somebody just the other day about sabbaticals and

what that looks like. For some people, they call a sabbatical a two week break.

That's not a sabbatical. That's a holiday. It's a two week vacation. It's a holiday.

It's time off work. A sabbatical is a prolonged period of time, a minimum of

four weeks, maximum maybe 12 weeks, where you take yourself out of the work environment

entirely. You do deep work. You read, you pray, you meditate, you travel,

you have deep, long conversations. That's a sabbatical right there. And how important those are.

We even talk about it in the book, actually. And so all of these things

are important. given the green light for you to be able to go ahead and

start. And that's why that stop, stay, start, audit that we do is probably one

of the most powerful exercises I do with clients. Now, if you're interested in hearing

my own personal story of how I started my own lifestyle business when I was

in med school and made my first million by the age of 26, then you'll

probably enjoy this video over here. And actually, a lot of people have already gotten

a lot of value from this video. So we'll show some of the comments on

screen. And in this video, I break down every single step from zero to $1,000

and then to $100,000 and finally to a million dollars. And I also share a

bunch of the mistakes I made along the way. So hopefully you can get there

a little bit faster. So that's that video over there. Thank you so much for

watching and I'll see you next time. Bye.