Building a Business That Can Work Without You in It w/ Simon Squibb

The business wasn't built to help them, the business was to help me make money. And so I just changed it. And I said, well, this business is built to help you get rich too. And these are the ways I can help you get rich. If I just try to make myself rich, you don't get as rich. It's 1 plus 1 equals 11. In 35 years of doing business, I've never missed payroll. I would have done if I hadn't had the right person in my life at that moment, showing me the difference between right and wrong. Branding is where value is. Build a brand, not a business. People are going to talk about you if you're in the room or not. And frankly, so first thing, what's your definition of success? Like, how do you define it? Well, it's changed over the years. You know, when I was 15 and I didn't have any money or anywhere to live, you know, like success was like having enough money to pay for a room to sleep in. It's warm at night. Yeah. You know, that was success. And I remember feeling like it took me eight weeks to go from homeless to having a place to stay. And I remember feeling like a success the day I could actually have somewhere to stay. So and as I've got older, I think, you know, you feel your own bucket up. You get to a point where, you know, long, I got to a point where I'm no longer worrying about money, which I think really I was about 40 when I first felt like I don't have to worry about money anymore. And I think that changed my brain because you come out or fight or flight and you no longer just try to survive. Yeah, I remember when I first filled my own bucket and then I thought maybe I need a bigger bucket. Yeah. And I think that happened to me. I tried the bigger bucket things and didn't get any more. Yeah. Oh, you should have bought a bigger bucket. Like for me, it's like buying a fancy car. Yeah. You know, buying a fancy house. And these are all the things that we think are going to make us happy. And I think, you know, in a way they do and in the way they don't. It is temporarily definitely. Oh, definitely. Well, I owned a really nice car and the first week I was like, this is amazing. And then slowly you got a scratch. I take to the garage and like this thing now owns me. I'm having to like show it to people to prove somehow I'm successful. It's really weird. Yeah. Yeah. I do love my cars, but I don't drive them to show on social and stuff. I drive them because I love that car. I feel good about and, you know, I think I felt proud about the fact that I could do that for myself. I exactly the same. Exactly the same. So, I mean, people say money doesn't buy you happiness. I think the truth is it does if you're already happy. Yeah. That's what I mean. I've found money to be a great multiplier. Like fame and money are multipliers. If you're a jerk and you get a lot of money, you're a complete out. That's true. By that point. Yeah. But it just multiplies who you are. So you got to that point of filling your own bucket. How did it go from there? Because what was that shift in your brain when you went from fight or flight? Yeah, just to say, I think I filled my own bucket. And one of the reasons that bucket really filled up big was because I think if you want to get rich, you got to help other people get rich. Yeah. So in for our kind of career, people that have worked with me have also got rich. So if I just try to make myself rich, you don't get as rich. It's one plus one equals 11. So I think I filled my own bucket. But what was great is I feel like I also filled up a lot of other people's buckets. So my business partner, Helen Griffiths, when we sold the company, we both got mega rich. But the good news is that she then became my wife. So we became partners and we were super rich. I think that's kind of like, that's the holy grail of it always. You don't really want to be at the top of the hill on your own. The view is amazing, but then you all go back and tell everyone what it was like. And they're like, shut the fuck up. I don't want to hear about your view. Someone once said to me, you got to have as many kids as you. You can afford. Right. It was like, holy shit, I got five kids. I better get rich. Well, I've got one. So when I'm tired, I don't know how you do five. But I think success now for me now personally now, if I look back, I probably advised the younger me to have this strategy I've got now a bit earlier, which is like what problem can I solve in the world as opposed to fill a market gap or do something that I can make money out of? It's like, I want to work with people I really like working with. I don't want to work with dickheads. I want to work on something that matters in my case, fix the education system. And I want to make money, but not just for myself, but for everybody around me, including the people I'm trying to help. So, you know, I have this crazy philosophy that people hate me saying, I believe everyone could get rich. And I actually want everyone to get rich. If everyone's rich, who's going to take out the rubbish? Robots. They're fucking crappy robots. Why now it's cheaper for humans to do it? The interesting thing is, like use that taking out the rubbish example. There's a company in the United States that hired a bunch of people to take out the trash that wanted to be fit. Right. And they treated it as a fitness thing. I like it. So it's about framing. Yeah, the framing of it. Because if everyone is wealthy and because rich is great money, wealthy time, money, all the most things, there's always going to be a desire to work. Humans having an innate need to be doing something. We've got to go. We need to. That's COVID proved. If we're sitting at home doing nothing, we go mad. We need something to do. And hopefully COVID's shown everyone that. Right. We need a thing to go and do, which is what's scaring me about AI, because a lot of people aren't retraining or preparing for that change because no one's quite sure what it looks like. Yeah. And no one's being honest. Like my delivery driver, I know my delivery driver who delivered my food to my house this morning, that vehicle in six years time will be driving itself to my house, but no one's telling him that because they need him for the next six years to keep delivering that stuff to their house. So the truth can't be told because there's mass panic. I think with AI, and it's my way of approaching a lot of things is just play with it, just get in and start off chasing with it. Like pick an app and even if it's just an app to make music that's AI, at least start learning something, play with it, get comfortable. Most people that slag off social media have never leveraged it properly. So most people that are saying how bad it is, how awful it is, most of them don't understand how it actually works. It's the same with AI and all that. If you actually understand how these things work, you can understand how to leverage them for good. So social media for social good, AI for social good. But if you understand how they work, you can make your world more efficient. It's like having a mobile phone today. People can't imagine not having a mobile phone today. You can remote work, but people have got fearful of technology for some reason. Typically technology has actually freed humans up. Now, of course, there's always going to be an ASA saying, well, I'm always on my phone now. Well, yeah, it's still probably better than two hours getting into work and two hours getting home and sitting in an office all day because you've got to go over desktop. You know, people don't realise how much freedom this stuff can bring you. But to your point, you have to play with it. Yeah. I like I love seeing the photos of everyone going, look, everyone's on their phone and you go back 50 years. Everyone's reading the newspaper. Right. Yeah. And actually, it's not really changed in a lot of ways. It's just the tech. People have never wanted to talk to each other. It's always been that way. It's great because it removes scarcity. So, you know, when I was a kid, I went to college and you learn that in economics, that's, you know, it's the study of the allocation of scarce resources. Well, scarcity is a fallacy when you introduce technology because like we have a scarcity of food. No, we don't. We can grow food in a high-rate. So much food away every day. The supermarkets and cafes are throwing tons of... Like, well, you and I were young. Do you remember that Time Magazine came out and said, we're going to run out of oil in 90 years? Yeah, I remember that. And then we went to Minicut. We're never going to run out of oil. We're going to be not needing oil before we run out of it. Yeah, I think. Of course. And then, yeah, exactly. But that's why these things need to be discussed, though, openly and honestly. You know, we do need to transition. So AI is going to take people's jobs. Hope so. It is. And that's great. But exactly. But if we... But dishwashing machine. Yeah, do you want to... Three people's jobs. I know. And now you put it in a machine and it comes out the other end. Well, those three people can go on and be trained to be great waders. They can go on to be trained to be masseuses. They can go on to be trained to be... Well, go and do what they love. But to retrain. To your point, not retraining is the challenge. That's the problem. You're going to have six careers in your lifetime minimum. Right. And I remember when Buckminster Fuller said that way back when he's, you know, past many years ago, but he said, you're going to have six careers in your lifetime because on average, if you're born after this, you're going to live to a hundred, hundred and forty sort of thing. And people seem to think you're going to do one thing. My kids always, you know, people ask them, what do you want to do with your life? I said, no, no, kid, what do you want to try first? Hmm. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. What's your what's stage one, stage two? But stage one for me at 15, I was a gardener. Yeah. Now stage, I think I'm stage five. I'm going to guess I've done it on my, I'm a tech founder. Yeah. You know, I've got, I'm a media owner, media platform owner. But I think people do need to frame it that way. It's so true. I think that's why I really hate at school when they ask you what will you do when you grow up, because it tries to make you pick a thing. Yeah. And I think the better question is what problem will you solve because you can widen your net and do many different things to get around that problem later in life. You know, like you don't have to do one thing. You don't have to be labeled as a lawyer or a doctor. You can be many things. Yeah. I got friends of mine that were doctors and now they're entrepreneurs. Now what's I call the companies and a friend of mine who was a lawyer and now he's a massive property investor. This is what I mean. That that's the problem. You're going to have multiple careers and maybe it's six, maybe it's 10. It doesn't really matter. You just got to understand that every five to 10 years, you're probably going to change the thing you're doing today. And if your listeners are business owners, they've also got to watch out because they can also get trapped by their own business. Oh, yeah. They get in the wrong way. Business is the product. Yeah. And you you make yourself invaluable in the business, for example, then you can't grow to find out what your next stage is. Yeah. And I had this experience myself. My first company that was really successful, Fluid, it took me 10 years to realize I was no longer the right leader for that company. You know, I think I think people sometimes are their own worst enemy. So I then realized I started investing in businesses. I was running a service agency before and I started investing in businesses. I realized my next stage was to become an angel investor. But I had to start that next stage to let go of the old stage because a lot of people get trapped by their old ways. Yeah. I I almost running action coach, 10 years in, I almost burnt out. Luckily, my my daughter was born and I just decided, you know what? Handed over to my CEO, who was my COO at the time. Just handed over, let him run it and went and be a full time dad for a few years. And thank God I'd rebuilt my business so that it could work with her. Perfect. But not enough people are doing that, by the way. I've been on a mission to teach everyone you got to build my definition of a business is a commercial profitable enterprise that works without you. Yes. If you're if and to be really blunt, and I had to learn this as a young man, if I have to go in there, it's not a business. It's a job and I work for an idiot, you know, and that I just had to learn that my job as the owner was to build people so that the people built the business. It's very liberating as well if you frame it this way, because otherwise you will build something that traps you like a job traps other people. 100%. And so you got to make sure that you're building. Now, that doesn't mean to say you basically want to wake up every day with the option to work in your business. So I like working in my business. I like adding value to my business. But if I walked away today, my strength of whether or not it's a successful business is will it survive without me? Now, by the way, this is in direct conflict with personal brand. Right. Because isn't it's not and I want to we'll get into that in just a second. But I want to finish this conversation around building a business that works without you. You do a lot of building your people. You do a lot of making sure your people grow. Was that a conscious choice? How did that happen? I was just tired in the early years of my career of people leaving. So I trained people up. I mean, my first agency business that was, you know, making a lot of money. I had clients coming out of my ears, but the talent to execute on the work was hard to hold on to. And so first stage was I used to hire fresh grads and then I can make them my culture. This is my first idea. This failed because people come in and like, oh, I've had two years experience here, but now I want to go work at a big company in a conglomerate or JP Morgan or whatever. And so I lost them. I trained them and then I'd lose them. So this strategy of getting. So then I switched it to people that were working at JP Morgan were tired of working in those corporate selfish organizations. And then they come away with me and that worked for a while because then they were having a refreshing new experience, not in a big conglomerate. And then I realized they're still losing people. And it turned out that the basic crux of it was the business wasn't built to help them. The business was to help me make money. And so I just changed it. And I said, well, this business is built to help you get rich too. And these are the ways I can help you get rich. Of course, obviously things like profit share as one element, but equity ownership. Because I would rather have 51% of Facebook than 100% of my space. So yeah. And so this equity thing, people get really confused and they're like, oh, I'm holding on to 100% equity. We've got 100% of responsibility then. Just keep your mind because no one's ever going to care about the business as much as you do if they don't own it. And no matter what you say, we're part of a team. Let's do it together. You're still the one getting the job. Yeah. So you've got to pick your lane as an owner of a business. And if you want to own 100%, you're 100% responsible. And if you've got staff turnover problems, well, you deserve it. So I just changed. I started giving equity to people and being like, not just saying they're going to make it along with me, I made sure that they did. I know, like with Action Coach, we're a partnership business. We use a franchise model that franchises partnerships all over the world. And it's brought me some of the best people and I've had many of them with me 20 and almost 30 years. What would they mean? You mean, I don't think it's like I meet thousands of people that want to start a business. And the reality is that it's much better to join with someone else's business because you can save years of your life. But the truth is not enough people give you equity in that business. So it is better you start it yourself because then you get equity. And equity is where the value comes over time. I made all my money from equity. Well, capitalisation is the key fundamental for wealth. Right. Cash flow is not going to... Pays the bills and allows you to fund a growth of equity. And once you capitalise, then you can recapitalise again. 100%. I mean, you can joke about Elon Musk or you won't, but that first capitalisation allowed him to capitalise three major events that then is allowed to capitalise. And I think he's now an 8% shareholder in Tesla. So people are stupid. They think that Jeff Bezos talked about it. He's a 7% shareholder on Amazon. You know, you don't have 100%. No, but nobody who's a billionaire from their business has 100%. It's just dumb. You know, you cannot build a business if you think that way. And you want to build a community. You want a community to own your business. Well, if you're also going to need capital, if you want to be that big. Yes. You're going to need venture capital or hedge fund capital. You're going to need an investment partner if you want to grow that big. 100%. And the bank is not going to lend you money at that. The only people who are crazy enough to risk with you are the ones who get the pay off from the equity increase. That's, yeah. To loot what you're saying back around, I think the other thing that I kind of blew my mind, I wish someone had told me this when I was younger, is that it's actually easier to manage a big business than a small business. Oh, yeah. But people think that running a small business is better because they don't know the difference. When you're running a small business, it's very hard to go on holiday. It's very hard to hire people that really know what they're doing. And you are, you know, hard to. If you stop working, you probably stop earning money. A big business allows you to bring in brilliant people to fight to build a big business. It's not easy to build a big business, but I think it's so much easier to run a big business. It's worth the pain in the early days to do it. If I take two kids and I take a kid that grew up in, say, Silicon Valley and parents were in Google and, you know, they saw all of that around. And then I take a kid who grew up where I did Brisbane, Australia, and I asked him to write a business plan. Which one's going to write me a billion dollar business plan? You know, the kid from Silicon Valley thinks a billion size business is just normal. And that's where I think a lot of us have never been around that size to be able to dream that big sort of thing. And so true is I love living in Las Vegas now. And I one once a year, I invite 10 companies in and I help them all create a billion dollar business plan or at least a billion. And I love doing it in Vegas because I can walk out the door and point out and go, Hey, see that? Yeah, that was a billion. See that? That was two billion. See that? That's another billion. And like, I think this is environment is so underrated for people to understand where they're going to be successful. I think there's a couple of important. One is the people you end up with. Like, my wife, I'm successful today in large part because I've got the right partner. She supports me. She just backed my crazy ideas. And people don't understand how important that is. They don't. On Tinder, it should be a profile, you know, category. Like, can you help me be successful? Yeah. Are you willing? Are you willing to work together to be successful? Exactly. You're willing for the pain along with me, you know, like, I think the second element I think is where you are based. So I got lucky. I moved to Hong Kong at 23 years old. And like you said, I look at the window and there's a building that someone in their head came up with the idea and it's worth a billion dollars, or probably more than that, trillions in front of me every day. And I just look at that city in particular, Hong Kong has no natural resources. So it's all built on brain power. It's all built on someone had an idea, whether it trading or export or whatever it was, and they made it and then that generated that wealth. Because that's what we don't understand about entrepreneurship, the people that hate entrepreneurship. We're not taking wealth out of the economy. We're creating wealth. Well, who creates jobs? Exactly. Entrepreneurs take their entire life savings and they risk it all to provide jobs and build an economy for the community. And people go, that's bad. No, that's the best thing ever. That's why I started this event. Only to celebrate business owners, because I think they get beat up way, way, way too much. Talk about beating up social media. Yes. It gets beat up all the time. You can get beat up on it. I get beat up every day. Really great parts about social media. I think that it's one of those things that I get a fight. Sometimes I like playing around with conspiracy theories, because it's fun. You know, most things you can prove are true or not by following where the money goes, OK? Because most of it is just about who's making money out of that particular story or that particular lie or that particular take on things. And let's be honest, today it's Blackstone State Street Vanguard. They're the three that are making money out of every day. They damn are. I'm not going to make money out of these podcasts. I don't think. I don't know. I might be wrong. But they're probably fine. I'm sure we're putting this on as well. I'm sure these phone mics are made by them. I mean, they own all of the social media platforms between them. They own what, seven, 10, 20 percent of the social media platform. That's true. Well, the reason they are making the money right now. Yeah, just listening to this, you're making the money. But I think, you know, this is a thing. I don't think there's anything wrong with people making money. I think it's, I think it's important, actually. I think, well, I have this, I honestly believe if we can make. I watched, I went to Hong Kong in 1997 and when Hong Kong's being handed back to the Chinese by the British and I watched 400 million people come out of poverty into middle class in China. And that's why we don't have a war today. That fact that we, we, China, not me, China managed to help 400 million people come out of poverty is the reason China is not a war with America today. It is the reason because people don't want a war. I think China is winning because they don't go to war. Yeah, they don't want to spend money on them. They don't spend all of that money on war. They go and spend it all on investing in things. They have that. That's the whole political side. That is the week again. That I've said a lot about soft power is incredibly powerful. They have, you're right. But I think this is the thing, isn't it? Like, if you want to make a difference in this world, you've got to invest in people and things. And then if you do that, you'll make money. And I think there should be nothing wrong with that. And again, my conspiracy theory point around social media is it's actually a big leveling up tool. So, so actually social media, as much as it might have people in it that are bad players, it's a chance if you're listening to this to break through and beat Walmart. You, I get more views on my social media channel than the BBC, right? With all their staff and all their broadcast and their TV license income. We get more views than them. Right. Tell me a time in history. Okay, you can't buy a fucking house. Forget that. You're young. Come by. Joe Rogan won the election. Of course. No, no media. Like, if not, not on TV, I go on a podcast. That's what I mean. This is what I mean. But if the people are suddenly waking up to it, but they're not taking action quick enough, because what's going to happen is this is, this is like the wild, wild West. It's like a gold rush. And you're going to be in the future, personal brand. And, and I have a personal brand is going to eat any other marketing strategy completely up. It's, it's, and it's a big opportunity. If you are someone listening to this podcast right now and you want to make something happen, you can beat the biggest companies in the world. If you can go and leverage social media. And then, and so I, you know, I put one up video up yesterday, 60 million views in less than 12 hours. 60 million people have heard about my product and what I'm doing for free. In fact, no, no, worse than that. I made money. I made a video. It wasn't free. You made money. It wasn't free. People built it was not free. Is it? It's not free. You're right. You're right. It's not free. I already owned the phone that I recorded it on. And then I actually did pay. No, that's, you have to pay the staff. Yeah, but hold on a minute. The video itself is making what at the moment around 20,000 pounds. And my cost of execution is a thousand. So my marketing has maybe profit. Plus it's free marketing. I don't think people understand, though, the tick talker vacation change of social media. It used to be you had to have the followers. And if you didn't have followers, it didn't matter what you did. You couldn't blow up. Now with the interest based algorithms, I can make a video. And if it's a great content and a great subject that's timely that people want anyone now that is has been no good at it can still blow up and viral right now. A hundred percent right. And I think that's the thing, but people don't realize that you don't even know. You don't even need to over engineer the video either. Don't the best videos are ones literally cat on skateboard. You know, like if you can catch a cat on a skateboard and put it up on tick talk, you'll probably make money. You know, if your whole life. So I'm going skateboard drinking juice, playing the right song. But that's what I mean. It's like it's sometimes more about creativity than it is about execution of the actual editing and cameras. And you know, and that's true. I've got 14.8 million followers. It's a useful metric from a point of view of like, are we attracting people to our community? I see them as community. So that number is a community. But the actual videos themselves, some get hundreds of millions of views and some get less than 10,000 views. You're not getting hundreds of millions unless it gets fed to non followers. Right. It's got to be fed to non followers, which means your followers watch enough of it to show the algorithm. This is a good video. And I want to harp on video for a second. Your genius video. People are still doing photographs and memes and stuff like that. How do we get people to just understand its video today? It's a bit like, you know, radio didn't die and radio will reach a certain amount of people. I listen to the radio in the morning when I'm going to take my son off to his forest stuff or whatever. So there's a moment when I listen to radio. So radio didn't die because there will always be a moment when people are listening to it. I think social media and in generally content frameworks will, what I've noticed LinkedIn last week is really now pushing video. If you open up LinkedIn now, it's video. Well, they go to 30 minutes though. That's my problem with. No, go to 30 minutes. Please LinkedIn. If you're watching 30 minutes, yeah, they'll be listening. I think they've been listening and LinkedIn do listen to me because they keep featuring me in their newsletter. So I know they're listening. I think you should never restrict a user. That makes total. If you've got a minute video, you've got a 30 minute video. Again, I have put up a video two hours and 26 minutes on YouTube. Everybody told me no more watch it and 10 million people have watched that video in the last six months. And so if you can put value into 2026 minutes, you can put it up and people watch it. But if your value is only one minute, then put up one minute. If you put up a one minute, one video on TikTok, you can make money. You put a one minute video up, you won't make money. People don't, they make mistake of making one minute, one minute, second to get the money. And that's when the video doesn't do as well. Yeah. Cause that last 15 seconds, no one watched. Exactly. So you, whatever, you know, when it comes to content, you do want to put as much funny. Again, people doing posts about like, I see this all the time, very successful people. Oh, I've just won this award. I've just won that award and they feel good putting up about themselves. No one fucking cares. Right. Well, you can put that in your stories, but don't make it a real post. Exactly. I think people, you know, don't be selfish, can't put content up that people value the people speaking Australian. Yeah, you're welcome. I'm hanging out a feeling, I feel like in Australia right now. I'll be like, you know, people don't, people don't realize when they're doing social media, you're actually trying to entertain. Yeah. So you want to put something up that's going to teach someone something, make them laugh or help them grow. Yeah. The three is entertainment, education or emotion. Exactly. Exactly. And so, but again, I know, I'll do all three actually, if you can do all three. And people can't help themselves. I know someone's going to listen to this right now and they're still going to post, oh, I just, you know, I just won this award. Look, look, maybe you can say how you won the award. Yeah. That'll be more in the story of what made this happen. Stories, people, stories. Totally. And then how that, how this award has affected your business because that might make people go for an award. Like teach people some of the story of the customer you served that made the award happen. Exactly. You know, tell a story. The economics around the world. Anything other than you're brilliant. Yeah. You know, like people don't want to hear it, but that's 90% of content on social media and then people tell me I don't get any views. Don't get likes. People send me links all the time. Now, please like my post and look at, I don't like the post. Oh, what if I like the post? Oh, please, if you like it, more people will watch it. If I like it, I'm endorsing it and I don't like it. You know, so yeah. So social media can be used to go. I think it's the future of social media. I think it's, it's, there's a lot of people using social media for bad. So people need to get in there and make it. The internet is good and bad, right? This is the history repeats itself. There are a lot of dark things happening on the internet. There's also a lot of really amazing positive things. Someone's raising money right now on GoFundMe to fix problems in an earthquake zone. You know, the internet can do incredible good, but you need to be in the arena making these tools do good. I tell this people at the time, there's a lot of people lobbying at the moment to ban social media for kids. And I totally understand why, but I'd say if you put that much energy instead of taking the tool away from kids, why not help them leverage it? For kids to get in there and put content on TikTok that's going to help those kids. That's what I'm doing. Yeah. Instead of saying, right, no kids, don't go on TikTok. It's really bad for you. I'm putting content in there that's helping them. Yeah. My team have asked me to start a new podcast called My Rich Uncle. Right. And it's like, oh, I would do is talk to young people about, well, just pretend you're a rich uncle who actually gives you advice because every kid needs a rich uncle. Yeah, totally. They need someone that can tell them the actual reality of how money is made and how things work and how your first job should be to get a mentor. Your first job shouldn't be about how much money you make. It should be about who you're going to learn from. But you'd like the more successful Australian version of me. Because when we started this five years ago, I did a brand profile of myself. I'm basically, I am the rich uncle that my brothers and sisters, kids respect. So they come to you and say, Simon, I don't want to do my GCCs. What should I do? You're like, how do I make money? You know, like that profile is quite, you know, who can you turn to? You're like, isn't bullshit? Yeah. It's going to tell you the fucking truth. It's going to help you understand things from your point of view. I built the Action Coach Foundation was built for one purpose, and that was to help young people learn that you don't have to leave school and get a job. You can leave school and give people a job. Yeah. Don't be an employee, be an entrepreneur. Yeah. And because for me, I didn't fit in as an employee as a kid. Like I lost a lot. I was I was asked to move on from a lot of positions very early in my career because I didn't know how to be a good employee. I just was not. But as an entrepreneur, I went, oh, this is where I'm supposed to be. That that didn't work for me. And this works for me. So. So I am I ask you a question. I get a lot of hate from people who say, I'm saying everyone can be an entrepreneur. Not everyone should be. I think everyone has the ability to if they're given the tools to be different types of entrepreneurs. There's there's the Elon Musk's of this world on one extreme. And then you've got people that just want to do a flower business and enjoy it. I will agree with them on one because my definition of an entrepreneur is probably different to most a business owner has one business. An entrepreneur buys and sells businesses has multiple companies. There's a distinction in my mind. Everyone can be a business owner. Everyone can be self employed. In this day and age, there is absolutely zero reason why you got a desk and a phone or a laptop, start your own business. But even laptop get good at something. Well, yeah, if you want to start your own business and it could be your whole business. It's all right. You don't even have to be an operator. You can be good at buying. Absolutely. I've taught many people over the years how to buy companies that and in this day and age, in fact, right now is the biggest boom potential for that because you've got baby boomers who own the majority of employer based businesses. So companies with employees are owned by people who are wanting to retire right now. Now, most of them won't be able to find a buyer because there's not enough entrepreneurialism in the the next generation down in the generation below that. But if you learn how to buy them, you will actually be able to convince that seller to lend you the money to buy their business, vendor financing, because they won't have another buyer. Is this financial literacy you're touching on here too? Like people think they need money to start a business or buy a business? No, you don't. In fact, if you're hungry and because you don't have money, more charts will be successful than those that have got money and not as hungry. Yeah, it's easier if you've got money, but you don't have to. By the way, I've invested in over 80 companies and my experience has been sometimes the companies with too much money fail. Oh, yeah, because they buy brand new desks, brand new everything. You know, the WeWorks. WeWorks isn't even checking the leases it's signing. Yeah. You know, like you got something like 20 billion in investment. Like this is not healthy. Yeah. I think you've got to be innovative. Like I act like I've got no money. I actually tell myself I've got no money. I have got money, but I tell myself I don't have it because I actually want to be innovative. I wouldn't have gone on TikTok. I wouldn't go into the street. I talked to my other millionaire friends about going into the, why do you go into the street? Simon, what are you doing there for? Because I have, in my mind, I've got no money. How am I going to get this business working? How am I going to make this platform help people? I go into the street and ask people, what do you need? What help do you need? And so I wouldn't have done that if I thought, you know what, I'm a higher marketing company and a PR company. I'm going to sit in my ivory tower, my fancy office, and I'm not going to get out there and actually like dig this business into success, you know? The disease of looking good gal nowhere is. Right. There's a lot of people in there. Disease. That's a lot of people in jobs they hate. You know, I remember a guy wrote to me one time and he said, you know, I need your help. I've, my kids are in a private school and I have to drive a BMW to drive them off, but I'm going broke. Yeah. And I wrote back and go, dude, get out of the BMW, put your kids in a normal school you can afford. Yeah. But my kids won't have the opportunity and all that sort of stuff. You know what? Your kids will have as much opportunity as they want. Absolutely. You know, you've just got to be a better example, be a better example of taking care of money. And the number one thing I tell people is like, get your costs down. Like most people are trapped by their own that private school things are a really big problem. I say a lot of people that are in bank jobs, they hate it. They're not helping society. Often they're having to extract money from people that can't afford it through things like bad mortgage structures. And they are literally like only doing all of that, the thing they hate to put their kids in private school and they never see their kids because of it. I've got a seven year old. All he really wants is my time. Yeah. You know, kids spell love to me. Right. That's how they spell. Yeah. Yeah. You sit on the floor with your kid. They are more loved than if you bring him home some gift. Yeah. You can do both. It's good. Yeah. I was covered. I'm an MI kid loves Lego. Definite and person. Yeah. I'll be and I wanted a new car. I was like, what car are you getting rid of? Ah, getting it's just an end. Yeah, just an end. No, I think I think having the option to do it. I think to me, the definition of entrepreneurship, by the way, is owning your own time and being able to buy time, not sell time. I think owning time time is the most valuable asset. Like, I just think that that is one. People don't spend enough money on buying themselves time. Yeah. Someone said to me when I was a kid, poor people spend time to save money. Rich people spend money to save time. Totally. Yeah. I was I went to a restaurant yesterday and there was a 20 minute wait. So I said to the waiter, I'll give you 10,000 pounds to sit me now. Because that's only thing of value money brings. Saves you 20 minutes. Did he take it? He didn't take it. And I and I and I and I understand why it's like an ethics thing. Right. I get it. But, you know, I think I wanted to do he said, no, I can't. That's not right. I said, listen, this is what you should do. You should take half of this money and go to the table. You're about to sit down and say, do they want 5,000 pounds and to wait 20 minutes? Yeah. 100 percent guarantee you they'll do it. They would have said 100. And then you make five grand by making those people wait 20 minutes. But I know the only thing of value is that 20 minutes. It's crazy that we live in an age where social media connects so much of us, but loneliness has become sort of an epidemic out in the world. What are you seeing with that and how that's playing out? It's quite scary. And this is why, again, I believe social media has the chance to fix and not be the problem. I have literally made friends through my social media. I've never met them. Now, I think they started during Covid because if you'd asked me before Covid, can you make friends or someone about meeting them? I'd say no. I need to sit with you. Touch. Yeah. See you all. Belly to belly. Right. I get it. I get it. And it does. It does. It does have something to it. But equally, I have now realized that connection is connection. Yeah. And when someone is your type of person and or has that thing that you connect to, it does. So social media has the chance for you to make friends. And that's what's happening for young kids, by the way. This is what they're doing. They're going on social media to have a connection because they're in a school and the school itself, the people in that school, they don't have a connection to them for whatever reason, they're being bullied or this or that. So where they're going for connection, they're going online. They're looking for other people that have been bullied or they're looking for other people who feel disenfranchised as a young man or not feeling like they're understood. And they're then ending up sometimes in the wrong algorithms, being told by the wrong influencers what to do. But again, another reason that we need to do wrong videos and then they're fed a million wrongs. That's it. But that connection is there. And I think we need to accept that that's going to happen. And then again, educate people, especially young people about what life they could have and use that community. So, for example, I've recently started going back to the gym quite a lot. Accountability is really powerful. So if you are in a community on social media where you're all going to the gym and you're putting up a video each day of you going to the gym, I don't have to live in the same country as you even for that to feel like we're in it together. You're getting fit. I'm getting fit. I put my video up there. You put your video up today. I didn't put my video up. Why? I got sick. Are you OK? Community. You know, I think it's such a powerful opportunity if we frame it properly. Of course, we can say, oh, well, you know, my kids are watching the wrong person. That's true. Educate your kids. Don't take the phone off them and tell them not to do it. Educate the difference. And make them understand the difference between a good algorithm and a bad algorithm. It's it's, you know, raising kids is a lot of work because you have to do those things. You have to have the conversations. And I know with my older kids, how well I listened to them when they were young, determine how well they listened to me as they got older. And I told them all at some stage, you're going to recognize that is stupid. It's like teenage years. It's going to happen. And then somewhere in your 20s, you're going to recognize that maybe I'm not as dumb as you thought I was. Yeah, that hopefully I've opened my kid. Well, I lived that long before my kid will see that. But my experience shows that so far out of the five, it's it's coming true that way. But now that's so true. My seven year old is definitely smarter than me. I mean, kids teach you stuff. I think that's the beautiful thing about having kids. I never quite understood. You're not really there to teach them stuff. He reminds me of like how cool the double decker bus is. I forgot how cool the double decker bus is. I thought they were a bit annoying and they're very loud. He's like, look, that is cool, isn't it? I'm like, actually, it is cool. You know, so they teach you stuff, don't they? So final area then, personal branding. You've touched on a couple of times. Why do it? How to do it? OK, so first of all, if I tell your listeners, you must start personal branding you. A lot of people go, oh, I can't be bothered with social media. It's not really about social media. People are going to talk about you if you're in the room or not. And you know, and frankly, depending on your business, that whole like attraction can create businesses. So for example, you know, what's the line? It's like, you can talk bad about me or you can talk good about me. Just be talking about me, you know? And I think I think that kind of like personifies if you look at history and the success of businesses in the last 20 years, you know, Facebook started off by creating attention. Everyone comes to a platform. This is kind of the first wave of modern marketing, right? Facebook becomes and all these apps, all these platforms become trillion dollar companies, they basically create attention. Attention goes to a platform that become worth trillions of dollars. The next phase was layered on top. You've got like Snapchat, let's say, or TikTok. These are apps that sit in a similar space. They also then attract the attention and become trillion dollar businesses. The next big one right in front of our face that no one seems to quite see. And I see it because I'm in it is personal brand. So I have 14.8 million followers. I get 450 plus million views a month. I can launch a business today for zero marketing costs that can be bigger than most people listening to this business they've been running for 10 years. I can launch a chocolate brand. I can launch a this is what's having Mr. Beast, he launched a chocolate brand. It's now one of the biggest chocolate brands in the world. I can launch a drinks brand. Travelling my son wanted to Mr. Beast chocolate is what I'm talking about. Like I don't it's it's but personal brand. Let's just take step one for those that are listening. I think I can't be bothered to go on social media. First of all, shake that from your subconscious because it's just stupid. But let's just say that step when you don't want to go into social media. What is your personal brand? Have you written down a business plan for your personal brand? Who are you? What are your values? What are your red lines? What's your kind of purpose? Why are you here? How are you going to do it? When you're not in the room, what do you want people to say about you? And so people don't do that. They do it maybe for a company. Not even everyone does that. Branding is totally overlooked in most businesses. Branding is where value is. Build a brand, not a business. Brand is where the value is. We see this in hundreds and hundreds of examples. The Jenner's, the Kardashian. Oh, where's one more for you? That kid became a billionaire overnight because of her personal brand. But people her mom had taught her to have a personal brand for. What it is. But the problem with those case studies is that people that are listening and thinking, well, I'm not a Kardashian. Am I? But here's the thing. There is now it's you don't have to be on television. What took luck and connections, connections and someone totally taking you and the the universe all the lining for you to get on television. Exactly. You don't need it anymore. You just need to be good at something and communicate it out of the world. And it could be good at crafting something with wood and you've got live streaming of it or you're videoing it. It doesn't have to be your face on camera. Don't get sucked into like talking heads. That's the only way, you know, like the anonymous channels make as much or more morally much more. There's a guy on YouTube is doing fireplaces who's making millions a week. He just recorded fireplaces and then people put that fireplace on their TV. He's making millions a week. Good for you. It's a whole new world. Again, are the guys that went and played pianos out in the middle of the woods. Right. And it's like, oh, millions of my like listening to the watching photographs of the guy that records the plows farming the fields. Oh, yeah. And he's making a million smaller guy. The lawnmower guy. I got sucked into the lawnmower guy every day. Let me tell you, he has power washing. And it's like, holy shit, I'm power washing guy now. Really? I'm watching that. But this is the thing I think of. And whoever's listening, please remove your subconscious bias to all this stuff because you you you if you are finding it hard to make ends meet and you can't own a home, it is very frustrating for people. But the exciting news is that although right now you can't own a home, you have this access to this reach and to this ability to create a business can compete with Walmart in a week. You can be competing with Walmart in a week. You just need one video to go viral. You're competing with Walmart in a week. This is amazing. And that's why I think everyone could be an entrepreneur. Because it's like this is this never if you've got a phone, you're probably listening to this on a phone. You've got all the infrastructure you need. Fucking go do it now. I love the tick tock finally started rewarding at a level that made sense for content creators. You think the other guys will ever catch up? Tick tock is not paying people enough for their content. I'm part of that creative fund. They're not. But again, they're paying more than everybody else. You choose paying number one. Yeah. You choose number one. A snapchats making a big push. I am. Instagram, you make no money on any of the content, but it's all about brand deals and partnerships. You see the matrix of making money on social media. If you don't have a product to sell, which is probably the low hang through is, you know, have a product to sell. It could be someone else's product. Have a product to sell. That's the low hanging fruit with things like tick tock shop. You can make a lot of money on that. I had this recently a marketing person being five years studying marketing a very well known university. Spent 65,000 pounds on this education. I said to him, what are the four ways you make money on tick tock? They've got no fucking idea. Right. So let me quickly tell you what a 60,000 pound marketing degree should look like. You make money going life. People like what you're saying. They like what you're offering. They like what you're talking about. They believe in you. They just like you. You make them laugh. They'll give you tips instantly. Right. I did one live a little while ago. I got about 8,000 pounds in an hour. Right. Now I give all my money away. I have a different strategy. That's up to me. But what I'm saying is if you're a single mother sitting at home right now, struggling, maybe you can make a bit of money from that. So tipping second element is the videos themselves. Let's say tick tock in particular does pay per view. So if you make business content, you get more money than if you say make lifestyle content. So the per view revenue is dictated by the type of content you put out there. But if you get a million view video, you're going to make on average a couple of thousand pounds. Then the final thing that I think people don't understand is there's so many brands out there that are so shit on social media. No one wants to hear from any of these brands. They need you. Yeah. So you will get brand deals coming out your backside because they can't go on TV anymore. No one's watching it. So what do they do? They'll find you on social media. So that's just instantly three instaways. There's loads of other things about it, like product placement, opportunities to do, you know, co-co-branded communities. You can get subscribers which pay you a monthly fee. I mean, I've got subscribers paying me a monthly fee and I give them nothing. I give them nothing. They're doing it to support what I'm doing. Yeah. I didn't even ask them to. And they're paying me $5.99 a month like I'm Netflix. Right. It's crazy. And I think it's exciting because communities can support you. If you're a single mother struggling right now, there's a community out there will support you. There will be people that will get behind you. If you're genuine and you're honest and you're doing as a trick and you need a bit of help, people are nice. These platforms give you a chance to talk to them. If you're a single mother straddling, telling your story on there will actually work. It will work. Just tell them what you're going through. Yeah. People, people love story. They love getting in with other people. I've been wanting to help. I always finish with one thing. Best advice you ever got on success and who gave it to you and why is it important to you? I think the... Well, I'll reframe the question slightly if it's OK. I think the most important thing that ever happened to me is I accidentally got a wife as a mentor. So my wife, Helen, who we've been together 23 years now, when I first started building fluid, this agency did really well, I was quite selfish and she made me a better person. In 2003, we had SARS in Hong Kong, which is kind of COVID-1.0 for those that don't know, is the beginnings of that kind of problem where a disease hit the city and the whole city had to shut down. And we had a financial problem where we couldn't pay our staff. And my instinct back then was we had to pay ourselves as business owners. Because otherwise, we'd put our own oxygen mask on first is what we're taught. Right? My own oxygen mask on first, because if I don't survive, it all dies and we'll pay everyone else later. And Helen said to me, she said, no, Simon, these people have more than juice and responsibility and rent to pay and we had to pay them first because we promised them we would. Right? So I drained our bank account to pay everybody on the first of the month. And then we had no money for ourselves, literally no money, no money for food, no money to pay our rent, nothing. And I was like, this is a nightmare now what? And luckily, everyone kept working, a client who owed us a lot of money paid us despite saying they couldn't. And it all eased up and we had about 20 days where me and Helen were behind on everything, we got paid, it all worked out. Now, the important thing is in 35 years of doing business, I've never missed payroll. I would have done that day. I would have done if I hadn't had the right person in my life at that moment, showing me the difference between right and wrong. Right? Because I was taught to put my own mask on first. But if I had done that, those people would have lost faith that I was there to help them and they would have seen I was just there to help myself and they would have left. And if they'd left, I wouldn't have done the work, I wouldn't have got paid, we would have died. I would have died putting my own mask on first. And so I reframe it a little because I think it's not one person necessarily or one bit of advice, it's an experience I've had that actually helping other people has helped me survive. And I think we have that now. Right now today, if we don't help other people, I don't care how rich you are, you're going to live in a fucking nightmare world. And I don't care how poor you are, you've got four minutes to help someone today, stop making excuses. And if you help someone today for four minutes, they'll help you, someone will help you. Right? We can all help someone today. So I think, yeah, I think for me it was Helen, but that bit, the experience of like, don't what you think you think is true isn't true. Question everything. Probably the line, I'd question everything, probably a line I'd give people as advice. Question everything, everything you think is true, what your subconscious has told you is true, is probably not true. We'll be back next week with more of your success. Hit the show notes and share and help.