Episode 033 – Reacting to change, becoming an entrepreneur now, business fundamentals, getting to your first million, big trends over the next decade and more – with Daniel Priestley

Harms: Hello, it’s Harms here and welcome to another episode of the Seekardo podcast and today. Unlike other podcasts I want to keep today’s introduction very short because we are going through and have been going through a challenging time. We are all aware of that. 

We have all felt that in some way or another, but with challenge comes an opportunity to reset and reinvent. 

Specifically today we’re talking about resetting and reinventing in the world of business. This is the important point to note right now if you have ever wanted to start a business or reshape the current business you are operating in now is the time. 

To help us with this topic and this introduction and to answer this question about resetting and reinventing your business during a challenging time or at any point in your life time, we have a special guest here to help you, the listener with that topic of business right now. 

Ro over to you to introduce our guest today.

Dr Ro: Thanks Harms and thank you to all the listeners again for coming and listening to today’s programme. 

I’m super pumped. 

The gentleman I’m about to introduce we’ve known each other for probably one and a half decades now and somebody I’ve got a huge amount of respect for. 

We don’t necessarily touch base as much as we used to, but I constantly keep him on my feed, look at what he is doing because there are so many insights that Daniel brings to the table. 

Daniel, thanks for joining us today.

Daniel: Thank you so much for having on the podcast.

Dr Ro: It’s lovely to have an Aussie accent my daughters have fallen in love with Australia after having flown them over. 

Dan is a very successful entrepreneur he has built and sold businesses in Australia, Singapore, UK. 

He is the co-founder of Dent global one of the world’s top business accelerators for entrepreneurs and leaders to stand out to scale up, so if you’re even sitting on the fence thinking about or currently in business, you’ve got to stay tuned into this. 

His offices stretch from London to Sydney, Singapore, Tampa, and the programme he has is endorsed by the Institute of leadership and management over 500 entrepreneurs and leaders each year participate globally in developing their businesses with the support of Daniel Dent and his high net worth mentors. 

We are talking about some really switched on individuals that he brings to the table and knowing Daniel the way I do and knowing his values and his core ethics the people that he does bring to the table will be totally aligned with that. 

He’s an amazing author and he’s inspired me actually over the years in the way he writes to keep that consistency in what I do. 

Bestselling author books like the key person of influence. Loved it when it came out. Remember when I used to be speaking around the country, often we’d cross paths or you’d have one of your training going on. 

Entrepreneur revolution is another book, oversubscribed, and 24 assets go get these books. He is named one of the top 25 entrepreneurs in London by Swift and Williamson power 100 and awarded as being in the top 10 business advisers by enterprise nation. 

That’s the formal introduction. 

I’m going to add Dr Ro’s spin on this. I personally believe that right now globally the world needs leaders with authenticity and integrity with a sense of purpose, but also with a natural intuition to read and understand the market and there aren’t that many out there who have all of those qualities. 

I’ve known you for a long time Dan and he has all of those qualities. 

Myself and Harms are very specific about who we bring to the table into the space because over the years, as a public speaker I have been all over the world doing this, one thing I found is there are people out there that talk about the subject and those that are actually passionate. 

They love it. They live it, they breathe it, and they are proof of that, and that’s Dan Priestley. 

He is a family man and he’s got this gentle quietness about him which is quite unassuming and yet he’s got an amazing impact on the way he delivers his message. 

I shared the stage with him in the charity space as a speaker and on the circuit centre back in the early days and I actually sat in and attended some of his courses, which is partly how we met in the first place. 

I’ve got a huge respect for him, so Dan, that’s a sincere message from me about you, but what would be amazing is if you could let our listeners understand a bit about your background, so they understand what I see in you as a person. 

Again, it’s a huge honour and a privilege to have you with us today.

Daniel: That’s one hell of an introduction, my goodness I feel like I’m on my toes already having to live up to this person who walks on water over here .

Dr Ro: It was meant to be heartfelt.

Daniel: Thank you so much. 

My background was always very entrepreneurial. I discovered a book called the E myth when I was 15 years old and read it, and I knew straight away that I wanted to be an entrepreneur and what he was describing was what I’ve been searching for. 

I read another book called Rich dad Poor dad when I was a teenager and I really loved the idea of becoming an entrepreneur, being a bit of a rebel and a misfit and getting outside of the traditional career path. 

I was much more interested in creating jobs than having one. Throughout my teenage years I did a number of little entrepreneurial things like garage sales and nightclub parties. I did some great nightclub parties. 

If you’re interested in that, when I was 17, 18, we launched a series of nightclub parties, we were getting a thousand kids at $10 ahead with all the costs covered so I was making ten grand in one night in cash.

Dr Ro: That’s Fantastic and this was in a nice climate with great weather.

Daniel: Yeah great weather, lovely people sponsored by McDonald’s and the local council and the local radio station and it was just great. 

What a fun way to start in business and we gave away skateboards and CDs and all that other stuff, that was one of my first entrepreneurial proper ventures. 

When I was 19 I was super lucky I dropped out of university because I wasn’t learning what I wanted to learn and I was feeling frustrated and I was working three jobs and I didn’t feel like I was going in the direction I wanted to do. 

I was probably impatient as well, but I was so lucky I fell straight into an entrepreneurial start-up. 

A guy who was 38 years old, which at the time felt like it was a proper grown-up, he was starting a new company and he was a successful entrepreneur. 

When I went to his house it was this beautiful waterfront mansion in Noosa and he had three little kids and he had a humongous house and he basically shared with me his business vision as to what he wanted to get done and it was really day one. 

It was sitting around the table, plotting, and scheming, pulling out a huge annual calendar coming up with ideas for campaigns and promotions and launch events. 

Brainstorming headlines for ads, sending out some invites to launch events. All of that. When  I say sending out, I literally mean packing and sending and folding envelopes and the folding paper. 

As part of the start-up it took off. 

So in two years we went from zero absolute standing start to about six million in revenue and about 50 to 60 people in the office. 

We started around his kitchen table and we had big offices in Melbourne two years later.

Dr Ro: How old were you Daniel?

Daniel: Between 19 and 21.

Dr Ro: We have got a young Dan Priestley, and you’re suddenly involved in that, what was going through your mind at that stage?

Daniel: I soaked it up. 

If there was an opportunity to work on weekends I worked on weekends and if I can learn something from John, I’d just sit and learn. If I could sit in on a meeting I would, if I could make sales I’d make sales. 

It was actually what most people dream of in terms of the mentoring relationship. So basically, John really wasn’t my boss. He was my mentor that I happened to work for and, like every day was a lesson and every day he would take the time to explain to me why he was doing certain things and what he was doing and it was like a practical MBA. 

It was just daily lessons. 

I also was a good student in the sense that there were times where John needed to go to the airport and it was an hour and half drive away to the closest airport and I would absolutely jump at the opportunity to drive him to the airport and back and pick him up from the airport and any time of day or night.

Because it would give me 90 minutes to just have good conversations with him. 

That was great, great, times.

Harms: Do you find the younger people around you now are pro that kind of activity and behaviour?

Because for myself, I know I’ve done that in the past as well just to absorb what this wiser may be more experienced person has. 

Do you find that young people tend to do this now or they shy away from it or are they saying to you, if you pay me I will drive you to the airport.

Dr Ro: Personally Harms from my observation slightly more of an exception because you used to come and sit in the car with me when I’d go to speak, but I’ve come across a lot of people that wouldn’t put that commitment in. 

I think it is a great question.

Daniel: I’ve experienced both. 

Over the years I’ve employed hundreds of people and many of them are young people and I’ve come across a number of people who have absolutely relished the opportunity to be part of that start-up culture. 

Right now on my team I have a young guy on the team Yusuf and Yusuf is absolutely dedicated to, if I suggest a book he has read it within a week and he’s come back to me with the summary notes. 

If I suggest a YouTube video he should check out he is on it and he came to me with a business idea that he had that he thought one day I wouldn’t mind doing this, I said a terrible idea, and he went bang I’ll drop it.

He completely dropped it and then he said, what should I be doing and I said, I think you should do this, this, this and this and he said great. 

I won’t worry about anything else and just do that. I do have people on my team, who have really kind of jumped in two feet with the mentoring opportunity and I tell you I respond really well to it and he responds very well to it.

If  you get the chemistry right between the two people it can be such a great rewarding relationship on both sides.

Dr Ro: What happened next?

Daniel: In year one at the end of year one I had an idea for the business and the business was operating in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne and it was doing about two million a year in each of those major cities. 

I said to John I think that the regional areas would be very profitable because I’d analyse the amount of advertising spend that it cost to reach 100,000 people in the big cities and it was like half to a third of the cost in the regional areas. Places you’ve never heard of, like Bendigo and Ballarat are basically places that don’t have more than 200,000 people living there and John said well maybe we could try this. 

What was interesting is from year one all I did was sales, I was on the phone making sales and I was on commission. In year two I got rid of the $12,000 a month commission stream that I was earning in order to go back to 0 to basically earn a percentage of starting an intra-partnership, starting a business within a business and I absolutely nailed it. 

In year one I did about $750,000 worth of sales in the regional areas, I picked three regional areas with three to $250,000 campaigns and they were really profitable. 

175 grand worth of profit out of 250 and what is interesting is that the main city businesses that John had, they were making a lot of revenue but they weren’t particularly profitable. Because he was growing so fast he wasn’t making a lot of profit, but I had made 175 worth of profit. S

o what happened is that I walked to the car with him one evening after work and I said John I want to talk to you about something I want to become a shareholder in the company. I’ve just built this 750-grand side of the business; I’ve been from day one and I want to be a shareholder in the business. 

For whatever reason, I timed the conversation wrong and he was having a bit of a bad day and he turned around and he said Dan, if you want shares in a business, you start your own business. 

I think he was saying that almost to draw a line under the point of like I’m not ready but it’s not how it landed for me in my 22-year-old brain, 21-year-old brain I went cool, I’ve got permission to go start my own business. 

At 21, I quit and started my own business and basically launched my own company and essentially kind of picked up where I left off with the internal business that I started with John. 

In my first year I had 1.3 million of revenue, 400,000 of profit and that business in the next three years went up to 10.7 million of revenue. 

A great team, really dynamic, fast growth business.

Dr Ro: You use the word luck, what’s your view on that? 

Because when an entrepreneur uses the word luck, I know you have a different meaning to somebody else that randomly throws the word luck out there.

Daniel: I really believe strongly in luck. 

I think you need luck on your side. 

You need lucky breaks and I was very lucky there to meet John when I met John. I was really lucky to have certain things go in my favour.

Dr Ro: Do you believe you put yourself in that space to attract that to you?

Daniel: I think of luck a little bit like wind that’s blowing somewhere and you need to kind of position yourself in the path of it and there are lucky places and lucky people. 

Now if I said to you, sitting at home watching Netflix series is less lucky than going out to a networking function with a bunch of millionaires, yeah you can get your head around that as a concept is true. 

I can’t tell you what will happen now as it turns out, you might go out to dinner parties with some phenomenal amazing people and nothing happens. No connection, no chemistry, literally nothing happens. 

It was a waste of time but I can tell you that over time and distance the person who sits at home watching Netflix series and the person who goes out and meets interesting people is going to be luckier. 

I can’t tell you on what day lightning strikes but I can tell you, lightning is more likely to strike in those environments. There are lucky people and hanging around lucky people is good and there are likely places such as networks and places where ideas come together and there are certainly unlucky people and unlucky places. 

Showing genuine interest in people asking questions, asking bigger questions rather than just the normal salutations that you know is obviously more lucky if you deepen the questions that you ask people and find out what’s really going on for them. 

All of these types of behaviours tend to be more lucky, but with that said, there’s no guarantee and there is no predictability to when luck will strike, but I do strongly believe in luck. 

The other thing that I think about luck is that the absolute starting point is you have to stop yourself in your tracks and your jaw has to hit the floor with just how lucky you are to be alive at this particular moment in time. 

The fact that you’re sitting and your technology around you, and here’s a crazy idea. 

There are literally cars circling the block on the off chance that I might need a ride. There are people developing world changing technology on the off chance that I might buy it, there are people fuelling up aeroplanes on the tarmac on the off chance that I might want to fly somewhere. 

There are people loading information content onto the Internet, on the off chance I might listen to it. 

We live in the most incredible lucky time and if you can’t start with the starting point of how lucky you already are and realistically anyone listening to this podcast and I know it’s pretty brash thing to say, but you are so much luckier than 90% of the people alive today and 99% of the people who have ever lived. 

The starting point in my life is that I’m just so damn lucky.

Dr Ro: That is beautiful and you know what, one of the things that we do here on this podcast is dive deep and just go straight to black belt. 

That philosophy alone is profound and I really appreciate you bringing that to the table. 

When I watch you and see your journey that’s guided you constantly put yourself in the place. 

I remember watching Daniel having intensive conversations occasionally at an event and you could see it was a deep conversation and in each one of those the dots start to join together and it might be another two months before the conversation manifests itself. 

But you’re creating it by the fact you put yourself in that path as well.

What then led you on that journey over to the UK to this place where we are with Dent now?

Daniel: Basically in 2005 I was growing the business very rapidly and we went up to about 10 million, and there was an opportunity to exit the business to the company that we were in partnership with and it had also run a kind of natural end. 

That journey for me I was done, I was exhausted and actually there was a natural point of break, as in like I can take a break and I don’t have to worry about much. 

From 19 to 25 I had just done nothing but work really when I say nothing but work I probably had one weekend off a month. 

As we used to do a lot of weekends with the business, so it was just pretty much most weekends there was something to actually do. 

When I say I worked weekends. I mean, I worked weekends in terms of on-site at an event and seven in the morning and leaving the event with clients at 10, 11 o’clock at night on Saturday and Sunday. 

It was relentless. 

In the year that we did over 10 million in sales I did 174 events in 12 months about an average of 300 people per event, 200,000 a month in marketing costs. 

It was just a really full on year, so I spoke to a mentor of mine and he said to me why don’t you travel and do this thing in the UK for a couple years and where there’s this top speaker, you can go launch them in the UK and have a little side-line business and do maybe one or two campaigns a year. 

Which to me would be a massive reduction in activity. I thought yeah that sounds cool and no sooner did I get to the UK I realised that this could be a really cool opportunity. 

I threw myself into it and we launched the business in September and by December we’d done the first £800,000 worth of sales. 

I’d never been above the equator; never been to London I was quite shocked at how low London was. 

No high-rise buildings that I was expecting to see and I kind of really in my head London might look a bit like New York. 

That’s how naïve I was and I had literally moved to London to start a business, not even knowing what the city looked like, and we did £2 million in the first year and then four million the year after that.

Dr Ro: Fast forwarding now. It’s not been a smooth journey. 

There have been some ups and downs but what led you to this point now?

Daniel: In 2008, 09 there was the global financial crisis and my business consisted of two main speakers who were international speakers and we would do about £2 million worth of revenue off each in London. 

In the global financial crisis I lost both of them, so one of them from the US, the pound collapsed against the dollar that was no longer feasible to bring him to the UK and also people were less interested in personal leadership development, so it just wasn’t going to work. 

That was £2 million worth of business gone and then the other guy basically focused on his Asian business and went back and he had a resort in Asia that he wanted to base himself out of and not travel so much. 

So suddenly I went from having a four million pound to business to collecting about 400 grand worth of outstanding collections, but essentially having no business overnight. 

Having about 15 staff to get rid of and just a horrendous kind of reset. 

Weirdly I had this attitude of I’ll just keep sailing out into the storm, even though everything is going wrong. I’ll just keep pretending it’s not. 

I kind of shot myself in both feet in that time and I ploughed through so much capital and it was just a very strange complete reset of the business. 

But it was during that time that I had to get real with myself at a low point and say what do I actually know about? What is my passion? 

What do I want the next 10 years to be about? 

What lessons have I learned from all of this?

Essentially I wrote a book called key person of influence which was about my time now working with famous speakers and what they do differently, and how they do what they do.

I launched the key person accelerator and then 2010 we relaunched and over the last decade we’ve gone and built a global business. 

We now run and are major offices in Toronto, Sydney and London, covering the three major time zones. 

There’s also another three companies in the group that do film production, IT technology projects and book publishing. 

On top of that I’ve just started a brand-new start-up which is a data marketing business collecting data on it, utilising it and without being horrible a little bit like Cambridge Analytica but for small businesses. 

Helping small businesses with a cyber targeted marketing approach and we just raised a good £300,000 for that business and we’re putting on about 30 clients a month at the moment. It’s fast growth.

Dr Ro: And you’ve got married.

Daniel: I’ve got three kids. I’ve written four books and not watched a lot of Netflix.

Harms: I think that is one of the biggest messages that I’m taking away from Daniel’s introduction is, you’ve got to get to work and put yourself in the position of luck off the foundation that we are lucky. 

What’s interesting is you use the word change or you’ve actually been through hell of a lot of change, especially when it came to the financial crisis, plus moving country starting a business again from scratch multiple times. 

Based on what’s happening right now when the world around us is changing what I find fascinating is the way lots of people react to that particular change and for listeners listening, the change at the moment is coronavirus. 

Many people are driven either by fear and scarcity which is a natural reaction for us and I do understand that to any kind of significant change, but we all react differently based on our personal development and perception of change. 

As someone who has lived through one many global changes and successfully built businesses plus tough times, change of complete environment and circumstance. 

It will be really good for the listeners at home and for myself to get an understanding of what was your initial reaction when the coronavirus hit, based on the fact that you employ lots of people, you’ve got this business operating. 

What was your initial reaction? 

Is it different to how the general public or normal people, as we say, are reacting?

Daniel: My reaction was a little bit different, I kind of went finally. 

My first business was started off the back of September 11 and the recession that followed September 11 and then the next business started off the back of 2008, 2009. 

Then from about 2013 onwards it was like eight years of just economic growth non-stop and it was just everything was overheated and I was just getting ready for the next thing. 

I didn’t know what was going to cause it. 

But six months before the coronavirus came I released a report to my clients called the crash report and basically said, we’re due for a massive disruption every 10 years there is a huge disruption and we are well overdue for it. 

The inverted yield curve happened a while back, it is just the fundamentals just for me, don’t feel right and you can’t just keep growing to the moon the way that we are something big is coming. 

I basically said, there are four, five things I want you to do. C was for building a cash buffer and A was for assets and automation and then I basically outlined it all on this crash report. R was for rationalise expenses. 

I said here are the things I want you to do in preparation for the whole market going down and I started saying to people it’s going to be big. 

It’s going to be a big crash, something big is going to come along. 

I don’t know that the trigger will be but there’s going to be a big thing that happens and the whole market will go tits up. 

Then there will be mass unemployment, there will be all of the things that you’d expect to see. I actually released the report and said it will probably happen in 2020 in a big way. 

A year before that I’d also said 2020 will be a massively turbulent year because the baby boomers are turning 70 and retiring, and in 2020 there is a real tipping point. 

In the same way that 1963 was a tipping point for people turning 15, 16, and buying music and the Beatles boomed with a song called I want to hold your hand. You can predict if there’s a lot of people in an economy at the same age at the same time, you can predict what they’re going to be doing and how it’s going to unfold. 

I kind of just said the baby boomers in the year 2020 are well and truly over 70 and will retire. When it happened I said okay cool, I’ve been expecting this and I had a whole action plan as to what we do and how we respond and we just started applying that action plan.

Harms: That’s fascinating. My takeaway is you were looking ahead, is that fair to say Daniel on a constant basis just looking ahead, thinking about the future, how you can protect the business, your people within the business. 

Rather than just cracking on with the daily thing and then all of a sudden you hit a brick wall.

Daniel: Absolutely. 

The first time I got caught off guard was my business coming off the back of 9/11 but I wasn’t in business during 9/11 and the dot. Crash. I didn’t know what it was like to go through that. I just knew what it was like to get started during that time. 

I wasn’t particularly paying any attention to it. at that particular time I had no idea that an event in New York would have any impact whatsoever on me living in Australia so I thought it was newsworthy but didn’t see that it had any influence whatsoever on the business community in Australia. 

It was just outside of my awareness and I just cracked on kind of naïvely, it wasn’t even stressful because it wasn’t even in my mind. 

I then got massively off guard at the speed of how fast things change and the speed that it all came crashing down in 2008, 2009 and how long it lasted, and all that stuff. 

I just thought to myself I’m not going to get caught out like that again, I’m going to make sure that turn next time that happens, I’ll be ready for that. 

I just had that in the back of my mind and had a plan and when the market tips over here is what we’re going to do.

Dr Ro: I think the word preparation jumps out there. 

I remember in the mid-90s I was in my mid 20s finishing my PhD, I embarked on an engineering career, although I’d already looked at business and played with a couple of start-ups myself. 

The thing I was being told by people because we went into a period of unrest and recession during that period. People said stay safe in your job role you’ve got a PhD. 

Get your head down for your career, but I was young, I was reading books all over the place. I was like a sponge, even following people like Les Brown reading all the classic historical books like think and Grow Rich because of something in my soul that told me I want more than this career. 

But the people around me in their jobs kept saying it’s a recession you shouldn’t start up and history just keeps leading us back to this cyclical effect of we are going to have down periods and up periods. 

In your view is now a good time to be an entrepreneur, bearing in mind where we are at. 

Secondly you used the word disruptions, how should entrepreneurs handle disruption?

Daniel: The first one is it’s a great time to be an entrepreneur. 

The reason I say that is there’s never been so much money in the economy in the UK, we’ve just had 133 billion pumped into the economy. 

Also liquidity you know every small business out there has just got a 50-grand loan, people are getting grants and there’s a lot of liquidity in the economy and people are looking to change. 

People want to do stuff, they will actually put themselves in a good position and also a lot of business owners are retiring, so there’s huge gaps in the marketplace forming.

When recessions happen the biggest companies in the economy retract their core business. 

They go back to what they do best, and they drop everything else and often to their own demise. Kodak decided to focus on photographic film and paper in 2002 and dropped digital cameras and would have been the world leader in digital cameras had they pursued it. Blockbuster video decided to pursue and focus on its retail stores and dropped subscriptions and downloads and mail order. 

Even Facebook in 2009, decided to stop focusing on mobile first and start focusing on desktop and advertising platforms and had to go and buy Instagram for a billion because basically Instagram came along and did mobile first. 

Had Facebook not been disrupted, they would have absolutely done a light version for the mobile right.

Dr Ro: Can you define what disruption means.

Daniel: If you think about it like this every 10 years you’re going to have a major personal disruption in your own personal life and every 10 years you’re going to have a major economic disruption at least.

You get majorly disruptive every five years on average. 

A personal disruption could be that you have someone in the family who is ill, maybe a new baby joined the family, you might have depression, you might have a bankruptcy, you might lose a major client or job and all that stuff is personal disruption. 

It’s basically things that just seriously don’t go to plan. 

And something suddenly catches you off guard and then a major disruption, an economic disruption that happens for everyone. 

There’s a shock in the economy and historically I think over the last 92 years we’ve had nine major disruptions. 

Almost like 10 years like clockwork if I were a conspiracy theorist I’d say it’s built into the system or something. 

There’s another kind of form of disruption which is that normally after global shock we enter a new phase. 

In the 90s we entered the PC era and then in the 2000’s we entered the Internet era. The 2010s the mobile Internet. 

Now we are going into the AI 5G era, and every 10 years a fundamental massive new piece of technology comes along that really seriously changes what is possible for entrepreneurs and for business and the way that we live and work. 

This one that’s come is a big one. If we were at a different period of time this would be like a bunch of people out in the field, ploughing a field by hand, looking across and seeing a tractor for the first time.

Harms: When I talk to other younger business owners, entrepreneurs about business the conversations we have or the people I have the conversations with always fall into two categories. 

It’s either a young person who is fired up about business but has no idea where to start. And a younger person who is actually just terrified about starting a business, but they really want to. 

Here’s the really cool part, almost within every one of those conversations, there will be reference to your books, this is why I’m extra excited to have you on today. 

For those young people listening or even somebody who is maybe they’re older and just had enough of their job and want to make a shift.

Daniel: If we were talking about sport there’s a huge amount of urgency and to get into the right sport at 15 and then make the absolute most of your 20s and then go into like winding down mode between 30 and 35. 

Then you kind of become a commentator at 35 and maybe go on the BBC and talk about sport. If you are in the sporting world your decade of achievement is probably your 20s and after that you’ve got to say what I do now? 

It’s a bit different with entrepreneurship, we all hear about Mark Zuckerberg at age 21, 22 we hear my story aged 21, we hear about Bill Gates 21, 22 and you would be forgiven for thinking that it was like sport and it was that you had to get your shit together in your 20s or else you’re in trouble. 

But it’s absolutely not like that, so statistically the fastest growing companies on average are started by 42-year olds and statistically the big exit happens for a 57-year-old. 

A multi-million pound exit happens at 57, if you imagine that the statistical average is that someone’s had a career 15 years’ experience may be more, and then they started a business in their early 40s. They grow it for 15 years and then they sell it for millions. 

If you go down to Coutts wealth management bank down the Strand and you talk to a wealth manager who comes across hundreds of millionaires all the time and you would say give me the typical entrepreneur who’s got millions in the back. 

They would say this particular person started the company at 42 and they built the business for 15 years and they sold it for 35 million and they had three or four shareholders and they each walked away between five and 15 million in each.

That’s actually the non-newsworthy event. 

If a plane takes off and wobbles a little bit and has to re-land that makes world news and everyday four million people fly on a plane perfectly safely and it doesn’t make the news at all. 

Remember that the newsworthy event is statistically irrelevant of it and anything that is statistically rare, makes the news and anything that statistically normal doesn’t make the news. 

Mainstream media or any media does not care at all about a 57-year-old who sold the company for 35 million that is not even newsworthy. 

The whole thing is that you’ve got time if you’re young. 

One of the things is there’s no rush to be out there starting a business. It’s not a bad thing to start a business if you want to get some experience and you kind of know what it is. I feel like you shouldn’t probably start a business, you should know what business you want to start. 

If you’re in your 20s, the number one thing that I would highly recommend is that in the UK there are 40,000 fast growth businesses that grow by 20% year-on-year. 

Out of 5.7 million businesses, most businesses are not growing very much. Most businesses are taxis, fish and chip shops and consultants. 

But there are 40,000 businesses that are fast growth businesses. They grow 20% year-on-year and typically they’ve got teams of five to 50 people, and when you join a team of five to 50 people, you’ve got visibility. You can see what’s going on around you. 

You can see what the salespeople are doing. 

You can see what the marketing people are doing, you can see what the finance and management operations people are up to. 

Looking around that business you’re going to start to see how a business actually fits together. If you go and work for a company with more than 50 people, you lose that visibility. 

You’ll find yourself in a sales team completely unaware of what the other teams are up to. You won’t be invited into any management or leadership meetings whatsoever so you lose visibility as you cross over 40, 50 people.

Dr Ro: Would it be fair to say as well within that smaller group size there’s more accountability?

Daniel: Yeah you can’t hide. 

You get given responsibilities that normally wouldn’t be thrown on to you. So for anyone in their 20s your job is not to start a start-up. Your job is to join a start-up job, to be employee number five. 

Your job is to find an entrepreneur who inspires you and if you can I know it’s a middle-class thing to say, but if you can basically say I don’t care what you pay me I want to join this start-up. I’ll sweep the floor; I’ll drive you to the airport or whatever it takes. 

I love this start-up but I want to be part of it. If you need me to sit on the phones making phone calls, fine I just want to be part of this start-up. 

Now if you can get yourself in on a fast growth company that is half the battle to later on down the track having a fast growth company. 

You’d be utterly shocked how predictable that is that the millionaires and people who are predictably millionaires down the track they almost all worked for someone who did something incredibly similar and they were kind of like under somebody’s wing for five years and then they went off and did it themselves.

Harms: When you think about it like that it just makes so much sense. But it’s not sexy to hear it that way, it’s sexier to just be 19 come across a fantastic cool new invention started from scratch.

That sounds sexy so I guess that’s what people are pursuing when the statistics show you’ve got way more chance of success if you follow the model that Daniel just explained.

Daniel: That almost never happens. 

When it does happen, it is often a young person so it is actually often a young person who is tinkering with social networking when no one else is. 

A lot of those brand-new technologies there’s no business model, no revenue model. So typically it’s that kind of person in the dorm room, tinkering away with it, who is not worried about making money. 

They just love doing it because they like it. When you hear about someone who comes up with something game changing, it is often a young person. 

Somebody who has got a bit of time on their hands and isn’t particularly under pressure to make money today, but when you hear about the predictable business the ones that when I think about the predictable millionaire, it’s the guy in his 50s who owns seven or eight properties owns a portfolio of investments. 

The business spits 250, 350, 400 of profit a year that gets reinvested into different places. The business pays for a great lifestyle and investments and over time and distance it’s doing well, running well. 

Running quarter on quarter growth it has got a good dynamic team and a good quality product and a nice niche and then ultimately, at some point, someone comes along and says I’ll have that thank you very much. 

And then there’s a two to three-year exit plan to hand the business over and to capitalise on a bunch of money and they’re onto the next thing. 

The businesses are normally like 15, 20 years old so you know that’s your statistically relevant millionaire. 

One of the first millionaires I hung out with was a friend of mine’s mum and dad who built a pest control business on the Sunshine Coast and sold it for four million and basically I witnessed first-hand as I went through school with this guy and I actually dated their daughter. 

Basically they ran a pest control business. 

They ended up with about 20 trucks on the road and they focused on a very unsexy industry, pest control termite control, putting down pest control barriers into homes and they had 20 trucks on the road. 

They sold that business for $4 million, and along the way they bought seven, eight, nine houses and they sold the business and bought their dream home. Paid cash for it and retired 55, 56 years old. 

I witnessed how unsexy it can be.

Dr Ro: You can hear a very clear description from Daniel here that it doesn’t have to be this wow shiny business that suddenly blows up and creates huge amounts of steady, steady flow, which leads me to another question, and it’s one I’ve been through myself. 

There is definitely a transitional period or point where you go from where I started my business to now gosh, this is growing and it’s more than just me and I think for many people, there is a block associated with taking the business to another level and that block has many assets. 

For me certainly it was the first time I took on somebody for the first time and now it’s not just Rohan it’s actually Ro and someone else. 

Then there was another person and the shift in responsibility what do I let go of?

Daniel: Suddenly you’ve got 10, 15, grand a month worth of payroll.

Dr Ro: Number one what about scaling up from start-up to your first million and part two is what changes beyond the million when a business grows say to 10 million?

Daniel: I also just want to circle back on that one question you said to the person who’s 45, 50, should I start a business? 

The quick answer to that is that you’re standing on a mountain of value and when you climb the mountain and you stand right at the top of the mountain, and you’re literally standing on the summit of a massive mountain, you can see the horizon really clearly. 

You can see everything around you, but the one thing you cannot see is the mountain, you’re actually too close to it. 

When you’ve been through 15, 20 years of experience in industry and you’re surrounded by other people who have been through 15, 20, 30 years of experience, when your normal month isn’t doing a project that is great and transformational, but that’s just a normal month. 

When you kind of have people who sit on boards and those kinds of things, it becomes very blasé and you think to yourself, okay I’m not special and I’m not sure what to do. 

The truth is the chances are you’re standing on an amount of value and you’ve just got what proximity bias. 

The example of proximity bias that I love is my father-in-law so my father-in-law wears a 1969 Rolex he bought for £350 in 1969, and he’s worn it every day since. 

He wears it mowing the lawn. He wears it pretty much all the time and I looked it up online and it turns out that it’s worth about £18,000 it’s a vintage collectible that has an investment value. I said to him If you had bought that watch for £18,000 would you wear it mowing the lawn? 

I said why don’t you sell it for 18,000 and buy yourself a brand-new Rolex and it’s proximity bias to him because it is his old watch. 

Even though it’s worth £18,000 he can’t see it as anything other than £350. The funny thing is that when I talk to a lot of people who are 45, 55, 65 they’re sitting there with their collectible vintage watch metaphorically speaking, saying this old thing, I don’t think it’s very valuable. 

It’s like it’s really valuable. 

You are hypnotised into a state of apathy about the value that you have, it’s right there it’s not far away. You don’t have to learn coding. 

You don’t have to learn some brand-new skill. You’re literally sitting there with a priceless artefact which could be scoring, knowledge, it could be your networks. But you just take it for granted.

Dr Ro: One of the phrases Deepak Chopra used years ago and I’ve held on to it is, be a silent witness in the moment. 

If you’re at the stage of transition be a silent witness to yourself step back from the mountain, look down and realise just how much you’ve got under your belt and how much value you have about the industry.

Daniel: Yeah, stop looking at the horizon and look at the mountain you’re on.

Let’s talk real kind of fast roll up the sleeves, fast and dirty street fighting how to get to the first million. 

The first million is pretty easy if you are associated with someone who is somewhat semi-famous or somewhat well-known. 

Anyone who’s got more than 10,000 genuine followers on Instagram or Twitter if they’ve written a bestselling book, if they are in their industry and are reasonably well known it’s very easy to make money around those people. 

For example, if I had to start from scratch, I would probably buy any commoditised business and then stick a famous profile associated with it and start running weekly and quarterly campaigns around that. 

The first million and mind you, I have bought businesses like this. I bought a digital agency that was doing 350 grand with 10 people and then two years later we’re doing a million with 10 people. 

Why? 

Because I get out and talk about them.

 I’ve got the books and all that other stuff and I’ve done the same with some other businesses, but essentially a mini weekly campaign, a decent quarterly campaign and an annual big message combined with someone who’s semi-well-known. 

It doesn’t have to be a dragon from Dragon’s Den or something like that, but it does have to be someone who can pretty much open doors and who people show up to see them speak or something like that. 

That’s been the easiest formula that I’ve used again and again and again and again to do the first million, and I’ve done that with the betting company, a franchise. 

That’s how we sold 10.7 million worth of franchises and then I’ve done that with training business, software business. 

Just literally take anything that is pretty much a good quality commoditized business stick a semi famous person on it and get them doing weekly and quarterly campaigns and you will very rapidly, a million is only 20 grand a week. 

If it’s a five grand sale it’s four sales a week, it’s not a big deal.

Harms: With that strategy which is again a non-sexy strategy. 

Have you then positioned yourself in the way which you talk about in key person influence where you are then the face of a business that you purchase? 

Therefore, you don’t have to go out and attach somebody else to it, you just attach yourself to it, and that’s the way you bring the value.

Daniel: In my very first business when I struck at the first time that 1.3 million, I was 22 years old there was no way I could be a key person of influence in my industry so I went and found this guy called Kerry who was 66, he just retired and he had a huge story. 

He ran a billion-dollar fund. 

He knew the world, the market, and economics and all this other stuff and I was building a business that ran training alongside the new piece of software that had been released and basically I put Kerry on stage every Wednesday night. 

70 people show up to see Kerry speak.

I ran an ad saying that he’s going to give a talk and out of 70 people we’d get 14 people who would buy the training. 

Which was the training that went alongside the new piece of software and basically it was that simple. We repeated that 41 times for the year, Kerry got paid 1500 as a base for giving his talk for two hours and he also got 5% of every sale we made, no matter how we made it. 

Out of 1.3 million he got 65,000 for commission on just our revenue target and then he got 60 70,000 in speaking fees. 

I paid him 125,000 to turn up 41 times and give a two-hour talk, so 10 grand a month pretty much to do a few little talks. Basically I realised the power of this very rapidly and it was one of the techniques I learned from John and by the time I’d been doing this for 10 years because I did this strategy for 10 years across a number of different things. 

I realised that I wanted to be that person. 

People who get paid a lot of money who are key people of influence are also real pains in the ass. They’re prima donnas they turn up when they want to, they start to believe their own hype. 

As soon as you start speaking in front of 100 people a night and a couple hundred people and people start showing up and following you, it all goes to your head and you become an egomaniac.

Dr Ro: I remember a couple of short brief conversations with you over the years. 

It’s keeping that purity of message and not being swept up by the fact you’re on a stage and you’ve been put on a pedestal. 

But if you can keep the authenticity it allows you to keep going back out to the market and people want to come back and be around you and buy whatever businesses you are offering next.

Daniel: 10 years of working with prima donna speakers and I realised I just do not want to be that person. 

Basically I got to the point I thought you know what, it’s far better to be that person than to pay 10 grand a pop to have that person.

I eventually positioned myself as that person a little bit accidentally and a little bit on purpose, but yes, that’s the formula for making the first million. It’s really easy if you’ve just got someone semi famous around. 

A lot of the time people who are a bit semi famous have a hard time figuring out how to turn their fame into money so it can be a real symbiotic relationship as well. 

That’s a cracker of a way to do it. It’s one of those things that works based on human psychology we’re always looking for the tribal chief, the person who leads the tribe, we can’t help that. 

Elon musk suddenly builds the company that is bigger than Toyota because Toyota is faceless and Tesla is not. 

Richard Branson cut through on British Airways because he has put a face to it. It happens on a small and big scale all the time. 

That’s the first million very much very easy to do. You only need about three or four people plus a famous person and a decent product that is priced around three to five grand. 

You can make four or five sales a week, smash out the sales and you’re on 20 grand a week and it adds up to over million a year.

Dr Ro: Fantastic. So, part two or the ones thinking what about more than one million?

Daniel: One to 10 million it gets hard; a team of less than 12 people can self-organise. You don’t need a hierarchy; you don’t need a system; you can actually do it in a WhatsApp group or a Facebook group. 

You don’t even need to be in the same location. You don’t need to have like team meetings it just flows. 

It’s kind of like organising three or four people to go down and play basketball altogether. 

But as soon as you actually say okay we’re going to have a proper team, management once you have 12 people you can’t self-organise and you need hierarchy, systems, you need a process. 

A way of combining the team, objectives, and key results and all of that costs money, and you also find that you can’t afford it. 

So between 12 and 40 people it’s the hardest point in business because you need people and systems and stuff, but you can’t afford it. 

I call it crossing the desert because you’re kind of too big to be small, too small to be big and this is the barrier that most companies hit. It’s around 10 to 12 people. You go in great guns until a lot of people discover 15 people where they are very profitable when they got eight people. 

Nine people, 10 people and then their losing money hand over fist with 15, 16, 17 people. 

Then they think we better rush back to being eight people because this horrible and essentially you’ve got to commit to what the business is going to look like at 40 people. 

You’ve got to figure out a leadership team, management team, operational teams, how to structure the business to look like this, sell in these territories’ markets and products. 

Do one or two of these acquisitions to fast track, raise a little bit of money to bridge the gap that we need to bridge.

Dr Ro: I’ve noticed with the expansion is the duplication of the original model, so the original model works and now expanding that having the people, the right values, the right vision and duplicating the system that we know worked.

Daniel: That’s the difference between growth and scale. 

If you’ve got one restaurant and you do one million and you want to go to 1.2 million. That’s growth. 

If you’ve got one restaurant, you want to open up three more that do one million each that’s scaling. 

Typically your strategy for a zero to million is growth and strategy from one to 10 is scale.

Dr Ro: The people factor plays out in a big way.

Daniel: The three things that your life becomes about when you hit about 10 million is talent, so bringing talented people into the organisation and I can’t tell you what an incredible breath of fresh air it is when you get a new talented person into the company. 

I’m not just talking about teams, but then there’s these people who are talented.

They literally can come on in and manage and run and attract like a seven-figure section of the business and suddenly that’s off your shoulders and that just frees up energy. 

Number one is getting that talented person, that person is better than you, and the second one is a proprietary asset. 

What you’re trying to develop with a £10 million business is some form of defensible proprietary asset. You’re the only company in the world that has this combination of assets and if people want it they’ve got to come to you. 

You’ve got something that is different, unique and an asset model, not people; it’s actually proprietary IP software media something along those lines. 

The third one is drive and performance and basically what you want with performance are two things. 

Number one if you do nothing, if you literally let the business sit there doing nothing you want a baseline of performance that just keeps ticking over, and normally that’s subscription revenue, recurring revenues. 

Those kinds of sass type revenue businesses and that means that the business will not just drop dramatically. 

If you do nothing with it, you could sell it and there’d be like 12 to 18 months of just revenues coming in without having to think, terribly hard. 

The second thing you want is the opposite, which is growth. How do we grow it? 

How do we week run campaigns, promotions? 

How we open new territories or markets and one of the levers we need to push in order to really wrap this thing up and double it in the next year. 

Essentially if you’ve got talent, assets and performance levels, then you’ve got a very excitable business. You can sell that from an absolute fortune if you’ve got those three things.

Dr Ro: Do you have a personal preference at this stage of the business?

Daniel: I love zero 10 million. 

For me running those first campaigns, getting people in a room or on a zoom call watching videos or into a marketing landing page, seeing that first traction and then seeing those sales coming in. 

That first zero to one million, the original team where everyone has got their sleeves rolled up. I love that first million and then that one to 10, is so hard and I hate it, but I have a love hate thing. 

That’s where it suddenly becomes rewarding where you make the business a bit more of a grown-up company. 

You’re putting in routines, rhythms, weekly meetings, quarterly make meetings right. 

Getting that 12-month alignment to one goal with the whole team you’re bringing on team and talent, training and recruiting them. 

You’re finding that amazing general manager who can handle most things, so all that happens between one and 10. It’s hard and actually find it infuriating, but I kind of have a love hate because that’s where the payoff happens.

Harms: When we spoke about that non-sexy company which the 50-year-old sells, they have that saleable asset now beyond that 10 million point or when they have a system put in.

Daniel: Between one and 10 million, you’ve got what’s called a family business. 

Traditionally in the banking world they call it like a family business, it might even be a bit bigger one to 20 million. In private wealth they call that a family business and basically it’s a fairly stable business, but completely privately held and can do what it likes. 

That’s rewarding because around the one to 10 million the business can pay a decent income, it can pay a decent dividend, you can actually hire good people who can run it well and can pay them a decent income and the business kind of starts to take on a life of its own. 

As far as actually a proper exit the minimum amount you need for a proper exit is about a million of profit, which tends to happen around five to six million revenue. 

Big companies won’t buy a company if it doesn’t have a million of profit. In fact a millions of profit is like the absolute minimum mostly they want more like 10 million of profit in order to properly buy. 

Below a million of profit you have to sell it to your employees, you have to sell it to a competitor for four or five years and you need to adopt a more chairperson role and let it pay you an income.

It’s not that you’ve exited the business, you’ve just exited the time out of the business.

Harms: Having built yourself also guided others to build businesses just like the ones we spoke about over decades now from your experience, I ask this again for the people in their 20s and 30s who maybe have been completely shocked by what’s been going on in the world around us. 

Maybe for Ro’s generation where they maybe went through that financial crisis and are still in shock from what happened then. 

Rather than come out of it and acting in a way that they can ago create and craft something new. 

Instead, what they are doing is defaulting to staying what they consider secure, staying in front of Netflix getting that basic pay cheque.

To give these people some creative inspiration because my assumption is they’re excited. But I don’t block or that fear of what’s happening out there in the external world to just shock them into not doing anything and watching Netflix. 

To give them some creative inspiration what big trends will be driving the next decade that these people get their teeth into?

Daniel: This decade that is coming is going to be hugely transformational, so a few things are going to happen. 

We’re going to have 5G rollout and that means that there will be lightning fast Internet everywhere in a major built-up area and then on top of that, you’ve got the ability for devices to form their own networks in real time. 

That technology linked with high def cameras linked with his voice to text linked with AI and machine learning, is going to create a fundamental shift in how the world does business and how the world works. It’s going to change the way we live and work and coronaviruses have sped everything up. 

Some big trends that are going to happen and I think what we’re going to see is the outsourcing of white-collar jobs outside being expensive cities and to much more low-cost areas. 

There’s going to be a lot of jobs that we now do in London and New York that are going to be moved to Wichita and Philippines and India and Wales. 

Places where you can get an amazing person with a master’s degree for 30 grand as opposed to 60 gran. 

Everyone saying we get to do remote working, that’s lovely, I love remote working. It’s only a very short window of time where that’s going to be happy and exciting. It’s going to be a very big window of time where that’s going to be. 

If no one comes into the office anymore why do we need them to be anywhere near London or anywhere near a big city? 

The next big trend is a lot of jobs are getting automated. 

Or de-professionalised would be a better word, de-professionalised means that a complicated high skilled job is a lot less complicated because of the software that is running in the background. 

For example, it used to be that being a photographer was an extremely difficult job, you had to have very expensive camera equipment, a dark room and chemicals and had to be part artist, part chemist. 

Just to develop film as a photographer and get those kinds of unique and different looks you had to be one hell of a chemist, scientist, artist and now you just need to kind of have a bit of software and toggle things on and let the software do the work. 

I’m currently doing a meditation course and it’s an amazing meditation course that lasts for a year and it cost me £90 as an app on my phone. 

One guy recorded at one time, and basically that one guy has now solved the problem as well as you could possibly solve it for the rest of the next five years, 10 years and you just don’t need to go and see a meditation trainer or coach. 

The guy who recorded it doesn’t need to do it anymore he put himself out of a job for the next five years. 

Think about how much the world changed as a result of smart phones and 4G, and GPS in everyone’s pocket, gave rise to cloud computing and it gave rise to new business models like Uber and Instagram. 

Even the way people meet their partner using swipe left, swipe right all that is made possible by the mobile phone with the fast Internet with the GPS. 

If you basically work on the very basic assumption that 5G is 10 to a hundred times more powerful than that and gives rise to 10 to a hundred times more powerful applications then we are about to see the world absolutely shift and change. 

On top of that the European age and demographic the average age of someone in Germany is now 48, the average age of Britain is 41. 

That basically means for every person in retirement there is not that many people working, it requires huge commitment to health care and all that other stuff, selling down assets and moving out of big houses selling into more small houses and trying to live off the additional equity. 

But if everyone’s doing that all at the same time, that means huge levels of disruption across every industry, across everyone’s job and work. 

You have to be an entrepreneur you’ve got to have an entrepreneurial mindset because for entrepreneurs disruption is a problem and problems are opportunities and opportunity is money. 

For people who love certainty and security, disruption and problems are the enemy, and it stops them earning money and it is really you’ve got to get onto the surfing side of the wave, otherwise you’re going to be dumped.

Dr Ro: What Covid has done in so many ways it’s not been just like let me take a holiday where most people diffuse for four or five days then have their holiday period and then maybe reflect a little bit, come back, get settled foot back on the table, carry on for another 10 years. 

This has been a serious pause and so many people ask the question, do I want to do something different? 

What I’ve been doing for the last 15 years I’m getting pissed off, fed up with it and I want to make a change. 

I think that’s the conversations are happening a lot, which is why these types of conversations are so important and what you do with Dent and just your whole brand is so important because your position now, with decades of experience to take somebody on a springboard who’s ready to go and say this is how you do it.

Because otherwise people just try and do it on their own and they may end up finding they lost a lot of money. 

Feel the pain of it and then slip back into the jobs again.

Daniel: As it currently stands we’ve just lost the last 18 years of job growth. 

I can tell you first hand every company out there is not hiring back everyone who they furloughed, because over the last four months every smart company in the world just figured out how to do what they do with less people.

Dr Ro: As you say, there’s more technology coming into place that allows people to do the same thing technologically instead with physical manpower.

I think what you’re describing in a nutshell, is just an opportunity here for anyone that is ready to pursue something they’re passionate about rather than just to chase the money. 

That’s a personal view I have on business myself, having gone down the road of pursuing the money and then realising it wasn’t the business I wanted to do.

There was a question years ago when I was on stage with Kiyosaki and a few others in Singapore and the question was asked to all three of us on stage and mine was actually I’ve lost money because I just got greedy. 

I was pursuing businesses I thought were going to make me money as opposed to ones I was genuinely passionate about doing that had value.

Daniel: It never works as soon as it is clear and obvious that it’s a money project versus a passion project you are sure that everyone else has noticed that as well. 

One of the things for young people, I see so many of them getting sucked into money making things like trading and flipping properties and all these kinds of things, where unless you are extremely experienced and knowledgeable on that particular topic you’re in competition with people who are extremely knowledgeable and experienced in the topic.

Dr Ro: I think any start-up needs that level experience.

Daniel: Unfortunately and I don’t know whether this pisses someone some people off, I’d say forget trading. 

There is no way you can trade. It is now PhD’s with quantum computers who you’re up against.

Dr Ro: Statistically 90% people start trading within a few months and have lost their funds as well very different world out there. 

When we wrap up on a podcast what would be a few actions that Dan Priestly all the years of experience that you’ve had, what could be something they could do now to keep that momentum off the back of this.

Daniel: Number one commit to stop watching the news. Just don’t watch the news at all. 

Tune out from that and spend half an hour a day journaling rather than watching news. During the time that you would normally watch the news and unwind for the day.

If you like a glass of wine, go find a comfy spot, grab a glass of wine, sit with a journal and start writing down some ideas and thoughts and just sit there until something comes up. 

Just basically say what are the types of things that would change my life for the better? 

Who should I hang out with? Who is my network? 

What makes up my amount of value and just spend the same amount of time that you dedicate to look into her statistically relevant events and sit and think. I buy these Mont Blanc journals, beautiful clear no lines, free-form and I have a couple of really nice pens. It’s a beautiful experience and I love to just sit with a big journal and just journal. 

Getting a mentor is an important one. I’ve got this saying that the environment dictates performance and it’s the core philosophy of why accelerators work. 

Environment dictates performance basically says humans are environmental creatures, creatures of environment we behave the way our environment thinks that we should behave. 

We tune in to the environment and if you ever watch these Darren Brown documentaries where he gets people to do pretty outrageous things. He just makes it normal for that environment for you to do the outrageous things. 

Then suddenly, they realise what they’re doing and it all comes crashing down. 

You can use that same philosophy for positive things, so environment dictates performance means that in your environment most of your friends are the types of people who are achieving things and doing things and making things happen. 

You’ve got a mentor in your environment, people in your environment who can fund the project if you want. You’ve got accountability and transparency; you’ve got access to strategies and best practices. 

So really work on building your environment or get into an environment that already exists. 

With Dent accelerators we have about 2,000 people fill in an online form for every 50 people we take on, so we are massively oversubscribed.

I would recommend getting on a Dent accelerator if you can, but about 1,950 miss out for every 50 who get in.

Dr Ro: I’m going to sign off personally as a friend and say congratulations on the kids, getting married on that amazing journey. 

On a personal level and just thank you for your sincerity, your honesty, just a down to earth approach that you have to everything you do and the way you’ve shared today. 

Huge amounts of value packed a lot into the time we’ve had with you.

Daniel: Thank you again for having me on the podcast.

Harms: Amazing. 

There we have it that the environment dictates performance. 

I think that’s a fantastic final takeaway. From myself thank you, Daniel.

This has been a business masterclass and one that we shall point people to whenever we talk about the topic of business on our podcast going for it. 

A massive thank you to yourself, myself, Ro, and Daniel signing out. 

This is us signing off the Seekardo podcast. 

Until the next one we will see you later.