- Employ a cleaner. - So you're saying employ--
- You can't do everything.
How much time have you got in the day?
24 hours, how much have I got?
24 hours. - Yeah.
- You're gonna write 20 letters.
Good old-fashioned snail mail
and you're gonna send it through the post to them.
And then you're gonna call them up and say,
"Let me take you to Costa Coffee,
"come on, let's have a little chitty-chat chat."
If you are doing repeatable tasks,
you will never break through what that,
so called, glass ceiling is.
(funk music)
I'm obsessed with only doing leverage tasks
and I wanted to talk to you bout what that is very quickly.
So leverage tasks is where you do something
and it continues to work forever for you.
So what I'm doing right now, is an unleveraged task.
I'm sitting down with you guys,
as much as I enjoy sitting with business owners
and let me tell you now, I really do enjoy it,
it's unleveraged.
You know, I'm doing the work once
and then it never happens again.
So the way that I justify doing this stuff
is I get Chance along to record it,
so these questions and answers that we have,
he'll cut that up, chop that up,
put that into loads of videos,
on linkydink, twitbook and YouTube and stuff like that.
And then those videos will continue to work for us
forever in the future
and that's how I justify doing this stuff.
Because, time is precious
so the single biggest difference between okay entrepreneurs,
good entrepreneurs and successful entrepreneurs
or okay businesses, good businesses
and outstandingly successful businesses,
the business owner focuses most of its time
on leverage tasks.
I.e. he's doing stuff that he does once,
that works for him forever.
If you are doing repeatable tasks,
you will never break through what that,
so called, glass ceiling is.
You gotta make a decision though,
this is the thing I went through.
Jason, let me tell you now how many people I have sat with
that are going through,
and right now I promise you here in the UK
going through the dilemma that faces you right now,
can you charge your customers and extra 20%?
Have you gotta swallow it, will you just lose the customers?
I went through that situation,
you have got to decide in your minds eye
whether you want to be a business that just makes wages,
which is fine if that's what you wanna be,
a business that just employs your girlfriend,
you work five days a week,
you get a couple of nice holidays a year,
you don't have any real stress
and you build a profitable job.
If you want to build a profitable business
and the answer might not be,
"No actually, I don't wanna do that".
Then you stay as you are.
But if you want to build something
that's what I call an investment.
Most businesses are jobs.
Not investments.
An investment is someone wants to buy something
and they want to do it and I generates income without them.
Why do people like doing property?
Because they see it as an investment.
So they're buying that two bedroom,
that two up and down,
two up, two down house with two bedrooms,
they're renting it to a family
and it's sort of passive to a certain degree.
And some tenants might change,
you might have a boiler break every now and then
but it can be managed by others.
Your business at the moment is you live and breathe it
and you make everything happen.
Therefore it's a job.
It's not an investment.
So you've gotta go through the three stages,
from profitable job, profitable business,
to an investment that completely works without you
that someone wants to buy or invest in.
So you need to decide which of those three do you wanna do?
Now this is a lot of stress getting to here,
well the stress is here actually, that's less stressful.
So a profitable business is stressful.
A profitable investment is hallelujah time,
they're the tress stages; profitable job,
profitable business and profitable investment.
You and only you can decide what's your DNA capable,
can you actually say, "Yeah I wanna have 10 employees,
"I wanna go out and get contracts,
"I wanna be the marketeer of a business,
"I wanna be the business development person of a business
"and get someone else to run it."
So what I'd be doing if I was you,
is I would be getting as much cash together,
whether you borrow it from families, get a business loan
and employ someone to run the business
and you become the marketeer of the business.
You actually just go out there and get customers.
- Okay.
- And then your life will change.
Or you say, "No, I'm happy with where I'm at
"I wanna try and get another 10 grand a year out of it
"so I can but some nice things, go out for dinner a bit more
"maybe have some new holidays".
Get out of this mindset like most business owners
that are in your predicament, in your situation
that you need to go and get someone
that can do the sales and marketing.
I just know that what people, "I need to get sales--"
- I love marketing.
- So just do that and employ a cleaner to run the business.
Employ someone on 18 to 25 grand a year that is really good,
honest, that can go and look after the grand hotel,
that can go and do all that stuff
so you focus 80% of your time on growing the business
and 20% operating it.
And if you do that, and especially as you said,
"I love marketing", you'll fly.
And when you employ someone
and you have that pressure of finding their wages each month
you'll push yourself to do more.
- Okay. - Don't be all this,
"I got a virtual assistant,
"I've got some self employed people"
because you're just relaxing yourself
from not pushing yourself.
I'm employed my first person at 17.
By the time I was 21 I had 24 employees.
You're buying yourself back time.
I imagine you're gonna be better at most people
at marketing because of the great words that you said,
"I love marketing."
which is great because obviously there's a natural,
"I want to do that".
All the most successful business owners
that I ever come across, marketing first, operator second.
And I'll talk to you about my career,
I started off as a kids entertainer,
didn't wanna go over the VAT threshold.
I started an entertainment agency,
it was a bit easier back then, I did have two,
I had Sole Trader and Limited Company.
But that was all swapping time for money business,
I just couldn't grow it.
I wanted to get into attractions
like what we're in right now,
I had the steps to getting there,
I had to that stuff
but then I started getting a bit more commercial work
and off I went.
- If we split it - I don't, employ--
- Employ a cleaner - you're saying employ it
there you go. - You can't do everything.
How much time have you got in the day?
24 hours, how much have I got?
24 hours. - Yeah.
- How can I be more effective than me?
I mean I'll walk you around mate, if you wanna come see.
There is like soldiers everywhere that I pay
and I've done that from day dot.
You've got to buy in more time.
What you're doing is low value tasks.
You're doing, what you charge your customer £25 an hour,
you're doing £25 an hour tasks.
Whereas if you do the marketing,
you're into £500 an hour tasks
and it changed the business, game changing.
Yeah, well that's most business owners by the way yeah.
But they just, they're stuck in a rut
and they can't see out you know
and I get that, I've been in those ruts.
The last to years even in our sides
we've had some really tough situations.
I just opened a day nursery at Cambridge and built Cambridge
and then someone set it to fire
and we got half a million pounds
but it costs a million pounds to build.
So I've had to find half a million pounds
just like I've got that down the back of the sofa, no.
Because I'm doing other things over here
and doing over things over there.
I've got, send a million quid to China
to make a load of teddy bears
and then 2017 we had the World Cup and a heatwave,
sorry 2018 World Cup and a heatwave
so I had difficult trading times.
But how I've always been able to get through those things
is because I've been good at getting customers
but you're operating a business, not growing it.
- [Audience Member] That's the problem.
- First of all, you get a flip chart and you go,
you write up on the flip chart 20 customers
that you know within Nottingham
that you could do a great job for.
So don't need a list of leads
because you don't need thousands of customers,
you might only need eight customers to change your life
on retainer, good customers.
So you're gonna write 20 customers
or 20 avatar good companies within Nottingham,
within an hours drive time of you,
that you know you could change their business.
They're shoddy at marketing,
then you're gonna write 20 letters,
good old-fashioned snail mail
and you're gonna send it through the post to them.
And then you're gonna call them up and say,
"Let me take you to Costa Coffee,
"come on, let's have a little chitty-chat chat."
but if I only need five or 10 customers,
I'm doing old fashioned stuff.
The best marketing to this day in my opinion,
is watching what happens right now
up until the 12th of December.
12th of December, yeah, election day.
The stuff that politicians do
is the marketing that you need to do.
They go and speak in village halls,
they go and speak in factories,
they send leaflets through the door
and they knock on the door and say,
"Hello, I'm your MP, will you vote for me?"
Like that stuff still trumps videos on Facebook,
emails, text messages.
Now they do do all that stuff too
but they know that good old-fashioned grass roots marketing,
acting like a local MP, or a local counselor,
getting those votes, what they do, those votes
and knocking on the door, gets the most loyal customers.
You might even find you only need four customers.
But you might need to buy a list for an MOT station
'cause you wanna get 10,000 email addresses
of people that are in Nottingham.
And I get all of that stuff and it's right
but you need some really great clients.
And you think that great people are gonna come off an email?
D'you know what I wake up in the morning
and I get up and I go, right, it's time for the coal.
So I get my iPhone, delete, delete, delete, delete,
delete, delete, delete, delete, delete.
Oh and there's actually someone I know.
I'll read their email.
You know when I said you get the avatar thing,
you get yourself a flip chart
and you write the 20 companies
that you know you can make a difference in.
And you might come up with 100 companies,
then you go and market to just that hundred
and then 10 of them might say,
and I reckon it'll be 10 of them,
"Yeah, let's have a meeting."
One day the business if gonna finish,
whether it's you don't decide to retire or you die.
I'm constantly faced with, I will never retire
but there is a finish date to me,
so what happens when the business is finished?
Like I said with Jason, do you want to have an investment,
a business or a profitable job.
Profitable job, profitable business, profitable investment,
only you can decide that.
Because for some people, I say to them,
Just stick with having a profitable job.
If you got kids and you just wanna work three days a week,
that's absolutely fine, you're bringing in some income,
having a great life.
But if you really do want to build something
that you can sell or that is of value in three years
then you gotta employ people
and get yourself more time back.
I would be putting a great Keynote presentation together
and speaking at as many events as you can.
I would literally be going
and speaking at the opening of a packet of crisps.
That's how much I'd be doing.
The situation, because you're gonna be dealing with,
what I would call, sophisticated people here.
And I ignore funnel stuff
and email stuff until I know the person.
Now if I've seen someone speak and they send me an email
and put me through a funnel, yeah, I wanna be involved,
I wanna talk to them and I wanna meet them.
But I would be, so I'm going to,
it's Wednesday tomorrow, isn't it?
So I'm going to a childcare conference
with my senior team in London tomorrow.
Like, you need to be speaking at that.
You need to be speaking at that.
You've got 400 people focused on you
for your hours presentation
and you could be calling your Keynote,
how to sell your business for millions of pounds
or how to generate the hidden wealth within your business
and then you do an interesting not a boring,
like don't use all the, "You can make some,"
just like real interesting, a wow, not how talk.
And I'm just gonna say that again, a wow, not how talk.
As soon as people go into the how (snores)
you know, it's like, it's really important.
And then you'd be going speaking to those at banks,
I spoke at Santander to all their childcare people.
All the banks are having people come, Christie's were there,
Savills were there,
you might have represented Christie's
some time over your career doing stuff like that.
- [Male Audience Member] I have sort of stood on stage
and presented--
- Do more of it, like how can you get on those things?
And you're in a similar situation as me,
you don't need thousands of customers do you?
How many do you need, probably 10 a year?
- [Male Audience Member] If that.
- If that.
It's the most dangerous thing
and I won't do it today 'cause we haven't got time
but basically the way that marketing works
is market, message, media.
And because now you have access to media so freely,
so easily, you're thinking media,
then what's your message, then what's your market
and you need to think what's my market?
That's my message to them
and then do I actually need any media, no,
probably need to go and have some coffees with people
and meet people direct.
And the media for you could be speaking on stage.
So when it comes to,
so The Sun newspaper are the masters of wow-ing you
not how-ing you
and The Financial times are the masters of how-ing you
rather than wow-ing you.
Now don't get me wrong, I love reading The Financial Times
but it's niched down to people that like business
and stuff like that.
So, say like a world performing headline would be this,
for example, I lost seven stone
in six months eating all the food that I still love.
Like wow, wow, wow, wow, wow!
You're in.
There's a famous thing
that always goes around the internet saying,
"All the foods that you shouldn't eat to get cancer"
and there's a picture of a bunch of bananas.
I don't know if anyone's ever been conned into that
and a couple I'm like, I thought bananas were good for you.
So you click on it and then wow, it is click bait
and even then I wanna know what they're doing
I'm like, still whoa, hang on a sec
this is a bit of a wow moment here you know.
Dan Kennedy is the master of it.
Like that is a Dan Kennedy phrase
that I've just whacked out there for you.
He wows you, not how's you.
And the Daily Express and The Sun
always try and use weather headlines to sell newspapers,
so for example, they know if they put out there
and there's a few of it.
"The UK set to have snow storms for two weeks solid."
Like oh wow, I need to know about this.
It's not like, it's gonna be a bit chilly,
there'll be white stuff on the ground,
this white stuff is made of cold ice that then turns into,
d'you see what I mean?