- Four years ago in 2017, I started this YouTube channel.
I built it from the ground up while I was a medical student.
and then when I graduated university for the next two years,
while working full-time as a doctor
in the UK National Health Service.
So for three years, I was working on the business part-time
in my evenings and weekends,
and now we've grown to a team of 10 full time staff
with around $3 million in annual revenue
and nearly two million subscribers here.
So if you're new here, then do please consider subscribing
to get that number up.
Anyway, in this video, I wanna take you through
the three stages of that journey,
and I'm gonna share the lessons
I've learned along the way,
so that hopefully it can help you in your entrepreneurial
or creative journey, let's get into it.
So whenever we're starting any kind of business
or creative journey or trying to get
anything at all off the ground,
usually we're gonna be doing it ourselves
in the first instance,
it was really nice to have co-founders,
but for something like a YouTube channel,
it ends up being a very solo activity.
And so for me, while I was working solo
on the YouTube channel and the business
for the first two years,
there were a handful of principles that I found
really, really helpful in making that happen
in a productive fashion.
Firstly, there's the idea of thinking in systems.
When it came to churning out two YouTube videos every week,
it was going to be pretty unsustainable to kind of
treat those videos as like one heavy lift at a time.
And that's how it kind of got started,
okay, I need to make one video, cool that video is done
now I need to make the next one, cool that's done
now the next one and so on.
And very quickly I realised that this
was gonna be unsustainable.
And so instead I try to figure out what
is the system behind this?
Can I build some sort of system that systemizes the process
in a way of making YouTube videos?
And so that involves mapping out
what are the different stages within the system
of creating a video, like idea generation
then writing and scripting and then filming
and then titles and thumbnails and editing.
And I tried to do my best to make the entire workflow
as efficient as possible and also to batch similar tasks.
So for example, I would have like a writing day
where for the whole day I would just kind of write,
bullet point, talking points for my next
like 10 to 20 videos and I would do that all in one go.
And then when I would have 10 or 20 videos prepared,
I would try and film a bunch of them all in one day,
once I'd already gone through the sunk cost
of setting up all the equipment.
And then when it came to editing the videos,
I'd actually be able to edit in my spare time.
So for example, when I was a medical student
and preparing for finals,
there'll be like two hours in the evening between,
I'd study from like 10:00 AM till 6:00 PM
and then from 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM for that two hour window,
I would just do editing on whatever needed editing
and then from 8:00 PM till like 1:00 AM
me and my friends would play Avalon and Articulate,
fantastic board games by the way, in my room.
And so I guess the lesson here is that
whatever you're trying to work on,
if you think of it as a system rather than
as you doing a heavy lift every single time,
then the whole process of creating this thing
as a solo creator or entrepreneur becomes a lot easier.
Lesson number two that I learned very quickly is that
friction is the most powerful force in the universe
and that anything I can do to minimise the friction
in getting stuff done was gonna pay dividends
in the long run.
When I was first starting out the YouTube channel
and I didn't wanna spend money on stuff,
I would like literally stack my camera on top
of a bunch of books and use those as a makeshift tripod
and then I realised after awhile that like,
why am I trying to save like $20 on the cost of a tripod
because there's just so much friction
in getting my medical textbooks
and turning them into a tripod every time.
And so I spend that $20 buying a tripod
and suddenly it cut down the friction of filming a video
by about five minutes and that five minutes made
an absolutely massive difference.
Then after a while I realised that it was taking about
20 minutes every time to set the camera up,
put it on the tripod, get the angles,
get the lighting right and so I tried to find
a camera angle in my room where I could just
leave the camera up at all times
and only take it down if I absolutely had to.
And this friction thing applies to
all other aspects of life as well.
Like when my guitar is right next to me on the sofa,
I practise the guitar around 10 times more
than when my guitar is in another room,
out of sight, out of mind.
If I was studying for exams again,
I realised that reducing the friction to having my books
and my laptop like right next to my desk rather than
having books on the bookshelf,
just those three metres in between my desk and my bookshelf
made it so much more likely that I was actually
gonna do some work rather than procrastinate because
who can be bothered to get up
and take a book off the bookshelf.
And then principle number three
is the idea of productive downtime.
Now, whenever we're working on any of these things
as solo entrepreneurs or creators or hobbyists or whatever,
and we have a lot of interests that we wanna sort of
cram into our time in like a way
that's still fun and sustainable and like not burn out
but then I think the idea of productive downtime
is quite helpful.
So for example, when I was working full-time
as a doctor for two years,
it wasn't so intense that every single day
I was like working from like eight in the morning
till 6:30 in the evening
there would often be moments of downtime.
Like for example, the ward round is finished in the morning
and now there's this like half an hour window
where we're waiting for all the scans and bloods
and stuff to come back and there's actually
nothing objectively that we have to do in that time.
Now what most of my friends at work would do is
get on their phones and scroll social media or whatever.
I would do that as well but I realised on some days
that in that half an hour window
or even if that window was 10 or 15 minutes,
I could actually use that time to plan another video
or to start drafting out the structure for an online course.
And so the lesson here is that if you're working on stuff
that's taking up a lot of time,
you actually can use your downtime in a productive fashion.
Obviously what I'm not saying is don't take a break
and work 24/7, I'm not about that life at all,
I'm all about enjoying the journey,
having fun along the way.
But realistically, if we imagine how much time we spend
like on the toilet scrolling through Twitter,
or just chilling, just browsing Instagram on our phone,
I find that that's not actually particularly fulfilling
or enjoyable for me and if I spent that half an hour
on the toilet planning out videos or stuff instead,
I got a lot more joy out of it
and my legs got a lot less dead than they did
when I was just scrolling Twitter.
Stage two, building a team.
So after two years of working
as an entirely solo entrepreneur/creator by myself
in June, 2019, so two years ago now actually
I decided I was gonna try and outsource the editing
of these videos to a freelancer.
Now there were a few things that led to this insight.
There's a concept that Naval Ravikant
talks about a lot in his Twitter account which is,
figuring out our effective hourly rate,
like how much would our time be worth
if we were to charge it out to someone else.
I found that my effective hourly rate,
I think at the time was around $30 an hour-ish
and I realised that if it's taking me somewhere between
four and eight hours to edit every single video,
maybe that's not the most value I could be adding
to the business and so what I did is
I went on a website called PeoplePerHour and I found
a fantastic freelance video editor
who then started editing my videos for the next few months.
This was absolutely game-changing because
all of a sudden those like 20 hours a week
that I was spending editing my own videos,
that was completely gone.
And until I did it I didn't realise just how much time
I was spending on the editing stuff
and how much more my brain would be unlocked
to be able to do more interesting things
when I didn't have to edit my own videos.
These days when I teach my course,
the Part-Time YouTuber Academy anytime we get like...
One of the things we always talk about is outsource editing
as soon as you can provided you can afford it
and anytime a student's done it, they've always been like,
"Oh, I was really shy about this initially,
I didn't wanna outsource editing
I wanted to hold onto it myself."
But then when they do it, they're like,
"Oh my God, I feel like a breath of fresh air,
this whole weight has been taken off my shoulders.
There's so much I can now do
now that I don't have to do the editing myself."
And this lesson applies even if you're not a YouTuber,
like whatever project or entrepreneurial endeavour
or creative endeavour you're working on,
you probably could outsource some elements of it
so that you don't necessarily have to do them yourself.
Anyway, outside of the freelancer thing,
the most important lesson I learned during this period
came from a book called, "The E-Myth Revisited"
by Michael Gerber.
And this is like a book that is genuinely changed my life
and changed the game for the business
because his model here which I just had never heard before
is that actually to run a great business,
you don't just need to be a good technician.
So the role of the technician was the one that I was doing,
like writing videos, filming videos, editing videos,
it's very like technical stuff, actually doing the work.
To run a great business you also need to be
an entrepreneur thinking ahead and making like big plans
and also a manager like knowing exactly
what's happening in the business day-to-day
and being able to delegate things appropriately.
Then a few months after reading this book,
the business was making enough money to actually be able
to afford a full-time employee, full-time team member.
I was really scared about hiring
my first full-time employee.
I remember thinking, now I have to pay the salary,
now we have to make a certain amount of money each month.
What if the YouTube channel fails?
What if this stuff doesn't work out?
But after reading a bunch of books about this
and talking to a few friends and mentors
who've run businesses, they all basically said that like,
when you hire a full-time team member,
it will just completely changed the game for you
because now it's not just you doing the thing,
and it's not just you like having all the responsibility,
you can offload some of that responsibility and ownership
onto this other person.
And so in around October of 2019, two and a bit years
into starting the YouTube channel,
I hired Christian as our Head of Content/Video Editor
and he was the first full-time team member that we had
and I think this was one of the pivotal moments
for the business where like at the time I could barely
just afford to kind of pay Christian's salary each month.
The money was coming in and it was basically
going straight out into a salary,
but that was an inflexion point in the business
where for a few weeks it was that like very
kind of money was coming in and immediately going out
and it was quite scary.
After those few weeks, the extra output and productivity
that we in the business as a whole unlocked,
thanks to having not just me doing it,
but having two of us kind of focusing on the business
that skyrocketed growth and our revenue,
and it was able to make more courses
and then I joined Standard, my YouTube agency
which was amazing from the sponsorship front.
And I think if I'd stuck to my kind of risk averse attitude
of, I don't wanna spend money on paying someone's salary,
I don't think that would have happened.
I think I would have been stuck kind of
in the mode of trying to do everything myself.
And so obviously you can't do this
when you're right at the start of your journey
and you're not making any money at all,
you do have to have that period
where you're doing everything yourself
and that was me for two years,
but now having spoken to a lot of pretty big YouTubers,
I think a lot of them, even though they can afford it,
they're afraid for various reasons
to make the leap into hiring team members full-time.
But honestly, for me, it was one of the best decisions
I've ever made and Christine has been awesome
and he's probably the one editing this video.
So maybe he keeps us in.
So then for the next year, from October, 2019
through to August, 2020, the team expanded by two people,
we brought on Angus, who started off as a writer
helping me research scripts for some of my videos,
but then he ended up taking a far more
kind of managerial role in the business
and that was really cool because
then I could give Angus ownership of things and be like,
"Hey, we wanna do this project.
Can you just make it happen?"
And Angus was great in actually getting stuff done
and making things happen.
And that was another kind of light bulb moment for me,
whereby again, it was amazing to not to actually
have to do everything myself and to recognise that
I can ask someone to do it instead
and as long as I set a reasonable vision
and what success looks like then people are quite happy
to take an idea and run with it and actually make it happen.
And then after Angus we had Elizabeth who joined
as my personal assistant for a little bit
but then very quickly her role morphed into kind of,
again, more manager staff and leading projects
and helping out with the Part-Time YouTuber Academy
and then she started her own YouTube channel as well,
which is kind of cool.
And so for that year,
I was still working full time as a doctor
in the UK National Health Service
on the obstetrics and gynaecology department
during COVID during the pandemic
but I had this team of three other people around me
who are helping with stuff.
And again, that really started to skyrocket
our growth and our revenue as well.
Stage three, running the business full-time.
Then in August, 2020, I decided to take a break
from full-time medicine intending to travel the world.
And then obviously COVID was a thing
and therefore I couldn't do any travelling at all.
And so what was meant to be a kind of working four hours
a week on the business while travelling the world
ended up being just actually focusing on the business,
the YouTube channel, all of our other stuff full time
and that's basically what I've been doing
for the last year since taking a break from medicine.
And this has been a really exciting time
because our team has gone from four of us
now to 10 or 11 of us.
So like we hired one new person just last week
and I'm learning a hell of a lot of stuff.
Like there's so much in the realm of how to run a business,
like how corporations run businesses
and structured businesses and organisational charts
and like delegation, ownership, accountability,
one-on-one meetings, how to hire people, how to fire people,
thankfully haven't had to fire anyone yet,
there's all of this stuff, which is all like
in the corporate/business world that I've never in the past,
I never really thought it would be useful for me.
'Cause I would think,
"Oh, meetings are a waste of time,
what's the point of having goals,
goals and metrics are totally pointless.
I'm not gonna have KPIs, KPIs are so corporate."
All of that kind of stuff.
But I realised that over the last like four years,
I think I'd been throwing out the baby with the bathwater,
as they say and just rejecting all of this corporate stuff
just because it's corporate
but now that we have like lots of people in the team,
I'm starting to realise that,
oh my God, businesses have been setting goals
and KPIs and metrics and stuff for like generations
and there is a reason that they do it
and there's a reason why it works.
And things like quarterly reviews
and having policies for staff and having systems for stuff.
It's all stuff that I never thought I'd be doing
when I was a solo entrepreneur because I was just
being a technician and getting the job done
but I've realised over the last year,
the role of a manager as well
is just a ridiculously important role and one in which
I need to improve in so many different ways.
Every week I feel like I'm learning new stuff
about being a manager and being a good leader, hopefully.
And how to talk to someone about negotiating a salary raise,
not something I ever thought I'd ever be doing,
but having read some books about it now
and I've got coaches to help with this as well.
I feel I can feel myself levelling up basically every week
while I've been running this business.
There's a few lessons that I found particularly helpful.
Number one, again, is just the incredible power
of giving people ownership of a project
and letting them run with it.
And as long as I set reasonable criteria for what I want
and what success looks like,
which admittedly I'm still pretty bad at,
then people will just take the thing and run with it
and that just feels absolutely magical
when I've got this team of 11 people around me
who can execute on my ideas
without me having to do the work as well.
Another interesting one is actually like the power of goals
and the power of having a clear direction
in what you're doing.
In the past I have been historically
very anti-goal thinking that,
"Oh what's the point of having goals
because they're not really within our control.
Let's just kind of as long as the numbers
are roughly going up, who cares, it's all hunky-dory,
let's just have fun and go along."
But what I've realised over the last year is that
goals are really powerful in like setting a direction
for where the business is going
but they're also very powerful as like a motivating
and strategizing tool for our team members.
It's a thing in my head about
how I want the business to grow
and how I want the YouTube channel to grow
and all the different platforms
and of course there's in the book that I'm writing,
but turning them into like a series of specific,
measurable and attainable, realistic,
like turning them into a series of smart goals.
In the past, it was always like smart goals
this is all just BS, who cares,
but now I realised that power.
And then now that we've got some sense of
like smart goals within the business,
now the team members can take those goals
and reverse engineer strategies
from the number that we want to hit
and those strategies have been really helpful.
And every time I think about setting goals for the team,
I'm always surprised by how well they seem to work.
And one thing I'm still struggling with admittedly is like,
now that there's so much stuff to do and in fact,
now, while not working as a doctor I feel like
I have more stuff on my calendar and more stuff on my plate
than I did while I was working full-time
and running this business inside.
But now my candidate just gets full up with random stuff
like calls and meetings and it's all like important stuff
like the job of a leader is basically to have meetings,
but I've been finding over the last few weeks
that I haven't actually been making time for myself
to kind of sit down and actually write the book
that I'm supposed to be writing.
I haven't really made any progress on that
in the last few weeks, which is kind of embarrassing.
And so what I'm trying to work towards now
is like time-blocking parts of my own day
that are purely for deep work that I'm gonna do myself
and kind of let the team fit their schedules around that.
And this is the lesson that's useful,
whatever stage of your life journey,
entrepreneurial journey, creative journey that you're at,
it's incredibly powerful to just time block a few hours,
a few times a week where you can make progress
on your most important project.
And I found that back in the day where I felt
I had more time in my life to do that,
I was making more progress personally whereas now
that I feel like my time is scattered all over the place,
I'm trying to kind of wrestle some control back,
but hey, it's all a work in progress,
that's something I'm struggling with right now.
And obviously none of this would have been possible
without the support of you guys,
the audience for watching the videos, for subscribing
hit that subscribe button if you want.
And if you enjoy the tips in this video,
you might like to check out this video over here,
which is how I manage my time,
which is more like general useful tips on time management
that I've learned over the last four years
while running this business part-time.
Thank you so much for watching.
Have a great day, I'll see you in the next video.
Bye-bye.