Asking Australian Millionaires How To Make $1,000,000

i traveled around australia to ask millionaires one question how would you make your next million dollars when i was getting started i always wanted this question and things change over time so let's get some insights we just landed in the gold coast and the first person we're meeting is simon beard owner of culture kings is an absolute wizard in the retail space let's go check it out me and charlie have just got a taxi we're not going to simon in this we're actually going to get a car we want to make sure that simon is impressed oh [Music] just pump your paddle pedal i'm obviously not a car person why is the ac just going as they say if you can't buy it twice don't buy it once do i turn this you can see i'm not a car person for those that don't know simon beard absolutely amazing entrepreneur he started culture kings which if you're in australia and you're my age you know what culture kings is streetwear brand lots of locations as well they even just sold to a private equity stake that's listed on the stock exchange so he's been incredibly successful and we can learn a lot of lessons from him especially about the clothing industry if you want to start a streetwear brand you're going to want to hear what he has to say hey mate it's me yo oh my gosh hello hey hey brother how's it going it is thanks for having me mates insane oh yeah cheers how have you been here for uh just six months or so eight months yeah we just bought it last year it's a it's a really you can't sort of uh replace it what it is it's yeah it's crazy it's four levels like thousand square meters i gotta see the sneaker collection yeah yeah and i always wanted to have the uh the most coveted ones in the world which are like you know the nike mags yeah well we're back to the future so that's the back to the limited drop that they did and they all sold on ebay and i paid like 13 grand from then it was like oh my god are you insane but they're worth like over 100 now what's the most expensive pair that you got then i just got the the louis vuitton virtual ones that just came so these all they did for auction for virgil's foundation which is incredible so there's only 200 pairs they all went on sophomores but yeah so i paid like 136 000 u.s got two spas but one of these i turned to our ice plunge oh it's oh it's eight degrees oh yeah oh this is so cool i'm gonna have to have a sauce but it's like so good because the sunrise comes up like right there in the morning it's like hey this is like my dream this is incredible is that drake yeah did he do it something with coach kings yeah yeah we we uh he was in the store so i'm here with simon founder of coach kings he just sold a steak for over 300 million dollars what's the most important part about a brand uh i i can't remember where i learned it but it's like brand is earned in drips and lost in buckets and it's this thing is you know as much as i talk you know everything oh it's a game changer oh this is the next level it's just a drip and it's a drip and it's a drip and it's just to be really careful of like when you're gonna do something make a decision you know in that wrong steak or the frantic sort of energy where you can just pour it out like a bucket yeah what's your morning routine like so i wake up at four and then i do the big thing like i don't hesitate i hit that ice bath within about like a minute i try and not quit yeah i literally just literally wake up and grab the towel and just try and you know it's that thing of overcoming your mind trying to talk you out of it like no not today we sold half of uh culture kings last year yeah and got like 300 million off the table which was really cool and and then um but then the rest you know we flipped into a public company so we could just scale you know we've got a big stake in in that talk us through the process of going public and you know even that phrase taking it off the table would love to hear it you know as an entrepreneur you have different parts of the journey and we started you know the markets and just greened and grinded from nothing and just really but we were really disciplined on you know 50 margin 10 rent 10 wages 10 other stuff and make 20 profit and that was always sort of the around about our sort of thing and we just grew consistently between like 20 and 60 year on year and but just 10 straight years grinding it out so we weren't able to you know we never got any loans or any partners which allowed us to own 100 so we could have you know in hindsight growing faster and stuff but i think it really built that discipline to us but this is the thing as an entrepreneur it's sort of it doesn't matter how big your business gets it's actually quite hard to take the money out because you always got to spend for the next thing and the next thing and especially if you want to keep growing that's where we were in that situation and we we looked for you know for us as our opportunity i've always sort of thought like these iconic stores that we could create around the world in these best locations that create the feeling the state the emotion the disneyland of street sport music lifestyle culture like and and then backing that up with the best the best online store you know that was where we felt taking some money off the table so we can really achieve that and you're in america now uh yeah so we're onlining uh and got our warehouse and our first store in vegas this crazy store opens in november the store will just literally dwarf anything we've we've done in australia how did you kind of make your first million dollars the first million was definitely a grind you know i started at the markets i always had this goal at school like to never work if you never worked for anyone i was just going to be an entrepreneur day dot and yeah i started at the markets just importing this these little gadgets out of china and then selling them and i suppose i wouldn't have got to that first million to you know i was there for a lot of years grinding and maybe would have got to the stage of turning over a million but you know when we talk about turning over a million and yeah still exactly what everyone wants to achieve yeah i remember there was a time where i screenshotted you know when it clicked over a million dollars in the bank yeah euphoric feeling like looking at it and then i remember like the next day having to pay all bills and it went down like 800. you know so if you had your time over again how would you make your first million would it be in streetwear again in today's world like i was sort of giving this advice to someone else of like if i had to start from scratch the first thing i would do would i go out and just products that i like and stuff that i have at home and i like i would just make video content ads of it and dm to them to the brands and say you know i'll license you this video i was for 250 bucks here's the paypal request invoice and i'll give you advertiser access to run ads for liking and just smash heaps of different brands and try and get ones to buy it and do it because it's so easy like going to the supermarket in dorm go in the shops in harvey norman you can just do them everywhere and and it's real quick to experiment and see and learn and yeah but probably just in how crazy the organic content in that quick video reel and the big brands haven't figured it out yet you sort of got an advantage being like it's all a pl even playing field and you can actually get ahead on that and yeah i definitely do that and i i know you could you could earn a pretty good just doing that and then once from those bases you know i think definitely the stuff that you taught like learning media buying learning you know all the things on shopify is super crucial learning like just understanding product market fit doing real simple financial models of like profit to return to like learning all those sort of aspects and then finding something that you're super passionate in because that's what i believe is when you're super passionate you're going to have the energy that's required to really grind it and make it happen like i'm a huge one on that energy management over time management and that's that key differentiator that would crack it i suppose it's hard to say now because i know the clothing part like the back of my hand so it's like obviously i that but i do believe in a lot of different things just reimagining it and connecting that more emotion to it because at the end of the day that's what our culture kings was built on and i sort of learned that at the markets it's like people weren't buying this product they'll bind this feeling the state this emotion if i could generate it and link it to the product and i suppose that would be the thing because if you just went out and made all those videos for all the brands you would find i'm sure you would find something in that like that's like the ultimate searching thing like you know and every different type of product and thing and especially like the huge brands that can be reimagined in a different way i just definitely know that would be where i'd start and you'd find the nugget doing that so do you think money buys happiness uh no it buys it definitely gets rid of unhappiness though so in a way it buys you comfort that's what it does and that can be it's that can be a good thing and it can be a bad thing you know because i believe happiness is is being challenged yet on top of things and it's that fine [ __ ] balance of like oh i'm not going to pull it off and then you pull it off like that's the magic you know challenge yet on top of things and so you always got to be chasing the next challenge i'd always heard that when i was sort of younger but i wanted to sort of find out for myself but you know i can tell you it but it is you still get those that you know is going through all that it's the journey is is all the fun mate this has been incredible i think all young entrepreneurs to see what you've done especially aussies to kind of find your blue ocean as they call it i know you're busy and you know you're still grinding getting up at 4am so it's it's been incredible i appreciate your time oh yeah thanks keep making that cool content actually get my whole like marketing team to watch it and stuff like watch this this is like the blueprint you know so as expected simon was absolutely genius i think you probably under appreciate how much knowledge someone like that has to get where they have you know that is the entrepreneur's dream to build up a company that you're so passionate about that's changed lives that pretty much accomplishes its mission do a big exit to create financial freedom for yourself um that's exactly what you know a lot of entrepreneurs strive to do that was amazing we're going to go see mitch orville now now mitchellville was one of the first australian youtubers building millions of views through his channel angry dad he's going to drop some real knowledge bombs he's going to be contrasting to simon he's super mindful he doesn't even do youtube anymore so i want to understand that journey um let's head there now what have you been doing with yourself are you working at all or i went into um web3 oh yeah went down into that not so much the rabbit hop with the technology the developmental stage of the blockchain and its capabilities where i think the future's going for sure and for me it just made total sense yeah and from the industries that i operated in and how i saw money made and how i was affected by money along the along the way it always came down to transparency for me so when i came when i found the blockchain and saw that that was all it was really was making money transparent and digitalized i was like wow this for me is something that yeah that means i'm interested in i've been investing in domains actually domains domains so as you like you know so crypto domains that's correct so it was like there was the dot com boom like i've now gone into what i think is gonna be the dot-com boom of web3 and been purchasing assets in the future and trading domains that's cool we're here with mitch orville one of my favorite youtubers and good friend as well we're gonna pick his brain today tell us about how you started making your money initially it's crazy hey because when you look at youtube now as what it's designed for and you look at youtubers where it actually started in my life i actually started a youtube channel 13 years ago right back in the day not to upload content of myself so i didn't see that avenue back when it started but i remember buying a device off ebay that could record off the tv and i was recording videos of talent videos and uploading them onto youtube 13 years ago trying to make the adsense so i feel like for me youtube was always a part of my vision into where i was going to be making money or an avenue for hey i i can see this is a catchy thing that people are going to participate on and wow i can see you can make a dollar but i never saw the way it would pivot into my life and the role that i end up playing in my life as a as a whole tell us about angry dad how much money did that make how did that kick start your kind of career if you look back at the timeline of where angry dad started like that was sort of when the pioneering of you know viral marketing and all of that adsense and you know even in even influencer marketing to a degree there was no basis or platform or even agency that represented it back then it was like we had a system that generated insane amounts of eyes and views consistently but we didn't really know what to do with it so it sort of became up to us really how proactive we were how creative how clever we could be i mean we ended up getting represented at times and we had management at times and as obviously the industry grew we started to grow but it was all about for us how we could be creative with product placement in videos i'll talk about a video we did with steggles there was a chicken like a steggles chook and the chook was you had to flavor it by sticking a can of flavouring up its arse and then on a barbecue anyway the steggles team had reached out to us and said like we just think that's a great gag in that so if you can make it work it's a native placement spot i've got the chook i remember thinking of an idea and i remember when dad like we we had to con him into making dinner which wasn't that hard we want to do the groceries had the chokes it was [ __ ] beautiful started making it and then i remember taking the can out of its ass and putting the candy sprite and then when that went on bang and we were like wow i think that's a good reaction i remember we made that video sent it back to the company and we're like hey is this all good and they're like yeah good and remember we made 20 grand for that and that was man that was amazing back then if you were starting over again how would you make your first million dollars and should you even i'm going to talk about a moment i had i i met someone in a lucky i can't i won't really say who because it'll dox them because of their net worth situation i was in shock as to how well-off they were and the opportunity i would have to be sitting next to this person and i said to them hey if you had one piece of advice to get to you know what you've got what would it be and he said to me find out where the world's going and get there first and that's stuck with me right it really stuck with me especially at the time that we have now i feel in this transitional period between where technology's going and where the future is going everyone's announced their plans into you know web free metaverse cryptocurrency everything if you follow the money you see where it's going now at a point of recession where things are cheap you know what i mean if you have a couple of dollars around and you're looking to make your first million my my tip would be ens domains so they're called ethereum naming servers and i think the dot eth domains are going to be the new.com so when we see this all pump back up and we end up yeah i think that um it's gonna it's gonna really take over so it's a low low risk high reward cost you maybe 30 to 80 dollars per per name per entry and yeah if you look at historically speaking what you know they did in the dot-com era you can sort of follow suit and introduce that into web 3 and then you're not trading what looks like just you know profile pictures that you know nothing about that's very cool man that is not the answer that i expected to hear today well that's what so basically domain flipping how do you predict those domains if you can give away kind of your your process i look at it like i look at it like playing future chess you know what i mean like as you said where's this where's the world going what companies are going to be needing to be transacting in there who's going to be needing to have their their ip and their names represented what do you feel like are going to be important categories going forward in there well because you know you already know that the money's going then you know what i mean it's it it's everyone's future it's everyone's plans forward so it's like all you have to work out is where you can get ahead and put little blocks in place for eventually sit on and wait for the world to catch up and you kind of achieved what heaps of our viewers would have even wanted to achieve you know with youtube you're working with really cool brands and whatnot but now you've stopped that can you tell me about that why that is and you moved into different areas it was as i said like i i natively fell into this position i i started pranking my dad when it wasn't a career to look for an opportunity to look for it was something that i did and then i uploaded it and then it started and then it was like then you made a channel and then you made a page and then naturally i moved away from my family so i started another channel with my partner who i met who had a channel and it was very like very evolutionary it evolved naturally for me over the last few years i've been through the highs of social media and the lows of social media i got to a place where i was overweight unhappy using drugs drinking a lot and social media was my only source of validation right and it sort of kept me afloat i then flipped it around lost the heap of weight did a heap of things became the person that i was you know starting to become proud of as i was doing that i've realized it became a very solo journey and whilst i was trying to evolve and grow as an individual i was not saying held down but i was tied to an identity that i had online which was attached to hundreds of thousands of people and it wasn't you and as i'm trying to change there's resistance to that change and it's pulling me back so for me the only way i had to see was i cut that tyres with being online and gave my chance myself a chance by myself to evolve and i feel like you know when you're online it's very easy to fall into the trap of looking for just knowledge you know what i mean but i have a very very big appreciation for specific knowledge and i feel like that's found by genuine curiosity not just going to what's cool or what's trending or what's hot and i had as an individual had to back myself in to find that on my own terms and i thought i don't have to be online for that and when it comes to my family life too and my relationship with my my partner my mum my dad my friends it all got better because the things that mattered were there yeah and it was it was an important decision for me in terms of living my life and not just proving to the outside world that i had one as well yeah that's incredibly mindful i definitely know like i never wanted to do social media and i only ended up doing it to probably assist the business but you can feel the um the actual pull and the validation that single likes and single comments can actually give you and i can see that it's just a slippery slope so to pull yourself out of that through mindfulness is definitely something that you could admire i appreciate it and would be remiss if we didn't talk about chloe she's obviously not here she's too busy i'd love to just talk a little bit about zepp one thing that i noticed you know when i met you both for the first time is just like you know you see the influencer side of things but you don't really understand how creative you both are and good good at business like both of you complement each other very well in that tell us about chloe and also zap as well honestly it's such a cool time to have this conversation too because chloe is someone i've admired in business from the very out the very get-go because what you might not know about chloe is she's only 23 now when she started that three years ago she was 20 years old she'd saved up 36 grand and put 34 grand into product and into starting this business she never paid herself a wage she made money yes influencing and doing other things but she never took a wage from that company and she grew it over the last two to three years into what it is today and i must have like got emotional thinking about that but she neglected the business for the last year and a half because she decided to take on the role as being a mum and for someone like and as a partner to see someone step away from their business you know and you can be attached to money so easily but when you watch i've watched her over the last year and a half walk away from her business and put it into our son and into our family and she's now she's ultimately paying for that now and catching up and in this transition period but she's she's pregnant again and she's taking it head on she's got things coming out of her ears but she's taking that head on and she's learning and she's she's tackling and progressing forward so at the moment like i couldn't be more proud of what she's done with zepp and who she who she is as a person and as a as a business leader and and just an inspiring person who's just taken the world on under our own terms that you know at the age of 23 years old and with you know a kid and another one on the way she's got it's a it's a lot of pressures people don't understand and i think she handles it admirably well man thank you so much for sharing that i think people love getting the contrast of where your mind is at versus some of the other you know millionaires that we're talking to at the moment so i appreciate it that's it bro that's what it's all about polarity thanks man one thing that you'll find in common with all of the entrepreneurs that we interview is that they all read as naval says read what you love until you love to read and then just constantly you know even simon's talking about just not getting stuck in that netflix trap of just watching entertaining things that just melt your brain and don't create any value for your life granted you can do that stuff to switch off but you definitely need to get in the habit of reading new things and learning new things all righty so we're back in south australia the home state um going to see kane ellis at the moment so it's great to have a south australian entrepreneur there is one other south australian entrepreneur that i can't wait to show you as well but kane is brilliant so he started an app called car swap also he's into crypto a little bit so we're going to try to ask a couple of questions about that super smart guys let's see what we can learn from him hey how's it going good come on through yeah this is pretty much where we get all the work done yeah yeah i got some of the team to chuck that on for us just uh looks really nice we work directly with pretty much most dealerships within australia-wide what we do for the dealerships is we provide a two-stage solution so one is commerce on a mobile platform so that's the facilitation of providing the dealer all the users cars so we've got over 150 000 registered users worldwide that is so what we do is we put the dealerships in and amongst all those other users yeah similar to how tinder works yeah dealerships really wanted to get in amongst that action yeah they hate dealer-centric markets not many users feel safe with the dealership sometimes they feel like they may not be getting the best value for their car so you're not just swapping cars you're also selling cars to be honest was that the original concept yeah yeah and we actually like came into this automotive mindset we were like car guys cyrus and myself the other co-founder were like let's trade cars temporarily and we're on a rally around australia we did that and we're like we should do an app for this yeah so we started like a concept a prototype that prototype led into like an investment from there we built the app and here we are five years later where the screens came into it you see the you go to these dealerships especially in melbourne crappy like you know amber you know the construction site screen yeah yeah yeah and they're advertising finance and such and we came up with a concept and actually patented technology you can see over there we've got all our patents we've got patents across usa china and here but how it works is a dealership will have a inventory system similar to shopify we have an inventory system and we feed that out to car sales gumtree yeah similar to how shopify integrates with ebay and you know we put all that inventory on the one platform or the dealerships do so and we directly connect to that and it's in csv format so it's pretty ugly it's got like all their images sometimes they have 50 images the next slide after this will be the first image of the car it will have the make and the model up the top and it'll have the price down the bottom left and on castle that's all automated the dealership plugs in this screen it grabs their cars from that inventory system puts it into a visual format yeah we patented that technology across australia hey everyone we're here with kane ellis and he's got some stories to tell i think he's the only one that's got more businesses than me so i can't wait to dive into them okay and i'm gonna start with maybe a confronting question can you give us any indication on how much your businesses or you are worth at the moment sure sure that is a bit confronting but um definitely uh car swap has a large amount of shareholders and uh all of my companies together as a whole it's hard to say but i would say in excess of maybe you know uh 25 million dollars amazing man it's absolutely incredible and other businesses let's let's list them out yeah sure so i've got uh currently four um so i've got nano flashlights i've also got a real estate company um nerd heard and casper many flashlights e-commerce yes it's actually i've just dove into it um and with help of davey i'm doing very well um in my first year i'm still at 10 months i think i've made an excess of 500 thousand dollars in that so for me that's yeah i know it was incredible that yeah the role has in the account is amazing no yeah so it's exciting a lot of our viewers are young that possibly even in school they want to start getting into entrepreneurship making money what would be your one piece of advice for those those watchers sure i'd definitely say team build a team a successful team that's everything in this industry nanoflashlights i'm running solely right now but every other company i have a good team so yeah i definitely recommend that and execute those ideas execution you have to give them some advice how to make their first million dollars what would it be i would have to say the fastest um growing company that i've had is probably ecommerce so i know it's a bit cliche but yeah it's it's yeah at the moment it's the quickest and easiest so why not and crypto tell us about that you into crypto not into crypto yeah so you know that's a splashy top subject right now but uh 2010 i got into it and i really didn't get into the investment side it was more just uh the crypto uh mining so i got miners really early on and then i dove really hard into it in the mining aspect of it so the back end you know i was earning i think it was like four bitcoins a day back in 2010 and back then that was only 12 13 at mum's house the power bill started racking up you know so no it was good good fun but now you look at it um and it's a bit more advanced yeah definitely [Music] so it's brand new day you can probably tell i've got got a bit of a fresh new trim so we're actually going to one of my favorite people toby pierce toby is probably adelaide's best entrepreneur biggest entrepreneur he just exited his uh sweat which is in one of the most competitive spaces whenever you're versing apple you know you're going to have to perform toby's been a coach for me since before i even launched calming blankets when i was just doing instagram so he is a wealth of knowledge whenever i have like a really complex problem whether it be people product or just general strategy i will always go to toby so he's going to drop some incredible lessons um let's let's get into it i don't think i've been in a penthouse before until we filmed this video and now we're going into two which is pretty cool we got out in their own floor now here's come pick us up how's it going good to see you how are you how you been good man thanks so much for having us man i've got to ask how did you make your first million dollars i made over a million dollars doing personal training but that was over a couple years so i wouldn't really call that like technically the first million the first million dollars in the bank so to speak for me it probably would have been the e-books like you know very early on in that journey uh selling you know effectively like workouts and nutrition device or whatever which was back in the end of 2013. you know we really started that running ads on facebook doing email campaigns like back when it was the good old days the wild wild west what was so special about yearbook i know you've talked to me a couple of times around what you did different compared to every single other business out there yeah it would be a whole bunch of things that at the time frankly i didn't really understand were actually special to me they just seemed like obvious you know that we would that we would do so you know we firstly not many people were really using social media well at this time and i always try to contextualize this and you'll understand because we used to talk about this back in the day right that you know instagram didn't even have ads you know it was a chronological news feed you know there was no algorithmic distribution of content at this point no videos no messaging like you know real basic which meant instagram there was sort of like tick-tock of today that the exposure was just you know huge so yeah we kind of had taken fitness in a digital format which was a little bit different to most people you know you know product type and and the product content that the consumers actually liked which were girls the girls hadn't really been targeted properly we'd target them quite specifically and we'd also kind of broken the convention of you know work out for 30 days and get abs and we kind of positioned it as work out to feel good and confident which at the time was revolutionary you know and especially for the for the female mindset as it relates to their health and well-being so we kind of had you know the reason at the time we got such a great cut through was we had sort of this combination of parts you know that went together to make it work um and then obviously you know shortly after we had launched and kind of got all the other things i just said put together we then you know really started to build an internal capability around digital marketing which you know as i think everyone everyone knows it now yeah back in 2013 and 14 like it wasn't really as prevalent so we had a massive leg up on you know all of our competitors yeah the one thing that i really took from your story as well with those ebooks was just how much better your product was compared to everyone else in terms of like the length of the ebook which well how how much longer was it yeah well also like at the time and we we there was other people in the industry trying to do similar things or whatever they were releasing like 20 pages or 30 pages you know i think collectively i can't remember what the first version was we updated them all the time anyway but the first version would have been like 250 or 300 pages or something like that you know from memory anyway um and also as well i wasn't so much just you know like here's some workouts it was like oh well like you know here's how workout programming works and here's how we think about progression and periodization and this is a reason why this stuff will contribute to weight loss if you don't do this then you probably won't achieve weight loss yeah and that's what happened it was this flywheel was kind of like you're obviously acquiring customers because that's just what you do but then the product was so good that everyone was literally getting abs yeah yeah one of my friends just got so yeah in adelaide and it was largely because the product was so good it actually worked well yeah i mean and we discovered we didn't properly know this at the time we like intuited it you know way back then but i mean the the reality was that the one thing that we'd actually done really well with the brand the product was that we helped to find a way to actually want to make people work out because like you know some industry starts depending on the gym but anywhere between 50 and 80 of members who buy a gym membership after the day they buy they'll never go back you know so like and obviously you have to go to the gym to work out right and so like in our space i think that was one of the things that we really addressed you know like we found ways to break down the education barrier which inherently increased confidence and competency which therefore helped these you know people to actually exercise and then to your point in order to get the result you have to exercise so if you're exercising more you're more likely to get the result and the results not only being you know physical but very much mental and emotional you know these all the girls would tell all their friends about it i remember there was like a at some point in time you know early on in the journey that most of the major like big universities and all colleges you know over in america they had like groups of like 50 to 100 girls that would work out together in small groups throughout the week um i mean we lost well the word lost is strong but we lost a lot of money because people would just share the ebooks um you know digital security wasn't quite yeah wasn't quite what it is now um obviously back then but you could also argue that even that like viral you know gifting and sharing yeah loop to a degree helped build these small networks of women around the world which then built the brand which then built the opportunity for what happened later for sure and then what did happen later you've obviously got sweat can you walk us through that that transition first of january 2014 was the very first workout book but we had some other stuff before that so that first year you know kind of went from zero to 100 really quick yeah i think within two years we were like on a run rate to do 25 million bucks a year in ebooks or something something like that i couldn't remember the exact number nothing like the entrepreneur mindset to kind of go oh i've got this great thing maybe i could destroy it and build something better um but no for a lot of different reasons there was a whole bunch of ideas floating around and i'd you know pull together some info that suggested that maybe maybe the next big opportunity was subscription and it was mobile and it was video yeah and a whole bunch of other stuff but better application basically we built the app which was initially on ios and web in hindsight it was terrible but it was also terrible at the time and we kind of didn't like that but we'd already sunk so much money into it you know we'd kind of already pre-committed but we put it out anyway got lots of complaints but you know we ended up you know remedying that and then making that work we released on a whole bunch of other platforms over the following few years we evolved the brand from kayla to sweat with kayla and then to sweat which was always part of this sort of you know what we thought might be like a five-year you know mission to you know build a brand platform for trainers to come on to for any woman in the world to work out which was you know later on in the journey our you know company purpose kind of became empower anybody with fitness and then obviously later on we ended up bringing a whole bunch of other content partners expanding to you know 190 plus countries having like 10 languages at the end you know 100 million bucks in revenue and then sold the company to a large conglomerate if you could give advice to entrepreneurs out there how would you make your first million nowadays i mean if you had to like look at it yeah categorically it depends what your goal is if you're trying to make your first million building something that could be a billion you know versus making your first million for something that might only ever make a few million dollars probably quite different but you know if i was to stick to the assignment strictly um it would probably be e-commerce and it'd probably be a social media driven brand um something i don't know what the product would be but i'll be doing it that way i think if i was kind of in it to do it quickly yeah i think the the cycle of e-commerce products and the complexity is going to continue to increase yes so that opportunity may not necessarily always be there and the ceiling's definitely there as well you hit it quite quickly as well yeah and and that's like quite an interesting point right which is exactly the reason why i make the remark around are you building are you trying to make a million to get to a billion or you're trying to make a million to get to a few million yeah because they're kind of fundamentally different businesses yeah correct we experience the ceiling at sweat of like the business model in stages you know in the sense that like you every time we kind of butt it up against this we're like oh we can't really grow through that what do we do yeah and then make minor pivots or like slightly augment the company to allow us to move forward but i mean um yeah everything's got a ceiling you just don't try and find something that has a big ceiling what was the biggest mistake you made when you first started out when you've made as many mistakes as i have it's really hard yeah it's really hard to kind of narrowly you know think about one mistake that i think stands out because there's so many if i had to you know try to at least categorize and maybe i'll answer the question but two even though you asked for one yeah i think one probably was i didn't spend enough time building my people management leadership skills early on that was as a result of like i had no awareness what it was yeah and it's really easy early on to kind of say like oh it's the people's problems the people's problem but like at the end of the day you hire the people yeah so like i didn't i didn't probably like recognize that enough the second thing probably is i've always suffered a little bit from the dunning-kruger effect you know like over confidence when compared to my actual true competency level you know in relation to human centered design or like customer centricity you know however you want to kind of think about it you know i would often say myself like doing what the customer wants doing what the customer wants which was really i heard some complaints and so we did the complaints but complaints only represent like a tiny portion of what the true customer desire is and so if you're if you're only listening to complaints they're only building that you're kind of building a business based off of a squeaky wheel if that makes sense you're like squeaky wheel gets changed first but it doesn't necessarily mean that it's the thing you should be putting all of your attention into if that makes sense and so i think yeah for us like that definitely led us astray a few times when i say let us australia let's do a wrong partnership deal or invest in feature sets and in technology that are expensive that don't add value or whatever they might be stuff like that that is quite costly what's next oh man that's a hard question lots of things that's a hard question i mean so yeah in the long term you're like in the medium to long term i'll i'll definitely be back in it you know whatever it is you know doing something i'm just passionate about business in general you know that so i mean i'll find something but in that regard i'm not really necessarily in a huge rush like my focus there is really like how can i find something that contributes you know when i say contributes i mean you improve society and you know the quality of life that people experience while i'm figuring out what that is like in the interim spending a lot of my time you know really working with other founders and helping them avoid all of my all the scar tissue that i've you know built up over the years from like you know silly decisions and mistakes that you know made on my part how can i prevent you know other people from from experiencing that when i just kind of started calming blankets and i went up to we had breakfast at pickle in the middle or whatever it was yeah and i was like oh should i sell should i sell i think the offer was like three and a half million dollars for business a year later i got offered 16 million and then a year later i got offered 30 million you told me not to sell because you're like the fear never goes away there's no point no you're selling at this time yeah and the fear has no relation to a good decision anyway right does money buy happiness short answer i would say no you can't necessarily buy things or make you happy forever i don't really subscribe to that but in some regard i would say there is a practical utility to having what i will use in inverted commerce as enough money to not have a lot of other problems that drugwood financial position might put you in and so when i say that i kind of put it in inverted commas because having heaps of money or having a lot of money doesn't necessarily actually provide you the things that you deem that you need because what you did what you deem you need is normally relative to your means one of the greatest definitions of wealth that i ever heard and it was one word you know is that wealth is surplus yeah and so if you make fifty thousand dollars a year but you live on forty thousand dollars a year and you have financial security and you know joy in your life and peace and whatever technically you're far wealthier you know than a person who makes i don't know a million dollars a year but spends a million dollars a year yeah because correct because they're constantly you know it's constantly fear-driven decision it's future of a motivation to work to make the money yeah whereas the guys or guy or girl who's on 50k a year living on 40. it's like yeah yeah i had a good quote that once you make money you're only left with problems that money can't solve yeah well i mean i had a super well for me it was a super interesting experience so i like earlier in my life my financial situation was uh you know me simply described as not that great you know like i had a lot of um you know financial difficulties not from frivolous use of my money but not really having enough money to actually like eat and live and whatever and so yeah i think like that the desire to not be like that you had to not be in that position had definitely provided me motivation along my journey and you know i've been very fortunate in some parts of it to have a little bit of success however you know the deal gets done and you know some money comes into the bank and this is probably incredibly anticlimactic for those people who are one day hoping to have an experience it's similar to this but you do that the money hits the bank and you go hurrah and i don't know if you like to drink or party maybe you drink a party and you celebrate great a few days later though you'll wake up and it'll be monday morning or whatever day it is and for me it was monday morning you know we'd exited yeah i'd worked some time some money had came through you know and my kind of role had finished up you know and so i was no longer working at sweat and i kind of vividly remember waking up you would get up go to my local cafe have my breakfast and i come back here um my house was empty because i didn't have any furniture or whatever i just bought it and so that's you know sitting around it's like 9 a.m

no messages on my phone no emails no important tasks to get to no huge fear that i have to do something because if i don't that my world might end you know i'm safe you know in all intents in all intents and purposes of the word from a financial perspective have decent financial and life security and i was like you know holy [ __ ] now i've got no time left in my life and that was my like my first thought i think i have no time left what i'm gonna do with my time you know i've done i've done nothing i've achieved nothing it's a it's like the human brain is a fascinating thing right pretty much spends all of its time figuring out what is your current most significant fear and how can i put a huge amount of your energy and emotion into that um you know whether it be like survival or reproduction or whatever it may be you know so i'm sitting here and i'm like well holy [ __ ] like i've only got like you know i mean i i was you know 29th time i'm turned 30 this week which is glorious crazy yeah but um you know so you know 29 at the time i'm sitting there and i'm like yeah i've only got like maybe what 40 good years left and like that sounds ridiculous it sounds really so like i've only got 40 years which is longer than i've been alive but i've seen them i've only got 40 years left yeah and so i started going through these thoughts i was like oh yeah although the people were hard sometimes i really like those people that i work with and i was like although there was lots of stress and problems you know that were work related and the complexity and you know long days and you know a lot of like you know stress that comes that i was like there was so much there was so much good enjoyment yeah and it was so energizing and you know i i mean less towards the end then at the start you know like just the learning opportunity and and all this sort of stuff i was like oh you know now what if you could give it all up and be 18 again but know everything that you know that's a good question i don't know maybe i mean the debate is between it really is like do i back my capabilities right yeah i reckon maybe i'd spin the wheel i could be 12 years 12 years or whatever make it all back i think it was a very good few days i know i'm feeling more motivated than ever it's always good to surround yourself with very successful people some of the people we talk to is obviously leagues above me at the moment feeling very very motivated i think the best advice we kind of got is kind of taking parts of each in that you know what toby was saying like what is your overarching goals like it shouldn't be just to make a million dollars you need to understand you know some level of mindfulness about what you're trying to achieve in life if it's you know a huge huge exit or you're basically just trying to buy financial freedom for your family they're going to be different businesses and you need to consider that a lot of people agree that ecommerce is probably one of the best things to get into for young people with low barriers to entry and basically just growth hacking and running running facebook ads i think another part is like what is your personality or character type if you're a creative person simon's advice to you know start doing creatives and filming content for brands is a great piece of advice but if you may be more like product orientated maybe you want to or you know just more data driven maybe you want to start doing you know facebook ads and you could even start with a bit of an agency so that you can make sure that you can run ads before investing into products so there's plenty of ways to get it done um i hope you enjoyed today's episode i really want to get a episode um with pure purely female-based millionaire entrepreneurs if there's any female entrepreneurs that you want us to interview please make sure you leave in the comments and we'll reach out and we'll do a whole episode on that as well so thanks for watching don't forget to like and subscribe peace you probably have three oh i've got the full drive one but then i've got a uracia but then i've i've got a hurricane sto coming in july and then i've got an aventador ultimate you know [Music] you

2022-07-29 22:37

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