Episode 423: 16 Years of No BS Business Advice In 46 Minutes
Business is a journey. There is an overarching myth that immediate success is attainable merely by launching a business. The reality, however, is one of patience, discipline, and strategic sacrifice over time.
In this episode, Adam Stott shares invaluable insights from his 16-year journey in entrepreneurship, offering no BS advice on how to become a business millionaire.
Known for his ability to distill complex business strategies into accessible lessons, Adam emphasizes the importance of viewing business as a journey filled with incremental learning and strategic investment.
Show Highlights:
- Learn to use money as a tool for growth rather than hoarding it. Adam stresses that an investment mindset is crucial for scaling a business.
- Understand that business success is a marathon, not a sprint. Patience, focus, and discipline are key.
- Stay open to learning and cultivate a mindset that seeks guidance from those who have achieved success.
- Ensure your business has a strong model and clear strategy, and consistently work on improving it.
- Invest in marketing to increase visibility and hone your sales skills to effectively drive business growth.
Links Mentioned:
Get your Business Growth Secrets SUCCESS PLANNER for FREE and profit like a pro: https://adamstottplanner.com/free-book47315172
Adam’s website: https://adamstott.com/?el=Pod
Watch the Episode on Adam’s YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/adamstottcoach?el=Pod
Connect with Adam on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/adamstottcoach/?el=Pod
Join Adam’s network on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-stott-coach/?el=Pod
Coaches, consultants, and business owners – lower your marketing costs, increase ticket prices, and get more high-ticket clients: https://3daybrandbuilderworkshop.com/start-here?el=Pod
Transcript:
Please note this is a verbatim transcription from the original audio and therefore may include some minor grammatical errors.
Adam Stott: I’ve been in business for 16 years now and combined the different businesses that I’ve had have done over 156 million pounds in sales. I’ve had some ups and downs along the way. I’ve had some bruises and some bumps. I’ve had some major Success. And I’ve had some sleepless nights. And what I want to do in this video is break down the biggest lessons, the no BS advice that can make you a millionaire in business.
[00:00:32] So let’s jump into these lessons that can take you all the way to business millionaire.
[00:00:46] Okay. So lesson number one, it’s a very simple one is one that you need to pick up pretty quickly. And that is that money. Does not love you. So don’t you love it? What do I mean by that? Well, a lot of people get super emotional about money. Uh, you’re watching these videos. So you’re ambitious. You want more, you want to achieve more.
[00:01:09] You want to go out there and you want to crush it. But if you are a hoarder of money and you are trying to protect money and you’re just like, well, you know, I don’t want to spend too much money. I don’t want to invest too much money. Then you’re never going to become. A millionaire, you’re never going to build your business to a million pound plus by just hoarding money and being emotional about money.
[00:01:29] I think one of the number one reasons I’ve trained thousands of business owners now in my coaching programs like Gold Circle and Inner Circle. And the ones that have the most success fast are very ready to invest in their businesses, to invest in themselves, to invest in people, in marketing, in infrastructure.
[00:01:50] But the ones that really struggle are the ones that don’t want to invest their money. And they have some kind of weird attachment to the fact that, you know, money is precious and look, What typically happens, and this is known, you know, in psychology is that up until the age of eight years old, what people hear and what is said to people typically sticks with them for the rest of their lives.
[00:02:12] So if when you were younger, somebody said to you, money doesn’t grow on trees, you’ve got to save, you’ve got to make sure you don’t buy that. Don’t waste your money. Money’s precious. This kind of stuff. Then you’re not really going to have an investment mindset. Yet the no BS advice that’s going to help you to become a millionaire much, much quicker is to stop being emotional about money and start using it as a tool.
[00:02:37] Money, Essentially, it’s just a piece of paper, or in today’s world, it’s just a number on a statement, even. It’s even less than a piece of paper. And the way that you want to use money is you want to multiply money. Now, the way that you multiply money is by deploying it. You can’t multiply something unless you deploy it.
[00:02:56] And if you want to become a millionaire, unless you go and get, you know, CEO, managing director, chairman of Barclays Bank, for example, you’re very unlikely to become a millionaire. working in a construct, working for someone else, you’re going to have to work for yourself, which means you’re going to have to invest and you’re going to have to multiply your money.
[00:03:15] So the first thing you’ve got to do is you’ve got to get rid of the emotion around that, and you’ve got to start getting comfortable with investing. You’ve got to get comfortable with backing yourself. And as soon as you learn this lesson, you’re ready to start your journey. Which brings us to step number two.
[00:03:32] Which is business is a journey. And this is the thing. So let’s say we get comfortable, right? We’re gonna have to invest. We have to start investing money in my business, in my market, in my people and all this kind of stuff. And then we do the investment and we get going and then people are like, wow, I want results now.
[00:03:49] But actually understanding that. Business is a journey. It’s something that I’ve had to come to terms with. It’s something that I’ve had to learn. And when I’ll go all the way back, if I went all the way back to 2008 when I started my first ever business, I was quite deluded in thinking that actually I’m going to make loads of money really fast.
[00:04:06] I’ve started my business. I’m going to take control. I’m going to go out there. I’m going to crush it. And what I realized very quickly is that great things take time. And actually the skills that you need to build and develop as a business owner is you do need to develop patience. Hey everyone, hope you’re enjoying the podcast.
[00:04:27] We’ve got a free training that I’m doing right now online from the comfort of your own home called Stand Out Brand. What this does is it shows business owners how to get noticed on social media, stand out. Get more leads and get more sales. So if you want to make more money in your business, head over to adamstop.
[00:04:47] com forward slash SOB. That’s adamstop. com forward slash SOB and join us on the free three day workshop, stand out brand. You’re seeing everyone get rich or you think you are on Instagram right now, or you’re seeing everyone get rich on YouTube right now. You’re seeing people driving Ferraris and Lamborghinis and you’re thinking, Oh, you know, I want a piece of that.
[00:05:09] So But often, the fast money is not the money that lasts, right? You know, and a lot of people go out there and they kind of make that splash, but the reality is most people are doing really well, don’t need to go and splash a Ferrari out there and, you know, don’t get me wrong, wear a nice watch, but don’t need to ram it down your throat.
[00:05:28] And as soon as we kind of wake up to that and we understand that it’s a journey and great things take time, we need to. build patience, build up that trait and that skill of patience, focus, discipline, and also sacrifice. So if you were to be taking notes and hopefully you are, I really hope that as we go through this video, you take lots of notes down because these really are like the lessons that I’ve learned along the way.
[00:05:55] When I started out, I had no patience. I wasn’t that focused. I was always looking for what can I do to get there quicker. You know, my discipline was off and I didn’t have those traits, but the longer I went on and the more that I learned the lesson that if I’m patient and I’m focused and I’m disciplined and I take the right action and I build my skills, then that journey tends to start to develop and deliver you results.
[00:06:20] And one of the traits I just mentioned there as well. is sacrifice. So on that journey, if you’re going to create amazing results over the next year, the next two years, the next three years, the next five years, you’ve got to look at building a business requires you to sacrifice in some other areas. So you’ve got to figure out what is it that you need to stop doing?
[00:06:41] What are the things that you’re doing right now that are not helping you? And if you’re going home and you’re watching five hours of Netflix every night, odds are you’re not going on the business journey and the journey to becoming a millionaire that you want to, right? Um, or maybe if you, when you’ve made it, and this is the key, this is actually the piece of advice when you’ve made it and you are that business millionaire you want to be.
[00:07:01] If you want to watch Netflix for five hours, you watch it. But if you’re actually on the journey to spend every night watching Netflix and you’re going to go and you’re going to be watching a football and you’re going to be out on weekends and you’re going to the pub and you’re drinking. That means you’re not making the necessary sacrifices, but the resource that is finite is time.
[00:07:19] And we’re going to need to make available time in order for you to go on that journey and go on that journey successfully. And there’s one thing that I want to add to this step as well, which I think is super important, is don’t beat yourself up on where you’re at on the journey. As long as you have the patience, the discipline, the focus, and you keep going, you’ll get to your goals.
[00:07:39] But there’s no point as we’re climbing a mountain beating ourselves up every five minutes about why we’re not at the top of the mountain. We know we’re going on a journey. We’re going to be patient about what that creates. And we’re just going to keep going until we get to the top of the mountain and we celebrate when we’re there.
[00:07:54] Okay. So the third piece of no BS business advice, which is super important, fairly controversial, right? But this is the reality. And I wish someone had said it to me back when I started out is you are nowhere near. As good as you think you are nowhere near now The reason that’s super important to hear is as human beings We all have an ego and the problem is your ego is definitely not your amigo It doesn’t help you out.
[00:08:25] And if you’re in the mentality where you think you’re awesome at sales or you think you’re awesome at marketing or you think you’re awesome at operations or building products or you think you’re awesome at social media. It doesn’t matter whatever you think you’re awesome at usually you switch off the brain from learning from other people when you think you’re incredible at something and there’s been so many times where because I think I’m good at something I’ve tuned out when someone who’s much better than me at that one thing.
[00:08:56] I stopped listening to them because of my ego and I could have had shortcuts, I could have learned, I could have listened, I could have got faster results, but my ego didn’t listen. So it’s super important that we realize, and this is a very empowering piece of business advice for you really is empowering because if you open your mind and you get super coachable and you and you say to yourself hey look i’m not as good as what i think i am i’m not that good at business but i’m learning so you need to not put yourself down you don’t be saying i’m not good at something but you want to not put yourself down you say i’m on the journey i’m on the journey link back to the previous piece of advice that we said now if you’re on the journey That means you’re going to listen to people along the way.
[00:09:43] You’re going to really tune into other people’s advice, and that’s going to help you to build towards your goals. And I think that, you know, there’s a lot of opportunities that I’ve probably missed along the way. So as soon as you embrace that mentality of not being as good as what you think you are, but saying to yourself, I’m on the journey, what you’ve got is a really harmonized body.
[00:10:05] Balance towards understanding that I’m going to be open minded, I’m going to be coachable, I’m going to look for the right advisors, I’m going to look for the right guidance, but I’m not going to shut out opportunities. I wish someone had said that to me at the beginning, because then I would have been so much more open minded to opportunities as they come up, instead of being the one that was talking, rather than being the one that was listening.
[00:10:30] Now on that, our next piece of advice is super important as well. Again, this for me, I’m making this video because look, I wish I would have watched this type of video back in the day when I was on that business journey. Cause I made lots of different mistakes that I just didn’t need to make. And this one’s super important and super helpful, hopefully for you, because I remember back in the day when I was first starting out, I had this attitude like everybody wants to screw me.
[00:10:53] So the piece of advice is no one really wants to screw you. I used to think that people want to steal my business idea. People want to copy this. People want to take off me and all this kind of like negative mindset that does nothing for you. Let me tell you, no one wants to screw you, especially in the beginning.
[00:11:12] What you’ve got is not worth screwing you for. Ain’t that good. You’ve got to develop it, you’ve got to create something amazing for people to want to potentially screw you, but even then, they don’t want to screw you. Nobody actually wants to step on you. Nobody actually wants to cause you problems. They just want to further themselves.
[00:11:29] And sometimes, you’re in their way. So what that does is when you take that frame of mind is you can go, ah, okay, right. So you’re not out to screw me, but they are out for their own agenda. So what you can do then is you can use that to empower you to start to understand people and say, well, what is their agenda?
[00:11:45] What is it that they want? What are they, you know, trying to create. And what that will do is that will allow you to stop looking at things through a negative lens and empower you to start looking through things in a positive lens. Now in my early business adventures, I mean my early business, I said I had a point in time where a lot of people were in this situation where.
[00:12:07] People would start working for me and all of the sudden they, you know, six months, 12 months later, they would seemingly run off with my business idea and they would start a rival business and they’d start contacting my clients. And I’ll be like, Oh my God, this is so bad. This feels so crap. And you know, like I used to proper stress out about it actually caused me a lot of stress back in the early days.
[00:12:33] What I didn’t realize was that, And this is what most people don’t realize is I was probably creating that back in the day, my lack of a growth mindset, my lack of a multiplier mindset, and my survival mindset was really getting that fear into the people. So people come work for me and I’ll be like, Oh, you know, unknowingly impressing my thoughts upon don’t run off with my thing.
[00:13:00] Don’t copy me. Don’t do this. Don’t do that. And all that did was encourage the person to think, well, should I be doing that? And before you knew it, they were doing it and it happened over and over again. Do you know when it stopped happening to me when people stopped copying my ideas when people stopped running off of my ideas?
[00:13:16] When I stopped worrying about it And I’m sure that they still did and people probably did but you know, it just didn’t bother me anymore Just like look you want to go and do your own thing You you don’t want to be a part of the team then so be it You’ll be worse off without us because we’re going to do this awesome stuff But you do what you want to do and as soon as I start chilling about it Then it stopped happening to me.
[00:13:37] And this is what happens all the time. It’s like people are in money stress. We talked about money earlier. They get really stressed about money like, Oh, we can’t afford this. We can’t afford this. We can’t do this. We can’t invest in this. And they’re all stressed out all the time. And they’re so focused on the negative that they can’t bring any positive in their life.
[00:13:55] In fact, some people will sit there and stress and manage cash flow and manage cash flow and look at all these different things in a business and they do it so much when they could have spent the same amount of time going out and making more money, which would have meant that they didn’t have a cash flow problem.
[00:14:07] So you get what you focus on. I think that’s really important to understand. And whatever’s running through your mind is what starts showing up in your life. And when we get that. And we understand that. It’s easier to say than it is to do. And if you’re watching this and you can tell me, you know, in the comments, whether some of these things have affected you in the past, what you’ve got to do is you’ve got to start catching the story that you repeat to yourself in your head, and you’ve got to stop that as soon as possible.
[00:14:37] Because as soon as you stop that negative thought, flow. You can start to put a new positive flow in place that can take you in the right direction. And one of the ways to do that is like my next piece of advice, which is super, super important. And like the most, if you don’t listen to the other stuff in this video, listen to this, you got to be learning.
[00:14:59] Obsessed. This would be the number one secret for me in terms of the success that I’ve had is I’m absolutely learning obsessed. I’m always reading books. I’m always investing in training. I’m investing in mentors. I’m investing in coaches. I’m investing in my team. I’m investing in training. I’m always looking at skill sets saying, how can I get better at that?
[00:15:21] You know, whenever I want to get better at something, I want to get better at leadership, for example, because as you get much, much bigger, you’ve got to become a better leader. I’m investing constantly in that area. I’m consuming all materials in that area. I’m looking at the top people in that area. So how can I model them?
[00:15:37] How can I get better? I’m reading about, you know, industry leading figures from the history and from the past in that area. And I’m absolutely obsessed on that skill set. I think what a lot of people do. Is they don’t go deep on things, they go wide. So when I say go learning obsessed, what you want to do is you want to pick the thing that you need to know.
[00:15:58] So let’s say that you want to get better at marketing. And what type of marketing do you want to get better at? So what we’ve done already is marketing is top line. Well, what type of marketing do you want to get better at? So SEO, okay, which is then below line. So, okay, Well, then we’re going to read all the materials and all the resources.
[00:16:17] We’re going to get all the trainings. We’re going to find the leaders in the industry. We’re going to understand SEO at a level that we’re just obsessed with it. And we get obsessed and we get obsessed. We’re really going to learn that topic. And then you’re going to teach that and spread that out to our team.
[00:16:31] Then all of a sudden we’re going to have really good skills in SEO. So all you’ve got to do And by the way, I don’t have really good skills in SEO, it’s not something I’ve decided to learn because I’ve not seen the upside in it. But I’ll give you some examples, one that I have, you know, professional speaking.
[00:16:45] When I wanted to become a public speaker, I got obsessed. I did every training, I did every mentor, I invested in the subject constantly. I became obsessed everywhere I went, everything I listened to. Everything I did became about that. And I went deep, deep, deep, deep, deep on that skill. Same with marketing, same with social media, same with leadership, same with business strategy.
[00:17:05] So whatever it is that you want to become really, really good at, you’ve got to become learning obsessed. And as I said, if you listen to that, And you go deep rather than wide, then you can go and you can create some amazing results. Because the reality of it is, is that whatever you want to do, you can do.
[00:17:24] You’ve just got to find the tools, the skills, and the focus to get really, really good. That’s it. Which leads me directly into my next piece of advice, which is again, very important. I actually think all of these are very important. And tell me in the, in the comments, if you’re, you’re watching on YouTube, or maybe you’re listening along on the podcast, but, but tell us for you, what is it that’s standing out to you?
[00:17:47] Which piece of advice really resonates with you? You know, maybe there’s something here that you haven’t been doing that you could adapt. Maybe it’s one of these lessons you’ve learned already. And if you have, that’s awesome. Go and tell us in the, in the comments and, you know, endorse that as something that’s helped you as well, because I truly believe that what we’re sharing here can really help people really well.
[00:18:09] Now, the next one’s been really big for me, and I found this to be very important. And from the really successful people that I know and have met, if you have been listening to podcasts, I’ve done 420 episodes, you know, from there I’ve interviewed billionaires, millionaires, dragons, A list celebrities, so much more, and really studied and been a student of success.
[00:18:34] And this next one is one that I’ve seen that’s very common. You’ve got to do one thing well. One thing well. A lot of people that are not so successful, and I see it all the time because we run trainings, we run events and want to help everybody go and get more success. And that’s why I’m making this video is that a lot of the time people come in and they’ll say to me, Adam, I’ve got three businesses.
[00:18:57] And what that really means is you’ve got one business that’s probably okay. And you’ve got two that, you know, are not really doing much. And these two are going to start stealing from this one. And then you end up with none. And you thought you had two. Three. Listen, you, you only want three businesses is if your core business has absolutely smashed it out of the park.
[00:19:17] You know, you, you’ve put senior management team in place. They’re running your business. Your business is making masses of profit on a monthly basis. It’s consistent. You’ve got financial freedom from it. So you now want to put a team in to run it. So you’re like, well, I’ve got my time back. Now you’ve won the game of business without business.
[00:19:36] Awesome. And you can either sell it or have the senior team run it and keep paying you. Incredible. Then go and start another business. I’ve got no problem with that. Now, the other aspect of that is because we want to examine the different parts of it for you, because someone would be like in the comments.
[00:19:50] Yeah, but you know, I’ve got this business and I started this business because it’s got synergy with this one, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I get that. Um, and that is a caveat. You know, I’ll give you an example. I have a PR business and the reason I have a PR business is because I have a coaching and an events training company and a lot of our clients want PR.
[00:20:09] So, you know, we have our PR team come in and they’ll talk to our clients and, and that could help our clients to get a better result in a subject matter that we don’t deal with. So that business generates revenue. It’s got synergy. Okay. And that’s a good thing, but most business owners, and bear in mind, I said, you want to become a business millionaire at the start of this video.
[00:20:30] And I want to really fulfill on that. So if you do want to do that, you’ve got to build a business that is really successful. that is really disciplined and focused that you work on for a long time and you build up for a long time. So I’ll give you examples of how I’ve done this in different areas. The first business I ever had, I started in 2008.
[00:20:53] That business ran from 2008 to 2017. When I ran that business from 2008 to 2015, I never did anything but that business for the first, you know, what’s that, seven years. I just totally focused. I never did anything else. I never even considered doing anything else. The only thing I did was that business.
[00:21:12] And there were parts of that business that I started Which had synergy that sat with that business. So first business automotive. So I did service in, I did mechanical and really they work together in that way. It was only in 2015 that I started considering starting events business. Now what happened when I came from automotive to events is my focus shifted.
[00:21:34] And all of a sudden I took my eye off the golden goose. You don’t want to do that. You actually want to what I should have done in that particular business, because I took that business from nothing to 40 million pound a year in sales, a huge business, 120 staff, six different sites, you know, very successful thousand businesses inspired Britain for three years running Sunday times, a hundred fastest growing business, really, really successful.
[00:21:56] But when I took my off the ball, I made a mistake, and I ended up losing a lot of money from not staying focused. So don’t make the mistake that I made on that business. Instead, do it differently. Stay super focused. Because what I should have done if I was done with that business, I should have sold it, right?
[00:22:12] Instead of then having less enterprise value. And when I came out of it, because I didn’t sell it. So my advice to you would be stay super focused on one thing. And that’s what I’ve done with the existing business. I have a coaching training business. I’ve been running it since 2016. It’s super successful, does eight figure plus a year in revenue.
[00:22:31] And the reason it’s super successful is I’ve been totally focused on it. So I see business owners making this mistake all the time is they don’t do that. They, they get a little bit of success and it’s a lot like this. Imagine for a moment. You had a piece of wood that’s here, and you’ve got a nail, and we want to put this piece of wood with this piece of wood.
[00:22:52] We put the nail in the wood, and we hit it once or twice, and it kind of goes in, but it doesn’t go all the way through. These two pieces of wood are not connected together. Okay, so then we go. All right. Well, we’ll just do this now here. So we hit this now this now doesn’t go in and go Okay, we’ll just do this now care.
[00:23:08] We still got two separate pieces of wood because we didn’t finish the job We’ve got to hit the nail in until those two pieces of wood are flushed together Then hit the next now in then hit the next now in and then we’ve got a solid structure. So Metaphorically, I’m giving you the example here is focus on one thing Literally get that nail in all the way And make sure the job’s complete before you switch out to the next thing.
[00:23:33] I wish I’d known that. That would have saved me millions of pounds. And you know, hopefully you can take that on board. Because what is coaching? What is mentoring? Why would you listen to? Why would you even listen to this video? The reason you want to listen to this video is so that you can learn from successes, you can learn from mistakes, and you can compress time, which is super important.
[00:23:54] Which leads us into our next piece of no BS advice. You need something that’s got margin. You need something that’s got margin. And this is difficult because I’ve seen loads of business owners. So you’ve got that, that really good business owners, really entrepreneurial by nature. They start a t shirt business, they put all their time and their effort into it, they make the design good, they’re really motivated, good people, they deserve success, but the reality is it ain’t gonna be successful, because it’s very unlikely that you’re gonna sell hundreds of thousands of t shirts.
[00:24:28] Now, can it be done? Well, you could point to, you know, Jim Sharp, Ben Francis, and you could say, well, he did it. Yeah, but he’s the exception. He’s not the rule. You know how many others didn’t do it? Why? Because the margins are so small. So you’ve got to sell a lot of t shirts to make any money. So we’ve got to understand that and understand that that that’s quite an, well, it’s not quite an important, it’s pretty much everything that if what you’re going to go to market and offer has no margin, you ain’t going to stay in business very long.
[00:24:55] So you’re much better off to have higher ticket items, higher margin items where you go out and you actually deal in bigger profitability than you are in small. Because if you really go with small margins, you’re not going to be in business very long. Again, can be a hard bit of advice, especially if you’re watching this and you’re like, well, I sell candles, you know, or I sell things that are really small.
[00:25:18] And, you know, I sell 10, 15, 20 pound, 30 pound options. You’ve got to have higher ticket options in order for your business to succeed. And if you want to hear a bit more about that, I did a cool video called zero to a million pounds. I talk all about how a high ticket offer can be used to make a million pound in a year.
[00:25:36] We’ll connect this up to this video so you can go and check it out. Which leads me to the next piece of advice, which can really help you to is understand your business model. So your business model, so margin and product super important. We got that right. We understand it. Well, what is your business model?
[00:25:51] Well, the way I define a business model is you being able to explain it in a very, very quick way, very clearly. What the model of your business is and how your business model works. So let me give you an example real time. I have a coaching business, a training business. This is how this business model works.
[00:26:13] We have a brand. And that brand, Big Business of Eds, Big Business Entrepreneurs, is Is the business we have my personal brand, which is Adam stop. That’s me. And that is the brand. So when we look at what’s your brand and what does your business do? So my business model for this business is we coach and we train business owners to become more successful.
[00:26:34] In fact, do this nice and simple. We do it in three ways. We help people to start faster. We help people to start easier. We help people to grow faster and we help people to scale more safely. Now if you look at those three things it’s very clear we help entrepreneurs and we help entrepreneurs do three things.
[00:26:54] Things now how the model itself works is our top of funnel is we run ads And content that helps business owners and entrepreneurs We run ads and we run content to free events where entrepreneurs can come and meet us at a free event That could be online That could be offline, where we offer them the opportunity to come and work with us and our team.
[00:27:20] From there, they can get into our advanced coaching programs, which can help them to grow their business. That’s the business model. It’s very simple, it’s very easy, it’s very easy to explain, it’s very easy to understand. Now, your business model, you should be able to explain it in that way. You should be able to tell people who you help.
[00:27:40] So let’s just go over a few fundamentals that can help you. First of all, who do you help? We help entrepreneurs. Who do you help? Understand that. Okay. What do you offer them? We offer training, coaching. That’s what we do is we train business owners. We coach business owners. Great. Well, how do you do that?
[00:27:56] We do that through training programs. We do that through coaching programs. And how do you get to know that client? Which is another question. We do it through holding events, whether that be in person, whether that be online. Now you’ve got to be able to answer those simple questions and you’ve got to understand how that model works as in your business model.
[00:28:12] And you’ve got to understand how that business actually makes money. Now, if you don’t understand how your business model works and how your business makes money, and you can’t explain that clearly, easily, in a functioning way to somebody, then we’ve got some issues with the business model. For me, um, I’ll give you a bit of an insight on this and how important I believe this is now, because I didn’t really believe along the line, because I’ve built multiple businesses, 156 million pound in sales, as you said, a cumulative for all the different businesses have run.
[00:28:45] It was only It was only about four years ago where I really started to get obsessed with business models and how business models work. I’ll tell you why, it’s because I got a new coach, Sarah Willingham from Dragons Den. She was a dragon in the den, one of the most successful in terms of the deals that she did.
[00:29:01] She started coaching me. I had her as a guest on my podcast. She was incredible. I really liked her. And I said, Sarah, I’d love you to coach me. She said, I don’t do that. And I said, well, I’d love you to, you know, what can we do? And we ended up figuring something out, which was awesome. And then she started to, the first thing that she really dived deep with me on was, uh, And again, this is 16 years worth of lessons.
[00:29:21] I learned this lesson four years ago is the business model is fundamentally how does the business model operate? And then what you do next when you understand the business model is you really have to put those numbers to that business model as to how that business model works. And the faster you can do that, the faster you can explain it.
[00:29:39] The more you can scale it because you can’t scale mess. And if you’re guessing, you’re going to run into some problems. So get really focused on your business model. You should be able to have your business model on one piece of paper, explain it clearly in a minute or so to another person, business owner, entrepreneur, someone that doesn’t know you and they’ll get it straight away.
[00:30:00] And if you can do that and you’ve got good margins in that business, you’re really set to go and start creating some success. However, that brings us to our next no BS lesson. You’ve got to really focus on two traits. Those two traits are discipline and they are work ethic. These are absolutely critical.
[00:30:21] So what does discipline mean? Discipline means you keep a promise to yourself. When you say you’re going to do something, you’ve got to follow through. And do it. When I was a young man, I went on a lot of mindset type events, different things like that. And some of the simple traits and habits that I picked up were, when you say you’re going to do it, make sure you do it.
[00:30:40] You’ve got to start keeping your promise to yourself and start small with this. So what I mean by this is, like, if you say to yourself, I am going to ring three clients tomorrow, even if you’re physically sick of the thought of ringing those three clients, because you said you’re going to do it. You go and do it.
[00:30:59] That’s what discipline is. It’s doing something even when you don’t want it. It’s following through when you don’t want it. That is a critical trait that can help you to become more successful. And when you couple that with work ethic, Which is you work hard, you show up, you sacrifice, which we mentioned earlier.
[00:31:19] These can really help get you to the next level in your success, in your life and in your business and start moving you towards that business millionaire status that we talked about. Which really moves you into the next one, which is super important. Stop talking about it. And start doing it. We all know someone that’s like chats and I’m gonna do this and I do this and I do that and then they never do nothing.
[00:31:40] Don’t be that person. Don’t be the person that just talks about stuff. If you say you’re going to do something, follow through. That comes back that discipline. But don’t be a talker without being a doer. You know, people don’t respect people that talk. I’m going to do this. I’m going to do this. I know when you’re going to do it.
[00:31:55] You never do it. Say it, then do it. Now, the best way to do that, this is a little Tony Robbins tip from back in the day is Tony Robbins said, when you have the four, take action immediately on the four. I always done that. I picked that up when I was very young, you know, listen to his stuff. And he was really cool, you know, work to did all these different trainings and stuff.
[00:32:16] That’s very good for the mindset, right? Not necessarily the business stuff, but I got a lot of mindset tips out. That was really cool. And one of the ways that I took that lesson on is that, you know, Now, every single time I have a thought about what I want to do or what I want to accomplish, as soon as I have the thought, I take the action right then.
[00:32:32] I just grab the phone, I make it happen, I make the call, I send the email, I go and talk to the team member, whatever it is that I’ve got to do. So rather than talking about it, start now. So rather than talking about it, start doing it. So let’s get into some now practical. There’s a few there that are super practical.
[00:32:49] We talked about money. We talked about time. We talked about other people. We talked a lot about you. We talked about focus and discipline and habits. What about getting to that million pound Adam? Well, bang, piece of advice for you. Start investing in marketing. No one knows who you are. No one knows what you do.
[00:33:07] And this is a big, big problem. If you don’t invest in marketing and advertising, you’re not going to get seen. No one’s going to know you. And remember I said, Money don’t love you. The only way money will love you is if you invest in advertising. It brings you more back, right? So you’ve got to deploy to return.
[00:33:25] A lot of people want the return before the investment. It don’t work like that. You’ve got to invest to make the return. I was very recently, I went away. I was checking out a, uh, A new retreat locations. We run retreats and do a really cool retreat called Adam’s house. We can come get coached by me. Maybe the team can put that in the comments.
[00:33:43] And you know, if you’d love some some coaching a very high level in your business, tell me in the comments as well. That’d be cool to hear. Um, about you and where you’re at, tell us your business as well. And I very recently went over to Tenerife because I was looking at a location to go and do some more retreats and more of my Adam’s house retreats, which are really cool.
[00:34:02] And I picked up a couple of things about marketing and advertising I want to share with you very quickly. And one of the things was, as I was driving towards this hotel that I was staying at, I saw this advertisement. and this advertisement was on billboard and it was for like a wildlife park called lauro park in tenerife you’re you might have heard of this this wildlife park you probably have especially with what i’m about to tell you now anyway get to my hotel you know doing my thing having a nice time and we’re there over the um over the new year so we’re there end of christmas new year what’s really interesting was that As we start to walk around this little Tenerife town, like a nice little town in Tenerife, start looking at the bins.
[00:34:45] And on all the bins, you’ve got Loro Parque, you’ve got Cyan Park. The other side of the bin, you’ve got Brunelli’s Steakhouse. And I’m thinking, wow, like I must have seen these adverts like a hundred times now. Everywhere I walked, then I see billboards up. I see digital signage. I see the bins. I see everything.
[00:35:03] It was everywhere I could literally not escape laurel park sign park or this brunelli steakhouse So i’ll go back to my hotel get in the lift and lift opens up get in the lift What do you think I see in the lift? I see brunelli steakhouse So I ask at the reception. I’m like, um this uh This brunelli steakhouse.
[00:35:25] What’s it like? She goes. Oh, yes, great You I keep seeing it. I keep seeing it advertised. She was like, yeah, yeah, the, um, the owner of the hotel owns it. I said, what, the owner of the hotel owns Brunelli’s Steakhouse? And they’re like, yeah, yeah. I said, do they happen to own Loro Park and Scion Park? They went, yeah!
[00:35:45] And I was like, wow, all right, this person, now this is a really interesting thing. So I’m there over the New Year at the hotel, hotel of standards, like one of the leading hotels in the world. It’s one of the best hotels in the world. And there’s a new included was this New Year’s ticket to a New Year’s dinner.
[00:35:59] Um, and we go to New Year’s dinner. Who do you think is at the New Year’s dinner? with a thousand people sitting two tables up from me. The, the owner of, uh, Loro Parque, so Iron Park. Hotel Botanica, Bonelli’s Steakhouse. And yes, I did eat at the steakhouse. I did. And yes, I did go up to him and I said to him, don’t know if he understood a word I said, because apparently he’s German, but he nodded along and I said, you’re a great marker.
[00:36:24] And I mean that. Now why did I just tell you that, that anecdote? The reason I told you it is that I’m flying in from another country and that person got their message in front of me again and again and again and again and again. And in today’s world we’re exposed from 4, Which is incredible, right? Now, very few of those 000 messages sit with us and stay with us.
[00:36:50] They say fewer than 100 we actually recognize. And some people say to me, it’s out of my market in my business. So how are you marketing your business? I post on social media twice a week! It just ain’t enough. You’ve got to invest in your advertising. You’ve got to invest in your marketing and you’ve got to get seen.
[00:37:08] You’ve got to take that risk. You ain’t going to become a business millionaire without doing that. So step up, start investing in your marketing. And while we’re at it, let’s bring you to the next piece of no BS advice, which is you’ve got to invest in sales. And I’ll give you another piece of no BS advice on this.
[00:37:24] You’ve got to sell. You’ve got to go out there and sell your product. You’ve got to sell your service. You’ve got to sell yourself. You’ve got to sell your vision. You’ve got to go and sell. If you think you’re going to build a million pound business and become a millionaire without saying anything, it ain’t going to happen.
[00:37:38] You’ve got to go and sell and you’ve got to study sales. Study marketing. Study sales. Get obsessed. As we spoke about earlier, and you can see everything we’re talking about, Is linking together and make sure you tell me in the comments. What is it that’s standing out to you? Which one are you strong in which one are you lacking in which one’s a weakness?
[00:37:57] Because a lot of people’s like well, yeah, no, I like sales. I’m gonna get on board for that Great, but it’s the weakness that’s holding you back, not the strength. So which one is, is not staying out to you and that’s the one you’ve got to focus on. So really, really start to get obsessed on sales, invest in sales, invest in sales people, invest in sales team, invest in sales training, invest in sales management as you get bigger, invest in sales directors as you get bigger than that, because sales is what makes the world go round when it comes to building a business.
[00:38:26] Super important. Next, get obsessed with your product, but notice. The order I did this in. What did I say first? Marketing. Sales. Now product. So now you’re going out there, you’re marketing, you’re spreading the message. Awesome. You’re selling, you’re getting people converted, you’ve learnt to sell, you’re making that happen.
[00:38:47] Now what you’ve got to do is you’ve got to make sure that what you deliver that person, is incredible. It’s really great quality. It has lots of value to them. And let me tell you this, remember I talked about a journey? Your product is a journey as well. Imagine Apple, for example. What Apple phone have you got?
[00:39:05] You’re like, I haven’t got one. I’ve got an Android. But for those of you who have got an Apple phone, which one have you got? Probably got a 16, probably got a 15. You haven’t got an Apple iPhone 1. No one has an Apple 1. No one. Why? Because 16 years ago, if the Apple one was perfect, you wouldn’t need a 16th version.
[00:39:23] So what am I trying to say here? Do what tech companies do. Keep improving, keep improving, keep improving, keep improving, keep making your product better. And this is the amazing thing, is your product, the longer you do it. Like our coaching program, Gold Circle, when I started that in 2016, it was really good.
[00:39:39] Cause I put a lot of time and I put a lot of effort into it. 2024 is world class. Why? Cause again and again and again and again and again, I focus, I got obsessed on it. And that’s what you need to get obsessed with your product. You need to make it so great that people absolutely love it. Now the next one, this is going to challenge you and you can tell me in the comments if it challenges you and tell me if you’re obsessed in product, obsessed in sales, tell me if you’re obsessed with marketing and tell me which one you’re not obsessed with, you need to get obsessed with.
[00:40:10] You know, I really want to hear from you. One of the things I do love is when we look through the comments of the YouTube videos, I love hearing about where people are from, I love hearing about what businesses they’re in. I love hearing about what’s impacted them. In this video, you know, we make these videos to add values to business owners and entrepreneurs.
[00:40:28] And, you know, maybe one day we’ll work together, but we’re not working together already. You know, I’d love to hear what value that this is delivering to you. And, you know, if, if these lessons are really sitting with you, because Like I said, it took me a long time to learn them, you know, and I have done what we said at the beginning of the video.
[00:40:44] I’ve been able to go and, you know, become a millionaire through business and these lessons do work. They’re proven. You can use them, you can deploy them into your business and it’s going to really, really help you if you get super focused on it. Right? So do tell me in the comments where you’re from, what business you got, be really cool to hear about.
[00:41:00] Now, this one is a nice controversial one for you. So if you’re taking notes, write this down, people are better than you. And it’s definitely some people that needed to hear that. There are people out there that can work for you that are better than you at branding that are better than you at marketing that are better.
[00:41:21] You and sales, they’re better than you are product development. They’re better than you organize in your business. They’re better. You’re mocking your business. They’re better at doing your videos. They’re better doing your mind. They bury you, every Yeah. Adam, what are you beating me up for? I’m not beating you up, but what I’m trying to say to you is, is that as you grow a business, there are so many talented people out there and we can get really naive in our thinking that we think that we’re really good at everything just because we run a business.
[00:41:50] You probably are really good at a lot of things. Why? Because you’re watching this, you’d be watching something different. If you didn’t want to get good at stuff, you would watch something else, you wouldn’t even beer, right? So I’ve got no doubt you’re probably talented at what you’re doing, you’re really good at what you do, but you can’t buy into this belief that you’re the best of the best at everything and nobody can do it as good as you.
[00:42:13] Because that proper sucks, that proper holds you back. In fact, I’ll give you, you know, another insight. I was recently, when I was away again actually, I was reading a book called, uh, really cool book. Um, around leadership. And what they said in this book around leadership is fundamentally you are either a diminisher or you’re a multiplier.
[00:42:34] Which one are you? Now a diminisher, and they said this is the difference, this is how you can tell. A diminisher, which is someone that doesn’t develop people, that doesn’t help people grow, that doesn’t help people become more. A diminisher is someone that has the assumption that people need me to figure it out.
[00:42:51] People won’t figure it out. And as they get me they won’t figure it out. So that’s a diminisher. Where a multiplier, which is the other side of the coin, and this is a really cool book, the multiplier is somebody that says people are smart and they’ll figure it out. So which belief do you hold? Do you believe that people are not smart that work for you, that you work with?
[00:43:10] Or do you believe that they are smart? Because whatever one you believe is really going to show up in the way you run your business, and the way you run, and the way you grow your business, which is super important. I thought that was a very, very good lesson. And I think it ties into that piece of business advice, which is that, you know, there are great people out there.
[00:43:28] And if you want to build saying great, you need to get some great people. Because it could be a game changer for you. Now, the final one, which is super important, is you’ve got to find great people that you can take advice from, and you’ve only got to take advice from people you’d swap places with. Now, this is super important.
[00:43:49] If your employees are your advisors. If your mum, your dad, your uncle, your nephew, your nan, whatever, is your advisor and they’ve never run a business and every time you have a business problem you go, hey nan, what would you do about this? Your nan loves you but she’s not going to give you the best business advice because she ain’t run a business.
[00:44:06] And again, it’s controversial but it’s true and I wish I’d known it earlier because in the beginning, this was a bad trait of mine in the beginning when I was starting off and I was running businesses. I used to go and I used to talk to my employees and say, what would you do? What would you do? Well, you know, what would you and you’ve got to get your your employees ideas and you’ve got to trust them and you’ve got to understand them and you’ve got to listen to them and you’ve got to access their brains because they’ve got great stuff for you.
[00:44:34] But if you’ve got a fundamental business problem that needs solving, you don’t go to your team member and go, I’m really worried about this. I’m worried about making payroll. They’re going to worry about that. You don’t want to be saying that to them because they’re going to get very, very worried. So you’ve got to find advisors and mentors and coaches that are playing at a higher level than you.
[00:44:54] So your complex problems, you can go to them. You don’t want to be taking Complex problems to people that have not dealt with complex problems or never wore those shoes before and it’s a bad habit Some of you will be doing it. You want to stop it. You want to make sure that you only take advice from people you’d swap places with.
[00:45:11] That way, they’ve already walked the journey. You know, if there’s a mountain, they’ve climbed the mountain. And if you look at it like that, you’re starting off at the bottom of the mountain, you’re going on the ascension. So bear in mind that someone’s already climbed the mountain and you’re down here and they say, you know, Well, what would you do about climbing the mountain?
[00:45:25] I’ll say, well, you know what? There’s a big sharp fall about 50 feet up and you really need to be careful. Now, imagine you don’t have that conversation. You go and climb the mountain, you’re dead. So what you need, you need the mentors to tell you where the challenges are, where the frustrations are, so you can climb safely and you can get.
[00:45:46] To where you want to go. Now, there you go. That is 16 years of no BS advice. There’s a ton of great stuff in there. Please tell me your favorites in the comments. And if you haven’t subscribed already, we are making a epic YouTube video every single week. So mission this year, we want to bring you really great quality.
[00:46:04] I hope that you’re enjoying it. I hope you’ve got some great value. If you have gone this far, Do subscribe and comment for me, a player. That means I know that you watched all the way through, which means you’re committed, you’re driven, you’re focused, you’re disciplined, and it’d be really cool to hear from you in the comments.
[00:46:20] You’re an A player. Thanks again for watching. If you watch on YouTube, if you’re listening on the podcast, remember you can watch the visuals on YouTube, which would be really cool for you. I hope you got tons of value and I really hope that these 16 years of no BS advice can help you and your business get to the million mile mark and to the next level.