Unlocking Business Success: Free Knowledge for Aspiring Entrepreneurs

• Over the last 30 years, the author has built 19 companies and invested in 78 startups.
• They are sharing invaluable business insights for free, without charging for mentorship.
• The author emphasizes the importance of mindset, purpose, and effective execution in starting and growing a business.

I am good at only one thing: business. For the last 30 years, I built 19 companies and invested in 78 startups. People ask me every day to be their mentor and to help them, and they’ve even offered me £10,000 to help them just for one day in business.
I don't want to charge people for help; I want to give you the knowledge for free.

Today, I'm going to give you everything you need to start a business, grow a business, maintain a business, and sell a business. But if you can't stay on this video for 5 minutes without clicking off, I've got some news for you: you’re probably not going to make it.

I'm now going to list all the things I’m going to go through in the next 45 minutes to change your mindset, give you the tools you need to be successful, and hopefully create new Pathways in your brain that give you the chance to be successful. The very thing that the education system does not want you to be is free, working for yourself, controlling your own destiny.

So today we're going to cover:

• How to start a business with no money.
• How to win and the secret to it all in business.
• How to lose.
• Important: How to do a mind map, which is much better than a business plan—much more liquid.
• How to find your purpose, very important to motivate you and your team.
• How to find a co-founder, something that I believe is like having a relationship partnership.
• How to sell; everybody can sell, there's no such thing as people that are good at selling and people that aren't.
• How to market your business.
• How to PR yourself and your business.
• How to get an investor, and I’ll go through many different ways around that.
• How to get sponsors, often an untapped secret source for making a business grow without needing an investor.
• How to build a company brand.
• How to build a personal brand, which is vital today.
• How to hire, grow, and build.
• How to go global, which is easier than it sounds.
• How to get a mentor—there is a way to do it and nearly nobody does it.
• How to avoid big mistakes but accept luck into your life—make luck happen.
• Finally, how equity works and how to sell your business.

At the end of this video, you will know everything that’s taken me 35 years to know. You will be changed if you watch this video, and I promise you at the end of it it will cost you nothing and you'll never regret it.

How to start: Now, most people tell you to start a business when you have an idea. That’s not where a business starts. A business starts with a feeling, an instinct that perhaps you need to make a change and then applying yourself to learning what the best way to build something that you love is.

Everybody tells me that starting a business is filling a market gap or finding a niche. That is not true. One of my most successful early companies was a company called Fluid. This company turned into one of the biggest agencies in Asia, which I sold to Price Waterhouse Cooper for more money than I ever need. When I launched that company, there were 500 other businesses doing almost exactly the same.

So how did I manage to win? I didn’t have an original idea, like everybody tells you you've got to have to start a business. You don't start with an original idea; you start with what you like doing. Now, I love helping businesses and people succeed. I love marketing. I can spend all day long studying and understanding marketing. Every time someone launches a new business, I want to understand how they made it successful. I’m obsessed; I enjoy it!

There is no work-life balance; there is only syncing up your life with your business. I believe the first step in starting a business is following your passions. Now, everybody tells you that that's not the way to start a business because often your passions initially don’t necessarily generate revenue. But that’s because you haven’t applied a business mindset to what you love.

I loved marketing, and I started a creative agency called Fluid that helped people come up with marketing ideas to make their businesses successful. Now, many companies were doing it, but not many of these people doing it loved it like I did. So I evolved my marketing abilities. I pushed the boundaries of what was possible and used new technologies like email marketing and direct marketing that no one else was doing because I was obsessed with what the latest thing was.

For you, the way you do it is you've got to write down what you like doing and what you don’t like doing. What you love doing, you've got to get really good at; what you don't like doing, you've got to outsource and not do it.

The school system has taught you the wrong thing—that if you’re not good at something, you need to spend more time getting better at it. That is a lie! You’ve got to spend more time getting good at the thing you love to do. Get obsessed by it and that’s actually where a business idea begins.

Because once you’ve figured out what you like doing, the next step is the idea. Again, people will tell you that you need to come up with an original idea; that's not true. The second thing is when it comes to an idea you can actually combine forces with other people.

So back to my example with Fluid. I loved marketing, and I met someone who could take my marketing ideas and turn them into graphic illustrations and brilliant presentations, thereby helping that company in a visual way understand my ideas.

I teamed up with her and created a 50/50 business partnership. I’ll come on to equity later in the video. That was literally the springboard to one of the most successful companies in Asia in this space.

The key is not coming up with an original idea and trying to do it all on your own. The key is coming up with something you love linked to what you do, and perhaps if there's a gap within your ability to execute on what you love, find a partner.

So for example, if you love writing, then write a book. Maybe you need to find a partner that can publish that book or get someone to help you, like an agent. Find someone that will publish that book and that's where it really begins in the idea phase.

It's got to link to your passion and I’ll come on to purpose later, but it's key. You won’t be able to follow through and probably won’t be successful if you’re not willing to do the thing that you are doing more often than others.

So, you figured out what you love doing and now you have an idea. The idea itself can evolve. From my point of view, when I started what I'm doing today, which is a platform to help you for free, the first thing I did was in fact a podcast.

So the step after the idea is step one execution. Execution involves what is the first thing you can do to make your business idea come to life? For me, in my example, it was a podcast. But for you, it might be a blog, it might be a LinkedIn post, or it might be setting up a social media handle and starting to post up your photography.

Whatever the first step execution is, do not make it too hard for yourself. In my case, sitting down, interviewing people I found interesting, recording it, and putting it up would serve the purpose of giving people mentorship in a podcast for free, which was my first step in my mission in my recent business.

So all I really did was get a microphone, sit down, and record conversations. Now, if you go back and look at those very early podcasts, execution was not brilliant. The guests were good; the execution was not great. I had a rubbish microphone, I had a rubbish camera, and I slowly improved.

Step one is come up with a simple execution plan. Step two in starting a business is consider where the revenue is going to come from. Some people say you need this within the idea phase, and yes you can put it within the idea phase, but sometimes revenue doesn't actually make itself clear to you at the start.

An example: if you're a photographer and you think you’re going to make your money charging by the hour for your photography skills, you're probably limiting yourself. So you’re probably better off initially taking pictures of things you love and putting them up online and seeing if people would buy them.

Experiment with revenue models and see what sticks. Sure, maybe people will book you by the hour, but why would you start off with a revenue model that limits yourself? So I think when building a business, the thing to really think about is not necessarily revenue, but experimenting with different ways to make money from the thing that you are doing.

Again, when I launched Fluid, most companies charged by the hour for their marketing consultancy service; we didn't. We charged by the outcome. If we helped a company be successful and sell more products, we took a percentage of those sales.

Now, that was not part of most companies' business models because most people start with an idea, then they do a revenue model, and then they start. The famous quote is: everybody's got a plan until they get punched in the face.

The truth is when you launch a business, you just want to keep yourself nimble like a boxer. You want to see what is going to be the best punch combination for you to make your business work.

Finally, when starting a business, step three is to make sure your purpose is strong. Now you’ve made sure that you enjoy what you do and that's great because that’s going to help you get up in the morning. But actually, I believe new businesses today need to think about what they’re going to do to make a difference in the world.

How are you going to ensure that people want to work with you? How are you going to make sure that what you’re doing isn’t just for profit? Because if it’s just for profit, everybody that works for you is going to want more money; everybody that’s working with you is going to want to pay you less.

But if you have a purpose bigger than yourself and identify that purpose and install it in your business, I promise you, you won’t be managing people anymore. One of the biggest stresses of building a company—you won’t have to manage people because you only have to manage purpose.

I’m going to go into more depth on how this all works, but a lot of what I’ve talked about here already has cost you no money. You haven’t had to spend any money. Now, even if your idea is to launch an app that costs a million pounds to develop, start off with a service business. Start off with a revenue-based model that can get you there.

For example, Airbnb, when they launched, actually sold cereal boxes at conventions. It was enough to be similar to Airbnb, because some of the first accommodations Airbnb ever sold were at conventions—people going to see Obama speak or different politicians speak at these conventions, and they would rent out rooms.

But initially, they sold cereal boxes at these events to get to know their customers, connect to their customers, have a conversation with their customers, and make money. And that is the money they used to initially get the business going.

So I will come on to other steps later now in the video about raising money and other ways to do this, but if you do these first few things your business is up and running. Its cost you no money, and I promise you, because it will have purpose, because you like it, and because there's a revenue model behind it, you will do it; it will happen.

How to win in business? Let's say you've already got a company—you’re not winning and you want to win or want to know the secret formula to winning. Having built nearly 19 companies, and I’m on my 19th business now, how to win in business is actually very simple.

Now, I mentioned earlier having purpose and you personally being passionate about it that’s definitely going to give you an edge because most people are not loving what they’re doing. So if you are, you’re already winning.

But there is a secret formula to winning that starts with a couple of things.

Number one: delayed gratification. Delayed gratification is the number one reason that businesses win. You don’t rush to charge customers; for example, you let them help you succeed.

So the first customer I ever got in my agency Fluid, I actually did the work for free. Now, a lot of people say don’t do the work for free; I don’t agree. I built up a relationship with that customer, over-delivered when it was free, and that meant once they were happy, not only did they use me forever for the 16 years that I ran that company, they also recommended me to everybody. They felt like they were part of my early journey.

Getting your customers on your side is another element of winning. Realizing that if you delay getting gratification, you will make more money. And there are so many examples of this; if you look at big businesses, they spent years making no money, and then when they had the system all in place, huge databases for example, then they can monetize.

People don’t wait long enough. The other thing you can do is have a very strict moral code within your business. Culture will eat strategy for breakfast every single time. You’ve got to make sure that your culture in the company is client-centric. A good example of this is Amazon. I’m just saying that they do actually focus on their customers as a culture.

I think that a lot of people are too busy, for example, thinking about how they can get money out of their customers and not thinking about how they can bring value. If you want to win, bring value. You want loyalty. Bring value. You want them to follow you, promote you, share you on their stories, care about you, talk about you when you’re not in the room—then show them some love.

It sounds simple, but people don’t do it because they’re too busy, not waiting for the payoff, and too busy not installing a culture of patience, a culture of caring about your customer.

Finally, luck. Now luck is not a subjective thing. I have discovered that luck is hackable and you can hack luck three ways.

First: be persistent. What I mentioned earlier about purpose and loving what you do will help you be persistent. You have to outlast other people. When I launched my company Fluid in Hong Kong, I had so many competitors, but slowly but surely they all shut down and went bankrupt. They didn’t care like I did.

I think that whole luck thing is about persistence. That’s number one.

Number two in hacking luck is: know your destination. What is success for you? What will make you happy? What do you want? A big company or a small company? And by the way, a big company is much easier to run than a small company; aim for a big company is my recommendation.

But that’s my opinion; it might not work for you, so I suggest you find success for yourself today. Success for me is having the time to take my son to school and be able to pick him up. It's having time to do the exercise I want to do; that’s how I define success.

So I never sell hours and we’ll come to that in a little bit why you should never sell hours. But luck is hackable. You have to be persistent; you have to know your destination, and finally, you have to learn to take risks.

Be careful with sayings out there trying to trick you into options that are not true. The worst one is: the harder you work, the luckier you get. That is not true; that is a lie—a lie designed to make you work hard. If it was true, every nurse in this country would be a millionaire.

It is not true that working hard equals success. What equals success is taking risk. You have to learn to take risks. Lean into fear, learn to love fear, embrace it, and then you can take more risks. The more risks you take, the luckier you get.

Learn to build culture into your businesses about the long term and learn to hack luck; you will win. The secret to it all is learning to accept that you could lose everything and it doesn’t matter.

You’ve got to be willing to risk it all, take a chance, and go for it. Do not rush; do not see this as anything but a marathon. It’s not a sprint. Enjoy the journey; don’t rush. No one can beat you if you do it.

So delayed gratification is key: brands like Facebook and Instagram, although I’m not a fan necessarily of these platforms, they personify this concept. They did build massive massive user bases, but they didn’t monetize them at the beginning; they waited.

They just kept building value in their platforms for the users, and more people kept signing up. They didn’t actually monetize for a very long time. I think Facebook was near 10 years before it started making money, and although I’m not suggesting you wait 10 years—and those companies have different investment structures, which we’ll talk about a bit later—it’s important to understand how important this is to building a successful long-term business.

Do not think about making money straight up; build a brand, not a business. Those businesses like Facebook and Instagram waited a decade before they started monetizing, and as soon as they started to monetize, Facebook in particular started to decline as a brand.

Less people liked it—too many ads on the screen, too many annoying buttons that didn’t have any relevance to them—because they were suddenly trying to make their client happy, the advertiser, and no longer focused on the user in the same way.

So be careful, but that is how you build massive economic moats. People like Google, similar at the beginning, no revenue. YouTube, at the beginning, no revenue. Focus on building something that has value for people.

Delayed gratification is one of the secret weapons in building a sustainable, large, and successful business that you love.

Next up: how to lose. It might sound like a strange title, but it’s the number one thing I’ve noticed that people don’t learn to do that doesn’t allow them to be successful.

This all stems back probably to school, where you were told that success was getting an A. It’s not; success is actually accepting failure, learning to bounce back from failure, embracing failure.

Having learnings from the businesses that I have been involved in that have failed have allowed me to be successful. I guarantee you if I hadn’t lost a million pounds on a comic book business, I wouldn’t be rich or successful today. I needed to learn how to fail; I needed to accept losing. It’s key.

So how do you build the stamina and the ability to lose? The first thing you realize: number one, don’t let things own you. If you let things own you, you are controlled by the very thing that’s meant to bring you pleasure. You have to learn to lose those things and not care about those things.

The second thing to lose: you need to let your short-term ego go. Now, ego is actually a very powerful motivator, and there are different types of ego. The ego I’m talking about here is driving around in the right car to give an image to people that don’t care about you that you are successful.

Do not worry about this. Learn to enjoy looking like you’re a loser. Let people underestimate you. It is so powerful to be underestimated by your competition, even by your customers, because if they think you can’t deliver and you do, then brilliant!

Do not worry about losing. Learn to be a D student; love to fail. That’s why 80% of A students end up working for D students, because A students are scared to lose. They don’t want to lose; they always want to get an A; they always want to be seen as the smartest person in the room. Don’t worry about it. Learn to lose; learn to embrace failure.

I promise you, if you think that the worst is if you try something and you lose everything, it doesn’t matter—you can go again; you will succeed; I guarantee it.

Next up, I want to teach you something practical: how to do a mind map.

So many people teach you in business to do a business plan. Forget that! There is no use for a business plan. What you want to do is map out where your business could go, how it could go, and understand the different directions in which to take your business.

Now, I have never seen anyone teach anybody how to do a mind map, and the reason I think that no one teaches this is because there's no template to sell you. There’s no product to sell you around a business plan.

Business plan things actually kill companies. I’ve seen people with massive business plans stick to it and die. A mind map, however, will cost you nothing to do and actually leaves you nimble and free to explore where the business can go, and it’s so simple.

It starts in the middle with your hobby, whatever that is, what you love to do. The second part of a mind map is the business. What is the business? So what is your hobby? What do you love to do? And ideally, it now links to the business.

Now, with the business—and I’m going to use my company as an example, hopefully it translates into what maybe your idea is—but in my business, which is what we call Free Humanity, the name probably gives it away: we want people to be free to do what they love.

So within Free Humanity, this is what I did when I first started the business four years ago: I looked at different ways that I can make the business work.

So off here, I wrote podcast. Actually, as I mentioned earlier, this is one of the first things I actually did. So from a podcast, what comes off it? Well, I build a network. Right?

I’m now doing a mind map of something I have already done to illustrate how a mind map works when you’re building out a business of value. So one of the benefits of doing a podcast was a network. In my case, I managed to interview over 200 of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs, which are now part of my life, and help me with what I’m doing.

That was one of my “I,” and it was on my mind map. Network. The second thing was brands. I realized if I did a podcast, I could probably make revenue from brands.

Now, with a mind map, you can get bigger and bigger with mind maps; there’s no stopping how big a mind map can get—just like your brain is infinite in its ability to think. The mind map is also infinite.

When I wrote the original mind map out for my business, I thought brands, and then I started listing them. So in my case: GoDaddy, Tide Banking, Adobe—these were brands that I felt were a fit with what I wanted to do: give people the ability to start their own business, be free, do what they love.

I also listed in my original mind map—and I didn’t do it at the beginning, but it ended up becoming part of what I did—was an app. An app that would focus on free help for people.

Now, at the time, I didn’t have the name that I now have, which is HelpBank.com, but I knew I needed to build a scalable way of giving people knowledge.

Now what I didn’t know back then, that I know now—quick bit of insight—is that the word “app” is overused as a word. It’s actually not an app that you need to build at the beginning. For most platforms, you need to build a web-based platform.

Why? Well, if you build an app, you have to go in the App Store or in the Google Play Store; you get restricted by one of those two locations. So people that have a Samsung phone access the Apple Store to download your app—why would you, when you launch something, restrict people from getting access to it?

Plus, if it’s web-based, people can just log in straight from a web browser, any web browser. That aside, I realized in my early days I needed to do an app, and from that, I would do free help and from that, I would be able to connect the network that I built in the podcast to the free help of the people that I had interviewed in the podcast—the knowledge that I was capturing from their case, I could connect.

Now, that network being built via the podcast, to the help on the platform. This is how this has actually played out.

The next thing I spent time thinking about was team. On my mind map, I thought about who I actually need. Now, because I knew I was going to do a podcast, I knew that I needed an editor, but also I knew my weaknesses.

So I know I need an accountant, someone that’s going to take care of the admin—these are things that I don’t enjoy doing. So I know what to do, but I also realized with the network that I built through the podcast I could have partners. It’s not just employees but partners. I could link to the team again, working with the people that I’d spoken to on the podcast.

I could connect them. Although they’re not necessarily on my payroll, they are people that perhaps are connected to my mission, want to help people, and they can become part of my extended team.

Now within the team structure, I can also start thinking about things like if I have an editor, maybe that editor hires editors or I hire editors. You can start breaking down what you actually need within your team.

Right now as a mind map, you start— in my opinion—with what your hobbies are, what you enjoy doing, then you’re building a business around it, and then you’re thinking about different things that this business is going to need.

Now, one of the things that I spent a lot of time thinking about that I haven’t yet done but will be coming soon in my platform was what else I could do that would scale the business and give it what it needed resource-wise without necessarily me being involved in it.

At that time, back four years ago, the word was merchandising. So I wrote down merchandising. Now, I think it’s actually evolved; now it’s beyond merchandising.

But from that, I wrote down, of course, what everyone was doing four years ago: t-shirts, caps, that sort of stuff—right? Stuff that you know maybe the word “Free Humanity” would look pretty cool on and I thought about in those days things like sweets and products that perhaps we could launch.

I wrote down basically any way merchandise-wise we could make money. Now what’s interesting is I’m about to launch a sweet brand called Buzz’s; it’s taken four years to get to this part of the mind map, but it was on there—it was always on there.

Ironically, when I was building the team, if anyone said to me when I was interviewing them, they had some experience with the sweet business, I made a note and kept them as someone maybe could help in the future.

Same with merchandising; anytime I spoke to anybody that was perhaps looking at starting a t-shirt brand or working on building products, I’d see if perhaps they wanted to work in the future. Because once you know in your mind map one of the things that’s going to come up in the future, you can look out as you’re building other things for the very thing that’s going to help make that happen.

So this is a mind map; it’s literally mapping out all the different things and different ways your business can go. It’s fun, it’s simple; there’s no template you can download and pay someone for—you don’t need it.

And the beautiful thing about a mind map is you’re not fixed; you can start adding bubbles and adding things as things evolve. As people and the world change, you can start connecting the different dots between parts of your business; something a 20-page document will never let you do because it’s too linear.

So that’s a mind map. I hope it’s a useful practical tool for you going forward.

Now let’s talk about how to find purpose.

Now this word purpose might sound woo-woo; they don’t teach you it at school in my opinion, for a reason. Because if you understand purpose, you’re very unlikely to work for someone else. Purpose is a very personal thing. You can find other people with purpose; you can find your tribe; you can be free.

But finding purpose is not an easy thing, and it’s not something you’ve been given any of the tools to make happen.

So what is the first step in finding purpose? It’s a very obvious step that people do not do. You think about it. Now, the problem is if you say you’re thinking about purpose, people might laugh at you.

Other people try to throw silly jokes out there, like 49, and they’ll throw you off. Or purpose will get so complicated in your head because you haven’t really thought about it before, you’ll give up and go back to your old ways.

You need to think about purpose. What is your purpose? We used to live in tribes of 5,000, and we used to work on a method called give without take, not give and take. We used to help each other because it would make our tribe better—not because we’d make money from it.

You ask me for help; I will give it to you for free. The world will be a better place. I get better at giving you that help for free; I’d become an expert at giving that help for free. Eventually, when I'm not in the room, people will talk about me and what I do because I become so good at helping people.

But I think today, that doesn’t fit the narrative of working at a call center, picking up the phone, and doing what you’re told in a factory that Henry Ford created.

So when the school system was developed, the word purpose wasn’t included in any of it. They asked the wrong question of you: “What are you going to do when you grow up?” is what schools say. That’s not the right question.

What you should be asked is: “What problem are you going to solve?”

So the second step in thinking about and finding your purpose is: what problem matters to you?

Now at first, nothing might spring to mind; and if something has jumped into your mind, then great. In a minute, I’m going to explain how you action that, but if it hasn’t jumped into your mind, start thinking about what problems have actually affected you.

Big or small. Now it can be really simple, like: the banks aren’t open early enough for you, or the swimming pool you wanted to go to doesn’t let you swim at the time you want.

It might sound silly, but you start thinking about problems that bother you, and your brain wakes up the entrepreneur muscle in your brain that helps you figure out how to solve that problem.

Now it might be that the bank’s not opening on time isn’t a problem you’re going to solve, but if your brain starts thinking about that problem and how it can solve it, you might begin to understand how to find purpose.

The third thing you can do is start breaking down how to make your life and that purpose match. Now matching what you do in your day and your actual purpose is often easier than you think.

I’ve met hundreds and hundreds of people who tell me what their dream is, and it turns out that their dream is often just 3% difference from their existing life. You know, between chimpanzees and humans, there’s only a 3% difference in the DNA, and often, for example, I met someone that wants to do their own catering business—they're working in someone else’s catering business.

They’re just missing this video in their life to figure out how to turn what they feel is their purpose—to make cakes for someone and make them smile and own that business—into that business.

They’re just missing knowledge. They’re also not realizing that actually their purpose is nearly there. In fact, I would argue that the system sometimes wants you to feel like you’re getting enough satisfaction that you don’t need to make a change.

So in other words, if you are working for someone else baking cakes—even if they're not using the ingredients you would use, or they don’t care about the customer the same way that you do—at least you are baking.

But you’ve got to break free from this thinking. You’ve got to realize that if you’re going to do your purpose, you have to learn what I said earlier: take risks, but most importantly to truly know yourself.

I once interviewed a billionaire on my podcast, and I asked him how he developed his intuition. He said to me, “I used to go and ask my mom or my dad a question when I was young, and they both used to say to me, ‘You know the answer!’”

They never gave him the answers, so he had to go away and figure out the answers for himself. That, in itself, is the point I’m trying to make here.

You have a purpose. Yes, I can help you get there, but you need to ask yourself: What is that purpose? How are you going to make it happen? How are you going to get there?

You do it by thinking about it. Asking yourself not what you’re going to do when you grow up, but what problem you want to solve.

Then matching your life to that problem.

The final thing I’ll say: you don’t have to do this thing on your own. Let’s say you care about climate change, and I would just say we don’t need to save the planet; we need to save humans. When the humans are gone, the planet will be fine.

But let’s just say you care about saving the planet; you can go and work with other people doing something in this space.

The only thing I would say to you is make sure you ask for equity wherever you work. I’ll come to that a bit later how you do that and why you should do that, but that can be still a way for you to have the life you want.

You can find your purpose and then go work with someone that’s actually doing it. So in my organization, behind the camera right now, there are a whole group of people, talented people that care about the same thing as me.

So they can go off and help people in their own way like they want to, or we can come together as a team and solve the problem together, of people not having the knowledge they need to do what they love.

What I’ve noticed is once you find your purpose—this is what you need to be careful of—is that you don’t think that it’s such a big purpose, like solving the world’s problems, that you don’t do it. You can team up with other people to do it.

I’ll tell you 1 + 1 = 11. Remember that once you know your purpose, you can seek out people and communities, and old days, tribes to help you go and fix this problem with other people.

But if you don’t know what that purpose is, you won’t do this, and you will get stuck working on someone else’s purpose, someone else's destiny.

I promise you, it’s harder to work for someone else than work for yourself, despite what you’ve been told.

How to find a co-founder: Now if you’re someone that likes to work alone, you can skip this bit. But I would say to you, before you do, make sure you understand the power of a co-founder.

Sometimes we get caught in our own ignorance bubble. We think we know what we know, but you don’t know what you don’t know. So be cautious before you skip this section unless you’re absolutely sure that a co-founder cannot bring you value.

I will tell you first how a co-founder can bring you value. It’s a bit like if you get a gym membership; you probably don’t go to the gym. But if you have a buddy who goes to the gym every morning, you often have accountability, and you go.

For me, that’s one of the number one reasons I love having a co-founder.

Now there’s a counterargument to having a co-founder. You’ll hear from many people, which is: “Well, why would you give up 50% of your company to have a co-founder?”

I personally would rather have 50% of a business I enjoy that’s successful than 100% of a nightmare and a failure. I honestly think that if you get a co-founder, your life is better.

How do you get a co-founder? What should you look out for? That’s something I’m now going to cover.

But I want you to think carefully about the equity structure, and later in this video, I'm going to talk about equity and it's going to be important; it's going to connect back to this. But for now, I’m just going to talk in this bit about how to get a co-founder.

First step is to identify what I said earlier, which is what do you love to do and what do you hate to do. Be honest; be clear.

Now, once you’ve identified what you hate to do and what you love to do, you can identify what is the perfect co-founder.

Because you want someone that has the opposite skill to you, but—and this is very important when looking for a co-founder—I’m going to put it as number two—has the same moral code.

This process of finding a co-founder is pretty much the process of probably finding a partner in life. You’re going to spend a lot of time with this person; this person is going to become literally your business life partner.

If you do it right, it is for life. I’ve done businesses with people, and even when I’ve sold that company, I’ve done another business with them.

If you get it right, it is a lifelong partnership. And so you want to make sure you’re honest and clear about what you hate doing and what you love doing so that the person comes in and works off of you. One doesn’t question your crossover with you; lets you run your area and gives you respect equally.

You have the same with what they do. You write down exactly in detail what this person looks like. I would go as far as to say you write down how tall they are, what they look like, how they speak, their background, where they’re from, everything you can possibly think of, just as if you’re picking a partner in life. What is it you're looking for? Write down every detail.

The reason I say the more detailed you are with it, the more likely you are to manifest it. You aren’t going to be looking out for something unless you make it very clear what you’re looking for.

I mean, it’s the red car theory, right? If I suddenly tell you the words “red car,” you're probably going to see a lot of red cars. But if I don’t mention red cars, you probably haven’t seen one at all today.

You have to list out what you want.

So you’ve identified what you love doing and what you don’t love doing. You’ve identified your own moral code, and you’ve drawn lines in the sand what you’re not willing to do, and you know what this person looks like.

The final thing is post it. Now posting is very simple. You start telling people you're looking for this person. You post it on LinkedIn; you post it everywhere. You ask people; you make it clear. This is what you're looking for.

You look out for it in cafes, when you’re out having dinner, when you’re at the supermarket; you look out for this person because they're out there.

You just have to have your eyes wide open. Of course, you can go on HelpBank.com and ask people if they know someone like this. You can use the tools around you to get what you need.

But ultimately, you’ve now set yourself up with every chance of finding a co-founder. Now you’re going to have to sort out the equity structure and get that right; I’m going to come to that in a minute, but that is how you find a co-founder.

In my opinion, it’s one of the most powerful things you can do to ensure success in your business.

Next up: how to sell. Now, anybody can sell; it’s a system, it’s a philosophy, and anyone can do it. I don’t care your background; you can be an introvert and still sell and understand the systems of selling. If you are presently selling, I promise you, you’re missing a few tricks I’m going to try and help you with.

Now first up, how to sell—it’s not what you have been taught; it is not “Here’s my product; this is how much it is and this is what it does.”

The first thing in sales that you need to learn, and the number one thing I learned through the hard way of doing it is: sell the sizzle, not the steak.

So what does that mean? Well, let’s pick one of the best products ever sold: Apple products. Steve Jobs used to always set up events where he’d invite 3,500 people into a room—all the right tech reporters, all the right people—and he would then present to them the sizzle.

He would not say, “Here’s a phone with an Intel processor that has this and has that.” He would talk about how this product was for the game changers, for those that wanted to do things differently, for the creative types. He was very specific about what the sizzle is; he didn’t sell the steak.

Now, in that process of selling, there are a couple of other lessons that Steve Jobs teaches us. Of course he doesn’t sell to millions through social media; he picks a community—3,500 people in a room. He sells to them; he connects to them.

He talks to them, and they go and talk to the rest of the world. Getting someone on your side, selling for you, is one of the most powerful ways to sell.

Now, the number one salesperson in my last company was my accountant. Why? Because I gave her the tools to sell. I told her what we did and how we did it. I showed her the sizzle through the numbers.

We helped clients be more successful; we helped businesses stave off bankruptcy; we made sure companies did well. She was proud of that. She would sell the sizzle.

She’d sit with her other CFO friends at lunch and say, “We saved a company from going bankrupt; we made one company an extra million pounds a month they didn’t expect.”

She would tell people the outcome; she wouldn’t say “Oh, I work for Fluid, and we have marketing ideas.” That’s not exciting; she talked about the results.

The second element of learning to sell is understanding the process of selling. So many people don’t. So many people start on what I call the third step, and you need to do two steps first before you ever start implementing the third step in sales.

The first step in any sales is understand your customer. Now it sounds so obvious and I’m shocked how many people don’t do it. I often get emails that say, “Dear John,” or they say, “Dear Simon, I really love what you’re doing X,” and they haven’t actually researched what I’m really doing.

However, when someone sends me something and understands what I’m doing, it’s clear on how they can bring value to me. I sit up and I listen, and that is the number one thing that people don’t do in the first step of sales: enough research.

They do not spend enough time understanding if the person they’re talking to actually needs them. They spend way too much time selling to people that don’t actually need what they’ve got to sell.

Don’t waste your time with people that don’t need what you’ve got; focus on the people that do need what you’ve got. So, the first step is do they need you? Get to know them.

The second step in this three-step process to get any sales done is understand the person you’re working with in the context of do you like them? This element of sales is so powerful. If you can have a real connection with a person you’re selling to—a genuine connection—not a fake connection, it is something that will help you get through all sorts of difficult times in that relationship.

You need to like each other, and if you meet someone who needs what you need but they don’t like you, and you don’t like them, the sale probably won’t go ahead. Even worse, the sale might go ahead and then you’ll be working with someone that doesn’t like you and you don’t like them.

If they’re rude, they’re abrupt, you go out for dinner, they’re rude to the waiter, if it doesn't appeal to you, drop them. Do not work with these people; it might be hard; you might want the revenue.

But I promise you, you will not build a business that will last if you sell to the wrong people. So first step: do they need you, do you need them?

Second step: do they like you, do you like them? If you do these two things well, the final step—and let’s call it the deal—it will happen because they like you and they need you; they will work with you to make a deal happen.

I have done enormous deals every single time in my career because I’ve done the first two steps right; it’s no problem!

In fact, I have said how much I would like for, say, a contract and that client’s come back to me and given me even more, told me the budget, given me insight into how to make sure we get the work.

So it’s so important not just to go in there cold with what you’ve got to sell but go in there understanding the person and making sure it lasts. If you follow these three steps, I promise you, you’ll get every single sale done.

Now there’s one more final thing I want to tell you about sales. You've got to think long-term.

There was a study done by Harvard; they analyzed the best salespeople in the world and the top 50 salespeople in the world would, on average, approach someone to get a deal done five times. They would send them an email, for example, and then a few weeks later they’d send them a follow-up email. Then maybe they’d send them a brochure or contact them through social media.

They would basically contact a maximum of five times before they would actually consider that lead dead, and that was their mistake.

We’re talking about the leading salespeople, but the top 1% of salespeople do something very different. When I started Fluid, I wrote down all 50 companies I wanted to work with in building up this business. There were big names on there, and from day one, I built a system to reach out to them—by hook or by crook—in some way, every single month.

For example, at Christmas, I would wish them a merry Christmas, send them a card. Chinese New Year, I'd send them something. When I learned something about their industry that I thought could be useful to them, a bit of research, I would send it to them. I would always make sure every single month I made contact with them in some way—not to sell necessarily but to build a relationship to get to know what their needs were.

In some cases, I got those clients quite quick, but in the majority of the businesses, it took me, for example, 9 years to get some of those companies on board. Every single month for 9 years, I would approach those companies and that’s the secret to it.

It’s a long game; you have to apply yourself. Build a system in sales that lasts. It cannot be one email; they don’t reply; or one email and they say no. You’ve got to keep staying in contact with them.

Building things like email lists are still very powerful. I know it's not as cool these days as being popular on TikTok, but I promise you having an email list where you can contact that person regularly, keep an update of what you’re doing, keep up-to-date what they’re doing will ensure a sale at some point in the future, as long as you're politely persistent.

I promise you, if you follow these rules in sales, your life will change. I will add, in sales, people don’t bring their personality into the mix enough.

You’ve got to be yourself; be honest; be authentic. In sales, it’s not about selling someone a car that doesn't work; that's how people are projecting what sales looks like. Sales is about selling someone a car they actually need.

I have seen in my own life when I’ve gone to buy a car, the best salespeople tell me, “You don’t want this car; you want that car in another showroom where they don’t get the commission.”

I’ve actually had that happen, and when I saw that happen, I hired that person because that person is thinking long-term. They’re not trying to sell me a car to make the commission; they’re building a relationship with me, and that is what you need to do to be successful in sales.

Next up: How to Market. This is a deep subject, but I’m going to try to give you all the knowledge I’ve gained in decades of building some of the most complicated marketing structures there are.

Now, marketing is one of the most important pieces in making a business work. And when I think about this subject, it’s complicated. I honestly think, because I know everything about this subject, it’s like rocket science.

I will start off perhaps by teaching you that in marketing, 50% of what you spend will probably be wasted. So if you've got a million views but the wrong views, it’s wasted. So marketing is about really experimenting.

Now, I mentioned earlier when I’m talking about sales: sell the sizzle, not the steak. Of course, that applies in marketing too, but marketing is actually about connecting with people over time.

The biggest example is branding. If you get the branding right, people will resonate. You’re probably a victim of this; you would rather buy an Apple than another brand, right? You’ve become a victim of good marketing.

When, for example, the iPod launched, people all thought the product did the selling; it was such a good product that’s why it did so well. No! When they launched the iPod, they spent more money marketing that product than any company had ever spent on marketing a product ever.

Marketing is not one thing; marketing is a complex structure combining PR, brand messaging, and product-market fit. If you don’t know product-market fit, I can cover this later. Basically, you've got to make sure that the people you’re talking to will resonate to the product you’re selling or the service you’re selling.

Marketing in my opinion is actually the number one thing: it’s understanding who your customer is. Now, often in business building, you will see businesses focus on niches to start with. Now, it doesn’t have to stay in that niche, but it’s a great place to start.

So Facebook, for example, started off in universities, connecting people in universities. Of course, now it became connected with everybody all over the world. But they understood their customer; they knew what that customer was looking for.

In the early days of Facebook, they put a feature on there called single or available. I can’t remember the exact terminology, but basically, they created a feature that let you know if that person was in a relationship or not.

And that was designed to help university students understand the dynamics between their fellow university students, and so they knew their market audience. They marketed that feature, and people would then go around saying, “Did you see Sarah? She’s suddenly single!” and that would be the marketing for their product; they built a tool in the platform that became what people spoke about.

That created the marketing for you, and in my opinion, that’s the Holy Grail of marketing. And this brings me on to point two: I call this the staircase philosophy.

So the best way for me to teach you this is to tell you what I have recently done. So weirdly, a few months ago, a staircase came up for sale in London. It’s the first time a staircase had ever been for sale in London; it’s ridiculous!

I heard it on the news that this staircase was for sale, and I told my brain instantly, “We’re going to buy it!” Now I didn’t have an exact plan of what I was going to do with the staircase, but what I knew was that staircase symbolized something for my business, which was step by step, you can get anywhere you want.

But I also knew I could news jack that staircase. It was a sensation; people didn’t know why someone was selling a staircase. Two days after hearing it on the news, I owned it.

I spent £26,000 buying it at auction. And then we did a couple of clever things that hopefully symbolize how marketing works. First up, as soon as we bought the staircase, the news channels that had reported it was for sale jumped on us; I knew they would.

They wanted to know why we had bought a staircase, and that gave us an opportunity to get on the front page of the New York Times, on the front page of the BBC, in every single newspaper around the world—millions of dollars worth of coverage for our platform because we bought a staircase.

It doesn’t seem relevant, but doing these wild things, these crazy things, can actually make a huge difference. One of the things that I always loved in marketing was when flash mobs were a thing. What happened was suddenly you’d get a whole shopping mall, people would start dancing and everyone would wonder what it was, right? That’s brilliant marketing.

Now, it might not sell your product exactly in that exact moment, but over time it allows you to have a reach, an expansion and uniqueness that will help you stand out, because that’s what it’s about: standing out.

So by buying the staircase, we then evolved it; we got all this PR. Millions of dollars worth of free PR for a staircase. Then we put a doorbell at the bottom of that staircase and we said if you’ve got a dream, press a button, we’ll then upload your dream to our 4 million following and get you free exposure.

Well, that was what the press needed to do a follow-up story on it. Once you bought the staircase, what did you do with it? They wrote all about that. But also, we built a whole new way of helping people on the back of the staircase that was for sale.

I knew it symbolized helping people step by step. The final step in marketing: we all need partners. Marketing isn’t about promoting something on your own.

You don’t want to get a partner like Ring Doorbell or Amazon, who own Ring Doorbell, on board to sponsor the doorbell, to sponsor the staircase to help us reach even more people. Suddenly, they pay for our marketing, and so marketing isn’t a standalone thing; marketing isn’t a non-living organism.

You have to see it as living; you have to see it as evolving, and you have to see it as something that you do that pushes the envelope. Now marketing is connected to sales. If you have a sales team, in a way when they ring someone up, how they speak to someone, how they treat someone, that is also marketing.

That’s brand marketing. However, how that person receives your phone call, receives your interaction with them, will affect your brand. And that is marketing.

Nike, for example—how do they do marketing? Well, they endorse the very best athletes in the world. Of course, in some cases, they make shoes with those very successful athletes. They’re aligning themselves up with these people that are incredibly successful.

What does Apple do? Apple links to creative people. So anybody that is buying a product thinks they are buying a product associated with creativity.

So I think marketing is about again, similar to sales: selling the sizzle. But it’s also about understanding who your customer is, how to reach that niche, and then how to work with that niche to expand into the wider world.

If you want to scale, it’s the staircase method. What’s your staircase? What’s going to make you stand out? How can you evolve that thing that makes you stand out and go even further?

Number three is systems. When you’re doing marketing, it is such an overwhelming thing; there are so many different ways you can do it. You can do email marketing; you can do social media; you can do PR; you can do branding; you can do events.

I mean the list never ends, so how do you decide which one to do? Well, first of all, whatever you do, you’ve got to build a system to do it. So if it is email marketing, then you have a good data collection system; you have a good data management system, and then you have a good way of pushing out the content to that database.

Whatever one of these things you do, if you do all of them or you do one of them, do them well. Do not do all of them and order them badly. I see so many people with on their website Twitter and Facebook and Instagram links, and then you click through to them and they’re dead.

You’re better off doing one well. Now, I think marketing is something where you should spread your bet. You want to do many different ways, what I call entrances into your business.

You want to do as many of them as you can, but do not overstretch yourself. It’s better to do one platform on social media really well than try and spread yourself too thin.

But if you set up a system for doing your social media, there’s a chance you could do all of them well with the same amount of resources doing one of them well.

So for example, on my social media, I have one core video and then we edit it in-app for each of the channels. So we don’t have to record separate videos for each of the channels, but we do in-app edit them so they’re actually tailored to that particular platform’s nuances—be it their font or their image.

So you can actually set up a system to do all of these marketing things, but the key, of course, is not only just systems but making sure you pick what works for you.

Now when it comes to marketing, one of the big mistakes I see people get taught is marketing is about having the staircase only. It’s not about having the staircase only; it is about applying what you like to do as a founder or maybe what your team likes to do into your marketing strategy.

For example, if you don’t like talking on camera, that’s not your thing—as long as you’re not hiding away from learning something new and you genuinely don’t like to do it—but say for example you love to write, then doing an email marketing strategy is probably right for you.

Posting on LinkedIn is probably the correct platform for you. Sure, you’ll hear people talking about how good TikTok is and how much benefit they’ve gotten from it, but if it doesn’t work for you, it’s not sustainable for you.

It’s not something you’re going to enjoy. And marketing is something fun! This is something I want you to take away. No one talks about it, but marketing is meant to be fun.

I took my son to buy that staircase; we had a laugh. Once we got the staircase, we had a laugh cleaning it up; we had a laugh putting a blimp on top of it; we had a laugh putting a doorbell on the front of it. We enjoyed the whole bloody thing!

If you don’t enjoy it, what's the point!

Marketing is about enjoying it. That’s why I see brands do well.

I’ll give you an example: Starbucks. Starbucks’s marketing in the early days was two things: first, they would take good locations—sometimes quite close to each other—so instead of getting a billboard advertising Starbucks, they would open up another Starbucks.

Even if it was loss-making, as long as it wasn’t more expensive in its loss than a billboard, they were better off having a store, then people could have the experience.

They never did any billboards. It’s changed now, but I would argue it’s not as good a brand anymore.

But they opened up locations; that was one of their marketing strategies. The second thing that they did that was really clever is they looked after their staff, which sounds really obvious, doesn’t it?

But they did; they talked about their staff as partners. The Baristas are partners in some respects. The internal training manual talked about their Baristas as the customer.

And it worked! In the early days of Starbucks, when I used to walk in there, a Barista would know my name; they’d know what drink I wanted; they were just working for Starbucks, but they cared.

Because they were looked after. They were given full-time medical care even if they were part-time staff. They were given insurance, looked after, and they were given days off if they didn’t feel well.

And I think this is also part of marketing. It might not sound it, but if your people don’t represent you, then good luck making everything else represent you. Because those people will create all the things that represent you.

So do include fun into your business. Do look at the nuances of your business and figure out what is going to be your staircase. Ultimately apply your marketing love to something that’s sustainable, that’s going to be enjoyable, that’s going to be able to actually deliver the very thing that you want to deliver.

Which I think should always be the promise of a better future for your customers.

Next up: How to PR your business. Some of these things are interconnected, and sales and marketing all connect to how to get PR, but I’m going to give you some hacks and some insights on how PR works, and it is quite a complicated subject, but if you get right, it can be a game changer for your business.

Now first up, getting PR has to be very targeted. I know plenty of people that have got PR for the money they’ve raised in their company, and it will go out to platforms like Tech Crunch; it will make them feel good, but it had no impact on their business other than to make them feel good, which is fine, I guess.

But I do think PR should be more strategic. I’d rather spend time reaching the press and actually get a tangible result and not just playing to ego.

So recently, for example, I was featured on the BBC news; they talked about what we were doing at the doorbell, where people could pitch their dreams. This led to hundreds of people finding out about it, going to our staircase, pitching their dream, and helping them make their dream happen.

Now, that, in my opinion, is targeted marketing. Equally, I have done a business journal article that got zero reaction. Now, I was proud to be in the business journal, and I don’t want to say which one it is so I don’t insult them, but ultimately it actually led to no tangible value as far as what I want to do, which is help people do what they love and make sure people know there’s a service out there for free to help them do what they love.

So PR is very important to be targeted, and I’ll write that down first. Now targeting can also be subjective because, a bit like marketing itself and sales, of course, sometimes you do need to cast the net wide and get as much coverage as you can, but if you start to target your actual needs, it’s much easier to get PR.

I’ll give you an example. If, for example, you want to let people know that you are now selling cherries on the side of the street, the best thing to do is get some PR in the local area that you live.

Now, as much as it might be nice to say, “You know, we started a cherry farm selling cherries on the side of the street,” to make that farm work, you probably could get you in a mainstream news channel; it won’t necessarily lead to sales in the location in which you sell those cherries.

So targeting and understanding exactly who you’re trying to reach is actually the key, and it’s more likely that if you are selling cherries in East Sussex, the East Sussex times will cover you; it’s more relevant, more chances of actually getting the PR than, say, the BBC covering it, because it’s not necessarily going to be that interesting.

You could spend a lot of time and money reaching those people and then not cover you.

The second thing I’ll teach you about PR is: journalists are lazy.

So if you understand this and understand if you provide everything for them, then they don’t need to do any work; you’re more likely to get the press coverage.

So what I always do is I actually write the press release like it’s the actual story you want written, with a good headline that makes them happy.

Journalists don’t want to write and sell you; they want to write something that’s interesting for the reader.

So making a good subject line that’s good for the reader, making the story good for the reader: I do all the work for the journalist, and then things like photos; I take high-resolution photos and send them with a press clip to make sure they’ve got everything they need.

All they have to do is say yes to the story and then put their own touch on it; job done!

They’re human beings; they want to go out for lunch if they can, so if you can make it possible for them to go out for lunch and do their job, then you will win in PR.

Too many people are lazy; they send press releases that are generic, and they don’t tailor it to the journalist they’re writing to.

So the other thing you need to do is research that journalist—back to the targeting. You need to understand what that journalist writes about, what that journalist is interested in, and almost write in their style if you want that particular journalist to write about you.

The third thing on PR I’ll tell you is there are a lot of companies out there that will tell you they can get you PR; please be careful.

Now, as much as it might be nice to just pay someone to do this, I have discovered doing the PR yourself, especially if you’re a small business, can pay huge dividends.

Why? Because you can create a direct relationship with a journalist.

How do you find these journalistic contacts? That’s what the PR companies tell you they’ve got; you can go for a newspaper and find them; you can Google them. You’ll find them quite quick.

One big hack I’ll give you is Twitter in particular—it’s really good to get hold of journalists. If you start following the journalists that you want to write about you, and you start engaging on their posts, I would say that’s one of the best ways to start building up a relationship with a journalist.

Most people will reply to a comment or read a comment that you’ve made on one of their posts, and weirdly enough, often journalists don’t have big followings, and they don’t actually have a lot of comments. So you can start making a relationship.

Start commenting on something. If they post something about global warming and you’ve got a product that’s helping reduce global warming, then you will get noticed if you start commenting on a story they’ve done about it.

Start being part of that journalist life.

Finally, I have been involved in many conversations where I know brands have not worked with someone because they saw on someone’s social media that they posted something obscene or rude or stupid.

Remember that you as a business owner will always be the number one PR engine. Whatever you post up, be conscious, be careful.

Think about your brand, think about the image that you’re projecting, and I can’t tell you enough how important this is. Because if you do the first few things I’ve mentioned, you connect with the press, you know who you're targeting, and you’re not lazy.

You help them do it if a journalist sees that you are out of control or inappropriate, they won’t risk their job to write about you.

So learn to be disciplined, learn to be the brand. PR starts with one person having respect for you; so make sure you’re disciplined; don’t be lazy yourself.

Next up: one of my favorite subjects—one of the questions I get asked the most: how to get an investor. Learning how to get an investor can dramatically change the trajectory of your business.

Equally, though, just before I go into how to get an investor, I want you to think carefully about whether or not you need an investor.

Now, I have invested in 78 companies; you can go on my website Simon.com and look at some of the companies I’ve invested in. I have seen it all, and sometimes if you get the wrong investor or get an investor for the wrong reasons, you will have a new boss, and your life will become a nightmare.

It will be easy at the beginning when you get the money; it will get harder over time if you do it wrong. I will try to teach you how to not get it wrong, but equally, please ask yourself: is there another way to make the business work?

I’m going to touch on other ways that you could make it work, even if you don’t get an investor within this how to get an investor chat.

Now, there are quite a few ways to get an investor depending on the stage of your business and how much you're trying to raise. If you’re trying to raise money in the early days of a business, I would say to you, the more traction you have in your business, the easier it is to get an investor.

Now, that does not mean to say if you just have an idea you can’t get an investor. You definitely can; there are just fewer people that will fund it.

So just like the sales stuff I taught you earlier, it’s probably better to make sure that you actually know who you’re targeting when you’re getting an investor: what is the profile of the person you want?

So if you’re going after someone that perhaps will fund a business that has no traction, it’s just an idea, then remember those people’s profiles. They probably want quite a lot of equity; they probably want some involvement in the business to make sure it works.

Because no investor, I don’t care who they are, just want to feel like money—everybody wants to feel like they’re bringing some sort of value.

In fact, I would argue you shouldn’t invest in a business unless you can bring value. You've got to make the value the thing that gives you the edge to make that investment work; otherwise, you might just invest in the stock market.

If you can’t bring value, you might as well invest in the stock market, and I don’t think you make money from the stock market. Middle-class people make money from the stock market; you make money like Warren Buffet makes money—you own a piece of a company, you can influence, you can help make sure it’s successful.

So do your research. But these are the types of profiles that are often the best:

1. Family and Friends: Now I know family and friends can be difficult for a lot of people. A lot of people don’t have family and friends with money, and I totally understand that. And I’ll come to other methods, but I just want to touch on this first because family and friends, the reason it’s such a good thing to do is because they know you. You don’t have to convince someone of your personality, your profile, your dedication. They will know all of that—most of the time that could be really powerful in speeding up the process of getting the money you need.

Now, of course, we all know it can get messy if you take money from family and friends and you don’t pay them back. So tell them the truth: they could lose all their money. That’s all you need to do. You tell them they could lose all their money.

In the wish to get investment, we sometimes go down the road of overselling, and that’s totally normal. But please be careful with this, especially with family and friends. If you tell them to invest in my business, it could all go wrong; you can lose everything. Then after that, it’s up to them, but you make it clear.

Don’t oversell that it’s a guaranteed win; it cannot be a guarantee where nothing ever is. Unless you’ve watched all of this video, of course, there’s a high chance. But you know what I mean, please, please be careful!

But I have seen it work, and often family and friends can also help you, which in the early days of any business, if that’s the stage you’re at, then getting help is probably more valuable than money.

I’ve seen it work, so do give it serious consideration. And of course, a friend of a friend can also be the way to raise money. If you don’t have someone in your family that’s rich, maybe you’ve got a friend who has a family that’s rich.

Learn to leverage the network; your friend recommending you to someone who’s rich will be powerful, and it doesn’t mean it’ll save you time in the VC world, which I’ll talk about in a minute. Getting a recommendation is the only way to get investment; they don’t take applications online, despite what their websites say.

I’ve seen it; they don’t; they take it from recommendation, so start really networking.

The second thing I’ll say, and I’ve never seen anyone else talk about this when it comes to getting an investor, is consider the people you want to work with in your company as potential investors.

So sometimes when you’re profiling the people you want in your business, you will look at it and say, “Right, well I can’t afford the best, so I’ll get this person,” right? Which is fine; I understand that.

But smart people think differently. The smart people think, “Who are the best?” Let’s say I’m building right now a competitor to LinkedIn, HelpBank.com—so I think, “Who’s number two at LinkedIn? I want them to come and join me.”

They’re never going to be number one at LinkedIn—not for a long time—but maybe they want the chance to build their own LinkedIn and come and join me.

The great thing about the number two at LinkedIn: they definitely got some money in the bank, right? Some money to invest in the business. So I can—and I’ve done this many times, so this isn’t just a theory—but look at your team, look at your team members as potential investors in the platform I’m running today, help.com.

The people that are involved in this business have invested in this business. Callum, who’s buying the camera right now, has put his own money into this business and he’s got equity because of it. And he’s taken a lower salary initially.

So there are all sorts of benefits to actually doing it this way. You can get your cost down, you can get the best-in-class involved in the business, and you can bring money in to help make the company work.

And it’s much better to have money from people that are actually working in the business than from people externally who are asking you for a report on when they’re going to get their money back.

The third thing you can do—and of course, this is more traditional but it is very complex, so I’ll try to explain how to go about getting this type of person into your business, which is an angel investor.

Now