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This is exactly how to build a highly profitable lifestyle business.
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By the end of this video, you're going to understand how to build your team,
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how to develop products, how to have the right weekly activities,
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and how to run highly profitable, highly successful growth campaigns.
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I'm going to break it down step by step so that you almost cannot fail.
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If you get this stuff wrong, you are going to end up as a glorified freelancer
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with a few support staff and you'll never make a big profit.
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You will always be on a treadmill and you will just feel like business is such a drag.
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But if you get this right, you will elevate yourself to the level of a founder who owns a business.
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The business will take on a life of its own.
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It will have an amazing dynamic team.
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You'll make loads of profit.
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You can do this from anywhere in the world, and you'll have a new sense of freedom that you've never experienced before.
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The first element that we need to have in place is to understand the team dynamic that you're going to have in your lifestyle business.
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Now, a lifestyle boutique typically has 4 to 12 people.
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Businesses that have one to four people, including yourself, tend to put you in the role of highly
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paid professional with a support team.
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Yes, you're making lots of money.
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Yes, you've got a few people helping you.
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But no, it doesn't really feel like a business where you could take some time off or take
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a holiday.
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It feels like if you get hit by a bus, the whole business would stop.
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Now, once you hit the team of four to 12 people, everything changes.
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A four to 12 person team means that you can play your role as the founder and everybody
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else can focus on their role to do something important within the business. So let's get in
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and have a look at what are the key roles on the team. Now, there are eight key roles in a lifestyle
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business. The first one is your role, and this is the most important role. I call this the key
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person of influence. See, the truth is between half a million and five million, you've entered
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a phase called founder-led growth. Founder-led growth is where the business grows because of
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what the founder does. In practical terms, what this means is that you are the face of the business,
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you are the face of the marketing. You are going to be on podcasts talking about the business,
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you'll be up on a stage talking about the business.
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You might write a book.
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If you're running ads, you'll be the one featured in the ad
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describing what it is you want people to do.
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If you don't use your personal brand,
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you are leaving 95% of your firepower on the table.
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Having a personal brand does not mean that you share your private life.
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What you do have to do is share the value of what your business does.
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You need to share the stories, the case studies,
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and the intellectual property of your business
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and make sure that it connects with your ideal customer.
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The truth is that your personal brand will get 20 times the cut through as your business brand.
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I had already built multiple seven-figure businesses that looked like this before I
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had more than 20,000 followers. A lot of people who have a seven-figure business with a six-figure
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profit are people who have two to 20,000 followers, so long as they're the right types of people who
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fit the description of your ideal customer. You as the founder, you are going to focus on what we
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call the five Ps of pitching the business, publishing content, creating new products,
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raising your profile and therefore the profile of the business and doing strategic joint ventures
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and partnerships if you do those five things you're doing your job as the founder now here's
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what you're not going to be doing you're not going to be running the business the general manager of
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your business runs the business the biggest question is how do i get myself out of the
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day-to-day technician role and actually get into this founder-led growth role it normally happens
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when you have a few key people on the team someone who's good at sales someone who's good at helping
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deliver the product or a general manager. Just one or two good people on the team and you can
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set yourself free. Also, I really recommend don't think about what you're not going to do. Think
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about what you are going to do. Your job is founder-led growth using the five Ps that I've
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talked about. Here's something fascinating. If you go into a Starbucks or a McDonald's,
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there's a good chance that that's a multi-million dollar business that is being run by a 24-year-old
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who only has a high school qualification. Now, cafes and restaurants are very hard businesses
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to run. These businesses have razor thin margins. They have a complex variety of products. They have
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lots of young people working who need training. All of those things make it incredibly difficult
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to run. And yet a 24 year old on a normal amount of money can run that business. So I want to
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propose to you that a 24 year old on a normal amount of money could also run your business.
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You do not need someone to quit their job at Google to come and work with you and run your
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business. You need someone who previously ran a cafe, a restaurant, a nightclub, or a hospitality
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business to come on in and run your business These people are not crazy expensive but they amazing at what they do So you want a general manager to come in and do everything that is hiring firing team management running the business so that you don have to do that stuff
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and you can be that key person of influence who drives the founder-led growth. Let's look at the
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rest of the team. There are three key elements to your business. There's generating demand,
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generating supply, and general operations. Under your demand generation, you're going to have
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someone who's head of marketing and someone who's head of sales. Those are the two key roles. Now,
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you might end up having two or three salespeople, or you might have one or two marketing people,
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but essentially it's a marketing role and a sales role. Under operations, you've got finance and IT,
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and finance is going to do all the stuff relating to the money, and IT is going to do all the stuff
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that relates to the data. And then over here on the supply side, we've got the product development
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and product delivery team and the customer success team. So product development builds a great product
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and delivers a great product, and customer success makes sure that people are using that product
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effectively and solves any problems that happen along the way with a customer. What are the
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products that you're going to be selling? Well, you're going to need something called a product
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ecosystem. Product ecosystem is four products that are all nicely connected together to form
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one smooth experience for the customer. Now, if you only have two of these products or three of
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these products, you're going to be leaving huge amounts of money on the table. You need all four.
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You're going to have a core product. The core product is the main thing that you're known for.
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If you're a consulting business, you're going to offer consulting packages.
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If you're an agency, well, you're going to have agency services.
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If you're a training business, your core product will be a training package or a training program.
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If you're a software business, your core offering will be the subscription to the main software product,
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and it may even include a setup fee.
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Before the core product, we have two products that help to generate demand.
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The first one is a gift, something for free that people can try with no risk.
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They can download it.
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They can engage with it.
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It might be a free trial.
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It might be a free account.
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It might be a free download, something for free that totally scales.
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It's digital.
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It feels valuable.
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But as many people as possible can access this free thing, and it feels like they're
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getting an immediate quick win.
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The next one is a product for prospects.
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This is a small commitment of either time or a small amount of money in order to get
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started.
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This could be maybe a workshop that people do that's a 90-minute workshop.
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Or maybe it's committing to a 30-day trial.
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A product for prospects could potentially be a book that people buy.
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Or my personal favorite is an online assessment where people go to your website and they fill
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out an online assessment.
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Side note, if you've never set up an online assessment, really easy to do at my company
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called scoreapp.com.
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So for example, if you do cybersecurity consulting, you might have a cybersecurity assessment that
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makes people go, oh, I have a risk that needs solving and now I need to get these services
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in order to fix it.
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Now, after the core offering, people are going to want more from you because they had such
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a great experience with your core offering.
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they're going to want to stay connected. They want to stay as a customer. This is where we have a
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product for clients. A product for clients is typically a subscription offering. It could be
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a membership or a community, or it could even be something like an annual retreat. But it's
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something that is special for your clients and your customers to then go on and upgrade to.
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If you have all of those four products, each of them is doing a job. One gets attention,
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one builds trust, one delivers a transformation, and one maintains great standards over time.
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So those four products, they each do a job and the profit is not in any particular product.
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It's in the product and service ecosystem.
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Your core team's job is to drive people through that product and service ecosystem so that
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the marketing and salespeople are getting people to go through the gift and the product
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for prospects and by the core, product delivery and customer success.
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They're going from core into product for customers and the team understands what the flow is
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and they understand how to get people to go to the next step.
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Now, by the way, if you're enjoying this video, I'd love it if you'd give this channel a like and a subscribe and maybe leave a comment as well.
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I love the fact that I get to share my entrepreneurial lessons with you and I can in some way help you on your entrepreneurial journey.
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And I would love it if you could share this channel with someone else who's building a business as well so that we can all learn together.
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So we now have the team and the products. Let's now focus on the activity.
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The first activity is the quarterly strategic reset.
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The quarterly strategic reset is where you get the whole team on an offsite meeting and you get into
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a boardroom and you actually set yourself up for an amazing 90 days. You want to make sure that
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you're really clear about your priorities for the next 90 days. You want to delegate
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accountabilities and make sure the right person is doing the right thing and that they got all the resources they need to get the job done You want to get each team member to confirm and make a commitment that they going to play their role in the next 90 days
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and they don't see anything standing in the way.
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The quarterly strategic reset can typically be done in half a day to a full day
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and it's really fun to get the whole team together in one boardroom if you possibly can,
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although you can do it on Zoom if you need to.
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The next most important meeting is the Monday morning meeting.
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Now, another name for the Monday morning meeting is the three to six thing meeting.
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Every single Monday morning is the whole team jumps on a Zoom call, take it in turns for
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everybody to say what they're going to do for the week.
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They're going to give their three to six most important things that they intend to have
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finished by the end of the week.
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Three to six things is about the right number of things for people to declare that they're
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going to get done and they're willing to be held accountable at the end of the week.
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At the end of the week, we have a quick meeting, which is the Friday afternoon debrief.
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And the Friday afternoon debrief is where we go through and we recap what each person
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person said they were going to do on Monday morning, and then they say done or not done.
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They don't have to give big explanations, but they do have to say whether they got that
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thing done or if they failed to get it done.
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And just that little bit of accountability is enough to make sure people got their things
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done, even if it was in the 11th hour.
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What also typically happens at these meetings is a little bit of conversation where you might
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challenge each other or remind each other of priorities.
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It's a time to check in.
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It's a time to make sure that there are two times throughout the week where the whole team
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is together talking about what needs to be done. Okay, the next activity is to commit to having one
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communication channel. This is one place that all the communication is going to happen. For a small
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team, you may use a WhatsApp group where all the members of the team are in that WhatsApp group,
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and the constant nattering happens in the WhatsApp group. For a bigger team, you may want to invest
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into something like Slack, where you've got multiple channels and a few extra tools and those sorts of
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things. It's a little bit fancier, a little bit nicer, but essentially it's just one communication
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channel where nothing gets lost. It's all in one place. I've seen plenty of successful teams
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operating in a WhatsApp group, sharing files, sharing links, sharing communication. You don't
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have to overthink this, but here's what you don't want to have happen. You don't want to be scratching
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your head thinking, was that an email? Did that come to me on WhatsApp? Did that come to me on
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Slack? You want to make sure there's just one place where all the communication goes through.
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And also it's really nice for the whole team to have transparency and to see what's being
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discussed. The third thing that you need to decide as a team is your tech stack. Your tech stack is
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going to include all of the software subscriptions that you're going to subscribe to. You're going to
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have an AI provider. You're going to make a decision between all the Microsoft Office products
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or perhaps the Apple products. You're going to pick a CRM system for managing the relationships
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with your clients. And you're probably going to have some tools that help you to generate leads
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and make sales. And in fact, Scrap.com is absolutely perfect for running a lifestyle
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business through because all of this thinking is the same thinking that goes into ScoreApp.
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I also want you to make a decision to be extremely careful as to how you store all your documents
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and files. I want you to have a file storage system so that everybody knows where to file
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things away. If you've got media assets, they go into the right folder. If you've got databases,
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that's filed away in the right place. If you've got slide decks that you regularly use,
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then they're always up to date and they're always in the right place. With a team of four to 12
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people, it's easy to create a mess if people are not committed to filing things away in the right
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place. And then finally, I want you to have a dashboard, which we call the sleep at night
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dashboard or what we call the sand. The sleep at night dashboard is everything that you need to
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know about your business in order for you to sleep at night, that it's safe, that it's okay.
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So in the sleep at night dashboard, you might keep things like cash at bank, number of people
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on the database, a red flags or issues list, upcoming milestones that need to be achieved,
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whatever it is that would keep you up at night. You want to keep that on the sleep at night
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dashboard so that doesn't keep you up at night. Okay. And the final thing that is super important
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is you want to run three campaigns for the year. These three campaigns are the campaigns that I've
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been running for over 25 years and they always create growth. So let me walk you through the
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three campaigns. The first one is called the perfect repeatable week. Perfect repeatable week
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is you pick a set of activities that drive growth through the business. And it typically involves
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generating leads, appointments, presentations, and sales. In one of my businesses, every single
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Thank you assessment and we drive people to that online assessment and leads appointments presentations and sales In another one of my businesses we drive people to creating a free account and it generates leads appointments presentations and sales from there So what we doing here is
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we're having a particular way of doing business and we just want to repeat it and repeat it and
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repeat it. Once a quarter, we do something called the quarterly spotlight campaign. The quarterly
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spotlight campaign is where we do something special or different. It might be a special event. It might
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be sponsoring an event. It might be launching a new product or a special offer. So for example,
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it could be a Black Friday offer at the end of the year. It could be an Easter special at the
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beginning of the year. It could be a summer catalog that you've got coming out. Whatever it is,
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you're going to pick something special to do once a quarter that is going to capture the attention
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of your audience and it's going to give you something new to talk about. And finally, we've
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got the annual big message campaign. The annual big message is where we think about what are the
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big insights that we want to share? What are the big stories we want to share? What are the big
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ideas that we think people would engage with? And what we're going to do is create lots of content.
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So we're going to put lots and lots of short form content onto social media. We're going to drive
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people to long form content so that they can get to know those ideas even better. And we're sharing
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our big ideas across the annual big message. For example, this YouTube channel is part of my annual
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big message strategy that I've had for this year. And you've noticed that I've stepped up my game
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and I'm sharing more ideas. There's short form and long form content. So what you want to do is
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figure out what are the big messages and where are you going to share those messages to capture
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the right audience for your business. Done correctly, the perfect repeatable week will
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give you consistent sales to make sure that you have a baseline of revenue. Quarterly spotlights
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will give you that icing on the cake, that cream on top. It'll give you those profit spikes that
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happen throughout the year. And an annual big message will build your brand over time so that
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you end up with followers and fans. So this is what it looks like to have a lifestyle business.
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When you have these four things in place, your lifestyle business starts being absolutely
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wonderful. None of this is about geography. You could have a team of people who are working all
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over the world. You could have some people in Boston, one person in Brisbane, one person in
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Bangalore, and one person in Birmingham. All these people could be working all over the world.
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These products, these don't have to be physical products. These could be digital products. It
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It could be software, it could be services, it could be consulting.
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These could be intangible products, ideally that you can deliver to an ideal customer
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anywhere in the world.
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I love the idea that you begin with the end in mind and you work backwards from there,
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as opposed to starting with what you have today and trying to improve it.
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Don't start with something that's a little bit broken and see if you can fix it.
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I want you to reverse engineer the future, not forward engineer the past.
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The next question I get is how big does this business need to be?
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The typical number for most businesses is for that each person on your core team,
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you need about 125,000 US dollars per person as a minimum in order for you to stay profitable.
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So if you have four people on the team you need half a million dollars worth of revenue.
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If you have 12 people on the team you need 1.5 million dollars worth of revenue and that tends
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to be the flaw. What I like to do when I'm launching a new business or if I've bought a
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business is I like to do scenario planning and financial modeling to see what it takes to make
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a profitable business. Now, I've given you a back of a napkin version, but what I like to do is have
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a spreadsheet that has all of the costs and all of the products, and then it looks at what sort of
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volumes of sales do we need to do in order to make sure that we're profitable. With a decent
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spreadsheet and some sensible assumptions, you should be able to get the exact numbers that you
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need to achieve in order to achieve profit, and that you have a crystal ball that tells you exactly
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what's going to happen at every stage of growth. Now, if you want to know how to get to this,
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There are actually a few steps that I talk about in this book that get you up to the
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four to 12 person team.
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I talk about an entrepreneur apprenticeship.
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I talk about side hustles.
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I talk about scout teams and fire starting teams.
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And it's all in here, part of the lifestyle business playbooks.
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It's my latest book.
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It's all my best thinking about the shifts that are happening in the world at the moment
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and how to approach those shifts.
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It even takes you one step beyond this four to 12 person team up to a 30 to 150 person
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team, which is a performance business.
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If you haven't done so already, go to Amazon and get yourself a copy of the Lifestyle Business
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Playbooks.
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It'll give you a little bit more detail and information about how to get to the 4 to 12
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person business if that's something that you're worried about.
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Hopefully you've enjoyed today's video and your business is doing really, really well.
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I look forward to seeing you next time.