SPEAKER_04 0:00

Bro, life is different when you have five million. That was poor. It was when the money dropped. I remember just seeing more numbers than I'd see in my life and just being like, I just kept saying, wow, wow, wow, wow, wow.

SPEAKER_00 0:10

So you you grew up in Ghana, moved to the UK at 10, and by 27 had already still been exited two companies for combined multiple eight figures.

SPEAKER_04 0:18

A lot of that journey was filled with a lot of self-doubt and uncertainty, and am I gonna make it? I know business is the way that I get to change my life. I know business the way I get to change my family's life, and so I'm gonna dedicate myself to it.

SPEAKER_00 0:30

Was there a moment in that where it was like we've done it?

SPEAKER_04 0:35

When I started fanbinding around, my dad thought, I did it, I'm just doing it, daddy, we've gotta make it. I did it, I went to the territory and I just cried for like two hours, and I was just crying and I was like, we fucking did it, dad, we did it.

SPEAKER_00 0:50

How instrumental wasn't having those co-founders in the business.

SPEAKER_04 0:53

I would never start another business without a co-founder. 100%. A co-founder is more than just someone who compliments your weaknesses, they're also your mental therapist as you go through it. Is the mental side that's hard?

SPEAKER_00 1:06

What do you think is the biggest threat to those newer agencies over the next five years? The biggest threat to a lot of these guys here is Timmy. Welcome to agency giants. What's up? What's it roll? So you grew up in Ghana, moved to the UK at 10, and by 27 had already built and exited two companies for combined multiple eight figures. Yeah. What is it reflecting on that that stands out to you as the most profound part of that journey?

SPEAKER_04 1:35

Ooh, what a wonderful question. A lot of that journey was filled with a lot of self-doubt and uncertainty, and am I gonna make it? And it's crazy because like you hear that story, right? Grew up in Ghana, came here, live in South London, grew this company, saw that company, grew fan bytes, saw that company, and then you're like, oh yeah, that was dope. That was a guy who always knew he was gonna win. And the truth is I had an inkling I was gonna win, but I was constantly just thinking, actually, am I falling behind? Am I too late? Am I not quite getting it right? And that story there is basically the story of a guy who effectively outworked his self-doubt and his negative talk and then finally achieved the thing that he wanted. So that's the story.

SPEAKER_00 2:29

What do you think it is about your upbringing, that hardwired the desire for growth and success in you?

SPEAKER_04 2:36

Oh, that's easy. I was poor. That was it. I grew up on like a fourth floor council estate in South London. How about do you know London? Quite well. Ish. Do you know where Peckham is? Yes. So, and do you know where Oak Hent Road is? No. Okay. So Oakland Road is famous because it's actually the poorest street on Monopoly. So there you go, that gives you some sense of it. And basically, like it's next to Peckham. And so I grew up there on like a fourth floor council estate with my dad. And I think at some point around like 13 or something, I was like, yo, I don't I want to have a nicer life. Like, I want to have a more different life, and the way to do that, the best vehicle for that would be through business. And so that was the reason why. And um, and I think that's also fine. I think like right now I invest in a lot of companies, and you see these people, and they're all like, we're here to change the world, we're here to, you know, redefine payments. It's like, bro, just say that you want to make money. Like it's fine. And I think uh from yeah, starting my first thing at 14 all the way up to fanbytes, I think I was very much driven by I know business is the way that I get to change my life, I know business the way I get to change my family's life, and so I'm gonna dedicate myself to it.

SPEAKER_00 3:59

Were you doing it alone, or did you have like early stage mentors that helped you?

SPEAKER_04 4:04

I didn't have an early stage mentor, um, but I did read a lot. And you know what's very unusual is that like when you read, especially when you consume so much information about successful people or playbooks, you kind of normalize a lot of success. I've actually said this before on my Instagram that one of the very quirky things I would do, because on Oak and Road, like there was no one who had money. So I basically decided like, could I surround myself with money? So there were times every Sunday I would go to this famous hotel called Claridges, and I would just go there and I'd like to work from the lobby. And I remember every Sunday me doing that was almost being like, Yeah, I'm around these rich people. They don't know me yet. They don't know me yet. I also don't know them yet, but soon they would. And I remember the like the seventh or eighth time I went, the doorman recognized me, and his name is Ian, and I remember he called me sir, and I went in and I was like, Yeah, I'm that guy now. And I was like 15, 16 then, but um I didn't have any mentors, but what I had was like these what I can only describe as like these regular motifs and reminders that actually, even though my physical environment was, you know, showing like not having enough, it was showing that there was a world in which I could be like part of the people who had the thing. I mean so for me that was the way that I kept myself driven and kept myself motivated. Nice.

SPEAKER_00 5:37

What was the first business at 14?

SPEAKER_04 5:40

Oh, that was a two-trim business. That was um, you know how so I basically believe that every entrepreneur has like what I can only describe as um school kid businesses, right? So school kid businesses are, you know, they've sold stuff at school, you know. I I used to sell Lucas A's and gold bars at school for like a pound twenty. Um, a two-trim business is another one of those like what I'll call just you know, just uh GCSE businesses, actually. That's the term I'm gonna call them. GCSE businesses. And GCSE businesses are like the first business that you do where you don't quite know what the heck is going on, but like somehow you make money and you're like, whoa, what the heck, right? For me, it was my two-turn thing. Like, I was tutoring people. So the whole story behind this is that I made a bet with my friend. Like he bet me I wouldn't see 500 pounds before I turned 18, which was a silly bet, but it was because like we thought 500 pounds was like a lot of money. And so what we ended up doing was that we ended up then, um, well, I ended up then figuring out that maybe I could build my business or build an idea around a skill that I had. And on that day, I'd done very good at a maths exam. So then I was like, yo, I'm gonna teach people maths. And so literally the next day, in order to win this bet, was the day that I was like, yo, I am starting a tutoring company. It's gonna be called Alpha Tutoring. Really was called like Tim's tutors, but we called it Alpha Tutoring. Um, and then I just went next day. I just went and I was like, dude, in the last maths exam, I did the best. Do you want to know how I did it? And that was it. People just paid me £10 an hour, which is very cheap for tutoring. And then what ended up happening was like people were coming to me for other subjects like physics and chemistry and all that stuff. And I didn't know that. So then I figured out that, well, if I don't know it, maybe the other students would know it. So then my playbook was very simple. It was like I went to the teachers of all the physics, chemistry, and I'd be like, hey, who got the best grade in the last exam you did? And then they would just tell me, and then I'll just go to that person and be like, hey, do you want to make money? And like that became the first time I actually made money. It was like proper money. It was basically me being the connector between students and tutors, and then that was it. Within about six weeks, we had 65 tutors. I was just connecting them. I had a fake note. Actually, a teacher of mine saw me talk about this on a different podcast and actually was like, I I knew that note was fake. Because basically, around like 14, I basically like faked a note which said I had this like stomach problems or something. But the reason I did that was so that if a parent called me about a student or about a session, I could basically be like, oh no, miss, I need to go to the bathroom. And then I'd go there and then I like sort it out between them and the student or them and the tutor. And like that was the first time I I made like meaningful money and thought, oh shit, this is crazy. Like I can think of an idea, I can put it out into the world, and like people pay me for it. I was like, mad. That's that's mad to me.

SPEAKER_00 8:50

Presumably made a lot more than the 500 pounds before 18.

SPEAKER_04 8:54

Well, um not from that business. I think from that business, yeah. From that business, I made about two grand. And then I realized that actually, you know, 500 pounds is not a lot of money, and even two grand is not a lot of money. But I'll tell you the craziest actually story about that two-trend business was how it failed and how it actually led to me doing more things. Because, and I'm sure your audience can basically imagine this. Um, if you're a tutor and I connect you to a student, once I've done that a few times, there's like no need for you to come to me because you've got the link. And so what happened was like every week I'll be getting a cut, but then the cut is just getting lower and lower every week. And I'm like, yo, this is something's going on here. And so that was the reason why that business, it actually then came to came to an end because I didn't control the payments. But then the thing that was very fascinating about that particular business is it taught me that you can make money being a middleman. So if if you look at you know that business connecting students and tutors, the next business at 17 was like connecting people who were into business with advertisers and fanbytes, classic middleman business. There's brands here, there's influencers here, we connect them, we take a percentage, and then that business becomes like an eight-figure business that we sell for tens of millions of pounds, right? And it's like that only happened because at 14 I did that two-turn business, and that's so powerful. Like, so many people, I guess so many young entrepreneurs, uh, a lot of like young agency owners, and they're like, Yeah, I want this business to be like a hundred million a year business. And it's like, first of all, bro, you're 23, like, chill the fuck out, right? By the way, can I surround this? Of course, yeah. Okay, chill the fuck out, right? You're 23, chill the fuck out. Um secondly, it's very likely that your current business, this business, it's not going to be like the big successful business. It's going to be the business that on-ramps you to the other thing. And so a lot of the advice I give to founders, especially young founders, is often counterintuitive, which is like set your goal low. Like, because if you're 25 or 27 or even 30, and you sell a business for even 5 million and you own like 80% of it or the whole of it, bro, life is different when you have 5 million. You know, so when everyone is trying to build these mega huge things as their first thing and they feel this immense pressure because they're comparing themselves to people on social media. I'm like, yo, the most impactful money I made wasn't when we sold fanbytes, it was actually that first £500 I made at 14. And I was like, yo, I'm the sort of guy who can do this.

SPEAKER_00 11:41

It's great about us, man. You started fanbytes once at university, right? Yeah. Was it like starting in uni? Did you finish uni?

SPEAKER_04 11:48

I did finish uni. There's only one reason I finished uni, it's because I have African parents. That is the sole reason. If I didn't have African parents, I would not finish uni. Um, my dad was very insistent. I went to uni. And if I'm being like super, super honest with you, bro, I think um I also felt a bit scared about completely dropping out and not having some kind of a backup. And so I started FanBites in my second year of university. And yeah, I and two co-founders, I I met my COO, Ambrose, who was studying mechanical engineering at Imperial College. I met him at like a leadership event somewhere. And then I met my CTO, Mitchell, because I asked my friend, I said, like, who is the smartest technical person that you know? Because previously the idea behind FanBuys was to build like this very SaaS, like real, scalable, high SaaS, high margin solution. And then I remember we were going to brands talking about this, and it was like, uh no, we don't really want that. And I remember the government came to us, I don't know how they found out. Actually, I I do it, and we'll come to that later about how to get big clients. Um, the government came to us and they were like, hey, we want to work with you guys, we want you guys to help us to promote the new minimum wage, but we don't want to use your software. Like, we want you to do the service, you to find the influence, you to brief them. And I remember turning to my co-founder then and being like, Well, I guess we're now an agency. So I just like followed the market and where it actually was guiding me to, rather than trying to impose and say, you know, I want to be SaaS because I heard SaaS have very high multiples.

SPEAKER_00 13:40

Was there like an indicator in the market that said to you, like, this influencer thing is going to be massive? Because you caught that weight relatively early, presumably at a similar time to some social chain like something not be around.

SPEAKER_04 13:51

2017. Yeah. 2017, 2016. And then there was also GOAT agency as well. Um, yeah, so I think there were a number of indicators, and this is actually a very important thing, I think, for your audience to hear about like um when is the right time to get into an idea. Yeah. Right. So one of the indicators was that I had seen it already work in the US. So there's a company called NeoReach, there was a company called Influential. Um, both of them sold. Um, and I remember thinking, hang on a sec, like this thing is working in the US. There is no objective reason why it shouldn't work in the UK. So I think I'm a heavy proponent of basically copying ideas. I hate when people come to me with like unique, new, innovative things. I'm like, bro, just look at another idea and just actually move it into a new market. So for me, it was like, well, I saw this is working in the US, so therefore we can do it in the UK. But to me, the most important thing, you know, when I was 19, 20, I basically said to myself, like, I want to pick a business which gives me a 90% chance of making 10 million before 30. That was basically like my my goal. It was just because I don't know why. I I just I just thought about 10 million and I thought, well, wow, that's more money than I can ever even dream of ever spending in my entire life. And so what will give me the best odds? And one of the things about FanBites was that it was a business in its infancy. And so now that I've done a few deals, one of the most important things I've really come to appreciate is when you're picking your idea, you need to also see where the idea is in the market cycle. And the market cycle starts off with in its infancy. People don't quite understand what it is, or there's like a small group of people who get it. And then it gets to a period of maturity, which is where then you start to have a bunch of your different competitors, etc. And then it gets to a period of consolidation, which is where there's a lot of MA going on. And often in this infancy is where like there's a small group of people who really geek out about it, but like the general world doesn't quite get it. So for example, we are currently in the infancy of AI. Like we're still pretty early. And so with fanbytes, it was the same thing. Like in 2017, you have these articles about like why is this kid, Zoel or KSI, why they're in their bedroom and they're like shouting in their screen and like, oh, that's so weird. But then we saw the influence that they had on Gen Z. And so as a result, I remember thinking, oh, we are in the infancy, and what's going to eventually happen is maturity will happen and consolidation happen, and all we have to do is actually just like be in the game long enough. This is actually a a very important point, I think a lot of your audience should take from this, which is like if you pick the right market, you don't have to be the best. A lot of people want to build agency businesses and it's great, but then they go, Oh, I I'm just gonna build a creative agency, I'm just gonna build a social media marketing agency. And that's cool, but if your aim is I want to do something that has a high likelihood of exit, then you actually need to think about is this social media agency or is a service-based business, is it in an industry which is in its infancy? Because I know that as everything rises in that industry, we'll all rise. So like when FanBytes sold, man, like within 12 months, about eight other influencer companies sold. Like Gold sold for like a hundred plus million, some of our competitors some other people sold for like ten million, some sold for thirty million, some like Lad Bible the year before had gone public at 300 million. So it's because we all just picked the right industry, and so as it rose, we all rose, and that's a very important thing to think about.

SPEAKER_00 17:55

For people that haven't or aren't aware of fanwise, yeah. Can you just paraphrase like the core service initial service offering?

SPEAKER_04 18:02

Yeah, yeah, yeah. The core service is was very simple and then it got complex, which is the way to do business. Be mad simple, then go complex. So the core service was uh connecting brands to influencers. It was an influencer marketing agency, brands will come to us, and then we basically had a platform where brands could upload a brief and then our team, so we ended up growing the team to a team of 80 people. Our team will then end up then running the campaign. And we built the platform primarily because we wanted to have like a scalable way of being able to grow the business because at 80 people, we're doing eight figures in revenue. Actually, most of our competitors to get to that level of revenue were double our size in terms of employees because they didn't have any tech, it was just people just throwing things at the problem. So that was our core business. The core business was you brand, you have an influencer campaign, you want to reach a Gen Z audience specifically, we can help you to do that to plan the campaign, reach out to the influencers, blah blah blah. But within about our fourth year, then things started to get more complex, and that was important. And the reason why it was important because if you want to scale an agency business, what you want to do is basically you can either grow by getting more customers or by getting more share of your existing customers. And I decided that actually the best thing to do would be to get more share of our existing customers. So brands were coming to us for the influencer um campaigns, but then I thought, well, what if we created a strategy division? So now rather than them needing to do a campaign, they can just come to us for a strategy about like how to engage with Gen Z. Cool, done. And then we built a talent division, which was called bite-sized talent. And it was because we then thought, well, we could build these long-term partnerships with brands if they don't need a campaign. So by the time that the oh yeah, and then the fourth bit was that we then introduced a paid ads division. So by the time that the company was mature, you basically had a one-stop shop for everything to do with Gen Z marketing through influencers, but it started off as just us connecting brands and influencers and then eventually everything built on top of it.

SPEAKER_00 20:17

Nice. What did the paid revenue hit before you sold?

SPEAKER_04 20:20

Uh it was like multi-figure revenue.

SPEAKER_00 20:24

Okay.

SPEAKER_04 20:24

Um very comfortable and profitable as well.

SPEAKER_00 20:29

Obviously, a big contrast to when you started. What was the time period between that from starting to exiting?

SPEAKER_04 20:34

2017 sort of 2022, so about five and a half years.

SPEAKER_00 20:39

Nice, nice, that's awesome. Um and yeah, in the early stages in 2020, 2017, like what were the what was the initial strategy you used to get like your first big client over the line, or were you working with much smaller businesses to start off with?

SPEAKER_04 20:53

So we quite quickly became quite good at getting larger customers because we had a lot of incredible focus. So in the first year, I think we did like 400k, right? And our first ever campaign was with uh GoEgg, they paid us like 300 pounds, right? And I remember thinking, wow, that's quite cool. Like a brand has paid us for this. But then I started thinking, well, if we want to get to a bigger level, we need to really deeply think about how can we create a machine that exists independently of us doing so much outreach. So there are two ways to do this. The first way to do it is to really focus in on a niche. So in our first year to get to that 400, we focus a lot on record labels. And record labels actually don't have a lot of money for marketing because they believe that you know, if Drake's putting out something, Drake can just post and it will fly. But the good thing about record labels is that really There are only like three major labels Warner, Universal, Sony. And so I decided and I said, we're gonna pick this market first of all, because there's actually not that many customers in there, but we can really do land and expand. So Sony is not just one label. Sony inside of it has like 25 different sub labels. So if we get Sony, we can actually then go with all the other people. So Sony's not worth 10 grand. Sony really is worth each of their sublabels, giving us say five to ten grand. So Sony is worth like a quarter of a million if we get in there. I think that's a very important thing actually for your audience, especially if you are trying to get larger brands or just enter into some kind of customer segment. It can be very easy to think, let's go into a segment where there are a lot of different potential customers. But in the early stages, I actually encourage you to go into a market where there's not that many customers, but they have something which is also called high referensibility. So referenciability is the idea that if I get person A, it makes me more likely to get person B because person B wants to be like person A. And so I decided a lot on that, especially early on, because I was like, well, again, Warner, Universal, Sony. If we get Sony, we can then go to Warner with the case study, and Warner would be like, oh my god, we can't let Sony beat us. We must use fanbytes. And then what we're then gonna do is then use those two and then go to Universal. And so what ended up happening was that we ended up becoming known as like the most trusted authority in the music space. And then people would then come directly to us. And I'm actually gonna share a tactic which I think is huge, incredible, and I'm surprised people don't do this. Um I learned this from some book, I'm trying to remember the book, but so I learned from a book basically this idea of the what do they read during their break test. And so if you think about who your ideal customer is, one of the things to ask yourself is where do they consume the information and what do they read? And so in music, one reason why we got all the labels coming to us was because we figured out that they read three main publications. It was Music Week, Music Business Worldwide, and Music Ally. Those were the three that they all read. And so in my mind, I'm like, well, if we just show up in all of these different publications, like once a month at least, in their mind, they're like, oh my god, fanbytes are the best people for engaging Gen Z, and they will come to us. And so within about six months, I basically went to all of those different publications and I said, Hey, can we write an article for you? How music labels can engage Gen Z hearts, how music labels can drive streams with Gen Z. And then what happened was then the head of marketing at Warner or Sony is seeing that and going, Man, fanbai seem to be everywhere. So we're creating that everywhere effect, but really we're just in like a select group of uh things. And we did that in every different niche as we went to Fashion or Beauty. We're like, cool, what do those guys read? Oh, they read Business of Fashion, they read uh Fashion Forward, they read Fashion United. Cool, let's go in there, let's place an ad in there, or let's do some kind of a guest post, and that will bring people to us rather than us going to them. And that was such a key strategy because you know, by the time we sold, we had salespeople who were like 22, 23 who were selling half a million deals because basically the brand had come, they were primed, and it was just like, Yeah, you saw our content, yeah, that sounds good. How much do you want to spend? All right, that sounds good. Close. We didn't have to do these elaborate pictures that a bunch of our competitors were doing.

SPEAKER_00 25:50

Nice, that's awesome. Did you transition completely out of outbound and just then relied on inbound and referral?

SPEAKER_04 25:56

93.4% of our revenue was inbound.

SPEAKER_00 25:59

Interesting. Initially, the outbound emailed DMs, or did you cold call and so on as well?

SPEAKER_04 26:05

Initially, the outbound was LinkedIn, but even that wasn't even, yeah, so we didn't do any code email. But even that was never actually um, hey, do you want to work with fanbytes? It was often twofold. It was one, here's a report that we made about your industry, and then people go, oh, okay. By the by the way, again, because I know earlier we talked about keeping things like super tactical. Here is an absolute fucking cheat code, basically, to win big brands. Big brands are not driven, or big clients are not driven by making more money or making more sales from you. Because the truth is, let's even say I spend a million with you and I'm Nike, and you make me an extra 10 million, it doesn't mean anything to me. I'm making billiards. The biggest driver is actually competitive tension, which is they don't want to look like they're falling behind next to their competitors, and so the most important thing or the best sort of marketing thing that I've done has actually been basically creating a competitive leaderboard to say these are the top 10 brands in fashion that Gen Z love. And if the first brand is Nike, and the second brand is Adidas, and then the third brand is I don't know, Puma. And then you go to the head of marketing at Puma and you say, You guys are third behind these guys. We can help you go higher. Suddenly, you've created a desire to actually transact. Whereas beforehand, if you're just like, hey man, you should do influencer marketing, you should do social media marketing. It's like, okay, cool, you made me some money, but it doesn't mean anything. But I'm more driven by my boss, if I'm the marketing person at Puma, I'm more driven by my boss seeing that leaderboard and thinking, why the fuck are we not higher than our competitors? And just that absolutely crushed it.

SPEAKER_00 28:07

I love that. It reminds me of something I've been talking about recently called AI anxiety of a lot of these AI agencies in working with companies, and most people are selling growth on sales causing. Do you want to grow, do you want to expand, do you want to get more leads? Well, no, have you thought about the other AI strategies that dentists are using right now? Or have you seen that this competitor specifically is using AI to acquire new patients at the moment? And then the anxiety sets in that law of comparison and so on at the moment of that.

SPEAKER_04 28:30

Yeah, people are driven. I mean, generally business or consumers are all driven by this desire to like keep up with the Joneses. And in whatever way you can, if you can tap into that, you win.

SPEAKER_00 28:43

That's a that that that top ten list. I love that idea, by the way. It's that's awesome. The do you think the success of it depends on you having client working with the guys that are at the top? Or do you think in itself, and uh and then outside of that, then um I think it uh relies on you having a level of credibility in the company yourself to actually be able to rank companies?

SPEAKER_04 29:05

Well, so let's think about that second point, right? Yes, in an ideal world you have credibility, but also if you think about it, especially if it's stuff like social media, social sentiment data, like you can just be the gatherer of the data, right? And if you're the gatherer of the data, then you just instantly become the most credible voice because you you just happen to do the work on it, right? So let's pick the thing for AI dentists, right? Let's say you sell like AI automation services to dentists, right? If I was doing a competitive thing, I would say focus on dentists in London, and I would just email them or LinkedIn them, and I say, hey, we're doing a survey of like a hundred dentists and how they're using AI, right? And then instantly, what I would have is data points from what percentage of them are using AI, how are they using it? And now suddenly I have a report which I can then use to even go back to those exact same people and say, Hey, we have very important reports from what your competitors are doing. Suddenly you're now the credible person, but all you've done is just curated a bunch of different information and as a result become the person of authority. And so that's a very easy way.

SPEAKER_00 30:26

I love that as an idea, just to add something to that. I suppose you can position it as well, the survey of like why would someone fill in the survey or as a position of value, you're gonna give that information to them as well and let them know. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 30:37

Yeah, there's a very good friend of mine, Orrin Hoffman, um, who has built like three billion dollar companies and they're all around data. And he talks about this idea of a co-op model. And the co-op model is basically as a group, as a cooperative, we all enter in our data because the sum of all that data benefits us more than the individual. And that worked very well.

SPEAKER_00 31:00

What do you think the hardest phase was of scale up, like pre-exit? Like was it the very early stages? Was there kind of a mid-stage where you were transitioning from into enterprise?

SPEAKER_04 31:16

I think the hardest phase was between 30 to 60 people. Because I think at that point you move from basically an organization where really in one all hands you can kind of get everything across if you have sub-30 people. But now, as you then grow, you start to realize that really you are communicating through other people, and so if you get a message slightly wrong, then that other person has passed on that message, or if you change your mind about something, you actually then need to like pass it on to a lot more people. And so that bit was actually quite hard. Another really difficult part about this whole game of business is that you don't know what you don't know, and so as a result, like everything that seems bad seems like it could end the business. So I remember there were so many times, you know, throughout the duration of the business, we raised money, like raised two million in funding, but in stages. And there were so many times actually. I remember this, there was once where we basically had an investor want to invest 500 grand into the business. We're like, Yeah, this amazing. We're gonna forecast this, things are gonna look great, we're gonna grow. At that point, the business was also growing. And then I remember he called me on a Thursday evening, and I'm expecting him to be like, Yeah, you know, actually, I decided to send the money earlier or something, I don't know. And then I pick up the phone and he's like, Hey, I can't invest anymore. I'm like, what the f like what are you talking about? And he says, I can't invest anymore because I'm having dinner with my friend, and he told me that TikTok, because at that point we're activists on our TikTok, TikTok is like a Chinese spying app. And you're like, brother, like what what what is going on here, right? Um, and I remember just saying to myself, it's not that deep, it's not that deep, it's not that deep. And naturally, in my book, What's Stopping You, like the chapter, we have a cheat code number eight, chapter eight, is just called It's Not That Deep. Because I think that through business, there were so many times where I was like, Man, this thing could crush us. And now I realize so much of it, it's not that deep. So now, as I I coach a lot of um founders who are going through that process, and they're expecting me to come with some, you know, hey, we have this problem, and I tell you this amazing strategy. And yeah, sometimes it's that, but sometimes it's just be like, bro, you and 10 other people are going through this at this very same time. Trust me, it's not that deep. Like, this thing is not going to destroy you, and I think that's the hardest part of just generating business. When you haven't done something before, everything seems like it could kill you, and then you go through it, and then you realize, well, no, it didn't kill me. And it's actually completely normal, right? When your best employee leaves, when you have an investor pull-out, when you have a client that you've worked on for six weeks, and then they go with your competitor, and you think, oh, for fuck's sake, but actually, it's often just not that deep.

SPEAKER_00 34:12

What did you need the capital for? What were you bringing investment in for? How did you deploy that across the agency?

SPEAKER_04 34:18

So a big part of it was that we wanted to invest a lot into our upgrading our client services team. Because basically, at some point as you grow the business, I think this was after our third year, we were, I think, like five or six million. And I remember thinking if we want to get to the next level of growth, we need to have just better service. Because at some point it was just, you know, brand comes in, we do the campaign, and then they don't spend again. Or maybe they spend another time and then that's it. So we had like pretty bad client retention at that point, and then I realized well, to get to that next level, we need to have better service, which therefore meant we needed to invest in better people, and better people cost money, and so we had to invest a lot in that. And then the second thing, what we were trying to invest a lot in our platform, and that was actually a very intentional thing because when we sold the company, we were valued as a multiple on revenue, which is very different to any other service-based business. They're typically valued on eBay. But that was an intentional decision. You remember at the beginning I said that I had a CTO. I went to get a CTO because I knew that I wanted the business to be valued as a multiple of revenue, not as profit, so therefore a platform had to be like the central part of what we did. And so we needed to invest in that as well.

SPEAKER_00 35:56

How instrumental was that having those co-founders in the business? And like, what's your general methodology around like start like single co-founder single founder or bringing in co-founders and you had three co-founders? I had two co-founders.

SPEAKER_04 36:08

I had two co-founders, so we're a team of three. So here's the thing, Jordan, like I have pre-severe ADHD, right? There you go. ADHD boys, and I'm sure a lot of your audience probably have the same. And it's only in hindsight that I realize that fanbytes would not have got to where it would have been because accidentally had done the best decision, which was to bring other people along with me. Which was to have Ambrose and Mitchell as my right-hand men going through it. I don't think I would start another business. Even now, as I do more businesses, I would never start another business without a co-founder. A hundred percent. Because to me, a co-founder is more than just someone who complements your weaknesses, they're also your mental therapist as you go through it. And when you look and you understand that, especially with business, business itself is not particularly hard. The actual act of creating a service, creating a product, and then pushing out to market, it's not hard. It's the mental side that's hard. And if you have someone, in the same way you have a marriage, if you have someone going through the furnace with you, then it makes it all worth it.

SPEAKER_00 37:30

What do you pull out of as the you know the biggest lessons that you've taken from working with people? You picked those people when you were in university, like how would you look now into business and who you bring in as a co-founder? That's a great question.

SPEAKER_04 37:43

So I have these three main conditions for the people. In fact, on my Instagram story, I posted Timothy's rules of leadership, and there were three that were really meaningful to me. One is work with people who will be great regardless of whether they worked with you. This is a very important thing. I have so many friends, especially really accomplished friends, and they say my team were going to be killers anyway, and I just had to get them together with me. And I just happened to be the orchestrator. My friend uh just went to Richard Branson's uh Necker Island, and he called me actually two days ago, and he was telling me that the truth is if you look at someone like Richard Branson, people see him as this like insane entrepreneur, blah, blah. But really, what he is is he's an exceptional collector of people. So he sparks the ideas, and then he says, Who is way better than me at this? And then they're gonna win anyway. So I just now need to align my incentives with theirs so that they win with me. And that's something that I've really taken to heart since FanBytes. I since FanBytes, I've sold two more companies where I've been on the board of them. Since FanBytes, I've co-founded a bunch of companies where the people I'm like, Jesus Christ, I am so lucky that you work with me. So that's the first thing. Hire people who are just like gonna win anyway. Ambrose and Mitchell, I mean, Mitchell, my uh CTO, has gone on to now co-found another successful company which is probably gonna even be even bigger than FanBytes. And that guy was gonna win anyway. I just happened to like find him at the right time. Um, the second thing is like make sure that you all have the shared overall mission. So sometimes what happens is that you have a co-founder and it makes sense to work in the moment because you complement each other's uh weaknesses, etc. But you don't have the right long-term goal. So, for example, um, I invested 120 grand into this company and within eight months it failed. The reason why was because they hadn't had that conversation of what at this current stage in your life matters to you. So one was 35 and the other was 29, I believe. The 29-year-old was like, I just want to make this business work. The 35-year-old was like, I want to make this business work, but I also want to start a family. And so when things got like really, really intense, the 35-year-old had basically said, Look, my family is the most important thing to me. And that's fine, but because they didn't have that conversation, what happened was a lot of resentment built up. And then they ended up just splitting the company because they hadn't almost like sat down and said, Yo, what is the most important thing to both of us in the next three to five years? And then tied with that is actually what very in specific detail, what is what does success look like? Because I coach a lot of founders where sometimes I'll talk to one of the co-founders at dinner, then I'll talk to another of the co-founders somewhere else, and they both have like very different ideas of what success is. One wants to take the company public, the other wants to build a 10 million a year business, and they each want to be successful, but they haven't really defined what success is. And so a thought experiment that I tell people, and I wish that I did it, we actually did this in like the fourth year of the business when we're like, oh shit, we actually have something that's working well, but we should have done it earlier. Was each of your co-founders go into your own rooms or on your phones and write down in painstaking detail what you want from the business, and then come back, and then you both put your papers there, and then you say, Yeah, this is what I want for the business. And it's not just like oh, impact like how much money do you want to make from the business? What is the lifestyle that you want? And then you make sure if you are misaligned in any of that, then you know, all right, is this gonna work, or you know how to actually tackle that? And those are three things I've learned from just like just having co-founders building it all up. Yeah, I love that. It's great advice.

SPEAKER_00 41:57

I especially love the frame of, and that's such a simple frame of bring people in who are gonna be winners without you. Yeah, it's such a simple frame, but so effective.

SPEAKER_04 42:07

Yeah, I mean, just to just to iterate on that, like the PayPal Mafia, right? Everyone talks about the PayPal Mafia. You know, you had Reed Hoffman who went on to found LinkedIn, David Sachs went on to sell a billion dollar company, like all of these people, all of those guys will know win anyway, right? What Peter Thiel, you know, you had Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, David Sachs, Reed Hoffman, Max Leftching. Like it's like I think I saw something like 18 of them went on to found billion-dollar companies. They were gonna win anyway, right? What Peter Thiel did was that he was able to bring a bunch of like competitive, aggressive, intelligent people together to build a payments company. And then once it was done, was like, alright, boys, say yeah. And then he invested in all the different companies. So that sort of thing, like, how do you make sure you build a PayPal mafia in your service-based business is an absolute killer.

SPEAKER_00 43:01

How do you then transfer that throughout the entire organization and through the team that you build?

SPEAKER_04 43:06

You aggressively, aggressively, aggressively pursue A players and you tell them that your only standard is not to bring down the standard.

SPEAKER_00 43:16

Nice. So you presumably didn't hire junior and train, you were trying to hire.

SPEAKER_04 43:24

Okay. And that was a problem. That was when halfway through, I was like, ooh, I think we made a mistake. But also at the beginning, you don't have a lot of money. And even when we raised money, there was a bit of fear. Like we had a bit of fear throughout the business. Well, not even a bit of fear. In fact, I talk about this with my co founders a lot. Like, we had a lot of fear about like spending money. And it's only, I say, in the last preceding, you know, in the last years before we sold, where I was like, bro, what are we doing here? Like, we have the business, it's working well, let's invest. I remember I had this amazing conversation with Ambrose, and I remember that we're thinking about. Hiring a commercial director. And we had basically two options. One was a guy who was 130k, and then there was another person who I think was like 70k or something. And I was like, oh, you know, the difference is like 60k, we're not sure. And then Ambrose was like, well, the difference is a 60K. The difference is, do we think the person who is 130k can basically bring us like 600k more revenue? So the difference should always be like the 10x between what is different between the first candidate and the second candidate, and can the first candidate basically make it a no-brainer that we hire them? And when he said that, I thought, oh my God, you're so right. I'm looking at this as oh, 130 grand throughout the year, 10 grand going out a month to one individual, what happens if they don't work out? It's like, well, A, you can let them go at any point. It's not like you're beholden to 130 grand. And then also if you set the bar and you say, well, your end goal is to bring whatever, 1.3 million over the next year, or your end goal is to bring 200 grand in the next whatever, three months, and you agree to that, and then it doesn't happen, then you have a very objective reason as to why it can work or why it can't work.

SPEAKER_00 45:20

What do you think a business does, or an agency per se, or any company really, when they've been in a position where they have been, you know, building themselves up to a place where they've actually got revenue where they can afford good people in, but now they find themselves in a place where they're like, actually, I've got a bunch of people here that aren't really up to up to scratch. How does a company then raise the standard of the team or you know, replace and make those difficult decisions?

SPEAKER_04 45:45

So I have two main points on this because I actually gave this advice to a to a founder in my portfolio today. He he's had to let a bunch of people go. And I said, Is this the last group of people that you're gonna let go? And he said, No, because you know, next week then I need to let these other people go, and then maybe next month. I said, No, do it once, right? Have the conversation and do it once. Don't kind of gingerly go into it, I'm not sure about this person, you know, because we've all had that before, right? Where, yeah, this person's okay, sometimes it's a good, sometimes it's bad. Oh, I feel bad, etc. You have a personal relationship. You have a personal relationship, they came to your birthday, blah, blah, blah. So you're like, oh yeah, maybe. Make the call. That's the first thing. Because in business, you're being paid. The reason why you are the CEO is because you have given yourself the crown of king, hard decision maker. That's why you're CEO. So make those fucking hard decisions as opposed to just being a wuss, because then you're not being a CEO. So that's the first thing. Make the decision. The second thing is something so profound. One of my investors, Charles Songhurst. So Charles Songhurst is like, I think right now he's a billionaire. Um, he he led strategy at Skype. He's, I mean, conversations with Charles can be so depressing, by the way. He's like friends with Bill Gates and all those guys. So sometimes I'll call him and be like, hey, how's it going? He's like, Oh, yeah, I'll just, you know, playing cards with Bill. I'm like, who's Bill? And like, Bill fucking Gates. I'm like, okay, brother. Like so many levels to this. Um, but one of the things he said when he was um kind of giving me some advice, it was like, you often don't know what really good is until you actively expose yourself to good. And so I remember there was a time during fanbikes where I actually went to my friend's business and it was doing very, very well. It wasn't like a service-based business, but it was doing very well. They'd raised money. I think there were like 500 million valuation, like really doing well. And I just sat there for a week and I just saw how he ran the organization. And I was like, man, we are, we are just levels behind. And I think exposing myself to good then or or to great then enabled me to then go to my team and be like, this is what great looks like. You know, the cadence of the meetings, the workflows, the practicality, and how people said, I'm going to do this, and etc. And I went, okay, we don't have the right people for that yet. But it was because even though I I felt it, I couldn't communicate it. And so the two pieces of advice: one is like, if you're going to fire, like make the decision and then follow through with the decision because that's what you're paid for. Like, that's why you are the CEO. And then, secondly, is find a way to expose yourself to really great. It can be even like pay, pay to be, you know, pay to just spend a week at like a really um amazing um business founders environment, get exposure of great, and then that would just almost make what you're doing seem like, oh, well, of course, as we currently do this, we're not gonna win. So now I need to make the calls, I need to make that jump because now I know what great looks like.

SPEAKER_00 49:12

I resonate with that so much. Yeah, great advice. What do you think that you uniquely are exceptionally good at as a founder?

SPEAKER_04 49:23

So I think CEO doesn't mean chief executive officer, I think it means chief enthusiasm officer. And I think that's what I'm very good at. I think really in fanbytes, you know, we got to 80 people. I think really at 20, 25 people, I should have hired an MD. I should have. But I didn't. Mostly because of my ego. Like, to be super candid, it was because I was very much in the ego of being a CEO. And I know a lot of you know friends and associates who actually they have won because they've lowered their ego. Like one of my um friends is uh Jay who founded Hood Rich, right? Hood Rich has, you know, gone on to they sold the company, it was incredible exit for Jay. And I remember first talking to Jay and being like, Yeah, you know, well done, blah, blah, blah. And then actually, super early on, Jay had actually brought on two people who are way more experienced and just better than him and who had run fashion brands. And I remember thinking, that's why you're good. Like, that's why, because you realize that actually you're the creative ideation master, you're the craftsman, and you need to surround yourself with people who can run the business. I mean, Ben Francis is a great example of this, right? That level of self-awareness. And I think for agency people, because I'm sure a lot of the audience are like in their 20s, this is like the first business that they're growing, or maybe their second business, but they've got it to a scale now. A big piece of advice I give is check your ego. Because don't let your ego stop you from getting rich. And I think you know, fan bites worked out well, everyone's cool, but the stress and the headache I would have saved myself if I had leaned into my zone of competence, which is like being the enthusiasm guy, being the guy who can set the vision. Like I can raise money like easily. Since fanbytes, I've raised now about 32 million for like different companies. I can raise money, but that's because I understand how to sell the vision, sell the future, sell the stuff, and then get the team together. And then the moment, the moment that's done, I should then eject myself. Because then I'm like, my ADHD brain, my ADD brain, my impulsive brain would then be like, Oh, let's try this, let's try that. And then it's like, bro, nothing's gonna work. So um that is my superpower. Even now, when I coach um founders, I would ask them, like, tell me, what is your superpower? Like, what are you really good at? And it feels like you're throwing away money when you say, Oh, I'm now gonna hire, like, you know, someone for a hundred grand to be my MD. But if you think about it, if by hiring that person you are then able to make many more millions because you can then like really focus on your zone of competence, then you're not really like wasting 120 grand or 100 grand, you're making whatever that difference is, especially if you can give them some like profit shell, something like that. And there's people who are desperate. Jordan, desperate, desperate, desperate. Like people who have worked in middle management at WPP, at Mediacom, at these people who are desperate to lead an agency. Desperate. And you and if you can be the 20-something, 30-something guy who has got the business to, let's say, you know, 50k a month, 20k a month, 100k a month, 200k a month, you know, like we've got a foundation. We've got it all. I want to focus on being like the hellraiser, the the the that guy. And I just want you to be my second in command. You will have cues of people who would ready to do that because now they're employee number 500 at WPP and they can now be like the second in command at this fast-growing business. That's a very easy sell.

SPEAKER_00 53:24

What do you think an agency has to compensate an MD to get someone good in?

SPEAKER_04 53:29

I personally see it between 100 to 120k, but to be honest, that was then, I think now it's gone higher. 120k to maybe 180k. But also, the most important thing is what's the overall package? So it could be a good base, but then a bonus, and then most importantly, a um it's not equity, but like phantom equity. I don't know if you've heard that phrase, but phantom equity, right? I believe phantom equity is one of those amazing things which more people should use. So phantom equity, like people are always fixated on, oh, I don't want to give them shares in the business. And I always say, okay, yeah, maybe not. But what you can do is say, in the event of a liquidity event, in the event of an exit, you will get a bonus. And so that is some version of like phantom equity. So that means if they leave beforehand, that's fine, they're not getting it. If the company never sells, that's fine, they're not getting it. But if you can go to an enterprising um MD somewhere and say, you'll get a healthy base. In fact, you can even go low on the base, you get 90%, 90k base, plus you get an annual bonus, plus you'd also get phantom equity in the event that we sell the company. That is such an incredible deal for them because they're like, hang on, I earn good money, and I also get a bonus based on the efforts of the overall organization, and in the events that we have some kind of a big win, I also get to partake in that. Amazing. What's the downside? Compared to when I was at MediaCount, WPP, I was getting paid, okay, 110 grand, but I was like, it didn't feel like my own. I wasn't really getting much in the way of like bonuses. I was getting like really shitty bonuses based on what like the CEO of a 2000-person company said, but now I'm directly in control of it. Brilliant.

SPEAKER_00 55:32

Nice. Why did you know it was the right time to sell fan bytes? Like, did you pre-plan that we want to exit in three years? Was there an indicator in the market?

SPEAKER_04 55:42

Yeah, market indicators. Um, so we got approached. So in October 2021, 2021, we got approached um three times in six weeks by different PE backed buyers, not in a serious way, just more like, hey, are you exploring a sale? That sort of thing. And I remember going home to my um to my girlfriend at that time and going, I think it's time. I think it's time, boys. Um, because basically, what happens, and this is a very important thing to note, that so much of your business's success is down to timing, and so much of timing is indicated by when like big banks or consultant firms basically say, now this is the thing. So I think what had happened basically during that period was BCG or all these other people had basically said the best way to grow a big marketing business is to consolidate everything. You have your paid media, you have your search, you have your SEO, you have your influencer, you have your PR, and you have it all under one group. And so now you have these big boys who are reading that and going, all right, we should probably do that now. So basically there was that period there, and I thought, all right, now is time to do it. So we then appointed a bank. Well, we got two banks to basically pitch us, and then we picked a bank, and then it took about five months for us to go through the process. It turns out, by the way, that none of the three who actually had got in touch ended up actually being serious candidates. But we ended up then, you know, talking to I think five different people, three of them put in letters of intent. We then decided to go exclusive with Brain Labs, did I think 10 weeks of due diligence, and then that was it.

SPEAKER_00 57:36

What was the entire process again? So how long? Five months, I think. Five months. Oh, that's a that's a really quick.

SPEAKER_04 57:41

Was it five months, yeah? So so we announced the thing in May, January, February, March, April, that's full. Deal in November, yeah, five months.

SPEAKER_00 57:49

And then did you stay, was there a deal where you had to stay in the business over a year?

SPEAKER_04 57:52

Yeah, but more as like uh like a figurehead for a while whilst we did uh integration, and that was very yeah.

SPEAKER_00 58:00

And is that five months to cash in the bank?

SPEAKER_04 58:03

Yeah. Well, well, yeah, yeah, five months, yeah, yeah, because it was May. So let's say six months to cash in the bank, five months until like deal signed, but it was uh relatively straightforward. But a big thing for that, which is again like a very important thing I want your audience to really take in because we're keeping it like super tactical here, is that the speed was dictated a lot because we had a lot of competitive tension, right? We had three companies put in bids, influencer marketing by itself was very hot, and brands or agencies wanted to buy, and so as a result, you have this thing where like if we were in a different environment, actually, let me take a step back. There are two main factors that will contribute, or there's three main factors that will contribute to basically whether your business is something that can be sold for a high amount. The first one is macro factors, so that is basically when we sold, it was a period of like low interest rates. A lot of PE guys were just like buying companies, a lot of PE backed companies were buying companies, right? Because when somebody raises PE, it's typically because they want to go and buy more companies. And so at that time, because of low interest rates, it was easier to borrow money, and so as a result, it was like cheaper to get debt, and then they use that debt than to go and buy companies, right? So that's one. Um the second thing is is that are there enough big holding companies in the space where actually if they buy, let's say fan bytes, then that doesn't mean like fanbytes are the only game in town. You actually, in a weird way, want to be one of many potential targets rather than one of few targets. Because as I mentioned earlier, a lot of companies also sold before fanbytes or like during fanbytes within about a year, as I mentioned, about eight companies had been had been bought who were in the influencer space. It's because there was like enough there. Um, and then the third thing that contributed to us having actually a pretty significant outcome was that we actually left a lot of meat on the bone. And I hear a lot of agency founders or just founders say this and they get it wrong, which is when you ask them when they want to sell, they say something like, Oh, well, firstly they say, Hey, I never want to sell. It's like, alright, mate. But then the second one is they say, like, well, once I'm done with this business, and that's a very bad idea, because what you want to do is leave enough meat on the bone for the potential buyer. And so what we did, for example, was we had 40% of our revenue coming from the US. But then people, a lot of uh investors would say, right, let's go set up a US office. And I say, no, no, no, no, no. Because if we set up a US office, then we have basically explored the US opportunity. But if we then want to sell the business at some point, one of the big things we can say is, hey, 40% of our revenues come from the US, and we don't even have an office there, and we know the budgets there are way bigger, and so if you just buy this business, you're gonna make a lot more just because we haven't even fully explored the US opportunity. Another thing that we did was, for example, we added in paid media, but we only had like three people in the paid media team, and we could have built an entire organization around paid media, but we said no, because we think the company that could potentially buy us would be a business in the performance industry, so therefore, another reason for us to then say, hey guys, this is actually a business where if you buy, you can plug it on to what you're doing performance-wise, and you can win. And then the third and the most important thing that I see is know what you want to do after the sale. This is a very important thing. I see so many founders, they get rich and then they get depressed. Even me, like, for two years, I was just kind of in this wandering phase of okay, like what now? And it's such a weird thing, like you go and you achieve your dream, etc., and then you're like, oh, what now? And it's like, you know, the what's the phrase? Like a smallest violin. But I've seen so many founders, I have one friend who who sold his company for 420 million, and then the two weeks afterwards who were just like, bro, I don't know what to do. I'm just like, I'm sad. It's like, bro, go look at your bank account, and it's like, no, it doesn't matter. Like, I just did not know what to do after my business. And so those are just some factors around like when to sell and how to know when to sell.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:46

Was there a moment in that that would it was was it quite a challenging thing emotionally, or was there a moment in that where it was like, oh fuck me, we've done it here. We've absolutely nailed it.

SPEAKER_04 1:02:56

I have a video of my phone. It was when the money dropped. Because here's a really funny thing when you sell the company, the money doesn't land on the day. So I remember we had this announcement, you know, Forbes are covering it, BBC are covering it, and we're like, yeah. And we're getting congratulations, congratulations, congratulations, and we're like, there's still no money, bro. But that's because, you know, because of the size of the transaction, etc. Like, it had to go through a bunch of things. And I think that was I think that was crazy because it was like myself, Mitch and Ambrose, and I got a new bank account purposely for this. Not a Monzo, not a Starling, but like a Santander. I was like, yeah, this is official. And I remember Mitchell, and I remember us like just walking around, Farandon actually, just walking around, Farandon, like refreshing our accounts, being like, Okay, when is this coming? Our lawyers are telling us it's coming, and I'm refreshing, I can't see anything. And then all I hear is and it's Mitchell, his bears come, and he's like, What the fuck? Like, this is insane. And then, like, within five seconds, I hear another whoa, and it's Ambrose. And Ambrose is like, ah, this dropped, it's dropped, oh my god. And then I refresh mine, and it's still showing like 000. And I'm like, oh my god, have I given the wrong account number sort code? Is there like someone, someone, I don't know, Japan or like Norwich who's like suddenly's got so much money? And then I refreshed, and I remember like just seeing more numbers than I've seen in my life, and just being like, wow, just wow. And I looked at Ambrose and I looked at Mitchell and I just kept saying, Wow, wow, wow, wow, wow. Um, so that was definitely a main one. And then a second one was actually kind of a bit sadder, actually, was um when I started fanbytes around 21, my dad passed away. And as a result, I had kind of internally made this promise to him that we gotta make it work, like this has to be successful. And I remember the day afterwards, I think it was on the day, on the day that we sold after the money had dropped. I remember I went to the cemetery and I just cried for like two hours. I was just crying, and I was like, We fucking did it, dad, we did it, we did it, we did it, we did it. I think it was those two instances where just very much like, whoa, like we actually pulled off the thing that we thought was was impossible.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:45

That was awesome, man. Yeah. I've seen you say that your life hasn't changed too much since you've been a multimillionaire, like you haven't changed your lifestyle too much. Why is that? Did you did you have a splurge? And if not, why not? I mean I see the Nautilus on the wrist. The vintage bottomless.

SPEAKER_04 1:06:03

Bro, at some point, like, what more is there to buy that actually matters to you? Legit, like I you know, sometimes I wonder if I'm not spending correctly. Because I'm like, oh yeah, it'd be cool to have a Rolls Royce. I could buy many Rolls Royces, but I just don't want a Rolls Royce. I love my Tesla, you know. Um, yeah, it'd be cool to, you know, I've got an amazing apartment. I have dope friends and we do cool stuff at the apartment. I work with cool people. I don't know, I don't know what else is. Now, what I would say is, and maybe there's people in your audience who would resonate with this, I mentally struggled with having money because I grew up with no money. And so even when something was something small was spent, I remember once, you know, I had invested in, you know, Bitcoin quite early, and I always invested in like stocks and index funds. And I remember there was like a drop. And I think in a day I dropped like I don't know, nothing crazy, like 30 grand. And I remember thinking that, oh my god, this is the beginning, like this is the beginning of when Timo loses all his money, and oh my god, I'm so depressed. And it's because I didn't have much money, I was like very scared to spend it. And so the biggest pillar for me was when I remember I said, Well, there's two things I did. One is a crazy story, and I really wish I took a picture of this. It was on my other phone. One day I'm gonna find it. It was when I called my bank. I called my uh my guy at the bank and I said, Hey, what I'm about to ask you is the maddest thing ever, but please just do it for me. I said, Can I come to the bank and can I get a million pounds in cash? And it was like, Yeah, that's not actually a crazy request. We get this a lot. So, okay, great. Can I get a million pounds in cash so I can take it home so I can just look at it on my bed to internalize to myself that like I at least have this. Because when you just have numbers on a screen, it doesn't feel real, and it's a story that you tell yourself. Like in my book, the first chapter is we are the stories we tell ourselves. It's because I was trying to almost like now tell myself a new story, which is bro, it's okay now. Like, bro, you don't need to be constantly cagey about money and spending it. It's okay. You know, at the very least, if you lose everything and all your other money's gone, at the very least you have a million in cash. And you can see it, you can look at it. And then afterwards was then when I got comfortable a bit with spending, right? So I took my girlfriend at that time, like went to Bali, we did, you know, first class flights, best play, best hotels, best uh resorts. I think everything came up to like 30 grand or like 35 grand, and I was like, cool, I spend that, and I was still okay. And but it took me a while. It took me a while to like be very deliberate about it.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:21

Did it change your beliefs and what you thought that you wanted?

SPEAKER_04 1:09:27

Yeah. I realized halfway through fanbytes that I thought I was driven by money, but I was driven more by significance. Define significance for you. Being someone who had made some kind of use of their life and impacted the world in a very small way. Because I got sent to Ghana. So as you said earlier, I I was born in Hackney, but I got sent to Ghana to live with my grandmother because it was basically either that of foster care. Because I was like an unplanned for baby. I was my parents, God bless them, but it was an immigration marriage, and so I wasn't planned for necessarily by both of them, and that's fine, that's no drama. But I think subconsciously then I had always told myself that like I need to prove myself in this world because it could have gone completely left, and I'm just happy that it's gone right, and so I need to make sure that I'm someone who at least does something in life, and so now, even with my personal brand and the content that we put out, a big part of it is like, can I at least impact a thousand people? Like today, on my way here, this kid stopped me and he said, Man, I love all your content. I'm gonna become a millionaire. And I said, Yeah, you are, and I said, How old are you? He said, I'm 18 and I'm gonna do it. I have this AI thing which which is for med spas and all of that. I said, Yeah. Because when I was 18, if I had seen someone like me, who was a very normal person, who ran a very normal business that I could understand, do it and be like, mate, if this guy can do it, I can do it. So I think it definitely changed what I thought was meaningful. I definitely thought it was money, and you know that really funny thing when a lot of rich people, when you hear them talk and they say it's not about the money. Money doesn't buy happiness, right? I remember hearing all of that thinking, all right, that's cool for you, Mr. Jeff Bezos. But I know that if I make money, I'll be happier, right? And I think the truth is like it does buy happiness because a lot of my worries and concerns were financial. But it doesn't bring fulfillment. That's 100% true. It does not bring fulfillment at all.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:59

I always say to people I had to have everything to appreciate nothing.

SPEAKER_04 1:12:02

Yeah, yeah. What's that very famous quote? Is it by Jim Carrey? He says, I wish everyone was as rich and famous as they wanted to be to realize it wasn't what they wanted.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:15

Yeah. Think to that guy you saw today. Um, which is in some way symbolic to like your younger self. If you were, you know, meeting that guy and or you were that guy wanting to build the next fanbytes, or you know, that the modern evolution of fanbytes is probably an AI agency and sales involved to some degree, you know, what would you do differently from what you did back then?

SPEAKER_04 1:12:43

Okay. As in in order to then eventually get some kind of an exit?

SPEAKER_00 1:12:48

Sure. If we define the exit as the the goal of success of the business, which for most would be. It would be.

SPEAKER_04 1:12:56

Um well, so the first thing is I would think a lot more about what I chose to work on. So in this case, as you said, I do think that the thing right now is something to do with AI automation, 100,000 percent. The reason why, and I want to just explain like a big reason why, is because if you think about why influencer marketing or social media marketing was all the rage, it's because you had an expertise gap, right? You had people who knew how to do the thing and others who didn't know how to do the thing, and then in the middle of that was just money, right? Similarly, right now we have people who understand or at least can like assemble people who know how to do AI automation and those who don't know how to, and again, in between those two gaps of people is money. So I would decide that. The second thing is I would decide to do that for people with money, right? Um, so you mentioned dentists before, lawyers before, but then there's even like PE funds, wealth managers, like people who have money and they want to deploy it. The third thing, in order to actually increase my chances of success, would be I would actually go and make friends with potential buyers now. And that is something that we didn't do at FanBytes, or at least intentionally, that's something that we didn't do at FanBytes. When we started going through a process of selling the company, we came to realize that a lot of the companies who put in bids had already heard of FanBytes because we were quite, you know, press heavy, etc. But knowing what I know now, I would have been very intentional of saying, all right, these sort of companies could potentially buy us. What kind of partnerships or collaborations can we do now for them to basically have a feel of how we work? And then in doing that, that would increase the likelihood of them buying us. Because the number of friends now, oh my god. Actually, a very funny story I was in. Um so after FanByte, I sold this PR agency for 19 million, right? We sold that business to the founder's previous business. So basically, she was head of marketing at a big PR firm. She then went to set up her own PR agency. She then wanted to then sell the company after like eight, nine years of doing it. When she came to me, I was like, okay, is this interesting? And then I was like, hang on a sec. You specialize in healthcare PR. The previous company you worked for is a global PR agency who buys specialist PR companies. Let's just go there. And that was the easiest conversation ever. And the reason it was so easy was because they had worked together. You know, it's like they had dated before they got married. And so that's what I would do. I'd pick a market like AI Automation, I'd pay for a high value industry, and then I'd start making friends with like the PE backed acquirers in the space or just the bigger guys in that space to ensure that within two or three years, when it's time to roll, I can say, look, we've already worked together, we've done partnerships, it works very well. Do you want to take this to the next level?

SPEAKER_00 1:16:00

What do you think is the biggest threat to those newer agencies over the next five years? As in the AI ones.

SPEAKER_04 1:16:07

The new guys, yeah. That they don't move fast enough. That's it. That they don't move fast enough and they don't market themselves aggressively enough. It's it's quite funny. A lot of marketing businesses or service-based businesses, they don't realize that also they are a product. So, for example, with fanbytes, we weren't the best influencer company in the UK, but we were in like top three most shouty. And so, if you thought of Gen Z marketing, you thought about fanbytes. And so the biggest threat to a lot of these guys here is that you don't move fast enough because that expertise gap is just gonna keep closing every single time. And you don't shout about yourself enough, you don't shout about yourself to the right people enough.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:00

And tactically, shouting being PR, being personal brand?

SPEAKER_04 1:17:04

Shouting being PR. Not personal brand. I think personal brand, especially if you are trying to sell to rich people, it's a bit stupid. I think actually, um, well, actually, let me change that. It's not that it's stupid, it's that often it can be very broad. So, for example, if I was running an AI automation agency for let's say wealth management firms, right? And it's funny because we actually talk about it in the book, uh, basically, how to get rich people to take you serious. Um, it's actually in a chapter called How to Build a Network When You Are a Nobody. Um, we basically say, so if I was basically running an AI automation agency for wealth management firms, what I would do is I would have a list and I would say, going back to the thing we said, what do they read? Where do they hang out? And then who do they listen to? And for two, three years, I would just focus on that. I would just focus on being where they read, providing reports, providing insight, providing guest posts. I would go on their podcast. I might even pay to be on their podcast. Maybe it's a podcast which only 10,000 people listen to, but they are all in the wealth management field. I'd say, oh great. Like we have, you know, we have Timo here, and he's gonna talk about like, you know, five ways that wealth management companies are using AI. And then where do they hang out? What conferences, what events are they going to? Can I go there? Can I pay to speak? Can I do a workshop there? And that's what I mean by I will just shout about myself, and I'll shout about myself to a select group of people, i.e., my customers. And it's fine if I'm not famous, but I'm famous in that particular niche, and that's going to be the way that I'll just make more money. Nice, great advice.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:04

What's next for you? What are you working on right now?

SPEAKER_04 1:19:08

So, two things. One is the book What's Stopping You. It's actually out on Jan the 15th. It's a book I wrote with Penguin. And that book really is, I wrote it, it started off as a letter to my younger self, and then it now evolved into this book, which is part self-development but also part business. And the idea is that it's for people who like me were growing businesses, were anxious about whether they're going to win, we're a bit uncertain. And this is almost as if like your your kind of more knowledgeable uncle has like put his arm around you and basically said, It's all good, bro. Here are the mental things to do, and also here's the business things to do. So we split the book into 11 cheat codes, that's what we call them. Um, and each cheat code, like for example, how to build a network when you're nobody, we are the stories we tell ourselves, it's not that deep. They're all just like super short chapters about understanding yourself, overcoming yourself, and then how to then implement them in business. It's things that I wish that I knew when I was um early on in uh business. We're doing this amazing live event, um virtual event on Jan the 10th, which is basically where we're getting people like Simon Squibb, Dan Priestley, Lara, who I know has been on your pod, Kit Chivers, who founded Puberty, which has now like 200 million followers, um, who's built a very successful agency. Uh, my friend Nick, who founded blockchain.com, which is now like a $7 billion business. We're basically getting all of them to come in and do these talks, and then we are providing mentorship and business advice to people to launch their businesses or to grow their businesses. Because the whole idea of the book is like, what's stopping you? So if we're giving you literally the playbooks, the resources, and we're giving away money throughout the event, um, then what on earth is stopping you? And um, one of the things actually, which is very relevant for your audiences, and I shouldn't be saying this, I shouldn't be saying this because it's meant to be like a surprise, but basically, one of the things we're going to be doing on the call is I'm going to be taking 20 people who are at a scale where they've grown their business, but they're trying to get to that next level. I'm taking 20 people in person. We're going to spend a full day together. I'm bringing my CFO, my CMO, my P guys. We're going to like go into detail of your business and then we're going to like help you package it to eventually sell it at some point. And that's just something that we're doing just live on the call. And um, that's very, very exciting. So the book, what's stopping you? And the way that you actually get on that on that 20 people thing is that you buy some of our books, but it'll all be on the live. And so that is very, very exciting. Like that, I'm so excited by that because I feel like the book is an absolute is something that is needed in the world, practical business advice, not just like wishy-washy stuff, but then also the mental foundation that you need. And then the second thing, which is more business-wise, is that I have a company called Irrational Media where what we're doing is we're buying media brands, and we're buying niche media brands. I think there's an opportunity to build a very, very big company in the space of um hyper-niche media. I'm actually hiring for a CMO and a partner to actually lead that because as I said earlier, I don't trust myself after I've had the idea and the vision and raise the money. I need better people. So those are the two things that I'm like really fixated on.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:59

Amazing. If this is released before that date, then we'll make sure we'll put a link in the description for the for the live event that you're hosting. What's on the back end of that? Like, where does that go? What does the, if you don't mind me peeling back the lays a bit, what does the what's the book, the top of funnel of long term?

SPEAKER_04 1:23:13

It's so interesting. Like people ask me this question so many times, and I say legit, it is just that I want to put out the book that I wish I'd read early on in my journey. Like, there's no, you know, this is not like a homoty thing where really it's just like a masked like way to gain a funnel and sell you coaching or info. No, it is it's it's just the book put out to the world. Because another thing is also this is the book that I publish. I mean, I'm just gonna say this. This is a book I published with Penguin, right? Penguin paid me a fat advance, which like which also means unless we literally sell like I don't know, quadrillions of this, I don't make any money from it, and I'm fine with that. This is legit. I just want to like put this in the hands of people. And I'm sure people read it and maybe at some point be like, yeah, Timo's really good. I wanna, you know, I don't know, I want him to help me sell my company. Great. At that point, I'll say, all right, let's take a percentage of it. But like, legit, if you just read this and it helps you to unblock yourself and unblock your self-doubts in some way, great, because I know I struggle with that for so long.

SPEAKER_00 1:24:27

Nice, man. I've got four rapid fire questions.

SPEAKER_03 1:24:32

What's one habit that keeps you grounded every day? I know you said rapid fire, and I realize I don't have an answer to that. Doesn't need to be rapid, rapid never really is rapid fire.

SPEAKER_04 1:24:45

Go in to get my biscuffy protein shake at the one rebel near my house. That's outrageous. That's outrageous.

SPEAKER_00 1:24:55

I'll take it. One mindset shift that changed your journey.

SPEAKER_04 1:25:01

That the people that I thought were better than me were no different to me. They just were in the game for longer.

SPEAKER_00 1:25:08

One thing money taught you after the exit.

SPEAKER_04 1:25:11

That even though it's incredibly cliche, it's not about the money, it's about the people that you do it with. Nice.

SPEAKER_00 1:25:18

And finally, one piece of life advice that you just keep coming back to. It's not that deep. Timo. Pleasure, man. That was fun. That was fun. Great questions, man.