Episode 200: One year in: lessons from my first year as a full-time coach – with Jeremy Cline of Change Work Life and Al Elliott of The Truth, Lies and Work Podcast

Episode 200: One year in: lessons from my first year as a full-time coach - with Jeremy Cline of Change Work Life and Al Elliott of The Truth, Lies and Work Podcast

Jeremy Cline [00:00:00]:
It's been just over a year now since I left my job to start my own business full-time. So, how has it been going? What have I been doing since then? To celebrate episode 200, we're pulling back the curtain, and I'm going to show you just what it's like to start out on your own. I'm Jeremy Cline, and this is Change Work Life. Hello and welcome to Change Work Life, the podcast that's all about beating the Sunday evening blues and enjoying Mondays again. I'm a career coach and in each episode my guests and I bring you tips, strategies and stories to help you enjoy a more satisfying and fulfilling working life. This is episode 200, and to mark the occasion we're going to do things a little bit differently. Some of you will know that at the end of 2023 I left my job to become a full-time career coach. But what's happened since then? How has it been going? And what have I learned? To help me unpack all of this, I'm delighted to be joined by someone who has been a very important part of my journey so far. If you're a subscriber to my email newsletter, you'll have seen me make somewhat cryptic references to my business mentor. Well, in good old-fashioned Scooby Doo style, it's time to pull off the mask and welcome Al Elliott back to the podcast. You may remember Al from episode 178 when he and his wife, Leanne, came on to talk about burnout. Well, since then, Al has been helping me figure out what I really want to offer as a coach and how to make that happen. Welcome back to the podcast.

Al Elliott [00:01:45]:
Well, thank you for having me, and I'm very honoured to be called a mentor. I'm not sure many people call me a mentor. I've been called lots of names before, but mentor is not usually one of them.

Jeremy Cline [00:01:56]:
Well, it's definitely appropriate here. Why don't you start by reintroducing yourself to the audience?

Al Elliott [00:02:01]:
Yeah. I'm Al Elliott. I'm the co-host of the Truth, Lies & Work podcast, which is the number one work podcast in the UK, and we're working on America. So, I will hopefully be able to say that soon. And I suppose I'm a full-time tinkerer. I've had several businesses, some of which have worked very well, some of which have not worked well at all. And so, I quite like just mucking about with things, hence where the podcast came from. Just taught myself how to podcast, and that's that. So, I don't really have a job title, I suppose, really. People refer to me as the co-host, which I'm not even that because my wife is the expert in the podcast. She's a business psychologist and Chartered and all the fancy letters after her name, so she's the actual expert in the podcast.

Jeremy Cline [00:02:40]:
I feel like you're doing yourself a disservice there. I feel like people get an awful lot out of you, as well as Leanne. The intention is that Al and I are going to ask each other questions, and it's going to be quite conversational. It's a bit, different from my usual interview style. So, to kick us off, Al, you and I started working together on my business around, I think, it was May or June 2024. What questions do you have for me to help the audience understand a bit about what I was doing between leaving my job and you and me starting to work together?

Al Elliott [00:03:14]:
Yeah. I think it's probably going to be quite useful for listeners because they'll have heard your podcast, and generally, in your podcast, you take the interview role, so you don't often talk a huge amount about what you do. So, I think what would be really useful is just to establish a timeline. There was a point at which you left your job, which I think first of all is important just to remind people what you did, and secondly, just give us an idea of the timeline of when you started when you went out on your own and what the plan was when you did that.

Jeremy Cline [00:03:40]:
Yeah. So, I was a lawyer. I was what's known as a private client lawyer, so I tended to act for very high net worth individuals and families, a lot of tax advice, and various other things related to that. I left my job just before Christmas 2023, so I gave myself a couple of weeks off over Christmas before starting in January 2024 as, I think I described myself as either self-employed or unemployed depending on how my mood was at the start of the day. The question as to what the plan was at the start of the year, pretty undefined and unclear is a good way of describing it. I had decided at that point that I wanted it to involve coaching because I was enjoying that. But the question of who I was going to coach, what I was going to coach them on, where my niche was going to be was all a little bit undefined. And one of the first things I did work on was to almost do like a kind of mini analysis of the various areas that I could go into,

Al Elliott [00:06:09]:
Well, let's get into the tinkering in just a second. I think what would be useful for someone listening who perhaps has gone through a similar situation might be, how did you feel? So, you left your job. You said you described yourself as some days unemployed, some days self-employed, which I know was a joke, but a lot of these sort of flippant remarks do sort of come from deep seated fear or worry or whatever. How did you tell me about that first thirty days of you waking up, not going to your job. How did you feel each morning?

Jeremy Cline [00:06:38]:
A mixture of excited and scared. I kept myself busy. I mean, that was one thing. Certainly, the first month or so, I actually felt like I was really busy. Part of that was because one of the benefits I got when I left was access to outplacement support. And what that looks like is, I had some one-to-one sessions with an outplacement counsellor to help me to figure out what I wanted to do, so kind of like a coach stroke counsellor. But also, the organisation had a huge raft of webinars that you could do. So, there were three different ones on LinkedIn, there was one on becoming, like a freelance consultant, there were things on brushing up your CV, you name it, related to careers, they had all sorts of things. And I probably signed up to most of them. So, that took up a good part of my day. I was still keeping going with the podcast, so there was that. And one of my early, I'll call it strategies, my early activities was to offer free coaching sessions within certain communities, so like an online business community I'm a member of. I went in there and said, 'Hi, I'm a member. The part of the support of this community has been getting me to this position. I would really like to offer free coaching.' And I got quite a few coaching sessions through that. I think one of the important things for me to do early on was to verify that I did really want to do coaching, that it wasn't just something I thought, yeah, I like it, and then suddenly when it's your thing, when it's the thing that you're doing all the time, that I suddenly discover, oh, crikey, am I really going to be doing this day in and day out? I don't fancy that. So, getting that verification that it was something that I wanted to do was quite important. And I've not really answered the question about how I felt. Kind of optimistic. I felt like it was okay to allow myself to explore, and I think it was, but it became apparent that all the exploration wasn't actually getting me that much further because it was quite bitty, a bit of shiny object syndrome. Oh, see this, oh, let's try that. Oh, see this, let's try that. And I suppose there was a frustration that I didn't feel like I was getting very far. Maybe that frustration came in a bit later than the first thirty days, but I certainly didn't have a feeling, oh, what am I going to do now? I felt busy, not necessarily strategically busy, but busy. And the freedom and flexibility, that's something which, I mean, that was one of the reasons I went down this route, and that's still something which I really like. I do try to keep structure to my days, so I do make sure that I'm at my desk, and I'm usually working by about nine o'clock, and I usually finish by about five o'clock. But in that time, I can go into town and meet someone for a coffee or have a day in London meeting people. So, I'm enjoying that aspect that I can just go, 'Oh, yeah, no, I'll do that.' I can take time off to go to my daughter's assembly without feeling guilty that I'm taking time off work. Or if I'm feeling guilty, I'm only feeling guilty to me rather than I'm somehow abusing company time. So, that aspect of it has been really positive, and I've enjoyed that. So, it's definitely been, yeah, mood swings. There are days where I thought, 'What am I doing? I can't do this. I can't be a business owner. I can't make a living by myself.' And then, there would be other days when I'd be thinking, 'No, I can do this. I can do this. Other people do this.' Maybe I had had a success that day, and it had given me enough encouragement. Trouble is that kind of encouragement that doesn't then last all that long. You kind of get a buzz for about a day or so, and then you go back into the, 'Oh, well, I had that, but there's been nothing since then.' And so, can I really do it? So, it's definitely been quite a lot of up and down.

Al Elliott [00:11:21]:
I have a question. The question is going to be, what would Jeremy January 2025, what advice would he have for Jeremy January 2024? But just before we go on to that, I think this is a really important thing you've brought up here, particularly if someone is just moving into being self-employed or just moving into doing their own thing, and they feel the ups and downs, some mornings you wake up and you're like, 'Yes, this is going well', other mornings you're like, 'This is going really badly', some mornings you wake up and go, 'I can't do this. What am I even pretending?' that happens whether you are successful or not. One of my most successful businesses, which, being frank, set me and Leanne up for life in terms of money, even on the best days, there were still days I'm going, 'Oh my god. What am I doing? I can't do this.' And I think it's important for anyone to know that if they are going to start, that doesn't go away. Mark Randolph, the CEO of Netflix, I'm sure he wakes up some mornings in a cold sweat going, 'Oh my god, I can't do this.' So, I think that's a really, really important thing. But that was a little aside. People didn't tell me that when I was starting out, and I felt like I had to have all the answers. And you don't. You will always have bad days, and you will always have good days. And hopefully, you will always have fear that you're not you can't do it because then that drives you to be better. And then, that's really, really important. The day where you think I've got it sorted is the day that things start going downhill. I know lots of people who, the worst thing that can happen to an entrepreneur is to have success in their first business because then they go, oh, look at me. I'm really good at this. Rather than I was lucky, I was at a particular point in time, and I'm going to have to spend the rest of my life trying to chase that look again, and it's probably not going to happen. So, anyway, slight aside from that. The question I had, long way around to get to that question, January 2025 Jeremy, versus January 2024 Jeremy, is there any advice that you would love to have given yourself a year ago when you first started this?

Jeremy Cline [00:13:12]:
In summary, I think it's get focused sooner than I did and get help with getting that focus. So, I think it was okay to allow for a bit of exploration time. Maybe what I would like to have thought I'd have done in hindsight is put a, like, a time limit on that. So, you know, put a date in the calendar. Okay. By this date, you would need to have made a decision on where to focus in the business. So, I think I've probably allowed that to drift a while and also get support in doing that. It's kind of a weird thing. I don't know if it's just me or whether this is common, but there's this element of resistance to getting help. I don't know if it's a feeling that you should be able to do it all by yourself anyway. But the times when I have made most progress have been the times where I've had one-to-one support. So, I've been a member of business masterminds where you've got five or six people you meet regularly, and you help each other out. So, there's one where every, say, ten weeks, I'm in the hot seat. I'm the one who says to the others, 'Okay, this is the thing that I really need some help with at the moment. Open to ideas.' And everyone chips in. That has been great, and I've been part of one group for four years. They are an amazing bunch, and they've definitely helped me. But there's something about one-to-one individual support that just gives me a kick start. So, getting that to help figure out the focus and then move on from the focus, I think, in hindsight, I wish I'd done that sooner. And it's something... What's the expression? The good thing about making mistakes is you recognise when you're making them again in the future, or something like that. But it's something I want to take forward and remember that, if there's something that I want to do, and I'm finding it harder, I'm finding that it's taking longer than I want to, then getting help with that, whether that's coaching, mentoring, whatever, it's almost certainly going to help me to kick things off.

Al Elliott [00:15:52]:
So, I do want to get into this idea of you choosing your niche. Because I call it the empty car park syndrome. We've talked about it before. We use it in terms of, we live in Europe, my wife and I live in Europe, and we can live anywhere in theory. And so, that makes it really difficult to decide which country or even which town you want to live in. When you are in a situation where you can do anything, you are in a situation where you were looking at all kinds of different ideas, you almost feel like, well, I could be a Bitcoin guy, I could be a mining guy, a Bitcoin mining guy, I could be a coach,

Jeremy Cline [00:16:40]:
Well, the time when that happened was the point when you started to take an interest in my business. So, let's just talk about that to set the scene. Because I'm curious as to what it was that led you to start asking me some pretty pointed questions about my business, in a very supportive way, and now we've been meeting fairly regularly for a few months. Because you and I stayed in contact after you and Leanne came on the podcast. We talked a bit about some of the things that you were working on, so the RX seven, I'm going to really butcher explaining what that is, so maybe I'll leave that to you, but an offering that you and Leanne were working on. But yeah, I'm interested from your side what it was that made you go, 'Hey, you know what? This guy, he's all over the place. I'm going to start asking him some questions about that.' So, yeah, where were you when that happened?

Al Elliott [00:17:47]:
Well, I suppose just to give a little context, I love asking questions and listening to people. And my wife and I, we actually met at Samaritans, which is a listening service in the UK, for those people who haven't heard of it. And we learned, we had the best training ever on how to actively listen and how to be a good listener. And that has really helped because then when we do interviews and stuff, I'm curious, genuinely curious about why did you make that decision. And business always fascinates me. I describe myself as a tinkerer, and it is, I just love getting into someone's mind going, 'Right, okay, where is the commercial application?' And I suppose I was intrigued about someone who had come from a professional background, someone who essentially sold out his day in five-minute sections, because that's the way that lawyers work, isn't it, you record how much time and then you tot it up and say, 'That's the bill', going into something which is a very different field, which at the time you were talking about coaching, whatever you were doing it seemed to be this underpinning of coaching, and I was like, 'Huh, I wonder where this is going to turn out.' And there may be a little of macabre in there, because I'm like, well, if it doesn't turn out, it will still be a fun journey to be on and see what happens. Now I don't mean that that was the reason why I'm involved, but I think I'm just interested in why other people make decisions. I love waking up and going, 'Oh, wouldn't it be cool if this was in the world?' And so, by listening to someone who actually wants to put something into the world that either doesn't exist or exists but could be better, it's a fascinating thing for me. I just really like asking questions. And I get such a buzz when someone goes, 'I've had a breakthrough.' And I know you and I had a bit of a breakthrough, maybe about session three or four or five. And I remember there was a bit like, 'Oh', and there was a Japanese word, I've forgotten what it is, I know you'll tell me.

Jeremy Cline [00:19:30]:
Ikigai, yeah.

Al Elliott [00:19:31]:
That's the one, which was really interesting. And I had heard the concept and never really seen it in practice. So, I suppose it was more, I wonder where this is going to go. I'm lucky and fortunate enough to have a bit of spare time that I can go, 'Right. Cool. Well, let's do this.' I don't need to charge for it. Let's do this and see where we go.' And it was really that. And the more I got into your mind, the way it worked and what you could potentially bring into the world, the more excited me that, yeah, this guy really could make a difference, could bring something into the world. And as you know, you've only got a certain number of hours in the day. If you're a bit lazy like me, you've got even fewer. So, I don't want to start another business, but, god, it's exciting being on the journey of someone else starting another business.

Jeremy Cline [00:20:16]:
So, when we had that first conversation where you started to ask me questions, and you suggested that we chat again in a few weeks' time, were you envisaging that this could be, and I know the word mentor didn't quite resonate with you at that point, did you think that this was going to be like a thing which would go on for several months, or what were your expectations at the time?

Al Elliott [00:20:43]:
I don't know that I necessarily had any expectations or any thoughts about the future. I think it was more like, if I can help, because I know you had supported the pod, and you've always been a big fan of ours, and you've been sharing our stuff, which is fantastic, and it was more like, well, I have some time, I enjoy talking about this, let's just see if we chat another couple of times, or it might be a more regular thing. I don't think at any point in time was I looking and saying, right, let's see if we can turn this into a commercial agreement. Most of the successful ventures I've had in the past have started this way.

Jeremy Cline [00:22:26]:
That's interesting. Because something that I've got involved with is mentoring at University of Westminster, they run a programme, and it was something that I got into through my last job. They were, I don't know, corporate members or something like that. But I found, talking to undergraduate law students who are trying to figure out what they want to do when they graduate, I'm really enjoying it. I feel like I've got extra experience that I can offer, not just from having been a solicitor for twenty years, but also having gone through this career change process and having learned so much through my podcast and other podcasts about the world of work and interviews and that kind of thing. So, I kind of feel like I've got a few dimensions that I can offer, and there is something very satisfying about being able to offer that. So, I mean, genuinely, I still can't believe my luck in terms of the fact that, you know, the work that we've done together, I suppose, it's kind of like, what am I trying to say, that yes, I can see it from having had that experience myself that it's something that I get a lot out of, even if, but it's still being like a voluntary thing in a way of supporting others. So, that is interesting. Let's talk about niching, because that was how we came on to this. I feel that it was when we had that first conversation that you laid bare the fact that I was in an empty coaching car park, that I knew I wanted to coach, but I didn't know which space to go into. And we had a couple of false starts. So, there was one point where I was going to focus solely on lawyers, not necessarily with the same specialism as me, but a particular segment of the legal market in the UK, which led to me doing a bit of coding with ChatGPT's help. That was an unexpected thing to try out, but it was quite a fun project that never actually went somewhere. But it was when, I think, you said, 'Okay, the next conversation, we are going to decide on your niche.' Because even at that point, having done all that work, I was still a bit ambivalent about whether that was going to be the thing that I worked on. And it was knowing that I had that conversation coming up, I think, that started to turn the cogs in my brain. And I don't know why it needed that push, but that was what made me go, 'Hang on, why aren't I going back into the private wealth world that I spent twenty years working in?' So, not just private client lawyers, but that whole branch of professions whose job is to support the needs of the very wealthy. Because they need all sorts of professional services. And I don't think I'd actually included that when I did my initial sector analysis, way back in January 24. I hadn't really added that, and I don't know why. But something sparked in my brain. I kind of went, 'Oh, yeah. Why don't I go back into that?' So, knowing we had this conversation coming up, I kind of pretty much set on the niche or thought, yeah, this is a niche I could get behind. And so, then the question was, okay, so that's a niche, but what do I actually want to do in that niche? What do I want to offer to the private wealth professions market? And so, what I did before we spoke, you mentioned it, this concept of ikigai. ChatGPT is something which I've been using increasingly since I went self-employed. There are times when metaphorically I want to throw it out the window because it just acts like a childish six-year-old and doesn't do what I want it to, despite me giving it specific instructions. But when it works, it's amazing. And I asked ChatGPT, first of all, I wanted to check we were on the same page, and so I asked it about this concept of ikigai, which is s like a four-circle Venn diagram. So, you're looking at the intersections between four circles. Let's see if I can actually remember what they are. It's something like what the world needs, what you enjoy doing, what you're good at, and what you can be paid for. I think that's right. And if you can find something which meets all of those, and that's your ikigai, and I can't actually remember what the word means, but that's kind of like the nirvana, the epicentre. So, if you can find that, you're set up. And so, what I did with ChatGPT was, I said, 'Okay, well, here are some of the things that I've liked doing, here's the things that I'm good at, and so on and so forth, help me find my ikigai.' And it did. And it identified the fact that bringing people together, community, groups, is something that has always been a common thread going through my life as something that I enjoy doing. And so, that, in this niche, through some kind of a coaching lens, was probably going to fit the bill for the thing that I might enjoy doing. And it got me so far, but it was when I discussed that with you at our next meeting that you suddenly came up with, 'Oh, yeah. Well, you know, this kind of thing exists in other spheres.' So, I mean, do you want to talk a bit more about that?

Al Elliott [00:28:35]:
Yeah. And I think that the ikigai, I had heard the term, I had never actually done the exercise, and I think it's really cool, and I think it does give you some direction. But I always like to keep things simple, and I always go, right, you need to be solving an expensive and painful problem. And basically, the ikigai does all that, but my Venn diagram is just two things. It's expensive, painful problems, and then problems you can solve, and in that little ellipse in the middle, I'm drawing in the air, I know this is an audio podcast, in that bit in the middle is the things you can sell. And the ikigai, I think, is really good, because it gives you a lot more nuanced version of that. But what I really wanted to get to was... Okay, so there's two parts of this. First of all, what's the expensive painful problem? Because a lot of people say, 'I'm going to be an artist for dogs, I'm going to draw people's dogs and paint them and send them off.' Okay. Lovely. Brilliant. Is that an expensive and painful problem that people have? No, it's probably more nice to have. You can make some all-right money from it. But that's not expensive and painful. Whereas if you think about your private wealth, high net worth individuals that you were dealing with in your previous life, and potentially some of your clients do now, their expensive potential problems are tax, you know, I've got a problem with a lease, that's an expensive, painful problem. And so, that's where the real money is. Now I'm not saying that everyone should go out there and say, 'Right, I'm going to go and build a business that's going to make lots and lots of money.' That's fine if you don't want to. Absolutely fine. But the easiest and quickest way to get yourself to that 10 grand a month is to be the expert in one specific problem. Now what painful, expensive problem? Now where, I suppose, I brought something to the table a little bit was that I am genuinely interested in business and in offers and in niches. So, where some people would sit on a Saturday afternoon and watch football, I like football, but I wouldn't go on to Twitter then and start conversations who's going to win. What I do do on a Saturday afternoon, and almost every single day, I probably spend an hour on Twitter looking what people are doing, following certain people and going, 'I wonder what they're doing next', listening or reading their take on things, so I get exposed to probably 10 to 20 different business ideas a day, and some of them I follow down a little rabbit hole and go, 'I wonder how they make money from that. I wonder how they actually generate leads for that', try and think how I would do that. And then, when it came to your specific situation, I knew there was something called the Hampton, which is by a guy called Sam Parr, he's one half of My First Million, another podcast on the HubSpot podcast network, the audio destination for business professionals, but it is a genuinely good podcast. And they're two interesting guys who are doing interesting things. And so, I happened to know about him doing the Hampton thing, looked in his website, tried to work how he was doing it. And then, when you were explaining what potentially your ikigai was, I was like, 'Oh, well, that sounds like Hamptons, but for this.' And that is such a great thought process for anyone who is looking to start their own gig, or perhaps niche down a little bit more, is go, 'Can you be the X for Y?' Can you be the Netflix for lawyers? Can you be the Hamptons, which is a private members club, for badminton players? And so, if you can get that, then you already have this structure, you already know that Hamptons, first of all, exists, secondly, is very expensive, thirdly, is obviously... Well, I say obviously very successful, I'm guessing it is, because it's 25 grand for each person to join, and I think they've got about 200 or 300 members. So, I'm guessing that's a fair seven-figure business. So, by using patterns of what people had already done, that's such a great way to hone what it is that you're actually going to do. So, be the X for Y. And I think that is such a good starting point. Does that make sense? From your point of view, does that sound like it was what I was doing? Or was I doing something different?

Jeremy Cline [00:32:47]:
That does completely make sense. I think the fact that you were aware of Hamptons, this organisation where they get together small groups of entrepreneurs, business owners, and you identified that as being adjacent to something that would fit for me, I mean, that was a massive breakthrough moment, and we'll come on to that. There's something I wanted to pick up earlier. It was a concept which you introduced to me, which you touched on, the difference between painkillers and vitamins. Now vitamins, they're nice to have, you probably should do them. You're not likely to see the effects of them in any short time frame. Versus the, I have a problem, I need this solving now, help. I don't really care what it costs. Just make this problem go away. And trying to focus more on that side of things, the painkiller side of things, rather than the nice to have things. So, that was a really valuable thought process. I think where I thought the ikigai process was valuable was the risk of starting something which solved a problem, but then it turned out that you just didn't enjoy solving that problem in a particular way. And this was something I did have first-hand experience of. Because it was actually during the early days of the COVID pandemic, I had identified that one of the hot topics for podcasters was producing transcripts. And the options were either you got a human transcriptionist, which was quite expensive, or you got an AI transcription, which was a lot cheaper and also gave you something which wasn't terribly readable. It wasn't something that you could easily publish by itself. And me being the perfectionist I was when I started my podcast, I kind of did a mix of the two. So, I got an AI to generate my transcripts, and then I paid a VA to go through them and to basically turn them into proper English. And I realised that that was scalable, that I had a system which I could then get other people to pay for. And I started to do the maths. So, I figured, well, if I pay my VA X amount for a transcript, and I get X number of podcasters, and I can't remember what the numbers came out with, but I figured out how I could monetize and turn it into a business itself. And I started to offer a few freebies, and then I got one or two paying clients, and I did this, but I realised pretty early on that I just wasn't enjoying it. I didn't know why, or at least I didn't really know why until I got some coaching which went through things like my own personal values, and I realised that whilst the idea was good, and I think it probably still is quite a good idea, it didn't fit with me. So, I think that the one lesson I had in my mind was that there something around not necessarily just being enough to solve a problem. M. J. DeMarco, Millionaire Fastlane and Unscripted, he says how he could drive down the motorway and see five problems which are all potential business ideas. Which is great. But what I learned from that episode of offering this transcription service was that it wasn't enough just to solve a problem, but it had to be something that I actually quite enjoyed solving. Yeah, interested in your take on that.

Al Elliott [00:37:03]:
Okay. So, you're now going to meet, for the second or third time only, mean uncle Al. Because I am going to be mean to you and say, it is not your business to enjoy your business till you get to a 100 grand a year, 200 grand a year, 300 grand a year. It is a bonus if you enjoy it, but you've got to put your own gas mask on first. Most people have a runway, and when I say runway, it's the nerdy talk for you've got this amount of money to last you, and when that's gone, that's gone. So, most businesses have that. Most people who start a business, they go, 'Right, I've got a year to get this to work.' And then, I think a lot of people will spend the first three or four months going, 'Well, I really like painting, so I wonder if I could do a painting thing. Maybe I could do painting workshops.' And it's like, it's none of your business whether you enjoy your business until you get to a point where your gas mask, your air mask, what do I mean, you know in the planes, your oxygen mask is on, then all right, you're getting 10 grand a month coming in. That's enough for you to live. Now you can go and enjoy. And I think that a lot of people, they leave a job they don't like, not saying you did this because I know it's slightly different for you, but they leave a job they don't like and go, 'Right, I just want to wake up in the morning and just love my life and get excited about it. And I love making clay pots, so that's what I'm going to do.' I tell you what, when you have to make 20 clay pots a week, and you are behind, and you have to work on Friday night to make your clay pots to get them delivered for Saturday morning, because you ran out of time because something happened with your cat, you had taken them to the vet or whatever, then you're not going to enjoy making pots anymore. So, again, still being mean uncle Al, it's not always about doing what you enjoy. Because if you do that for a business, it'll soon become something you don't necessarily enjoy, and you could ruin it for yourself. So, I think the mean advice is, till you get that six figures in the bank or whatever your runway is, or till you get to a point where you're making enough money so that you go, 'Great, I can relax a bit', systematize it so you don't have to do it, so like you did with your VA, great, you got AI, you got VA to polish it, you potentially could tighten up the lead gen system, so that you're actually bringing in leads automatically from ads or whatever, once you've got that in place, then you probably need to just, you know, you just need to go over and have a look at it once every week and look at the metrics and go, 'Yeah, yeah, everything's within the agreed or the expected numbers.' Great, leave that go. And now you can go off and do what you want to do. Now I think you are fortunate in that what we've found is an expensive and painful problem is something you actually really enjoy doing. And I think you're very fortunate. And you've engineered it that way. But just being really
frank, for those people out there who are listening and going, 'I'm going to leave my job, and I'm going to love my day', you know, I know that most days consist of extreme highs of this is working, to extreme lows of going, 'Oh my god, I can't do this.' And that doesn't matter whether you're in business for 10 years, whether you're a decamillionaire, whether you've made a 100 grand, you're still going to have those days. And so, I think it's really important for people to go into it thinking it's not just going to be a beautiful existence where you can wake up, and you can do what you love and then go to bed at night and make money. Yes, some people are lucky to have that. But to start off with, your goal is to have enough cash coming in, so that you can go and spend three days a week playing with another idea. And that's where your painkiller-vitamins come in. Your first business should be a painkiller. It should be solving a very expensive and painful problem for a lot of money. Get that sorted. Then, you can play around with vitamins. You can say, 'I wonder whether the ultra-wealthy would pay for modern art of their dogs.' That's a cool idea. Let's go and find out, see if they'll pay 20 grand to get Damien Hurst to do a version of their dog or something. Cool! But that's not your first business because that's a vitamin. Okay, I'm going to exit mean Al, and go back into that normal Al, but is that harsh?

Jeremy Cline [00:41:16]:
I think the thing I would be concerned about would be sustainability. So, when you say, taking your hobby, taking your passion, and making a business out of that, I completely agree with what you say there. I'm an amateur musician. The idea of doing that to a professional level where I have to do it, where the pressure is on and all that kind of thing, absolutely no way. There's no way I would do that. It's a hobby. It's something I do on the side. It opens up a different part of my brain. So, I agree that the first business needs to be a painkiller business, that it needs to solve a problem. And I feel like there could be a bit of nuance, interested to hear your viewpoint, whether it's still got to be something, it's not doing what you love, but it's kind of loving or at least enjoying what you do. So, I don't know, maybe you have identified that there is a real problem with, I don't know, clearing dog mess off the pavements. And you have identified that people will actually pay you to do this. But you just, you know, you do it, and you are miserable. You can feel your life draining away as you're doing it. Yeah, you're getting paid, but it's sucking the soul out of you. Which is kind of, maybe I didn't give it long enough, but it was kind of how I felt with the transcription side. It solved a problem, but it didn't excite me at the same time. And so, I don't think that I would have had the drive to keep it going, because, yes, the money part, absolutely, was important, but it was just demotivating. Whereas we'll come on to talk about what my idea looks like now, it is something that, as well as, hopefully, solving a painful, expensive problem, it's also something which lights me up, which makes me go, 'Yeah, and I think I'm going to be good at this, and I think I'm going to enjoy this.' And who knows? Maybe that's not realistic. But I worry that just doing something because you know that there's a problem you can solve, if it doesn't engage you, then it's just going to be really, really hard and quite soul sucking to do it. Over to you. Am I being too nice?

Al Elliott [00:44:03]:
No. That's a really, really good point and a good elaboration on my point. So, dog muck off the pavements. Yes. That's a great example of something which you wouldn't enjoy doing. I think that if you're going to solve an expensive, painful problem, then you first will have to have respect for the person you're solving it for. So, if you are socialist, and you're like, 'Nope, labour, this is what I voted, I don't believe in extreme wealth', and then you try and start a business to help beat the ultra-wealthy, that's not going to work, because it goes against your belief. So, you're not going to enjoy that. So, you've got to have respect for the person who you're solving the problem for, and you've got to at least tolerate to enjoy, on that scale, on a scale of hate to love, tolerate in the middle, you've got to be definitely right of the tolerate. Because it's got to be something that you actually enjoy doing. I think there's two types, there's several ways that people approach starting a venture, a gig, a business, whatever. And I think a lot of people go, 'Right, I need to do something that I'm going to enjoy because I'll be doing this for the foreseeable future.' Cool. What they're starting is a lifestyle business, where they are essentially doing somewhere between 50 and 100% of the work, and they want to enjoy their day. Cool. Then, there are other people who look and say, 'Right, I'm going to start a business, but it's a mechanism. It's like investing. I invest in property, in the UK property. I've got a few houses. Some of those houses I haven't been in for 15, 20 years. I don't care about the house. One of them burnt down. I was like, well, how much is it going to cost me? No one was hurt. But I see them as a box to make money.' Whereas I think a lot of people would go in and certainly first- or second-time landlords, if I can continue this analogy for a second, will go, 'Oh my god, the tenants have left, and they've wrecked that beautiful fireplace that me and my partner built. And how am I going to get it back to how it was?' You shouldn't have put the fireplace in the first place, because it was a box to make money. So, I think that there's two ways of looking at business. If you're going to be like, 'I'm going to be doing the work myself', cool, yes, you're right, you can't have something that you don't like. You probably won't like it some days, and some days you'll love it. Or you look at it and go, 'Right, I'm going to start a business to make money. And instead of a box to rent out, I'm going to create a system that will turn one pound into four pounds, or one dollar into four dollars.' And there's two different ways of looking at it. And I think that it's really important to know what it is you're going to start. A lifestyle business could evolve into a systematized business that's actually a thing. Rarely would a systematized business evolve into a lifestyle business, because you're actually looking at it from an investment point of view. So, I think that's the first thing. The second thing is that, yes, I think if you intend to be, I think they call it IC, individual contributor. Is that the right term? If you intend to be the deliverer of the service, then, yes, you're right, you definitely need to be certainly near the 'I love this' side of it. But the podcast transcription, you had a VA to do it, you had AI who did the basis of it, and I don't think it's an expensive, painful problem for podcasters, because most podcasters don't have money, but it could be like, okay, well, I'm going to do it for the top 5% of podcasters who do make 100 grand a year. For them, where a grand a month would be like, 'Oh, yeah. Okay. That's worth it, because I'm going to get a really good transcription from it.' You could still start that business, because all you have to do is essentially add one more customer a month. So, five phone calls, one of those will buy. That's five phone calls a month. Your VA takes care of everything else. Your AI takes care of everything. So, that's a systematized business that you don't necessarily have to love, but it's bringing you in 10 grand a month. So, I know I've come at this from probably an angle that we didn't expect, or you might not expect it to go down, because I do respect what you've done with the iki-... What's the word again? Ikigai. I do respect you've done that, and I think that's great. I just want to underline that people starting out on venture have got two choices, and one of them is to do something which they're going to love. And the other one isn't. You don't necessarily have to do it. You don't necessarily have to love making sandwiches, but you could easily go and get a Subway franchise and make yourself a nice bit of money, which will allow you to spend time doing the stuff you do love. Back to you.

Jeremy Cline [00:48:14]:
Yeah. And this is something that I've reflected on, the difference between lifestyle business and scalable, you're not working in the business, you're working on the business kind of thing. And I wonder whether it is helpful if you are someone who will enjoy creating a scalable business. So, there are people who it doesn't really matter what the business is. They want to figure out the way of scaling it and systematizing it and eventually selling it. And it could be turning one small sandwich shop into a franchise, or it could be manufacturing widgets, or it could be goodness knows what. And it's the process of doing that, of understanding the business. So, I wonder whether there's, if you're going to do that kind of thing, then it helps to have a propensity to want to do that, to be excited by that. Because I'm conscious that, if what I'm working on does take off, then it could scale. Yeah, absolutely could scale. I could see a path to that. But at least for the first couple of years, it is likely to be more of a lifestyle thing where I am doing most of it myself. And having believed what I'd read that, oh, no, you've got to scale it, you've got to take yourself out of the business, you know, almost lifestyle business bad, I've kind of come around to thinking, well, as long as it works, and I'm enjoying what I'm doing in it, I'm kind of okay with that for the time being, and see where it goes.

Al Elliott [00:50:06]:
I think that's a really, really important distinction to think about why you're starting a business. And if you are a 22-year-old, and you don't mind working 20 hours, because you got the energy to work 20 hours a day, and all you want to do is be a millionaire by the time you're 30, then that's a different business, to when you are perhaps our age, and you're like, well, I either don't have or don't want to spend most of my time on this. Cool. And I think that if you watch Dragons' Den, you'll have this idea that a lifestyle business is a bad thing. You know, quite often they'll go, 'Well, this is just a lifestyle business.' And it's like, fine. Because that's beautiful. If you want a lifestyle business, that's your business. Have it. I think they are very much looking and going, the whole idea of me getting room boxes that I can rent out, that's the way they look at businesses. How do I turn my one pound into four pounds? Or in Levi Roots' case, my one pound into 400 pounds. They've got a different way of looking at it. So, Dragons' Den is fun to watch, but it's not something you should be emulating, unless you desperately want to make money, or you desperately want to, or not desperately, but you want to increase the cash you've got in on hand. Fine, if that's that, go and start a systematized business. Most people, certainly at our age, they want to start something which they're going to wake up and enjoy. And you've made that decision, and that's cool. And the reason why mean Al came out was because I wanted people to hear that you don't always have to love what you do if your priority is to make money. And the other thing is that, if you are running out of runway, which I know you're not, but if you are running out of runway, you may need to do that. You may need to do something. I know there's a guy, called Chris Cardell, maybe about 15 years ago, he's quite famous, he used to do all the online workshops and stuff, marketing, et cetera. And when he started his business, he wanted to do workshops and sell media. He's one of the OGs of the selling content. He wanted to do that. But what he did was, he did consultancy on the side for companies. He didn't really want to do consultancy for, because that paid the bills to allow him to work in evenings on the other thing. And I think I want your listeners to understand that it's not all, very few people say, 'I'm going to start a business', and then in month three, they're going, 'It's going really well. I made a 100 grand this year.' Most people spend the first 12 months making no money. And that's when they give up. Because they have to. Or they don't see a route to it. Just do something on the side to make money. You'll put that oxygen mask on first. The most important thing for you is to have as much runway as you need. Because let's be honest, a lot of people don't necessarily want to be rich. They just want to be able to go to the cash machine and take 50 quid out whenever they want.

Jeremy Cline [00:52:48]:
And what you just said there about the first 12 months, you probably won't make any money, I think that's something that people need to hear. And I've heard somewhere someone say that 18 months is probably a good period of time before you're going to be making any money. And you can find lots of stories around social media of people who have managed to shorten that time period, but they're probably going to be the exceptions. That's why there's a story around them. So, X, Y, Z had nothing, and then three months later, he was making his first million. That's unusual. On the one hand, okay, someone has done it, so why can't you? Well, yes. And they are probably still an outlier. And so, whilst it might work out that way for you, chances are it won't. And so, it's kind of tinging this idealism with a pretty healthy slug of reality as well.

Al Elliott [00:53:51]:
Exactly. They are noteworthy because they are, as you say, the outlier. And I think that the other part of that, which is quite damaging really, is that if you go on Twitter, particularly if the algorithm starts sending you stuff up that I see, then you'll see like, 'Oh, I made 10 grand this month, and I started it last month, and it's an AI wrapper. And it was brilliant.' And you go, 'Yeah. Cool.' But what you haven't seen is, there's a great guy called Mark ???, he's a French guy. And what you don't see is the nine other AI wrappers they started over the last five years that made absolutely nothing. And so, I think the first lesson is, you're right, don't take everything at face value. If it's noteworthy because they made money, then it's noteworthy for a reason. It's newsworthy because it's the outlier. Secondly, you don't understand what's going on, the ten-year overnight success. Most people who are successful have been at it for ten years. I was bankrupt. I lost everything. I got my car repossessed, and I had two houses repossessed when I went bankrupt, back in 2005. And then, 2007, that's when I started, when my second or third business went really well, which is in the property, and built some wealth. But had you seen me in 2005 not being able to pay my rent, having no car, having to get the bus everywhere because my car had been repossessed, that would have been a different story. And then, if you just take, oh, well, he got into property at the right time in 2006, and look, he built X amount in eighteen months, yes, we did, but that's because I got bankrupt. That's because I got repossessed. Because I entered the repossession. I also started two other businesses before that. They didn't work either. So, really, the journey was from 2000 to 2006 rubbish. Really bad. Negative bank balance. 2006, and mid-2007, very nice. Thank you very much. But don't judge me based on those eighteen months, nineteen months. Judge me based on the entire eight-year period.

Jeremy Cline [00:55:48]:
Yeah. Completely.

Al Elliott [00:55:50]:
I feel like I went off on a rant there. We need to at least pull this back to you, because I started to talk about myself.

Jeremy Cline [00:55:55]:
No. I think that was a really valuable diversion. I think it's something that people will benefit from hearing. I think it's something that I probably need to remember more often than I don't. So, I think, definitely, that was a well worth tangent to dive into. Let's talk about research and development. Because we had had this thing. So, you had said, 'There's this thing called Hampton, you could do something similar in the private world space.' And I still had some doubts about whether it was going to be a painkiller, rather than a vitamin. Oh, yeah, this private members' club, it kind of sounds nice without necessarily solving a problem. And I also knew enough about business at that point that 'build it and they will come' does not work. You need to do a lot more research on figuring out what you are going to offer. So, yes, did you want to talk a little bit more about, we'd had this conversation about, okay, this is a possibility, next step to finding out whether or not it, or indeed something else, is the thing which effectively becomes my first offer.

Al Elliott [00:57:15]:
Yes. And this is something I get really passionate about, I'm really excited about. And the reason, one of the key things that I tried to get across early on, and you picked up on straight away, was that what we're doing here is we are testing hypotheses. So, you're testing hypotheses here. So, what we don't want to do is come and say, 'Right, my beautiful business idea, I want you to sign an NDA before I even tell you it, and it's going to be brilliant.' And you go out, and you go, 'Right. And now let's launch it.' And then, nobody comes, because then you've got your ego wrapped up, and all your dreams and everything wrapped up in this beautiful business. Instead, we treat it like a lab, you and I. We were like, okay, we got a lab. Hypothesis is that private people in the private wealth space, this isn't necessarily the clients, this is just the people who work there, so we're talking accountants, we're talking tax advisers, that kind of thing, estate managers, our hypothesis was that those people would want to meet regularly, and again, don't forget, we're not putting it like a monthly or weekly or quarterly, we're just saying regularly, with other people in their industry, so that they can chat through their problems, potentially network, and they're going to pay for it. And that was our hypothesis. And it had four elements. Will they pay for it? Do they want to even do it? I forget what the other two were, but there was essentially parts to it that we were ticking off. And our idea was that we're going to go out and try this. And if it doesn't work, then one or all of those things are off. So, it might be that people want this, they need it, they love it, but they're not willing to pay for it. Okay. So, that's still a decent idea, but can you look at it from a different point of view? Oh, I wonder if we could get it sponsored by someone. Would that be interesting? Barclays wealth manager, would they sponsor your events for you? So, you start thinking a bit outside your box, as opposed to having this concrete idea going, well, it's got to work because I've now got all the business parts printed, I've done the website for it. I think that's an important thing to remember actually. At this point, am I right in thinking at this point when we're going out there, and we're actually testing the hypothesis, you had no website, no business cards, nothing, no business plan for this, is that right?

Jeremy Cline [00:59:28]:
Yeah. That's absolutely right. And I'd say the exercise that I did next was kind of part of testing the hypothesis, but it was almost like the bit before even testing the hypothesis. So, what you had me do, essentially, what I did was arrange lots of conversations with people who are new in the sector, so old colleagues, old contacts, that kind of thing, and I did mention the idea, but I didn't mention it first. So, I planned the sorts of conversations I was going to have, these sorts of informational interviews. And originally, I was going to say, 'Look, I've got this idea, and I'd like to talk you through it. What do you like about this idea? What don't you like about this idea? What would you need to see to make this a no-brainer for you?' That kind of thing. But it was actually from one of my mastermind groups when I mentioned the idea to them, they said, 'Well, what about making that the second part of the conversation? Why don't you, in the first part of the conversation, just open with some really broad questions? Like, what are the biggest challenges that you face in your job? Start out with that. So, don't go in with any presupposition about where you want to lead people.' It was really hard for me, because even by that stage, I was quite invested in the idea. I really liked it. But I could feel myself just, I had to pull myself back and ask these open, non-leading questions, to find out what people thought. And then, if the responses to that made me think, okay, they could be interested in them, then bring in the idea and ask them what they thought of it. And I'm so glad that I did it that way. One, because it meant that people were just really open about answering my questions and saying what the biggest challenges were. Side note here, I was pleasantly surprised about how open people were. I mean, there were plenty of people who either didn't respond to my email requesting a conversation, or who said no. But there were lots of people who said yes, and for the most part, they were very open and frank and honest about what were the difficult bits in their job, which was all incredibly valuable. And it also effectively wrote my copy for me. I mean, I could just, there were regular themes which came out, which I could then draw out when it came to putting a document together explaining what the offering was. So, I did that first, and then it was in the second part of the conversation where I said, 'Look, this is an idea I've got. What do you think of it?' And I made sure that it was framed in terms of, this is an idea, I'm asking for your advice on the idea. I don't actually have anything to sell. And the conversation was, it kind of keep you posted on how things go. And then, that would help inform me whether it would be someone who I would follow-up with later, if they thought it sounded interesting. There were a few people who said, 'I think it's a great idea, but for me, I can't imagine doing anything worse than going into these groups and sharing my problems with them.' Whereas other people were like, 'Yeah, this is a neat idea, and I don't think that anything exists like this already. So, yeah, no, do keep me posted.' But I remember after I did that, you and I had a conversation where I was still doubtful about whether the idea, having this offering where I offered to facilitate these groups together, whether that was still a painkiller, whether it was actually solving these particular problems for people. And then, that was when, I think, you said, 'Look, Jeremy, this is a science experiment. You're the scientist here. Your job. Now you've got this. Now you've got a really good understanding about what people's pain points are. We did some work on turning that into effectively a sales document. Now it's your job to go out there and see whether on the back of the conversations you've had with people, this is something that someone is willing to pay for.'

Al Elliott [01:04:08]:
Yes. And I think what really impressed me about this, because I'm being really honest, I was sceptical whether you're actually going to do this because it was painful. And I could see it in your face when I was saying, 'You need to go out there and talk to people.' You're a bit like, 'Oh, is there not another way? Can I not just ask ChatGPT, or can I just email them or send them a survey or something?' But to your credit, you had sent me a message, I think, two weeks after, or maybe even two days after, saying, 'Right. Okay. I've emailed 40 people. I've got 30 calls booked.' I'm like, that's brilliant, mate. That's absolutely brilliant. And I didn't think that you would do as much of it as you did. And you did, and it was phenomenal. I think this is the most important thing that you need to do. I've just made up an idea of the three stages of business where you start off with the scientist, and that's the bit you're doing now. So, that's working out hypothesis, testing hypothesis with the market. Then, you become the artist. That's when you actually create your offer, and you take it to market, and you design what it's going to look like, you design the whole thing. Then, there's capitalist. And that's the bit where you essentially say, 'Can I put one pound in this and get four pounds out?' And those are your three stages, which sounds to me like I should write a book on this, called The SAC Method or something, and sell coaching or whatever. Anyway, I jest, obviously. What you were talking about there with the scientist phase was something based on the book called the Mom Test, M-O-M, because it's American. I forget who it's by. Definitely, definitely worth reading. And he's talking about when he's creating software. And he says, if you go to your mom, and you say, 'I've got a great idea for this piece of software, what do you think?' She's going to go, 'Oh, I love that, sounds brilliant! Yeah. Yeah, I'll bet you'll be a millionaire from that!' And if you go to your friends, and you ask them, 'What you think about this piece of software?', they're going to say the same thing because they want to support you. What you did was what he advocates, which is, go in there and start a conversation and say, one of the best things you can do with software is say, 'What are you currently using Excel for that is really cumbersome?' Because that uncovers so many niche software opportunities that could be built now with Cursor AI, with them, I can't remember what it's called, there's lots of them out there, Bolt. So, you can uncover that. So, what you did there was go out there and essentially say, 'What do you use Excel for?', but in your world. You know, what are you doing manually? What's your biggest problem? What really annoys you? What's cumbersome? Now that's from the Mom Test, and it's definitely well worth reading for anyone who's listening to this. Stop now, pause, go and buy that if you're in this stage, because I think you're going to love it. Second book, which is a bit OG, is by a guy called Ryan Levesque, called Ask, and that one is more about surveys. That's worth reading, but he seems to suggest that all you have to do is send out a survey, and you get all the responses, and then essentially, you can build your product. It's not like that. You need to have these one-to-one conversations that you had. And I think, first of all, well done, dude. You did it. You did the hard work. You uncovered some problems. Secondly, well done because you went in it not trying to validate an idea, but more trying to test a hypothesis with the idea that you will change it if it doesn't come back with results, which I think is cool and why you're on the roads to success so quickly as you are, whereas most people would be like, 'No, I think Facebook for dogs is definitely, we're going to call it Dogbook. I've registered the domain, which is great. You know.

Jeremy Cline [01:07:32]:
Yeah. And the idea of having these conversations, it was one I was already aware of, you and I are both aware of Pat Flynn's smart passive income, and he was someone who is always saying that. And yes, so I was aware of the idea, but again, it was one of these things, okay, yes, all right, I need to do it now. And you're right, I was terrified of the idea. It's one of these things where it felt really uncomfortable, and it probably took me two days to send the first email, because I just met this massive resistance, maybe draft the email, and it's like, 'Oh, no. Let's just see what's going on Twitter.' Or whatever it is. But something that I've learned is that when I break the seal on it, so to speak, it gets its own momentum, and you realise that it's not that scary, especially when people come back to you and say, 'Yeah, sure.' And it generates a bit of a flywheel. And I'm sure I found this in loads of situations. Like when I started the podcast, those first few emails to people saying, 'Would you like to be a guest?', it just feels really difficult, and you start questioning it. Who am I to ask this person to be a guest or to have a conversation? But I think, like anything, it just comes with practice. And the coaching, the coach training that I did definitely helped, because I know the value of asking open questions and making sure if someone says, 'Oh, well, I don't like this idea because of this', I don't come back with, effectively in the nicest possible way, saying, 'Well, you know, you're wrong because', but asking them instead, 'Okay, so what makes you say that, and how would you answer that question?' So, that's valuable. But just doing it, just starting the process, and I'm starting to recognise those feelings of resistance, so I'm now at the stage where I'm having conversations with people to see whether they would like to participate in my offering. And when that started, again, I was meeting the same resistance, even more so, because I wasn't just asking people for a conversation, but I was asking potential customers to pay me for something, which is really, doing it when it's something for myself rather than in a business, it just felt really, really uncomfortable. But I guess it's one of these things, it's a muscle that you've never exercised before, then, yeah, of course, it feels uncomfortable. It's not surprising. But the more you do it, the more comfortable it starts to feel.

Al Elliott [01:10:14]:
100%. I think we're going to go on to the artist stage in my little, my new paradigm that I'm going to be copywriting before you put this out. But we're going to the artist in a second. But just going back to the scientist thing, there's a reason why most academics and most intelligent people are not good at starting businesses. Because they are so used to having all the answers, and they're so used to being right. And they hate someone saying no to them, or they disagree. Whereas the people who start businesses are the ones who don't care whether someone says yes or no. Because the fact is that most won't. You see lots of people going, 'Well, if I could just get 4% of the people who wear shoes to buy my shoes, then god, I'm going to be a billionaire.' It's like, most won't. You're talking about 0.001% of people potentially to buy your shoes, unless you're Nike or Adidas or something who really got an established market. The basis of almost every business is foundational blocks built on the number of times they said no. So, if you can imagine that you're building a house, the foundations of the house and most of the walls, well, every block represents a no. Now I'm slightly contradicting myself in, but I'll expand on that in a second. But when you get to the point of asking people to meet up with you, the majority of people will say no. Not because they don't want to meet up with you, although that's true for some of them, but most of them because they've got so much in the day, they're like, 'I just haven't got the time. I can't be bothered.' When you send out 100 emails, personalise those 100 emails, you might go, 'I've just spent two days personalising these emails, so every single one of them is perfect.' And you'll notice that probably 60% of them don't even get a reply. They're probably not even opened. But the fact is, you've had to send out 100 to get 20 replies, to get 10 calls. You've had to do that. You can't just send a better email to get those 20 calls and send 20 emails out. You have to go 100, so you start off with 100 people you contact, 20 people reply, 10 of them get on a call with you, five say they'll buy, three will actually pay you some money. That's the universal way of human nature. It's the way that you sell anything, even Apple. You think Apple, one of the most successful companies on the planet, yet, overall, in most countries, most people don't have Apple phones. Most people have Android. So, even the most valuable company in the world only has a 30% worldwide share of the smartphone market. And you think, god, well, Apple, they can do no wrong. Well, seven out of 10 people decide they don't want an Apple phone. So, I think that it's really important to understand that there are a lot of people that sit there and go, 'Well, if I write the perfect email, then everyone will reply.' No, you could write the perfect email, and still 40% of people will never even open it

Jeremy Cline [01:13:04]:
Yeah. And I think one point that's worth adding to that is, it's another Pat Flynnism where he says the riches are in the niches, and the fortune is in the follow-up. So, you send an email, you don't get a reply, and then a week later, you send a follow-up. Just seeing if you've got that email, I'd love to have that conversation, or something like that, something short. The number of times that that second email converted was quite telling that made me think, yes, it's worth doing. And there was part of me which was like, oh, god, now I've got to chase him. Oh, no, now I've got to chase him again. But you get results that way. Sometimes you just need that extra touch point. And so, I would have that, the fortune is in the follow-up, going through my head every time I thought, 'No, they're not interested, I'm not going to send it.' Because it's not my job to know whether or not they're not interested or whether it was just the wrong time or whether an extra nudge means they're going to get back to me. So, that was really important, actually, I think.

Al Elliott [01:14:07]:
Yes. And I think that's something which a lot of people miss, because, again, that fear of no, that fear of saying no, of someone replying back with some kind of expletive, or someone saying, 'Please never contact me again.' It's hurtful. It's not nice. But you have to get to the point where you follow-up people respectfully, because you are going to get a few 'Foxtrot Oscars', and you're going to get a few people who say yes, okay. And I think just as a little story, when I had my property company, essentially, we did sell and rent back. So, we would buy people's houses who were getting repossessed, we'd buy them and rent it back to them on a 100-year lease. So, we tried to be the most ethical way we could do it, but we were giving them 75% of what the house was worth. That was what was in it for us. Then, we gave them an option to buy it back. And we tried to be as, whilst making sure we made money, we tried to be the best in the industry, and we were the best in the industry for our offer. Which brings us onto the offer in a second. But one of the things I used to do was, every Monday I'd sit there, and I'd print out, I wrote a bit of software that would essentially track where people were up to, and they had seven letters that went in the post. So, this database would essentially track who needed what letter, and then it would print out a load of letters for me. I'd fold them, put them in envelopes, probably took me most of the morning, put them in envelopes, put them in the post, knowing that if we're sending out 100 of these a week, almost nothing happened. But then, occasionally, once a month, we get someone ringing up and going, 'Yeah, okay, look, can we come around and chat to you? You saw us back in April. I thought I was back on top. I'm not. Can you come in? We want to talk to you.' And almost all of them said, 'The reason why I chose you is because you kept writing to me. Everybody else came down, made me a lower lowball offer, when I said no, they took their stuff and went off home.' And those were worth hundreds of thousands of pounds, those letters, because they brought in those people who everyone else had given up on.

Jeremy Cline [01:16:07]:
Yeah. Let's talk about the offer stage or the artistry stage in the patent pending Al Elliott business framework.

Al Elliott [01:16:16]:
Yes. Let's talk about one of my favourites.

Jeremy Cline [01:16:19]:
So, I had these nearly 50 conversations. I was identifying some patterns. I had some great copy thing, quotes I could use. I now had to turn this into some kind of an offer, and I still had these doubts about whether what I was going to offer was the group membership programme.

Al Elliott [01:16:50]:
Before you go on, sorry to interrupt, but I think it's probably important just to establish. When we say offer, we're not talking about a special offer. We're talking about what we're going to actually go to market with, what the actual product or service is going to be offering. And I think it's just important, because I see some people listening who go, 'Offers', and their only concept is buy one, get one free. That's not what we're talking about here. Sorry. Carry on.

Jeremy Cline [01:17:13]:
No, no, no, that's really important. So, then you brought to my attention the book $100M Offers by Alex Hormozi. One of the exercises he mentions in that book is going through all the problems and challenges that people mention, and figuring out what would be the solutions that you could offer. And he encourages you to be as creative as possible, even to the point of ridiculousness. So, if a challenge that someone has is, they don't have time to go and shop healthily, then you could provide a personal shopping service. Clearly, it's not scalable, and it probably wouldn't work as a business idea, but he says, don't discount that. So, remember, the next phase was going through that exercise. Is there anything you'd like to add to that?

Al Elliott [01:18:10]:
Plenty. Plenty. First of all, go and buy Alex Hormozi's book. I'm not on commission, obviously. Alex doesn't even think about me at all. But the book is phenomenal, and it's nothing brand new. Sorry, Alex. There's nothing in there that's new. It just consolidates all the existing knowledge into, A, as the first part of the story, which is cool, and B, he just puts it into a formula, which I wish I could remember. But essentially, he's like... In fact, you know, I'm not going to spoil it. Go and look at the book, and you'll see the formula about a third to two thirds of the way through, there's an entire chapter on this formula. Follow that, and you will come up with a hundred million dollar offer, guaranteed. What I think is cool about this, though, is you didn't just go, 'All right, this is my idea. Let's go through the book and let's craft it according to that.' Which you could have done. But what you've actually done is all these, what, probably 20 to 40 hours’ worth of conversations you got with people, that you've logged, you've transcribed, you've added in ChatGPT to analyse and whatever, they're all add-ons like you've said. So, you could look at it and go, right, well, my biggest problem, let's imagine the biggest problem is time. That's going to be the biggest problem for everyone. I haven't got time. You go, well, I can't really do too much about that. What we can do is, we can have a time management course on this, or we can have a time management speaker coming in, or what about if we talked about the types of software that could be used? What happens if we actually went to a software house, and we've got a load of clients here, you write software, their problem is this, they're using Excel for this, why don't you create something, and we'll sell it, and I'll take a percentage of it. It opens up all these ideas. But also, what it does is, it answers the question, what else could I, A, sell, or B, give away, that would make this a no-brainer offer, make this something people would feel stupid saying no, which I think is Alex's actual terminology. And that's where this qualitative research, is that the right word? Or quantitative? Anyway, asking people, that's where that comes into it. Because you have all the answers. You have all these transcripts, these hundreds of hours or scores of hours where people have told you exactly what they want and exactly how your offer needs to look for them to go, 'Well, I'd be stupid to say no.' And that's where I think it all comes in, with the whole scientist, artist, and then you go capitalist, I think the artist is so much better when you've spent that time being a scientist. Because you have all the information. And it's difficult to get, and it's more exciting to go to the offer and create an offer. But, man, you did it the right way, and you did it beautifully. And now, even if this idea doesn't resonate as well as you think it does, you still have enough data to go back and go, 'Right. What will? How do I tweak it? Oh, do you know what's interesting? A lot of people seem to say that this was a big problem, meeting other or talking to other accountants who deal with high-net-worth individuals.' That's a very small subset. But if you have 80% of those people in the UK in your database, you suddenly become one of the most sought-after people in the UK because you can connect Dave with Judy.

Jeremy Cline [01:21:20]:
It does make sense. Yeah. So, I think this brings us up to date with where I am now. So, we're recording this just at the beginning of February 2025, where I've now started to go out into the world and say, largely to people who I've already spoken to, following that conversation, this is where I've got to. And I'm still largely framing it in terms of, 'What do you think?' There's been a few people who have said, 'I'd like to invite you to this to be a beta member, become a member of the first group.' And I still feel like I am in experimentation phase. So, there have been people who have said yes, which I don't know why I should be surprised at that, but I was a bit. And I think what I'm looking to do is to see whether enough people say yes that I can at least get the first group going. And that's also, I think, been quite important, is to focus on the what's next. Because my mind has been expanding with all the ways that I could grow this. So, multiple groups, groups aimed at different types of people, at different levels of seniority, bringing in guest speakers, having annual dinners, offering extra things, which I don't know what they are yet, but there's all sorts of things that I could add on in the future. But one of the things that I've been saying is, yes, and that's all great, but the most important thing you do now is to get this first group together. Get six people, maybe even four people, four to six people who say, 'Yes, I am prepared to be a guinea pig in your beta group and to try you out.' That's the thing that I'm now focusing on above all else and trying desperately not to get stranded by anything else.

Al Elliott [01:23:31]:
Well, that seems like a really good point to start talking about lessons and stuff that we've both learned from this process. So, if you were to summarise, because there's a lot to summarise there, and we were speaking for an hour and twenty, but if you were to summarise it, what would you say were the top three lessons, for someone listening, that you've learned whilst you've been down this route?

Jeremy Cline [01:23:56]:
Number one, finding a niche. Finding that focus. So, that was something that you said in one of our conversations. When you have that niche and have that focus, you know what you're going to do when you get up the following morning, rather than getting to your desk and thinking, 'Oh, crikey, what am I going to do now?', because you've just got so many different ideas. Number two, which, again, we touched on earlier, for me, definitely getting that help and support. I can't tell you how much difference it's made. I genuinely count my lucky stars that you decided to take an interest in me. I mean, goodness knows what I would have been doing at this stage had we not started working together. But it's something, I need to, whenever I, I don't know, feel the resistance to, I could just figure it out myself, I know that I really do need to get someone else involved. So, that's probably the second most important lesson. What am I going to put in my number three slot? I think it's this idea of recognising and acknowledging the discomfort. So, even saying to myself, 'I am scared about doing this. I am nervous about doing this.' Having the awareness of that, but doing it anyway, I think that's also been an important awareness. So, when I feel myself procrastinating, and I might even go to myself, 'Jeremy, you're procrastinating. Okay, you're going to allow yourself to procrastinate for the next 10 minutes and look at Twitter, but then after that, you are going to do this.' It's having the awareness that once you get through that fear and do it, break that seal, that's where, it's that old cliche about the comfort zone and where the growth happens, you genuinely do need to get out of the comfort zone in order to make that growth happen. And what I'm just going to add on to that is that there are ways to make that easier. I remember, crikey, it must have been 30 years ago, going to the US and going to the aerospace museum on the mall in Washington. And they had a great big cinematic thing about Air Force pilot training. And they said, it takes so many hundreds of hours of air combat before you're basically good enough and basically likely to survive your first engagement. And the way they give you that experience is by doing a load of dummy exercises. They make it as close as possible, but they give you that experience through this training. And that's something that I have incorporated using AI. So, using the ChatGPT voice function, I have told it, I've told ChatGPT who I want it to be, and I have practiced some of these conversations. So, the first conversation, these informational interviews where I was asking people their problems and challenges, I practiced that with ChatGPT first. And just the act of doing it and actually saying it out loud and responding to what the AI was sending back to me was really, really valuable. And then, again, I've practiced subsequent conversations. So, just doing that just to get used to hearing the sound of your own voice and doing something a bit different, that's actually been really helpful in breaking that fear. So, those are my top three lessons.

Al Elliott [01:27:45]:
And I love this one about ChatGPT. I think what a lot of people, probably not your listeners, because they're probably already into ChatGPT, but bear in mind that we are a very small subsegment of the population who understand chat ChatGPT and know how to make it work, the majority of people have never even heard of it, or they've heard of it and don't know what it is. They think it's some computer in the sky. The one thing that I think people don't understand or don't use ChatGPT properly enough for is exactly that. Treat them like a child, or as my business partner in the property thing rather unfairly says, like a lawyer, in that they are incredibly intelligent, but you have to tell them specifically what to do. Because a lawyer, their job is not to be creative. Their job is to protect you and solve problems. And you need to tell them, 'Right, this is exactly the scenario I'm trying to protect against', and the lawyer will be incredible and go through all things you never would have thought of. But you can't just say, 'Make me a contract', because they'd be like, 'Well, I need to know a lot more.' Same with ChatGPT, I think. That's the first thing, don't expect them to be a magic box. They are incredibly, incredibly intelligent, but you have to tell them what you want. And secondly, there's something that you've done, you can create actual chats, and you can give custom instructions to say, 'Right, you are now a customer, potential customer. You're a lawyer. You do this. You do this. I am going to pitch you on this, and I want you to make the pitch difficult for me.' And then, use a voice, and they'll push back with objections that you probably wouldn't have come up with and go, 'Oh, bloody hell. How do I say that? How do I deal with that?' But then, that's the kind of thing which is, I think ChatGPT is incredible when you know how to use it and treat it like a very intelligent but petulant child. They will not do what it's told until you very specifically tell it what it's told. One cool thing I learned, actually I used Claude more than ChatGPT now, but it's just to reply to whatever they're giving you and say, 'This is great, but do you think you can do better? What would you improve?' And I mean, I think you and I have talked about, you may have even given me the phrase to do that, and the resulting output is usually twice to three times as good.

Jeremy Cline [01:29:52]:
Yeah. A friend of mine said something similar. He responds to almost everything with, 'I don't think that's right. Try again.' And that seems to get results. So, those are my three biggest takeaways. I'm curious to know, and slightly fearful of asking the question, but curious to know what you've seen from the outside. As we've been working together, what's the kind of things where you've thought, how should we put this, things I've done well, things I could do better, things I need to do more of, so yeah, something like that. Pick a framework, whatever feels good for you.

Al Elliott [01:30:24]:
I think what I really have liked seeing is you taking action on some of the difficult things. Because for most people, the thing you put off is a thing that you really should be doing. And whether that's exercising, whether that's sales, whether it's whatever, the thing that you go, 'Oh, I really don't want to do that', is probably the most impactful thing. And to begin with, I felt that you were, I didn't push you much, because I didn't even know what relationship we had at the beginning, but then latterly, I did push you and go, 'This is the most important thing', and I could see your face going, 'I don't want to do this.' But then, you did it anyway. And that, the first time you did that, that actually surprised me that you did it. Because I was expecting to come on the call and you went, 'Yeah, I tried a couple of those emails, didn't really work, so I've got a new idea.' And you didn't. You went, 'No, I've done it.' And that was fantastic. I think I made a couple of notes as you were talking there. I think the second thing that I've really enjoyed watching your thinking develop, and I mean, being a coach, I'm sure you've come across Jim Rohn, if listeners haven't come across Jim Rohn, he's the guy who I think was Tony Robbins' mentor, and Tony Robbins learned everything from Jim Rohn, I think that's right, please don't sue me, Tony, if that's not right. But he said something like, in order to get what you want, help others get what they want. And that was something which you almost innately had. And that was cool. When you were sitting down, you weren't going, 'How do I make loads of money? How do I sell this thing?' You were like, 'Okay. How do I help people to live a better life?' And that was cool, and I thought that was brilliant. The third thing, which I can almost quote Jim Rohn again, is that you are the sum of the five people you spend most time around, and you recognised that. And also, what's interesting is that you've referenced it three or four times in this chat, that you needed to be around people who are willing to push you a bit more. The temptation is, when you start a business, to find someone who is like you and go, 'Right, let's go into business together.' And in fact, you should find someone who's completely opposite, who you're going to argue with all the time. Because if they have the same skills you've got and the same outlook as you've got, then you're only one part of an entire organ, of the trifecta you need, to create a great business. So, I think there's that. I think, actually, you were pushing for, like, yes, I'm ready to talk to you now because I've done my work. That was cool. So, I think for anyone who wants to have a great relationship where they're going to get lots of effort and success out of coaching, the top three things that you've done well is come with a very open mind, when I talked about being a scientist, it clicked with you, you went, 'Okay, yep, got it. All right. I'm not in love with my idea. I'm in love with helping people.' Secondly, take action on that most unreasonable and uncomfortable thing that you need to do. And thirdly, whether it's just accountability, whether it's actually getting advice from someone like me, I don't know, I suspect that it's more the accountability than it is my experience, I don't know, but just be accountable to someone. And don't find someone who's like you a bit, not like you, Jeremy, but like you, if you're a bit flaky, don't find someone who's also flaky. Find someone who's actually going to go to you, 'You didn't do that. Why not?' And then, stop talking. Because then you have to justify all of the reasons why you didn't do what you said you were going to do, which is very uncomfortable. So, that's my thoughts on it.

Jeremy Cline [01:33:46]:
Yeah. And I think learning humility is really important. Being able to, fortunately, most of the people that I've worked with have, they will usually say things in a nice way, but still, there's a point to this. So, there's a friend of mine who will say something like, 'I say this with love, but...' And then, you know the fist is coming. And something that I've definitely had to work on is accepting that. And I mean, just for me, personally, that was, I suppose, a bit of a challenge, because historically, I was like the school swot, very academic, used to get things right, and so consequently, god, I could probably go back into childhood a bit here, but criticism could feel hard, could feel uncomfortable, and so I wanted to avoid that. Whereas now, I'm like, no, this is someone who's trying to help me, they've got valid points, I need to be open to that and to accept that. And it takes a lot of work, but I'm finding that it's a more successful mindset doing it that way.

Al Elliott [01:35:07]:
Totally agree. And I think it's interesting you're saying that you were the swot, you were right. I kind of have yet another idea for a book in my head: Be Rich, Not Right. And I think the idea is, I don't think you can be both. I think you have to get it wrong a lot in order to make money. Because, let's be honest, if you're day trading, 90% of your trades won't work, but the 10% will more than account for those 90% of losses. I feel like I'm going to take charge here, but I know we've only got a couple of seconds left, but I do want to hear from you what you're most excited about for this venture, and maybe what you might be scared about.

Jeremy Cline [01:35:45]:
I think it's two sides of the same coin. I'm excited about what it could look like if it does work, and I'm scared that it won't. So, it really is something that lands with me. The idea of me being in groups, facilitating groups, doing a bit of group coaching maybe, with all these people that, you know, I know their backgrounds, I used to work with some of them. Creating this space, and if it works, and people are getting a lot out of it, and they want to renew and be part of it for another year and that kind of thing, just the idea of creating that thing and it working really excites me. You know, take a step back and go, I can't believe that I've made this, and people are loving it. The idea of that really excites me. The idea of it failing and it not being the thing, and then I know that I'm not going to go back to square one for the reasons that you said about the fact that I had these conversations with people, and so I've already got a lot of background information, but there is a big part of me that I might not get invested in this idea, it is still a really cool idea that I really like. And so, there's part of the, but what happens if it flops? What happens if it doesn't work? What the hell do I do then? What happens is that the end of that runway comes closer and closer. So, that's probably the thing that I'm most scared of, and I guess my way of dealing with that at the moment is just to keep going and see what happens.

Al Elliott [01:37:25]:
I love that. I love that. And a very amazing honesty there, I think. The key thing, I think the key takeaway I'd love, if anyone listened to this entire, well, obviously, people will listen to this, but if there was one thing that we're taking away from it is, where I think you'll succeed is that you're still in scientist mode, and you're not going to move to artist mode until you actually have a working hypothesis. And the fact is that you say, 'I'm worried that people are not going to like what I'm doing', some of it, they won't. Some of the events you'll put on, you'll do this, and people go like, 'Why have you done that? That's a waste of time. I really don't like that.' But if you keep asking them, 'How can I make it better? What did you not like about today's session? What did you love about today's session?', you're going to start to tease out all that stuff that people actually love, and you double down on that. And again, the whole point is being rich, not right. You don't have to get it right first time. You won't get it right first time. But if you expect you will, I think you're going to end up with being very disappointed and probably very poor.

Jeremy Cline [01:38:24]:
Oh, I've absolutely loved this conversation. So, grateful for you, well, for everything that you've done, but obviously, for coming on today. Give some people some links for where you'd like them to find you.

Al Elliott [01:38:34]:
Cool. Yeah, I think the best thing to do is, if you like this, and you want a conversation with me, then go to chatwithal.com, you can book a call with me. If you just want to help us and support us, then go and maybe just download an episode of Truth, Lies, and try it out, see what you think, because we're very proud of it, and we think it's great. And we have some fabulous guests on it. That would be the best way, I think. So, truthliesandwork.com or just search your podcast app for Truth, Lies and Work.

Jeremy Cline [01:39:01]:
And I will emphasize that Truth, Lies and Work is a fantastic podcast. I think I've almost gone back through the entire back catalogue and thoroughly enjoyed it. So, it's been great. Al, thank you so much for coming on.

Al Elliott [01:39:15]:
Thank you for having me.

Jeremy Cline [01:39:17]:
Okay. Hope you enjoyed that conversation with Al Elliott. Big shout out to Al, not just for coming on the podcast and being part of a conversation that I really enjoyed there, but for all the help that he's given me over the past few months. Something I would like to draw out from that conversation, which we didn't really touch on. Now I recognise that I have been incredibly lucky to have someone like Al giving up their time and helping me out with my own business. I absolutely meant what I said when I mentioned that I just couldn't believe my luck. Having said that, the opportunity wouldn't have arisen had I not met Al in the first place. The way I met Al was to invite him and his wife Leanne onto my podcast. At the end of the interview, I had some questions for them about the work that they did and how I could potentially get involved in that kind of work, because it really did interest me. And so, that then led to further conversations, which then eventually led to Al going, 'Come on, let's take a look at your business.' Opportunities arise when you put yourself out there. You don't necessarily know what's going to come from a particular relationship or a conversation, but you'll never know if you don't instigate it in the first place. I'm an introvert by nature, and certainly to begin with, and still to some extent, I find it pretty tough to reach out to random strangers to ask their advice. And when you don't get a reply, it can be pretty disheartening. But I've learned that when you do get that positive reply, when someone goes, 'Yeah, sure, I'll have a conversation with you', something is going to come out of it. You'll learn something, or that person will have another connection that they can introduce to you, which might help you, or you may have a connection for them that you can introduce to help them. We're kind of at this weird point where technology makes it both really easy to connect with people on the other side of the globe, but there seems to be less willingness to have conversations. And I mean conversations where you're talking to one another, not just exchanges of emails or exchanges of WhatsApp messages or whatever. For me, it's those interactions, whether on screen or in person, where magic really can happen. So, if there's just one thing I'd like to leave you with is that. Look for those opportunities to have conversations, and I mean those conversations where you are opposite that person, whether on screen or in real life, in real time, talking to one another. I'll put the show notes for this episode on the website at changeworklife.com/200. That's changeworklife.com/200. And wow, it does sound a little bit strange saying that number, 200 does feel like quite a lot of episodes actually. And this one was a bit different. Perhaps it was a bit more business focused. Although I think there's an awful lot in there that you can also take into a work situation. When I'm coaching around job applications or interviews, it often comes up that people hire because they have a problem to solve. They've got work which needs doing, and they don't have the capacity to do that work. So, you are a potential solution to that expensive, painful problem. But what I'd really like to know from you is, what did you think of this episode? It was a bit different. Did you prefer the format? Do you prefer my usual interview format? Did you like the topic? Any and all feedback will be welcome. And you can send me a message using the contact form on my website at changeworklife.com/contact. So, thank you for making it this far. If this is the first episode you've listened to, or if you're a regular listener, thank you for being part of my journey to 200 podcast episodes. And guess what? I'm not stopping. There's more great interviews and great episodes coming your way, so if you haven't subscribed to the show, make sure you do, because there's going to be another great interview in two weeks' time, and I can't wait to see you then. Cheers. Bye.