Modern Wisdom
#946 - Daniel Priestley - $0 To $1M: The New Rules For Building A Thriving Business
Mon, 26 May 2025
Daniel Priestley is an entrepreneur, speaker, and author. We’ve seen more change in business over the last 10 years than in the 50 before it. From the rise of artificial intelligence to a total cultural reset. how do you adapt to the current landscape, and what timeless truths still drive lasting success? Expect to learn about the current state of the UK, what Daniel learned about his discussion with Gary’s Economics, the process for taking your business form $0 to $1M per month, how to get from $0 to $10k per month first, how to charge more for you business and how to sell it, where Daniel finds his source of happiness, which aspects of your business you should outsource to AI and much more… Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Get 35% off your first subscription on the best supplements from Momentous at https://livemomentous.com/modernwisdom Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D, and more from AG1 at https://ag1.info/modernwisdom Get up to $350 off the Pod 5 at https://eightsleep.com/modernwisdom Get the best bloodwork analysis in America at https://functionhealth.com/modernwisdom Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: https://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: https://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: https://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - Get In Touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What are the current challenges in the UK economy?
But yeah, it's interesting that some people coming out of the UK have sort of disproportionate results, especially given how poor the sort of entrepreneurial spirit is in the UK. They tend to leave.
There's you, Jay Shetty. There's now, well, Ali Abdaal. There's now Stephen Bartlett. Yeah, what's going on?
What do you make of the state of the UK at the moment?
They're making every mistake. The UK should be so fundamentally strong in terms of it's a great time zone, it's got an incredible background, amazing institutions, English speaking, fast internet. There's so many great things about the UK. Natural borders, like it's an island. Great farming and farmland. It's a very fertile place.
And through policy decisions, everything is in collapse at the moment. Everything is in decline. They're overtaxing people so people are leaving. Only 1% of people pay 30% of the taxes so that basically if a small group of people leave, it has a devastating impact on the finances.
They've just done this terrible thing to farmers and now farmers that have been farming for generations are getting out of their farm businesses. Yeah. I mean, it's just really sad because when I arrived 20 years ago in London from Australia, London was the best place in the world. It was the place to be.
It was the most entrepreneurial place in the world and all the money was there, all the talent was there, all the fun was there. I mean, London is still fundamentally a great place and it's just like...
Yeah, they're just ruining it. How much is this is top down versus bottom up? Because the culture in the UK, the approach that people have to risk their preparedness to kind of break free from the trodden path, that also seems to contribute as well.
The issue with the UK is that if you're super ambitious outside of London, you go to London. And if you're super ambitious, you go to the world. Like the UK, you've got to remember, the UK took over the whole world.
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Chapter 2: How can businesses transition from $0 to $1M?
You know, people who want to do cupcakes, coffee, restaurants, burger vans, all terrible businesses.
Bly chain, perishable, tethered, can't ship worldwide.
Yeah. And it doesn't have scalability. So if you want to sell more burgers, you need to open more burger restaurants. So whereas software, if I want to sell more software, I just give more people usernames and passwords. I can build software once and then I can just onboard new customers at scale.
So anyway, high volume, low value businesses are notoriously hard because most people just don't have access to volume. If you're an influencer and you've got a million followers, by all means, go for it. Yeah. The next one that is notoriously good is B2B services. So business-to-business services. So for example, if you say, hey, I can help companies introduce their first chatbot.
Chapter 3: What is the importance of working for an entrepreneur?
We charge $3,500. We come in and do a deep dive into your business. We find out what are the most common customer success questions that need answering, customer service questions. and we're going to help you set up an AI chatbot to answer 70% of your customer service inquiries. And the package starts at $3,500, or if you're a bigger business, it might be as much as $15,000.
And in that kind of business, you only need four, five, six sales a month, and you're in the tens of thousands of dollars already. So B2B services is just notoriously great. Anything where you can make a sale, and then the lights come on, Uh, is a really good business as opposed to where you need set up costs and then you can make a sale.
So like, you know, you, you know, we're in a, a building that has like, I don't know, dozens of businesses here. If you could literally just walk around and say, Hey guys, we're doing a cybersecurity, uh, thing for people in this area. If you're interested in making sure you don't get hacked, we can help you with that. And then you just make all the sales and you say, okay, cool.
We're going to be available next month to start this. So you sell first and then build or sell first, then deliver. Great businesses. Sell first, then build is a great principle.
Right. Yeah. Because you don't put any liability down before you actually have guarantees that people are going to want this thing.
Exactly.
So it's the waiting list with financial commitment.
Yeah. You're getting some commitment there. Yeah.
Okay. What gets you from zero to 10K a month?
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Chapter 4: How do you identify a viable business idea?
So as soon as you hire the 13th, you now have a sales team, an ops team, a finance team, right? And now they don't talk. The 13th person introduces just this, we're too big to be small. We're not big enough to be big. Like it's just a world of awkwardness once you've got the 13th person.
Okay. And then 30.
And then, yeah, if you go to 13, you might as well go to 30. Yeah. So at 30, it gets good again. So from 13 to 30, it's too big to be small and too small to be big. The business is not going to work on either. It's going to work as a 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 person team. It's going to work as a 30 to 150 person team. It's not going to work from 12 to 30 people or 13 to 30 people.
So too big to be small, too small to be big. You have this old original crew who are the family who got roped in and they were the ones who used to be there 11 o'clock at night, 5 o'clock in the morning. We used to be friends, man. 16, 17, 18 people, two of them start sleeping together. So you get these relationships and it gets awkward and weird. Unfortunately,
At around 17, 18, 19, 20 people, one of the original crew who was like so useful, that was your Swiss army knife in the beginning days. This person held the company together. They bleed the brand. They are so loyal. And then now they are so like a bottleneck and they're just not good enough.
Because you've hired people that are at a higher skill level than they are and they haven't been able to keep up.
And they just don't fit anywhere. And they just, like, they go through six months of, like, not being a fit. And, like, they're just, like, feeling like an outcast. And they keep pulling the whole, I was there at the beginning, man. Yeah. And you're like, I know, man, but, like, I need you to either sell or this, you know, because the company's turning into specialists now. Mm-hmm.
So now you're going from generalist- Raise your game. Yeah, you've got to raise your game. They may or may not have it in them. In the early days, you might have just taken the neighbor's teenager and brought them on board, and they were amazing, but they're just not up to the game now. So what tends to happen is there's a great shakeup, and the great shakeup is like,
You go from 21 people back down to 15, and it's a dark time. But then if you can press through to 30, you end up with an executive team, a sales team, ops team, delivery, development. Now you've got this really tight unit at 30 people. You've got executives running teams of teams and now you are smashing it. Now you're doing 10 million plus, you've got a million of profit or more.
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Chapter 5: What strategies can help you reach $10K per month?
So they've got a member of staff in that regard that's handling this. Uh, but maybe they have a little bit of much too that's on the side and they do, uh, gigs, but they put music out too. So, okay. So I'm putting music out and I've got a page and you can see my content. Yeah. But then they also, if they're unable to do a gig because they're already booked, they stop booking other people.
And then they take it a little bit off the top. Then they go, well, actually, I mean, I can just put the whole gig together and then maybe I can book myself. I don't, you know, the manager actually becomes an administrative assistant as opposed to a gatekeeper that's in between me and the clients. Yeah. And you start to sort of build this out. The same thing presumably would be for comedy.
It would be if you organize dances and nightclubs, if you can do pop-ups for different coffee shops and stuff like that. Oh, I can get you the events.
You can go out and make this happen. You go and look at anyone who's actually making money. and they've got an ecosystem of stuff. It's never just a thing. It's an ecosystem of things. So take the musicians or the DJs, the most successful of them, they've got music licensing deals, they've got party promotions, they've got merch, they've got live gigs, they've got streaming rights.
So there's this whole ecosystem of products and services that they're making.
Maybe they're doing tutorials online that
They could be doing that.
Yeah, Kigabi or Teachable or something like that.
Could be doing private high-end parties. So there's all sorts of things that they have on their menu of things. So you have to have at least four things that do it. You know, I've worked with consultants where they've struggled along as a consulting business, maybe doing $150,000 a year several years in a row. And then we just get them to write a book.
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Chapter 6: How does a business scale from $10K to $100K?
So look, that's not going to be a life-changing exit. It's very common that that is a slow handover type deal. So what you do is you vendor finance for that one. And you say, look, the business is worth one times revenue. And you go, so you're going to pay quarter of a million and it's going to be over five years, 50 grand a year for five years.
And I'm going to help hand over over the next 12 months. And then if you can't pay the 50 grand a year for five years, then I get to take the business back in whatever form it's in. So it's secured against the business. So that's kind of a, these are these micro exits. Mind you, you can be on the right side. You can be on the other side of that. You can buy a business like that and it's epic.
Like you can buy a business that's doing a few million by just vendor financing it in and almost nothing down and the business can afford it. There's a lot of people now who want to retire. Yeah. And you can buy their business for nothing down. So that's totally a thing.
Once you get to a certain size, especially when you hit seven figures of profit, and then again if you hit five million US dollars of profit, you then get proper exits. And proper exits, what they're looking for is three things. They're looking for a core team of people who won't leave when you leave. So normally that's 30 people.
And they know that four or five or six might leave when you leave, but the whole business isn't going to fall over. So it's not founder dependent. So you want to have 30 people on a team. They're looking for what's called recurring revenues. They really want contracts in place for recurring revenue. So subscriptions, memberships, service level agreements, those sorts of things.
And the final one is called proprietary assets. So it could be the brand, the database. It could be intellectual property. It could be channels to market, you know, those types of things. And when you can present that and you can present a document that shows these are our proprietary assets, you can present a forecast of this is our forward-looking revenue that is contracted.
And this is our org chart of our 30-plus people who are going to stick around after I leave. then you get wildly high valuation, and it's life-changing. So it's a life-changing amount of money all in one hit. You typically can earn more than most people earn in their entire career in one sale. And mind you, we hear about the billionaire ones.
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Chapter 7: What is the role of the key person of influence?
We hear about the Mark Zuckerberg sold a company or whatever. But every day of the week, non-newsworthy, there are people who sell a company for $12 million or $6 million or $22 million. These ones don't even make the news. So you can have these kind of events where you sell the business for a multiple of revenue. One of my businesses, we just turned down an offer for 35 times profit.
And we turned it down. Why did you turn it down? Yeah. Because the business is going like that. And we set expectations around a certain level that we would sell the business. So like there's an actual number that we want to hit, which is like we're slightly off. And because I've been on a journey with these investors and I don't need to sell the business. Keep writing it.
Yeah, keep writing it and just hit that number and then we'll probably do the deal.
Yeah.
But imagine getting 35 years worth of profit in one year, like in one go, like it's life changing. So you can have these kind of exits that are, you know, profound. And all you have to do is prove that the team won't leave. Here's the org chart, that the finance, that the contracted revenue is going to keep contracted. And that you have proprietary assets.
And if you've got those three things, you then can basically put those into a set of documents. And once again, going back to the 30 people, you pitch that business 30 times and you're going to sell it for a life-changing amount of money at that point. So yeah, it's pretty cool. It's pretty wild.
Is there a difference between building a business to sell and building a business to generate cash flow?
Yeah. So a lifestyle business, a lifestyle boutique is normally built around the brand of the founder, the key person of influence. The revenue, you want to keep the team at about eight to 12, never 13. It's geared towards fun, freedom, flexibility, and cashflow. And it's never, it tends to be that it's never worth selling.
And the reason I say that is because when someone crunches the numbers, they go, well, it is founder dependent. Like it's largely built on you. The proprietary assets are mostly linked to you. And then they give you a price of what, and they give you like a transition, 18 month transition plan. And when you kind of look at the price and the transition plan, you go, meh, I'll just keep it.
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