From Finance Career to $1M Coach: The Full Strategy | Simon Alexander Ong

I had a video called "I'm 40" if you're in your 20s or 30s watch this. That's got any 4 million views. That's made us about 22, 23k just from the out of the blue. That's Simon Alexander-Arng. The best-selling author of "Energize" and one of the world's leading personal development coaches. In this episode, he reveals the secrets to his rapid growth on YouTube to 130,000 subscribers in less than 12 months. In a given 12 month period, you just need. and you easily get to 100k. Wow, that's. That is so interesting. We would always have a bias for our "outlier" videos. We would capture those videos into a list and we would try to understand what made that video do well. Was it a title? Was it a way of structured? Was it the way the beginning happened? And then those would become our inspiration. How anyone can build a 1 million a year coaching business? You cannot communicate an idea of product or service. No one wants to listen. Your technical skills could be a ten or the ten. But if your communication skills is only a 5 out of ten, what do you think people think of your technical skills? That's amazing. People do not buy your products, your ideas, or your services as much as they buy your energy. That energy is what sounds. How he lands clients, book deals and speaking gigs? To succeed in business, you have to be able to think like a marketer. Lead with a story that compels the person to sell to themselves. If you can get customers to sell to themselves, your job is done. And so much more. This is a personal branding and coaching business masterclass. I really hope you enjoy it and let's dive in. Simon, thanks so much for doing this, man. Thank you so much for having me. We know each other really well. When I look at you, I think, wow, what an incredible career and business you've got. And you've got big Instagram page, big YouTube page, bestselling book, coaching business, speaking gigs. But I'd love to turn this episode into a step-by-step playbook for someone who sees that now. And thinks that looks really cool. How could I achieve that? Would you be up for talking as through the process of how you build a business and an audience and a career that you love? Yeah, and I'm looking forward to it. I'll take me down memory lane. And it's always a good refresher to remember how I have been on this journey. What comes first? Is it the content creation? Or is it the coaching business? Or does one kind of lead into the other? For me, in my journey, it was the coaching business. So just to give a bit of background, I came from nearly 10 years in corporate. So I was working in the financial services sector. And my entire environment was just spending time with people in my industry. So I was spending long hours each day with people in finance. I went drinking with people in finance. I socialized with people in finance. So I was very much in a bubble. And so if I look back at the steps I took, almost a very first step was changing my environment. Changing my environment not just meant the people I spent time with, because of course I didn't know any entrepreneurs at the time. I didn't know any creators. The first step was changing my mentors. My mentors were authors of books that were my shelves. So it was what I read. It was who I followed on social media. It was the events I attended. It was what I watched. I started creating a lot of that environment more intentionally. And that was really the kickstart to then creating that corporate world. And beginning on this entrepreneurial path. Was that because you were not satisfied at work or you were unhappy at work? Like what was the catalyst there? Yes, I grew up with this mistaken belief that success is defined by your job title, status and money. Very much in my head I had this voice saying Simon, "When you graduate, be a banker, be a doctor, be a lawyer, be an accountant." Great careers for good reputation, good status and very well paid. But it wasn't what fulfilled me. I pursued this career in finance thinking it would be the answer to success. And in hindsight, the global financial crisis was a beautiful blessing in disguise. Not nice at the time. As you can imagine, you're facing redundancy, you're facing volatility in your career. But it really made me begin what I feel is the longest journey we humans make, which I'd eat inches from my head to a heart. And it made me do a lot of introspection. And the questions I started to answer sound simple on the surface, but a few of us actually spend time to answer them, which are things such as what does success mean to you, what does impact mean to you, and what would a fulfilling life look like. Now I didn't have all the answers at the beginning, but I just started brainstorming. I just started putting all of my thoughts onto paper and got curious to just experiment, to try to follow through what I wrote down in that piece of paper. Because I think it's one thing having clarity on what matters most to you. It's another building a life around those answers. And so on the side of my full-time jobs that I took in the years after the financial crisis, I would be very intentional with how I spent my evenings and weekends. Because what I realized is that the life you want, the life you desire, is built in the margins of the life you have. And so I was very intentional how I used those margins in terms of the events I went to, the books I read, the people I spend time with. Where I travel to, where I spent my time in terms of the physical spaces I was moving in. And that started to shift to my mindset. That started to lay the foundations to what I now get to do today. Interesting. So you're like exploring these, these forwards, these questions. You're doing that in your spare time. Yeah. When do you decide to take some action to step away from the finance world and career? It actually came from facing a dilemma. So in 2016, on the side, I built my coaching practice to free clients. But then a dilemma faced me. Do I continue with just free clients and stick with my daytime job? Or do I quit my daytime job and see how big I can build this? Because I knew that if I took on a fourth client, my coaching would suffer because I could only do this on weekends and evenings. And also my day job would suffer. Yeah. And so after months are going back and forth from my head of, do I quit? Do I not quit? What are the pros? What are the cons? Just going through in my head all the time. I decided to hand in my resignation at the end of that year. And beginning of 2017, I went straight into coaching full time. Interesting. And is that coaching exploring those same questions that you're exploring? Absolutely. Yeah. It was coaching people to help shift their mindset about where they could be and awaken their imagination of what was truly possible. Because I was beginning on this journey. I had no idea what I wanted to do in terms of running a business. My wife saw an ad on Facebook on her newsfeed. And she said, "That's this coaching event in London. You should go check it out." It didn't cost any money, but it would only cost me my time. I went there for two days over a weekend. Very open mind. And by the end of that weekend, I said to her, "I think I know what I want to do. And I want to give this a shot." And so I spent two years starting towards those qualifications. And when I qualified, I said, "I want to do something with it. I don't want to just qualify. So in all this time, training towards this and not use it for anything." And so that's what made me want to follow that curiosity and see where it would go. I mean, I had no idea. It would lead to what I now do today. If you told me back then that you could build a five in one-to-one coaching practice, I would have taken it. But I was very naive. I thought if I quit my corporate job and I followed this path, I would make something of it. I didn't know the emotional cost that would come with beginning a journey to the unknown. And what did you make in finance annually, roughly? So annually, you would be making, well, the time I left sort of close to six figures as a base salary. And then on top of that, you have bonuses and other sort of immunization packages and benefits. So it was well paid at the time for what I was doing. And I think for a lot of people, that's what holds us back. Because you can sink into this zone of comfort and not actually pursue the things that make you feel alive. So it paid well. I had to adjust how I related to that in order to build a path away from corporate. And that was an identity shift. So I began to see the money my company was paying me as almost like capital to fund my dream. If I saw it as just a monthly paycheck, I would have blown it on going out, socializing, traveling, and everything else that we spend a lot of money on. But once I saw the money coming in as almost like capital from my dreams, I used it much more with purpose. I would use it to invest in courses, invest in mentorship, invest in travel in order to network and grow my environment. What does that first year look like then? Did jump from free clients on the side to full time? It's for long. You know, I always say entrepreneurship is not for everyone. It's not for the faint-hearted. Because every single day, you are challenged to step out of your comfort zone. You have to take on every role, especially in the first year. When you have no clue, there's no blueprint to follow. And you're just figuring it out yourself as well. So for me, it was understanding how marketing worked. It was understanding how finance and operations worked. It was understanding how to communicate. You know, I grew up as a very stereotypical Chinese person in the sense that I was hardworking, I read a lot. But I would never put my hand up and want to go to the front of the room to talk or share my thoughts. But now when I am the product, I've got no choice. I have to speak, I have to communicate. And I have to sell myself. And so I quickly learned how to speak in front of an audience and the power of communication. I remember watching an interview Warren Buffett and he was asked, "What is the most important skill in business you can develop?" And he said, "Communication." Because if you cannot communicate an idea of product or service, no one wants to listen. Your technical skills could be a ten at a ten. But if your communication skills is only a five at a ten, what do you think people think of your technical skills? They make impressions based on how you communicate. They are buying your energy. And I always say, people do not buy your products, your ideas, or your services as much as they buy your energy. That energy is what sells. That is so cool. And I really want to get into how you hone your communication skills. Whenever I see an Instagram reel pop off, and I think you've had 16 million views or something. In the last few weeks on your account, I always think, wow, he's such a good communicator. It comes across even better in person, but even on social it, the way you come across, the way you communicate is there's something magical about it. So I really want to get into how we can be better at communicating. But let's just touch on that growth then from free to more clients. Is that all through direct outreach, that kind of thing? No, at the beginning, it was just by putting myself out there, by going to events, by connecting with people in person. It was conversations one to one at a time. In hindsight, probably not the most efficient, but at the time it was where I felt I could learn the most, by putting myself out there, and by speaking to people to give them an experience of what I could offer. Now, I liken it to when you go to the cinema, if you see a really good trailer in your head, or if you've got a friend next to you saying, I've got to come back and watch the full film when it's out. Now, in my case, the full film was my coaching product. It was my coaching service. But unless I could deliver a good trailer, nobody would be interested. And so I went out in order to first get comfortable talking to people one on one, and second, understand the process of selling. How do I go from saying, hi, I'm Simon, to let's do this. And so I could only do that by putting myself into the arena. So I got my fourth, my fifth, and my fifth clients, by going out and finding a way to serve people so well, that the only two questions on the head would be, how do I work with you, or you should speak with my friend? And that's how I started. Just one conversation at a time, just in order to understand how business worked. And are these people in banking or finance, or you'll find them at networking events? Yeah, they were from the. The classic number of industries. So I end up working with people in finance, people in professional services, people in entrepreneurship, just a variety of different backgrounds. And I always came back to this idea, when I was thinking, do I go out? Do I go to this event? Do I sign myself up for this? Is that the only way that you increase your luck surface area, is by choosing the option that increases the odds of your success. Keeping in mind success is never guaranteed. All you can do is stack the odds in your favour. And that was what I was doing. Just go out, give people an experience, try and create the best conversation they've had that night, so they'll never forget you. And in time, fingers crossed, they'll come back and say, how do I work with you? That's what I did. That's how I built my fourth, my fifth, and my sixth client. And as my coaching business grew, the speaking organically came from that. I had one client I was coaching from Barclays and Canary Wharf. And she said to me, Simon, I'm really enjoying our coaching session. It's really good in opening the ARB is helping guide me forward in this uncertain path. And I think the leadership team could benefit from you coming in and sharing some of your thoughts and insights. And I said, sure, let's do it. So I delivered this talk and by the end of it, the person who organised it said, Simon, can we book you again? And from there, we also ended up shooting a commercial together, which went out in cinemas across the country and Barclays stores across the country. And that was the beginning of my speaking career. Incredible. So all of this is happening before you're starting to go on the content creation. Absolutely. And journey. Yeah, this was way before the content journey. And way before I had a book there with Penguin. This was me just building from the ground up, just understanding how the game worked, and having one conversation at a time. But very strategically, you know, I don't have time to speak with everyone. So I became very strategic with how I did that, who I did it with, and how I made sure that I could create the setup for these things to happen. And what does that mean? That means starting to niche down on certain types of things before you're working with? Yes, so what I mean by this, so there's a, I don't know if you read about it, it's one of my favourite books called The Third Door by Alex Benayan. So the concept of The Third Door is that when you go to a nightclub, you have two ways to enter. Oh yeah. You have the main entrance, which 90 cents of people will queue up. They hope to get in, but it's not guaranteed. And you still have to get past the balance. You have the second door, which is where the VIPs walk in, the celebrities, the influencers. But there's always, if you're creative enough, a third door. And so I was very conscious of trying to create my own third doors early in my journey. So what I mean by this practically is, if there was a speaker on stage that I wanted to connect with, I would arrive early for that event and sit at the front. Because immediately by doing that one move, I stack the odds in my favour that I will either meet the speaker briefly before he or she goes on stage, or at the minute, I would connect with their team, because I will probably have their team in the front row, or even the organizers of that event. So I could connect with them and say, hey, when you're next looking for a speaker for future event, let's chat. And I realized you meet far more interesting people in that front row, than you do sitting at the back or standing in the spaces left once the event has started. So that was one of the ways I started creating my third doors. And it's how I got to meet the likes and reforlios, Simon Sinek, just by creating third doors. And thinking about the approach in a very different way. And then you have a good example of that. The two I shared just now, Simon Sinek and reforlio, I remember going to an event in London, when he was launching his second book called "Leaders Eat Last". It was hell that the eight club in bank, and the friend of mine was hosting an event. The event was hosted by a company called Table crowd. And she dropped in the message and she said, Simon, I know you'll love this event tonight, because another Simon is speaking. You shared some of his videos with me, I think you will enjoy it. And so I said, sure, put my name down. I arrived extra early. I go to the woman at the front who's got the guest list on the clipboard. And I say, can I just have a look through that to check if some of my friends are coming this evening? So she goes, sure. And I look through the guest list. And I see that me and Simon Sinek were the only Simon in that list. And I said to myself, Dad is going to be my icebreaker. And so I see him at the bar, he's preparing his notes, head of delivering an after dinner speech. And I said, Simon, good to meet you on the other Simon tonight. And that's how we started that conversation. With Marie Fulio, again it was a book launch in a private members club. But this was packed, this was a packed event. And so I knew there was a little chance to speak with her or to have any meaningful conversation. So I just started to talk to people in front of her. And there was this guy who was wearing very loud clothing. And at the end of the talk, I said to myself, I've got to go and speak to this guy. There's something about his energy. You know, he's clapping away whenever Marie is speaking. He's very animated. He's got certain energy about him. So I walk up to him and introduce myself. And I say, I just noticed that you were apprauding heavily throughout Marie's talk. You must be a big fan of her work. And he said, yeah, I'm a massive fan and wherever she is I am. And I'm like, wow, you are a really big fan. And he looked at me with a puzzled face and said, well, somebody's got to do her hair. And at that moment, I realized he was her hairstylist. Cool. And I shook up this conversation where I said, well, how long you in London for? He said, well, here for the week, we're promoting the books. We're doing some podcast interviews, we're doing some radio shows. Another media work, a wash is here. And I said, well, if you have time, let's connect on Instagram. And I'll send you a link to some cool restaurants and bars you should check out if you have time while you're here. And I just found a way to add value. It wasn't financial, but it was a non-financial way to add value. And he said, sure, and we connected, we pinged. And we just started to build a relationship. A few years later, I got the book they were penguin. And just before we were going to finalize endorsements, penguin had reached out to Marie's team to ask for an endorsement, because Marie was also a fellow penguin author. But she gets lots of emails coming. She gets lots of requests for endorsements. And so one day before the cutoff, I dropped this friend of mine at DM, and I said, hey, when you next do Marie's hair, can you nod your and say if she's interested to provide endorsement? Few hours later, he pings me back. And he says, Simon, I spoke to Marie. I championed your cause. And I said, you have to support this guy. She will send an email to one morning to your publishers. That's amazing. And that's how we got her endorsement. It was, again, thinking different, and finding a way to add value to open you up to very interesting relationships. Very interesting. Quick one. If you're enjoying this episode, make sure you're subscribed to the channel. I really appreciate it. It helps me grow the show, but bigger and better guests and keep doing this for you. So make sure you're subscribed if you're enjoying this episode. It's so, this is also interesting, because again, I just know you as like almost a creator first. I know you from YouTube, it didn't stir up, but all of this is happening like this. This is all behind the scenes as well. I mean, a lot of this stuff still happens now. And what I was laying here was the foundation to the order content stuff. Because you're building trust, you're building relationships. And a lot of these relationships, you can't build online. No, yeah. Online is very public-facing, as where you talk to the masses. But for me, the people ahead of me, those relationships had to be built offline. It's how I got the book deal. You know, we're penguins for me, was a dream to get a book deal. But if you look in the face of it, there's only two ways you can get a book deal. The first way is by going for an agent. An agent likes your work. Here she will champion you and say, "Let me talk to the publishers I know." And then they will try and get you a deal. The second is that the publisher reaches to you directly. They see you at a conference. They see you online. And they go, "Hey, we really love your content. Have you thought about writing a book?" But I had none of those options available. And so again, I had to think about a creative way to get myself to become an author. And so I went to book launch events of offers from a variety of publishing houses. And again, I would sit at the fund. I would connect with the editors. I would connect with people at the publishing house, build relationships, connect with them online. So they could see my content. And eventually, I would drop the message and say, "Hey, I've got an idea for a book to re-grab coffee in the new year. And maybe I can share some thoughts with you." But at that point, they knew my content. They've seen me in person. We've had multiple touchpoints, which again increased the probability of that, yes. Very interesting. So when does the content start? So the content was always there as soon as I started. But it didn't really have intention. It was just kind of put out there for the sake of just putting content out there. And I also really started pushing the content, probably a year to a year and a half before the book was published. Because I knew for the book to do well, people in public had to know my work. And so I became far more intentional about how I used Instagram, how I built the newsletter, how I used LinkedIn. Because I knew that would help me in terms of selling the book when it was published in 2022. So how big is the business when before you start going harder with more intention on the content? It was just coaching and speaking. Those were only the two avenues that I had. Once the content came in, it was purely a marketing exercise to build an audience so I could sell more books. Once the book was published, I think it just added fire to the entire ecosystem. Because when the book was published, I started getting messages saying, "Hey Simon, can you come and speak in San Diego? Can you speak in Los Angeles?" And so I was now trying to integrate offline and online, together into a really powerful system. And the speaking didn't open up opportunities to speak. It improved my brand. I made sure I got content for all of the speaking so we could distribute that online. And that opened up opportunities to then get involved as a consultant to companies, to invest, to advise. And the YouTube thing actually came a lot later. The YouTube journey only started at the beginning of 2024. And it was inspired by being in a few mastermind groups, where I was exposed to the likes of Daniel Prisly's thinking, on the Abdals thinking. And the unanimous feedback I got was, "Simon, you do a lot of speaking. You should be doing something on YouTube. You know, you're 50% there, you're comfortable in camera, you know what you want to share. You just have to understand how the platform works." And so after a couple of months, I really try to understand the strategy and how the platform works and how to get content out there, we just die straight into it. And it's done well so far. Yeah, it's done really well. So if you're advising someone who is a coach or a consultant or they've got some kind of service business like that or any kind of product really of those things you do, you recommend that they try and land a book deal and try and build content channels because that like, because that does that then set your business on fire and then position you is higher value. It helps. Yeah, but I wouldn't rush the book deal. Okay, that's why. Because if you try and get the book deal too early, you haven't built the credibility yet. Yeah, you haven't built the audience yet. So you're not going to get a great book deal. And this is why many people, when they do publish a book, they end up self-publishing. Yeah. Now, nothing wrong with self-publishing, but there's a different level of credibility when you publish with a big house like Penguin. So you need time to build your credibility, your network, and your experience first. Once you got that and you've built a good following, it becomes far easier to pitch when they say, "Well, why you? Why should you write this book?" And this is why when you look at YouTube creators, people who've got comfortably above 100,000 subscribers find it far easier to get a book deal. Yeah. Then people with no following on YouTube because the audience on YouTube is very sticky. And so that's why you'll see a creator go over 100,000 subscribers. It won't be long. I guarantee it won't be long before they speak into a publisher. Because publishers love that. They got a good following, very engaged, and they can sell the book to them. So for a new coach coming in, for me, the first very first step is to understand the type of people that you want to coach. Otherwise, you have no direction, no strategy, no intention of how you go about getting clients. So the way I put this is that, imagine if you go to, now here in the UK, there's a supermarket called Audi. Some countries don't always have Audi, but it's a low-cost supermarket. If you went into Audi and were looking to buy a black tray, you wouldn't pay more than maybe a few pounds for a black tray. Now you go to a weight troze and you are looking for the same product, you'll probably be open to paying 15, 20 pounds. Now you go to night's bridge and you go into harrads, same product, but you'll probably be more open to paying a few hundred pounds. Now the product is the same, the only difference is your perception of it. And this is why it's important as you begin your coaching business to understand what are the sort of clients you want to work with. Because that is reflected in how you market, how you communicate, how you show up, and how you interact with them. So that for me is a very first step. Second is then the conversation. You know, what sort of conversations are you having? Because if you're just going to sell coaching, it's very abstract for a lot of people. Yeah. They have to decipher what that means. And so one of the challenges I give them and why it's so important to go and build your relationships offline is when people ask you, which guarantee they will when you're at a networking event, what do you do? Do not answer with a title because immediately you've misled yourself. So if you and I have had never met Callum and you said to me, "Simon, what do you do?" And I said to you, "Hey, Callum, I'm an accountant." Now I might be the most interesting accountant you've ever come across. But you've immediately got a judgment in your head. Boring. Yeah. How do I finish this conversation so I can move on to the next person? Yeah. You've already made a judgment. And in many cases it can be a very negative association. And it does yourself a disservice. So what I say to them is lead with a story. Because this is the gold standard of marketing. I remember when I was in America on the speaking circuit. And I was in the green room before one of the events kicked off. And I walked up to an older gentleman because he looked very experienced. He looked like he's been doing this for years. And I just said to him, "So what do you do? What do you talk about?" And he came close to me. He put his hand on my shoulder and he said, "Simon, I have been saving the world from boredom since before you were born." And immediately I said to him, "What do you do? Tell me more. How do you do it?" Yeah. He got me curious. Yeah. And so that's the power of story. He hadn't even shared his title yet. He's already got me curious. And so what I say to those starting a coach in practice, is think about what is your story if you couldn't use the title coach. How would you tell a story that would get people interested to say, "How does that work? Tell me more." Because now they're qualifying themselves. They're giving you signals of interest that they want to find out more. Most of us have a week into a monologue. And then the person says, "It sounds interesting. I'll get back to you. What's your contact? Let's stay in touch." And then nothing happens. They haven't given you any signal of interest. Very interesting. So what's yours version of that? So when I was starting, I would love this setup. I would go to networking events. And a lot of us are scared of big groups of people. Yeah. We prefer to go to someone who's on the road not talking to anyone because it's the easy option. But I would love to go to groups of people insert myself into that group. And already knowing that the first question they're going to ask is what you do. So I would often lead with something like, well, there's four of you here. I'm going to give you four guesses. Everything I do is built to awaken your imagination of what is truly possible so you can write a better story. Go. And people would just throw out random guesses of what I do. And I would say, "Bingo. Close. Warm. Cold." And it would be a great way to just interact with these people in the group. That's awesome. And what about now? What do you want to do now? Now I tailor it depending on the audience I'm speaking to because as I've become more experienced, I understand that it's important to tailor it depending on the audience you're in front of. So for example, when I was in Los Angeles, I was invited to do a fight on chat at a members club in Hollywood. Now, when you were at a members club in Hollywood, the audience is very much show business, media driven people. And I had a question of somebody asking me in the audience. So how does coaching work? What is coaching? Because they were interested in it. Immediately, I knew I couldn't lead with the same way I would tell a story to the average person because these were people from a very specific type of background. So I said to them, "Well, have you watched the film by Christopher Nolan Inception?" And the majority put their hands up. And I said, "Well, coaching is kind of like Inception. You know, when people come to me, the process of coaching is going layer, beneath a layer, beneath a layer, all the way down to the core of who they are in size. And in building them back out with new beliefs, upgrade to their mindset. So they have a new software operating inside themselves. So that the reality hasn't changed outside of them, but the way they perceive it has. So think of it like I'm doing Inception in someone. Yeah. And they got it straight away. That's incredible. And it was very visual because they could see it happening. And so for me now, I would tell you what depending on who I'm speaking to, whether it's an audience, the person in front of me, or the demographic of people that I'm conversing with. When you do start to start creating content, what is the point of that? That's the point is to help launch the book. Yeah. And how does that go? The book went a lot better than I expected. You know, one of the biggest tips I took on board from mentor, one of the mentors I had when I first started, was to succeed in business. You have to be able to think like a marketer. And I've taken that to heart. And I remember when we were a couple of months before the book was launched in April 2022. I said to Penguin, "Can I, can I, can I lead the marketing?" Because I loved the process of marketing. And they said, "Sure. Well, we're really excited to see what ideas you come up with." And I sat down on the drawing board. And earlier, I spoke about the importance of building a power from Viamen. But the second level to that is making sure you have diversity in that environment. Because having diversity in the environment you create around you ignites your creative energy. So we ended up doing things such as partnering with the Conort in London's Mayfair, where they designed the cocktail named after my book "Enagise". So if you went into the bar and you ordered the cocktail, it would be presented on the sign copy of my book. Amazing. Just imagine the content people would create on the back of that. Yeah, incredible. We put together one of the world's first launches in the Metaverse. We partnered with a celebrity shaft to create a six-course menu with each course inspired by a topic or theme for my book. We had an artist who produces work that's put into lobbies of luxury hotels, create a piece called "Enagise", which we would look to then auction to raise funds for mental health charities. So it was really me seeing this sort of idea of promoting a book as a canvas for creativity. And it was unique. Yeah, they're one of the terms I coined that looking back at this experience that I now share with entrepreneurs or people looking to upgrade their gaming marketing is the idea of a UTP. Now UTP stands for unique talking points. And the more unique talking points you have in your business, the easier it is for people to talk about it. To share it. You know, my friend used to run a nightclub in South Kensington called Tontorua. And when it first launched on paper, you would bet against it. Because it was underneath a hotel. The ceilings were low. It wasn't the biggest nightclub. And you as someone thinking about what to do of an evening, you're spelt for choice. But what he did is he built UTPs into that business. And it had cues. Night after night wanted to go into this club. And one of the UTPs for that business was putting train tracks on the ceiling of that nightclub. So every time a VIP table ordered shots, the bar would put the shots into a toy train. Like the train on fire and the train would go to the VIP table. And it would be characters from day of the dead coming out to present your shots onto your table. What happens at that moment is the entire bar, the entire room becomes marketers. Everyone is taking photos and videos and selfies of this thing happening. And that's what sold it. People couldn't help but talk about it. If you'd like to implement Simon's frameworks for building a high value personal brand and coaching business, I'm going to put a full breakdown of it all in my next newsletter. You can get a copy for free at the link in the description. So if you'd like a copy of all of Simon's frameworks, so you can implement them, get a copy for free at the link in the description. Now let's get back into this week's episode. So for you at that time, what was your main platform at that time? Was it like Instagram or. So my main platform at that time was probably Instagram or LinkedIn. Now I think the free core platform for me, a YouTube LinkedIn Instagram, but they each serve different purposes. I've come to understand you've got to treat each one different. Instagram is why we call your shop window. It's the first place people check out when you're meeting them for the first time. What's your Instagram? Let me follow you. It's where they kind of get a feel for who you are and the work you produce. I always say it's where most of the business comes in. If I to choose a social platform where business comes in, because the people that book me to speak, they live on LinkedIn. A lot of professionals I coach, they live on LinkedIn. And so LinkedIn is a great platform for business. And in YouTube is what I would call mass market. You know, people who can't access your coaching, who can't access your products and services. YouTube is free. They can hop on there. They can get your thoughts and insights for free to help them on their journey. And that's how you begin to build that brand connection with them. They start to trust you because you're sharing things that are helping them through whatever point in the journey they're at. Is it worth it starting to create content on LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram? Has that like? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, obviously different different reasons for doing so. I mean, YouTube, for example, for me, is the only platform that pays you when your content does well and meaningfully pays you. If I have an Instagram post that does really well, you know, one of my recent videos has nearly two million views in under a week. I've not paid anything on it. But on YouTube, I had a video called I'm 40, if you're in your 20s or 30s, watch this. That's got nearly four million views. I mean, that's paid a lot of money on the ad revenue. And YouTube has three layers. You know, the first is from YouTube ad revenue. The second is from partnerships and sponsorships, where you can give a shout out to product and they'll pay you ex-thousand dollars for doing so. And the third level is redirecting viewers to your book, to your course, to your membership, whatever you're selling. So you've got three ways to monetize your YouTube channel. The other channels, the other platforms, little to nothing. So YouTube has a very focus point on that side because it can become a business. LinkedIn, that's for lead generation. And Instagram's just for everyone else. Because people might follow me for the quotes there, for the videos. But what I'm up to, just as a way of kind of keeping in touch and seeing what I'm up to. Yeah, I'd love to get into your process for each platform. Yeah. And how you run it and how you create content and what it does for your business. Where would we start? What is the most valuable platform to you or your most important one? It's YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram. But I was so Instagram's the easiest to create content for. Because I can just put a text post together and get it up. And it's very low lift, very little friction. LinkedIn would be the next one because that's not too difficult to do. Once you've got into a momentum or putting content out, that you know what's working, you can tweak and change things as you go along. YouTube will take the longest. And it has a less frequency because we aim to put out too long from pieces of content and month on YouTube because it has a high friction. It's also why there's not so many people trying to win on YouTube because there's so much friction on it. So the processes are very different. So Instagram, I might go home today and I might be struck by an insight. I go home and write out my thoughts. I post that straight away and it might do well. It's very easy to keep that content going. But the process for YouTube, just on Instagram. So do you have any weekly schedule you're trying to hit, hit or any kind of cadence around the thing or it's just kind of like, I think the goal is once a day. Once a day. It's once a day minimum because it's easier to get content out. Yeah, sometimes twice a day. And it's driven by data. So if the data tells me that I'm getting a lot more viewers from the US, then I will probably sneak in a second post towards the end of the day here in the UK. Just to tap into the US as we kind of go sleep and they're still working through that day. I will add in another post on that day. So it really is data driven. Once we've kind of got that one post out, just to monitor how it's doing, where the viewers are coming from. And then we try and tailor the post to that. And how do you choose which formats to do? Because I see you do the just like they're like screen grabs of your books, right? Or like, yeah, no. So they do really well. They do the really one. So I would say if I go back to May this year, we're probably around 27, 30,000 Instagram followers. And we're always testing what's working. And we noticed the rules were doing okay, but it was kind of tough to get a lot of views on it. So I started testing doing long-form text because I'm already scripting for YouTube. So I was thinking, well, I repurpose some of that scripting into an Instagram post. I tried one or two. It did okay. And the third one we put out, we followed data within literally two days. It had 50,000 views. Well, and we were like, okay, let's test it a bit more. And then we just started putting more text posts out there. And they started doing really well. And then one of them got 1.5 million views. One got 4 million views. And we said, it's telling us that this style of post is working. So we started pivoting heavier. You probably have seen on the grid. We started pivoting heavier towards long-form text posts because they were just doing far better than any type of content we're putting out there. Now I can do that for Instagram, but of course, long-form text posts wouldn't work on, say, LinkedIn or other-- Do you run your Instagram account or do you? Yeah. I run the Instagram account. You create the content. I create a content. And you post. And you post. And you just try to keep out of daily. Yeah, I mean, you don't think I jump into Instagram for us to get back to comments, keep in touch with people. It's one of the things that I've always embraced to make it human as I try my best to respond to as many people's comments as I can. Because I know what it's like being on the other side. You are inspired by a creator. And you drop a comment and it's just lost in the ether. It's actually quite nice when you get to reply from the person you were actually commenting on. So I've done that a lot. And it's often opened opportunities, partnerships, collaborations, just because they end up responding to the, "Hey, I really like that bit of content you put out there. I love to find out more about your work. There's only links I should be looking at." So you never know where conversations can go. I can see how your text posts are very, very highly shareable. Yeah. Is that why you think they do so well? I think there's a couple of reasons. So-- Duel time as well? Like, it's got a whole new-- So when you first come across a long-form text post, you can't skim it. You've got to stop the scroll and you've got to read all the text. And if the first few lines hit you, you want to read the rest of it. And by the time you read the whole text post, if it resonated, you are going to like, you're going to share it. You might even repost it because Instagram now has a repost function. And so when you repost it, it lives longer on Instagram, because people now have it on their feed in the repost section of their profile. And so that was what we saw working. People were spending longer on the post. People were sharing it. They were reposting it. And it started popping out all over my network. I was having friends sent me what's that message is saying, time just want to say, your work must be going far and wide, because frame my friends have been putting it on their stories. And I said, I recognize that guy. Yeah, I just had lunch with him the other week. And so it becomes highly shareable. It's why when I look at my YouTube, the listicles for me have always done so well. Because not every point will resonate with the viewer, but the points that do, they end up sharing it. So it's just condition to be something that people are more likely to share. And how much time do you put into creating content for Instagram? If you're doing one of those posts, do you actually write it every time or you're just like. No, so it's a mixture of repurposing and also writing new content. So for example, every three to four months, we would go back and look at what posts performed exceptionally well three to four months ago and just repurposing again. Because if it got four million views, three to four months ago, chance I'll get the same number of views now. And so every three to four months, we can go into a cycle of somebody old post. As you get new followers coming in, they wouldn't have seen the posts from months ago. And then we would look at the YouTube scripts, again, from what we shared on YouTube, hit the audience in the comment section. Great, let's take that as a catalyst for creating content for Instagram. And also my speaking. If what a particular statement, ideas or stories that really hit the audience, again, let's take that and put it in. And we also look at shorts. You know, if we put an Instagram short video or real out and that got good reaction, great, let's repurpose that by taking the statements that landed well and making them to a long form text. So we're just trying to see ways that we can lean into all the data points from different platforms. Talk to me about YouTube. What's the process there? Look like that's so it's two videos a month. So two videos per month is to go. So roughly every two weeks. And I think we need that time because what people underestimate about YouTube is that you have to have a process. Instagram and LinkedIn, you can kind of get away with posting as and when and kind of thinking, "I've just got a bit of inspiration. Let me just share it with my story." You can get away with that. YouTube, you can't because there's an actual process to it. And the process starts with, "Well, what is the video going to be about?" And you have to think about the packaging first. The big mistake for me is I started thinking about the content first as I started the channel. But I realized, doesn't matter how good the content is, the packaging is rubbish. Nobody's going to click on it and watch it. So now the first step is always the packaging. And it's, "Well, what's the title of the video? What is the thumbnail going to look like? What is the first 30 to 60 seconds going to sound like? How are you going to introduce the video? Get them bought in to the idea of what the video is about and wanting to watch until the end." So that was the very first step we had to focus on. And we just created a sort of area we used notion for that. And so we put a column of ideas for titles. And then we might go, "Oh, this title is interesting. Let's run with this one for the next one." And then you choose a title. The next thing is then formulating the script. And you know, what you want to cover, how you're going to laid out is you're going to be a storytelling video, is you're going to be an educational based video, is you're going to be a listicle. So you're just working at the best structure for the video. And then you go about putting the content together. And then you still have to record the video. You've got to record it, edit it. And then you've got to distribute it. So there's a lot of steps to the process. And that's why for me, it has the least frequency in terms of the social platform with you. Because there's a lot more thinking that goes into it. There with the titles and the thumbnails. What's your process there? Is that your inspiration or are you taking inspiration from stuff that you've seen elsewhere? Yeah, so inspiration from elsewhere. To give an example, when I first started, I started to coin descriptions for videos. And we would always have a bias of what I call outlier videos. Now an outlier video is where let's say somebody has a low subscriber count. So maybe somewhere between 10 to 80,000 subscribers. If a video within the last six to 10 weeks, has got say 2,500,000 views relative to their subscriber count, that's a huge win. So then we would just capture those videos into a list and we would try to understand what made that video do well. Was it the title? Was it the way I've structured? And then those become our inspirations. So for example, one of my early videos, connected to my book was about energy management. Now the title we just started with was let's just do a topic on how we can increase people's energy levels. And so we just went about research in titles. And then we saw a nutritionist who did a video on energy, which was quite different to her normal videos, which were all about cooking recipes. And for her, it had over 2.5 million views. Wow. And we said, okay, we should do a variation of that same title. And so from thinking about the video's content being around energy management and how to live with more energy, the video title then became seven habits, but almost limitless energy. And that was the title we landed on. And then it was about the packaging. So then we looked to fund that. That was what funders did well, related to this sort of title. And then we saw those are before and after sort of fund that works really well. So then we just did a before picture of me looking completely exhausted and drained of energy slightly darkened in the image. And then on the right was a after, well, I'm full of energy. I looked like I'm ready to take on a world. And so that became the fund now. So now we hit the fund and the title done. We then had to fill in the content. What would be the seven habits. And that's where you didn't have to go back. And whether you work with scriptwriter or you kind of bring your knowledge from other areas to go into the script, that's where you then have to create the content. So that for me was the is how I begin finding out live videos. That's awesome. You broke that down really well as well. So people can implement it for themselves. Do you in the scripting do you go quite rigid with the script? Or do you just have like bullet points and you just go off the dome and it's kind of a bit of a mix? It depends. If the video is illistical, it might be a bit more tightly kind of scripted because you have less time. You just want to rattle free the bullet points. If it's a longer sort of motivation style video, more of a storytelling video, I might give myself a bit more freedom to kind of just see where I go in each point or each section of the video. Because you can always cut it after. You can edit things down after. So yeah, it depends on the style and approach we're going for the video. Going back to the research because I think this is also a great practical point for people. Is that when you start a platform like YouTube, very often it's just you. Yeah. You're doing as a single person. So you have to be smart in how you research. And one of the best things you can do is create another account for your YouTube channel. Because if you are researching on your YouTube channel, your algorithm is messed up. Yeah. Because you might be watching film trailers. If you have children, you probably watching Coco Mellon. Or some nursery school video. And so your algorithm is pretty messed up. So you create a second account. There's a clean account. And on that account, you use it almost like your research system. So that account you put into that watch, sort of search bar, all the videos that you consider outliers. So that second account only watches outlier videos. And so you train the algorithm to send to your homepage outlier videos. Interesting. So every time you log into that second YouTube account, your homepage will be filled with outlier videos. And you'll be like, "Ah, that's another good idea for a title." Then you watch it because the algorithm starts to learn what sort of videos you like. And you're just feeding it to give me more outlier videos. That's a very good, good tip. And do you are those mostly in your niche? Mostly managed, but also again, there's a couple of different outlier videos. So the easy one is just a video is done really well relative to someone's subscriber count. Yeah. Another outlier video is if somebody typically talks about a different topic. And for whatever reason, the size of the topic is more relevant to you and it's blown up. That tells you the traction in the video. So like an example I shared earlier, if someone usually does cooking videos and now does a self-development video and that's blown up, there must be something in that sort of title. So that for me would also be class as an outlier. Quick one, if you're enjoying the episode and you think it might benefit someone that you know, I love it if you just take out WhatsApp right now and send it to that person. The same is true if you're in a company Slack or Teams channel or WhatsApp. Take out your phone and share it with them right now. It really helps me grow the show, help more people get value from the episodes and yeah, they might be grateful for you sending it to them. So if you're enjoying the show, please share it with someone. It really helps me grow the show. There's one video you did which really blew up. Can you talk me through the process for that one? Because that's one where I think I saw it first with you. And now everyone has copied that format. I think for at least six months afterwards, it was just every creator I knew was creating in that format. How did that one happen? And it's funny, what's it you say that because I was talking to someone from Simon Scribstein. And they did exactly the same title as my. And they even had the same thumbnail and the text on the thumbnail design as well. So they said, yeah, that was one of the videos we got inspiration from. So they're using probably the same process as well. But for me, this was August 24. And I was on holiday and I was thinking, okay, what's my next video going to be for September when I kind of get back into the swing of things. And it was going to be my 40th birthday. And so I thought, okay, it's a good time to do a listicle. Everybody loves a good listicle with life lessons and tools, strategies and insights. But I didn't know how to package it. And I started seeing people do videos like 13th-Harsh Trouffs. I wish I knew when I was 20 and those sort of titles. And then I thought, actually, that's going to be quite common. So I need to find a different spin to it. The kind of positions me as someone who's got experience and credibility. But the kind of self-qualifies people. I saw some similar titles where people were doing birthday lessons. And they were sharing with like, you know, if I could tell my 20 or 30 year old self, this is what I would share with them. So then I thought, okay, maybe if I lead with the fact that I'm, it's my birthday. So I'm 40. That's the first part of the title. And then self-qualify people with, if you're in your 20s or 30s, watch this. So that kind of became the title. Wow. And then it was, well, okay, how am I going to grab them in the thumbnail? And again, this is all easy saying hindsight. Before the video went live, we had no idea it was going to pick up. We thought, we need to make it sound like I'm someone coming at you to share with you wisdom you have to know. So we almost try to recreate that look on my face in the thumbnail. And then we thought we needed something snappy. So wake up became the sort of snappy hook on the thumbnail. And as every kind of YouTube strategy was say, you need to give the pay off pretty quick in terms of confirming that they're clicking on the right video. So the title was I'm 41. So literally within the first few seconds, it was today. So it was I'm 40. It was today I'm 40. And it was like, it's my birthday today. So we need by saying it's my birthday straight away. At a minimum, people who follow my content, we would get comments saying happy birthday. Yeah. At a minimum, we've really got comments coming in. Interesting. It's like whenever you lead with your birthday, even if they don't read anything else or watch anything else, they'll say happy birthday. Yeah. So we knew we'll get some comments straight away. Yeah. So I said, I'm 40. It's my birthday today. And if I could go back and speak to my younger self, here's what I would share. And we went straight into 40 bullet points, which, when we record it, it was actually quite draining because we got to like 35. As I, okay, we got five more to go here. And we still have to edit the film. But when it came out, it was, I think it was 15, 16 minutes. It kind of did nothing for the first few days. Interesting. You know, it was kind of ranking 8, 9 out of 10. Wow. For the first few days. That's so interesting. So it was only three and a half days into it that it started picking up. And it climbed right from 8, 9 out of 10 to 6 to 5 to 4. And then within 21 days, so before the end of that month, when we published, it then hit 1.5 million views. And then we thought, okay, this is, you know, this is doing well. Let's see if we can keep pushing it. And then once it hit 2 million views, we just started seeing everybody else started posting similar sort of videos on YouTube. And now it's just shy of 4 million views since it was published. That's so funny, especially around it coming out as like a 9, 7, 8, 9 out of 10 YouTube. Because a lot of people, when they get that, like you feel the pressure, like, I've done something wrong. Or I need to repackage it. The title is wrong. And that was wrong. I also didn't attempt to repackage it. So two days in, when it was still 8, 9 out of 10, I thought, do we change a title? Do we change a fun now? But the people I shared it with, I'm part of a few WhatsApp groups. I put it into a few WhatsApp groups. They said, no, this is really good. And I'm not sure why it's not doing better. But I just want to let's stick it at for a couple more days, just to see how it does. Because everything seems aligned. We just want to show why it wasn't picking up. And then for whatever reason, the shares started picking up. So we're looking at the YouTube studio. And we noticed a spike in the shares. So I think it was the shares that drove the uptick and viewer show. And now I think it's been shared 200 plus 1000 times. It's been shared. Which is incredible. And it's still going. It's still going in terms of viewership. Across your content, that seems to be the one button, I would say. That is. I mean, it's funny now when people recognise me on YouTube. I'm known as the "I'm 40" guy now. It's like, hey, you're the "I'm 40" guy, right? Yeah. But it's a great video. It's a great video. And so clever. And it's so value-packed as well. It's a lot of value in there. For actually quite a short commitment of time. I think that's another reason. But I think that's why that format as a whole does really well. It's like, I'm giving you a lot of value here in a short amount of time. And also, there is a degree of the packaging. It's a little bit kind of. But I think it also shows you if you are looking to go on YouTube. You don't have to have every video pop. I mean, there's too much pressure on trying to get every video perfect. In a given 12 month period, you just need three or four videos to do fairly well. You just need three or four videos to do fairly well. And the rest, it's just a way to keep up your relationship with your audience. Not every video will pop. And that's completely fine. But you don't know which one will pop ahead of time. You just got to keep churning at the content and just keep your fingers crossed that one of them will get lift off. What does your team look like for YouTube? Is it just you? So just me, my wife, we draw on some editors. We're learning from strategists. And it's funny because I mentioned my wife because she also started on the YouTube journey. Yeah. And the hilarious part is that in November 24, we both went through 100k subs in the same weekend. Yeah, well. Which was insane. So it kind of showed that what we were doing was working. Now she's ahead of me. She's like 205, 210,000 subscribers. Yes, it's crazy. But it just showed us. It can be done. If you go at it with intention and strategy, and just be consistent. You know, we see every video, you know, the beginning was tough because we were very emotionally attached to each video. But now we see each video like a lottery ticket. It's like you put it out there. You might get 10 pounds back, 50 pounds back. But one of them might hit the jackpot. But you can't have that chance to hit the jackpot if nothing's put out. Yeah. And so you just see each piece of content is something you can learn from for the next one. And so do you see YouTube as the goal there is a bit of ad sense? Yeah, I mean the ad sense is. People would drive people to the email list. Yeah, the ad sense is a bonus. Yeah. Because of course it's very volatile. And that is very much dependent on the video. So if you get a video like just to give people reference point, if you have a video like I'm 40 that's done nearly 4 million, we only introduced mid-roll about the 1.82 million mark because we took mid-roll off before then because we wanted people to watch the whole video. Yeah. But of course if you had mid-roll and to the beginning, you're in a lot more from the ad revenue. But from that video alone, nearly 4 million views. That's made us about 22, 23k. Just from the ad revenue. And so ad revenue is volatile because it depends on how the video performs. For us it's more of a brand building exercise. So it's more to build brand but also in anticipation for when I write further books, the YouTube will become a primary driver for that because we find that booksells do really well if you push it for the YouTube. Because people that watch YouTube videos tend to be people that want to learn something, that want to get educated and so there's a product on the back of it, they're more likely to purchase. And you pushed them to anywhere at the moment to. Yeah, newsletter, my comment book and we're looking at membership next year. So of course there'll be these added things on top of it as well. And then there's LinkedIn. So what's your approach on LinkedIn? LinkedIn's an interesting one because it's got more personal I think, compared to what it was meant for. It was meant to be something that was a professional platform, talks about your job successes, your accomplishments, deals and exits and so on. But now it's become very much a personal place where you would often share very personal stories, journeys. And so for me it's more of a story driven platform. And all about. It's very similar to YouTube in the sense that it's all about the hook. So you've got a hook in I think it's the first 125 characters before it goes read more. And so you're really thinking about what is that hook and then the story underneath that. So LinkedIn is very much story driven. In terms of getting people to share it, getting people to comment and engage. And so we look at YouTube through three pieces of content. There's what I call hero content, educational content and interactive content. So hero content always does well. Hero content is like, hey I just want an award for Book of the Year. Boom, you get a few hundred likes, lots of comments and some people share. Educational content is, hey my business failed. Here's what I learned and here's how you can apply to what you do. And you share seven tips or strategies and frameworks. And then people love it, they share it and they save it. And then the last one is what I call interactive content where you might put out a question, you might ask for help, you might throw a debate out there, what are your thoughts on the latest budget in the UK and how you're going to impact your business. And then people just jump in the comments and share shared advice and experience. So we see LinkedIn content through those three lenses. The sweet spot is if you can of course combine them. If you can combine hero content with educational and something interactive, that's where you've got a perfect piece of content. And we're still testing LinkedIn. We found the hardest one so far. Just because yeah, some things we didn't expect to do well, some things we expect to do well just didn't do well. Yeah. So it's been tough, but I think I'm looking to double down on LinkedIn next year. This year's been very much about Instagram. Yeah, if you followed the Instagram, you'll see how that's grown from 30k to now, I think it's 90k coming up now. Yeah, it's doing really well. YouTube was a year before in 2024 that we really focused on that. And I think 2026 will be a lot more trying to understand LinkedIn at a deeper level. You're love. We've got an episode with Chris Donnelly's header content, Josh Sanders. Josh kind of is the man behind his content and LinkedIn algorithm. He gave us the complete flavor for it. When he said it, I was like, I was like, oh my god, this all makes so much sense. Yeah. And it actually sounds pretty easy. I'm sure it's not as easy as he made it out, but he told us like their approach and the things that worked really well for them. Yeah. And it did make a lot of sense. So I reckon you could definitely crack it. Absolutely. Just a bit of a bit of a bit of tactical insight from him. And then they're just going hard on it. What does your business look like today? I know you coach some like pretty high level. Yeah, so some really fastening people. I coach less than I used to. Just because it allows me to do all these other things. But the people I coach, like I said, vastly different to the people I was coaching beginning on my journey. I coach a small hand for people. They may be tech entrepreneurs, sea level executives, creators, celebrities, mission and star chefs and so on. Quite a variety of different people, but very successful in their own industries. It's a speaking which I love because for me speaking is one of the most powerful ways I find to build brand because it hits while sharing earlier hits that sweet spot or bringing together offline and online because the speaking itself is offline. You're doing it in front of a crowd of people and everybody in the room will fill your energy. But if they love what you say and what you share, they were going to share on their socials. They will take photos, they'll take videos, they'll take selfies, they'll buy your book. So I can capture content all of that as well. So for me, it's the perfect blend of offline and online. And then the speaking opens you up to lots more opportunities. We've got the content now. And then just this year, just through the brand, I'm now advising a couple of companies. I'm investing in some startups. But again, that was organic. I didn't come into this year saying, okay, that's one of the things I want to do and I want to become this year. But it's just come naturally from building these other areas. I've got people saying, hey Simon, with your network and with the way you think and we get your borders and the visor to help grow our company when it launches in 2026. Wow. And so after great talking about the business, let me see the value I can add. If I get some decent equity, then let's do it. And so now that's a new added sort of string to the bow. Interesting. To someone who's listening to this, can you just give a sense of what's possible in each of these avenues? Because I feel like you're at the pinnacle of coaching in terms of the service that you offer and the price point. What have you found? You can kind of get that to a place where you enjoy doing it. Yeah. Well, first of all, I would say the price point is anything is possible. But the most important thing is where I'm at, you get to coach the people that inspire you. When you first start, you're just coaching anyone and everyone. Just to build your experience, understand how the game works. When you get to a point where you can start choosing, you can start choosing people that not just you inspire, but they challenge you to be a better coach. So I mean, when I first got the opportunity to coach a CEO, I was like, what do I know? There's a lot of imposter syndrome at that moment. You know, this guy's built an incredible company. But once you've done that first one, you're like, actually, that wasn't so bad. And then you start having more comfortability doing other CEOs. So for me now, it's really about being able to choose who you want to work with. And the fact they inspire you means it challenges your own thinking. What's possible from that? I would say anything is possible. But you have to really think about how you are positioning yourself and how you are interacting with your demographics. So let's say you want to charge 10,000 pounds a quarter for your coaching. The question you have to ask yourself is, do I show up and interact and give an experience that reflects a 10,000 pound per quarter coach? If not, well, you've got to change. Otherwise, you might be wanting to charge 10,000 pound a quarter and telling people your price is that, but you come across as a 1,000 pound a quarter coach. Yeah. And so that's the first thing I would do. It's think about what is that ideal dream number for you per quarter per month per year? And then reflect to yourself. Am I showing up as that person? So when I started asking myself that question, I then created a brochure. So when people came to me to ask my coaching, I said, here's my brochure. Go have a look. It was like a glossy brochure. Talked about my story, had photos. It was a very visual piece of a document. And they had my investment options at the back. I was very careful not to say price cost and fee. Because price cost and fee again have a negative association. But when you say investment, partnership, it's a sort of language people that level what we're talking about. Because when you think about an investment or partnership, you're expecting a return. So Dennis then think about, if I am going to do some media appearances or media interviews, what are the magazines and events day show up at? You know, what are the events day attend? What conversations are they part of? That's how you start to have those conversations. You know, last week I was at an event at the Groffner House. It was called Legends Ball. And you had a lot of sogath self-cate there. So Jeff Hurst, you had Teddy Showing him. Rebecca Adlington, Paul Radcliffe, and amongst those, you had some very wealthy entrepreneurs. People who have had 100 million plus exits. People who are running financial companies, FinTech companies. And for me to have been in that environment, I had to have certain relationships to get there. Now when you're there and you're having conversations with these sort of individuals and you understand their world, guess what? They see it was the £10,000 plus coach. Per-courting. Yeah. So he's really thinking about first, what is your dream number? Per month, per quarter per year? Reflect back to yourself. Do I realistically show up as that right now? If not, what do I change? So I show up as that person. Yes. And then start acting like that and everybody else will see you as that level of coach. That is brilliant. That makes so much sense. So that's the coaching. The speaking, the bit that a lot of people fall over is they think, "I get a speaking gig. Now I've got to focus on delivering an amazing presentation." So they think so much about the talk. And then they go on stage, they deliver, they come back, they do you confess, "Oh, I've got to find the next talk now." So they're in this constant hamster world of just speaking and then trying to find another gig, speaking and trying to find another gig. Or is that actually you have to have a system for how to speak and works? So for me, I sit simply as a free-faced system. So you have the pre-event, the actual rent and the post-event. So the pre-event is to treat the event you're going to speak at, like it's a film coming out. Yeah. So you have a poster of the fact that you're speaking there. You start to share the story of why you're speaking there, what you're going to share. Because if it's a public event, you're driving people to come to that event. And the more people that show up, the organizers are going to think, "This person attracts a big audience. We've got a booking again next year." Yeah. And then when you go to the actual event, you don't just speak. You want at a minimum someone capturing high-risk photography of you in action. Yeah. Someone capturing videography. Someone capturing all of these moments that are going on. So then when you get to the post-speaking phase, you can distribute that. And then that allows you to turn those things into speaking show-els, content on social media, stories you can share, images you can put into your brochure document, and so on. So it's kind of doing those three phases well every time you speak. And that naturally leads to lots of inbound traffic. So just to give a practical example, we often do highlight videos of talks I do. They do okay on social media, but the ones that do the best are when we leave the mic on. And I come down from stage, I'm signing books, I'm talking to people who've just heard me speak. Those raw moments generate the most engagement. So there's one we shared on LinkedIn where a lady comes up and, you know, I've just finished signing her book and she says, you know, before you came to stage, we were a bit low in energy, we just had the lunch and then you come on stage and share your insights and I was just blown away. And I'm going through this moment in my life where I'm starting to question my next step in my career. And it was so raw. It was just her just opening up in that moment. And we captured the whole conversation on camera, put it onto LinkedIn. And in mountain messages we got from people saying, what did you talk about? Can we, can we book you to the same to audience as you did to that audience? Yeah. They were just really curious about what the backstory was for that conversation. That's amazing. I love those moments as well. Like Chris Williams does these great vlogs at the moment where post-tour, they capture that. And again, that's what sells it. Yeah. Is almost better than just filming him delivering it. It's the reaction. You're like, what the hell did they do? It's sort of very unfiltered, isn't it? Yeah, like, and that's when you also realise the impact of the podcast because there are people saying, you know, it changed my life. I had cancer and, you know, I was in a terrible place for six months and you turned it round. And I've seen those with my clients in the DMs. The messages, but when you see it on camera, it's visceral. It's also really cool as well because I guess there's a real degree of, they're like the perfect case study, the perfect endorsement of your product. And this is why it's good. This is why this sort of content is good, because if I say to you, you should buy my product to service. Yeah. You are going to be naturally skeptical and say, well, of course Simon's going to say it. He is the product in service. Why would he say his business is rubbish? But when somebody else says it, live through a testimonial, through feedback, this changes my life. You now want to buy what that person bought. Yeah. You know, we have this tendency to go into a trip advisor before we book hotels or review science. It's exactly the same thing. When people are exposed to endorsements or testimonials about your work, they're more likely to buy. It's also the context, isn't it? It's like, you're not, you're clearly not selling to me. Yeah. I'm just overhearing that or I'm seeing you in action. That's why I really like actually really embellish on vlogs for business owners, rather than the talking head. Yeah. Because if you can document you delivering a service in action or giving advice to a client in action, yeah. That is there for everyone to see. And you're living proof that you're doing it. Rather than you just telling me that you do it or telling me that this works and telling me these are the results you got. Like I'm actually seeing it in action. And this is why when you know, just quickly go back to what we said about coaching earlier. When I first started, it was all about story. You know, when somebody says, what do you do? It was legal of a story. And then when they say, well, how do you do it? I didn't go into logistics or processes. I would just say, well, let me tell you about Sarah, who I started working with six months ago. And here's what she's been on in terms of her journey. And now they're thinking in the head, can you do to me what you did to Sarah? Yeah. Because they're putting themselves into that story. And so it's always thinking about how do you sell through storytelling because then the selling comes naturally. You don't have to focus on, okay, so this is what we're going to do. This is the next step. This is your packages. It just comes naturally. And then say, well, what would my lesson be if I brought you on board to do this? They would be asking that question. I'm super excited to share that this podcast is produced by SevenX Content, my own podcast agency. I've been building this agency for the last four years. We now work with some of the world's leading brands and biggest creators. Over 30 million subscribers to our podcast channels. If you'd like to work with us to take your existing show to the next level or you're thinking about starting a podcast, we'd love to hear from you. You can check us out at the link in the description. I'd love to work with you. And in terms of speaking gigs, like what can you be paid to do a speaking gig? So it depends on the reason. I would say when you're first starting out, go for free actually. When you first start go for free. Because what you want to do at the beginning is build assets. Because you aren't going to get the higher ticket speaking gigs if you do not have assets. Because people to book you want to see your stuff. They want to see how you want to stage. They want to see testimonials. They want to see how other people found you as a speaker. When you're first starting out, you have none of that. So what I did is I started off speaking for free. Now when I say free, it's not just any event I go and speak out. It's very strategic. What are the events you would love to speak out? Reach out to the organizers and say, "Hey, I would love to speak or event for free." In exchange for capturing content. And if I can get a testimonial. If I'm rubbish, you haven't paid a single penny. If I'm great, then here we both win. And so what you do is you do the free stuff. You build your assets, which is photography, video assets, testimonials. And then you use that to then pitch for your first paid gigs. So then you go, "Hey, I spoke at these events and conferences on these topics. Would this be something of interest to you?" And then you might start charging a couple of thousand pounds. And then over time, that can go up to the 10 to 20,000 pounds. Now what helps you go quicker up that journey is your brand. Yeah. So you might get to about maybe six or 10,000 pounds, just purely by people finding you to be a great speaker. But for a lot of people, six or 10,000 pounds might be the cap. What helps you break through to the 10 to 20K range is then if you have a book deal. Right. If you have a book that's coming out. If your YouTube's got two million. There's something that then differentiates you from the other speakers in that bracket. And books are a great part of that. Because then when you can say you were published off of with a known brand endorsed by some individuals, everybody knows. Then that moves you into the next bracket. So what gets you to that first top range is going to be your ability to kind of put yourself out there, find the right opportunities, build your assets. What's going to take you to the next level is then your brand. And that's why the brand part is so important. And do you have an agent or do you just have an agent now? Yeah. So I used to do, I still got a lot of my speaking queries inbound. Just some printing out a lot of content and a lot of that inquiry comes inbound. But I now have an agent for two plus years now. Yeah. Just because once we had the book out, we just start getting, we start to get a lot more inquiries. So now we have an agent. But just on those fee ranges, it also depends on your region. So I'm quoting obviously UK. But if you go to the US, the budgets are automatic. 1.5, 2 times bigger. Because you're speaking to a much bigger. Contrary. Yes. Yeah. Events are bigger scale. And so there's a lot more opportunity to be had in a region like the US. It's really interesting as well because in all of this, there's that balance as you say between that what's happening offline and what's happening online. Because I think people assume that you create content, build an audience. And therefore all of your clients come from that or all of your speaking inquiries come from that. But I'm getting the sense speaking to you that actually, is it more of a case of of your coaching clients or your speaking gigs? Is it 50/50, 50% coming from offline and normal methods and you, you outreaching and getting referrals and connected? Yeah. A lot of coaching clients are offline referrals. Sometimes I get online because they see my work on LinkedIn that they'll come in and they'll end up having a partnership because it's very private, very confidential. I might say industries, my clients work on but sometimes unless they're okay with me doing so, I won't mention who they are. So they're very confidential sort of business. So speaking, that's very public. So of course I get a lot of that online where people see me do videos or YouTube or podcasts interviews that I hate can become a my podcast or hate can get to speak of this event. So that's a lot of that's also online. But yeah, I think offline I've always valued a lot because I've met some super interesting people offline that I would never have met just purely on the online world. Yeah. And a lot of the stuff that we've done where this like I've come and bought as advisor to their business or we've collaborated in some way, like a lot of collaborations we did with the book launch. They only came about after I got to Noody's people offline. Yeah. We had coffees, we traveled together, we spent some time together. That's where I think the friendship has built. That's where the relationship has deepened because online is very surface level. Yeah. It's a very surface level relationship. I do engineer that. So do you create space for that serendipity to happen or you go to certain events? Yeah, they try to go something every week or like what? There's an element to that. I mean, it's changed over the year. So for example, recently the word that I've been sharing a lot with people is community. As I've been tapping into community a lot. So this year I've been part of a community of creators. I've been part of a community of authors. I've been part of a community of post-exit founders. I've been part of a community of people who are tech startups and so on. And so by just by being part of different communities, I get not only to understand what's going on in these ecosystems, but who could be some good people to kind of reach out to neutral relationship where I just kind of take our conversation to a deeper level. And communities play the big part in that this year. It connects me to some amazing people. Some of whom we've already done business with. Some of whom we are exploring ideas within the next year. And again, if I sent them an online message, they may respond. They may not. But when we're meeting a person, we're guaranteed to at least build a friendship. And then we open doors to see what we could potentially do together. The last thing we didn't touch on there is with the book deals. What's possible there again? Is it a case of the first one? You're doing it for credibility and reputation more than a fee? I know it's actually very hard to make money. So the reality is you're not going to make money from the book itself. Unless you do like James Clarence, so like tens of millions of copies, which is very rare in the awful world. But the book itself, you don't make money from it. You get some passive income from it depending on how much you sell, but it's nothing life-changing. What the book does, it's the opportunities it opens. For me, it's an unlocker. I can go to events, I can bring some signed books with me. And if the opportunity rises, I might say, "Hey, well, great to meet you this evening. Here's a copy of my book for you. So check out when you have the time." That allows you to remain top of people's minds. Because for me, it beats a business card any day. They get to know your story and they get to know your journey just by reading the book. So for me, it's been the doors it opens. So for example, speaking of the chances, people that want to connect with me, podcasts invite invitations to work with businesses. It's the opportunity that the book affords you, especially when it's a traditionally published book. Now, I'm not saying there's a right or wrong way. Self-published books have work for people. You just have to look at the likes of Alex Ormuzzi and Michael Bringer-Stanya, who sold millions of books without working with a traditional publisher. So there's no right or wrong way. Just kind of working out what path works best for you and what leads into your strengths. For me, I wanted the Penguin deal. I wanted the traditional publisher. Because I knew it would carry greater credibility when people would go into a waterstones, see my book on the shelf. And visually, they could see that the book was out and you open. What are your tips for writing a book? How long does that take or what's the. I think the biggest tip would be surround yourself with other people who are also in the same journey as you writing. I had the luxury of writing it to encode it. So I had more time than I would have other ways had, being at home in front of my laptop. But what also helped is I would meet with other authors every couple of weeks, just to kind of like either write together, we would put our Zooms on mute and we would just kind of write and then touch base two, three hours later to see how we got on and just share like challenges, struggles with writing the book. But also by learning from other people, you realize that when you write a book, it's not as easy as just sitting down, typing on Microsoft Word and you're done. You don't actually start writing when you sit down. You start thinking about the structure, the narrative, the research, the studies you want to include. And then it just starts as bullet points before you start threading it all together. And to realize you do need focus time for this. Yeah. You can't just go ahead and do write it for an hour here and an hour there. It doesn't work that way. It takes you probably 30, 40 minutes just to get stuck into it. Okay. And so you really do have to block our time and be committed to that journey of writing. And keep in mind for that writing the book and getting it over the finish line is still only 50% of the journey. You don't have to go market the thing. And so save some energy for the marketing part. There's a lot of people burn out once they've got to the end and they're like, oh man, I've got to market the book now. And they don't have the energy to kind of hit the road hard to get the book out there. And to be a someday time is best said, if you've got to sell, is it like in a seven day period? You've got to sell a lot. You've got to sell a lot in the first, usually say the first week because for a lot of people, that's where you're going to get the biggest traction because usually over time people start to forget the book. And the reason the first week is very important is because the pre-orders that you sell before the launch count in that first week. So let's say you sold on a 5,000 copies pre-ordered before that week even comes. You're really 5,000 up. Yeah. And so that's why usually the first week of sales is where a lot of all of us focus very heavily on. Yeah. And depending who else is publishing, we'll drive how much you need to sell to hit those numbers. Let's talk about communicating because you communicate really well. You speak on stage, you speak on YouTube. What have you done to develop that? So for me, I've always had this geeky interest in learning the mechanics of how things work. You know, we've talked a lot about content here, but it's the same with speaking. So when I started, I could have gone the option of going to a toast masters and learning the ropes and being part of one of those clubs. But I remember going to one of those, I was invited by Fenter to go to their toast masters to see if I liked him. So I stayed for a whole evening for one of these toast masters sessions. But the biggest drawback to me was the fact that if I join and I practice my speaking, the one thing it could never recreate was the fact that I know everyone in the audience. Yeah. The real speaking events I go to, I don't know anyone in the audience. So how am I creating that ability to be comfortable with my nerves? If I really know everybody's sitting in the room. So I said, that's not going to be the way that I learn speaking. The way that I learn speaking is by putting myself out there in the open, just like a stand-up comedian would by doing the sort of the smaller circuits before they go and do the big theaters. And just by trying it. And that's what I did. I put myself out there and I just started practicing in small groups of people. I went into a website called Meetup.com at a time and said, "Hey, I'd love to speak for free just to practice my speaking." And I would also watch YouTube videos. Of people I would consider to be great speakers. Not for the content, but for the mechanics. So how did they start? How did they tell a story? How did they engage with the audience? And that was how I learned. And I would just kind of codify what they did. So I could test it. And so one of the things I would then later coin, which is the James Bond opening of a presentation, came from what I learned from other people. Because a lot of people want to start a presentation. They begin with, "Hey, my name is Simon. Today I want to talk to you about this, this, and this. And by the end we're going to cover this. I hope you enjoy it." People really switched off. Because it's how 99% of speakers start their talk. Instead, I remember watching some James Bond films. And what I loved about it is they all started by dropping you to the action. And then you had the James Bond theme come on. And then they would pick up where they left off. And so that's what I learned. I learned that in order to hook people in in a talk, I had to start with a James Bond style introduction. So instead of starting with my name and here's my background and here's what I do, I would just jump straight into the story to hook them in. And then kind of go back later to fill in the blanks. And then as I saw people building out the presentation that I realized I had to lean into storytelling, a lot visual storytelling. But it wasn't just that. It was an understanding, the pace and the speed of your delivery. So when you want to hit something important, you really slow down your communication so you can emphasize those words. So then if there's a question, you can really slow down, let each word land or visit statements such as, "ready isn't a feeling, it's a decision." When you slow your speed down, it hits people more. And then when you tell a story, when it creates some tension, you can increase your speed of talking. And so that variety of use or voice really helps to bring people into your story. And then the ending, again, when I was understanding how speaking works, is then thinking of what your crescendo is going to be. Through a crescendo in music, it's just when things are picking up pace. In speaking, it's how do you close it because chance is when people leave the room, they're only going to remember what you said last. And so the last thing you say should be either a powerful story to get some thinking, a quote or a question that lingers in their head. And so once I started understanding some mechanics, I just went and tested it. I tried to fit my content into these frameworks and then tried it and I just hoped people would enjoy it. Have you done any coaching on it? Or. I've done elements of coaching with the leaders I've worked with on the wider coaching. Yeah. Because inevitably sometimes communication will creep into what we work on. So it could be their pitching for investment, or it could be they have to present to their stakeholders or employees. So communication will inevitably come into our coaching in some way. I think you you can't avoid it. Especially as AI starts to take over a lot more functional skills that we take for granted. The one thing that differentiates us will be our ability to communicate and deliver information at scale. It would be remiss of me having a personal development, business coach here, not to touch on the 80-20 of your coaching. What are the biggest things that you find people are struggling with, or that you go through in your process with them? Like what are the biggest questions and your favourite questions to ask people? The favourite questions I like asking people are anything that distances themselves from the situation they're in. Because when you are going through a phase in your life or career when you're stuck and you have no idea what to do next, you're procrastinating and you're not following through what you told yourself you were going to do. My favourite questions are ones that distance themselves enough from that situation so they can come up with their own solutions. So one of my favourite questions is something like, if your life were a Netflix TV series, what would the next episode be called and what would be happening in it? Because what happens then is with that distance, they start coming up with the solutions themselves. They might say, well, the next episode is going to be called comeback. And I'm like, well, I'm really curious now what happens in that? Or having gone through a redundancy, having gone through a structuring, this character is now finally taking the time to think about what he wants to do. And he's making a plan to follow through. He's meeting some extraordinary people and he's taking his first steps into the beautiful unknown. And so what happened is by removing the person from the situation, they're almost coming up with their own solutions, their own advice and their own answers. Because I think we all know the answers deep within. We just need to find and discover the courage to take them. And so questions like that for me are beautiful. What else comes to mind? Anything that sort of makes them think about their existence. So another popular one I've asked is we are a miracle. The odds of us being born are something like 400 trillion to one. You for ready one, the greatest lottery ticket there is going, the lottery of life. Question for you is what are you going to do without winning ticket of yours? What are you going to do with it? And then they would usually pause, go inward, have a think. And then so much comes out because we don't really appreciate we have one life. We always say life is short, we've only got one life, but I don't think we truly appreciate it. When we do, we do things so different. We do things vastly different. And so my job in some of these sessions is to remind themself that you don't have forever. And to remove them from the tragic scenario of living as if they're never going to die. And then dying having never really lived is to get them living now to start living and stop waiting. There are definitely questions you've got to sit with. And they unpack a lot. Do you find that because you work with a lot of very successful people, do you find that what are they, what do they tend to be struggling with? It depends where they're on the journey. I'll give an example. So I worked with a mission in Starship. Now to go from zero to one star, it's not really that difficult because to go from zero to one, so nobody's, nobody knows who you are. So you have an element of freedom to experiment, tried dishes, tried creations, put it out there. Just literally focus on the thing that you do best, which is cooking. Now when you get your first star, you're happy, you're proud. And now from one to two stars, the game is completely different. Because now you don't have as much time to focus on the cooking. You're doing interview, the media's following you. Critics are coming to your new restaurant. You're now hiring lots of people to run the restaurant. You're now becoming a manager, which is very different from zero to one star, we're just a chef. So it's navigating a completely unknown phase. And what comes with that is a story's you tell yourself, can I do this? What would a media think of my new restaurant? What would a critics think of my new dish that I'm putting together? And so it's really helping people to understand the power of the stories we tell ourselves and the influence that has on how we show up. And I understood that when I was in school, when I was a 15 year old, this was before mobile phones and social media and the internet. So when we came back to school in September after summer holidays had finished, rumors would always go around. People would want to find out what we did in summer holidays and people make up stories. And I remember coming back to school, I'd made this decision that I would shave my head. Before you can't imagine it now, maybe I had longer hair. Now I would spend 20, 30 minutes in the morning styling my hair. And I came back to school and I remember sitting at lunch in a canteen and a friend of mine came out to me and he said, Simon, have you heard this room going around? Is it true? And I said, well, what is the room? And he said, what a room going around is saying that you spent the summer in the shower and monastery. And that's why you've got a shaved head. And then nobody wants to mess with you because I think you're, you know, you can whack out a move or something. And the reason I share that is because the stories we tell ourselves create our reality. And for a lot of people I work with, the stories they tell themselves are based on old data. And so they need somebody where it's a mentor coach to challenge them about the stories that telling themselves and how to rewrite better ones that help to move to that next level. Because what they forget is that as we go through evolutions in our life, we also have to share identities. Well, God is here. It's not going to help us get to this level. And so we have to understand we have to upgrade our internal software in order to make that next leap even more possible. And sometimes without that challenge, we're using old beliefs and old ways to try and get to a level that requires a new set of beliefs. What is your experience of that? Because I assume a lot of the people listening to this will have their working content. They'll be a great cell, they'll be a brand. And so you set these goals and these milestones when I get to 100k subscribers, I'll have made it or when I get to a million in revenue, I'll have made it. And then you reset. And it's like, where do I go from here? Like one more, how have you processed that and how you get to this level? Yeah, the true fear. And it's interesting for me as a coach because the true fear I tell people is there is no there. If you kind of work on the fact that I'm going from here, what I'm there, I've made it. That's actually a trap because when you get whatever there is, well, what happens next? For many people, and I've looked at lots of success stories, what happens is complacency creeps in, especially in the water sport. It's easy to win that first trophy. So you become champions, you lift the trophy, everybody's enjoying the success of that moment. And next season, you're boss at the table because you've forgotten what got you there. It's the same thing with people saying, this young one and one of the mouth and so for them, getting there is finishing the mouth. But what happens when they finish the mouth and they then go back to their unhealthy ways before they were training for the mouth. And so for me, it's less the idea of having a dare that you've made it. And so combination of being content and grateful for what you have now, but also realizing that this is an infinite game. Now this game never finishes. All that happens is you keep evolving. And the only goal now that I have, and I think the only goal people should have is to be better than who you were yesterday. That's it. If you focus on being better than who you were yesterday, the results will come. And often results you cannot anticipate. You have I started my entrepreneur and journey said, I want to be a coach and only a one-to-one coach. I would have probably ignored all the other opportunities to become a speaker, an author and a content creator. But because I was open to seeing where the journey would go, I was content and grateful and a present. But I was also open to the fact this journey could go lots of different places. I'm just going to focus on being better than who I was yesterday in terms of relationship and terms of value I can give and terms of my knowledge. I'm sure doors were open. And this reminds me of a beautiful Japanese saying that goes, be attached to no outcome and open to everything. Be attached to no outcome and open to everything. Because when you embrace that, sometimes the universe works in beautiful ways in giving you more than you asked for. That's absolutely incredible. I've absolutely loved this time. And you just given so much value in terms of content, building personal brand, building a coaching business. But I think also the life, the life, the advice and there's some questions that I'll definitely reflect on. It's like, incredible. I see the value that you bring to the world and I love what you're doing and what you create and what you put out there. So thanks so much. Thank you so much. If you enjoyed this episode, let me know, send me a comment or a DM or an email. And if you're looking for something similar, I think you'll really enjoy my conversation with Caleb Ralston, former director of marketing for Alex Hallmosey. He has built personal brands for huge creators like Alex and Gary V. And it's just one of my favorite conversations. So I think you'll enjoy it. Make sure you're subscribed to the channel or the podcast and cue that one up next to listen to. I think it's one of my favorite episodes.