#218 James Kemp - 5 Hard Truths on Growing Your Online Business to $100K/Month

There are countless people who struggle to earn their first $1,000 online.

Most agency owners plateau at $5K per month.

And countless business owners are clueless when scaling beyond $10K per month.

In this episode, we sit down with James Kemp, entrepreneur and seasoned business coach known for bolting on $1m+ revenue streams to coaching and consulting businesses.

Together we break down the most common challenges entrepreneurs face while growing their business and how to solve for it.

James goes deep into creating the perfect offer, market testing, leveraging technology, maintaining client relationships, effective sales processes and how to truly sustain a business in the long run.

Got some clarity and solutions to the challenges you’re facing as an entrepreneur?

Hit like, drop a comment, and subscribe to ensure you don’t miss out on more discussions with top-notch guests like James every week.


Connect with James Kemp
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thejameskemp/

My Socials:
Instagram: Darrenlee.ks
LinkedIn: Darren Lee
Twitter: Darren_ks


(00:00) Preview and Introduction
(00:41) Commitment to Getting Results
(02:20) How To Make the Perfect Offer
(06:25) Service Delivery Models (Coaching, Consulting, Done-For-You)
(11:27) Creating Additional Offers by Bundling/Unbundling
(14:21) Origins of the "Chat Offer" Sales Process
(19:43) Addressing Customer Objections to Sales Processes
(23:46) Solving Problems Creates New Problems?
(29:39) Distinction Between Scale and Growth
(33:38) Recognizing Operational Limits in Services Businesses
(37:48) Audience Size vs Audience Responsiveness
(40:56) Not Offering Value is a Disservice
(41:21) Giving Everything vs Holding Back in Content/Offers
(47:39) Pain Tolerance and Prioritising Feelings as an Entrepreneur
(49:53) Life Shocks That Cause Perspective Shifts
(54:41) Valuing Optics vs Authenticity as an Entrepreneur
(58:13) Mentors as Part of Growth
(01:01:25) Increasing Revenue Without Increasing Costs
(01:03:51) Testing Demand Before Committing Resources
(01:07:23) Considerations for Low-Ticket Offers
(01:09:32) Evaluating Revenue vs Customer Acquisition Goals
(01:12:39) Exploring AI and Automation in Business 
(01:16:23) The Concept of Sovereignty in Business 
(01:20:14) Life Changes and Protecting What's Valuable 

Transcript

James Kemp: 0:00

Coaching, consulting, mentorship and services. I'm a believer that you have to try all of them in the course of solving the problem To know where your innate aptitudes and preferences lie.

Darren Lee: 0:11

People just are not committed enough to go get the result that they could get.

James Kemp: 0:14

People think entrepreneurship is like taking risk, but it's actually about mitigating risk.

Darren Lee: 0:18

This is working. We need to put time into it, because I've tried all the other shit and this one is working During growth.

James Kemp: 0:28

you need to launch a lot of stuff, throw a lot of jabs, throw a lot of right hooks, put a lot of offers out there and then find the one that lands.

Darren Lee: 0:32

Before we start this week's episode. I have one little favor to ask you. Can you please leave a five star rating below, so we can help more people every single week.

James Kemp: 0:41

Thank you, people accumulate skills at the time that they have no idea what they're gonna turn into. And we've all done those pieces where I just did a training recently for clients and like showed the kind of s curves. These are the things that I took, these are the things I swore never to do again and these are the things I took forward. So it was kind of interesting to just reflect on those like yeah, this, this particular time of your life sucked, but I got this, this and this out of it well, that's the thing right now.

Darren Lee: 1:09

There's like such an emphasis on like, oh, we need the skills and you need to be like a hard, you need to get the hard skills and stuff, and we know that to be true, but people don't really know like that they're acquiring it elsewhere, right, yeah, so, like when I was working those jobs whatever I was learning my product user experience, uh, user research that was ingrained in you, basically, and also testing and you're a big data dude, right, and we can get into that and start with that. Like, putting out a product checking is a shit checking the adoption and then going iterating on that. And, um, I remember daniel eck speak to polina pompliano on this that she mentioned. He mentioned basically that you know the spotify browser feature. That's like, oh, your recommendation of, like you would also like this.

Darren Lee: 1:50

When his team were building that out, he was like this is dumb, this is the dumbest shit ever. He was like no one's ever going to use this and then he let the team just roll it out and it rolled out and just popped it was the highest used feature and product that they had. Now, he didn't know that, but he had to like test it basically, um, and it was amazing, right, there's no marketing there, it was just all organic. How do you think about that? Right, because, like you're very much a data dude from a perspective on marketing and product yeah, I think the you know my.

James Kemp: 2:20

I've just got a load of heuristics that I've built up over the years and, like I think, so many people, just need to make the offer, just put something out there.

James Kemp: 2:28

When I was marketing director at GrabOne, we went from a stage where we were acquiring customers and spending a ton of money on doing it to the plug being pulled and not being able to acquire anything.

James Kemp: 2:38

So I had to work out ways to actually generate revenue so I could acquire more users, and one of the ways we did it is that, you know, on any given data for 50 000 transactions, so you had real estate inside the shopping cart that was, you know, seen by 50 000 people who were buyers okay, right. And so I looked at and said, is that worth something? And I went around, shopped it out and would you buy display inventory on our shopping cart to people who have bought? And we got CPMs you know cost per views that were 10x above what industry averages were, because we could show, we could guarantee we were showing that ad to a buyer. So I think in many ways you've just got to go and make the offer to someone because they value, they can value something more than you know, more than you know everybody else. Could everybody else looking in and say it's a shopping cart? Yeah, it's not worth anything.

Darren Lee: 3:30

Yeah, but to someone it's worth something well, that's your opinion versus the markets opinion, right, and you know biology, the CTO of coinbase. He says, like everyone's boss is the CEO and a CEO is boss is the market, because it doesn't matter what you think, it's what the consumer thinks. And data is actually interesting, like, because it's always so obviously there's data-driven decisions and a lot of these companies, individuals, like do that. But it's actually only previous, right? Yeah, it doesn't dictate the future now. It gives you a heuristic for what the future can be. That's kind of interesting in its own right. Right, and for this conversation, what I'd like to do is I love like your honesty with a lot of this stuff and I think it's actually refreshing, right, because, like we're in a world where everything's making 10k, I want to kind of get into, like I want to get into maybe, like the kind of uncomfortable hard truths of like scaling right and there's different ways to look at it, different ways to kind of view it. And we can start with the offer as well.

Darren Lee: 4:22

How do you think about offers in terms of your perspective? Because you have a combination of different things to do this, right, yeah, you've lower ticket, mid ticket, high ticket. Uh, my kind of opinion on this is that people are just so caught up on like what's the vehicle, is a community, is the agency, is it done what you've done for you? And they're not shipping things. And then there's the second side of it, then, which I want to get your thoughts on, which is like well, do I love it? Do I love that this is a coaching program? Do I love that this is an agency and whatever? And I'd like to get your thoughts on that first, because I definitely have gone through this so many times for herself over the past four years, which is nothing compared to what you've been putting in over the past couple years yeah, I think with the.

James Kemp: 4:58

I think nowadays you highlight, just because you can doesn't mean you should, and I think for a lot of people, they get away from the primary business they're in, which is solving problems for people, and get into that, or how do you do it, whereas most people out there just have a hierarchy of problems in their head Not enough money, too much weight, whatever.

James Kemp: 5:24

Whatever it might be and I think fundamentally, if you focus on solving a problem for a singular person, the internet has has enabled us to scale that idea, because a hundred or a thousand or a hundred thousand people want that particular particular piece, and if I look back at the most effective offers that I've ever created or made, they were made for one person, they were really made with one person in mind, where I solved a specific problem for a particular individual and then it just happened. There are 100 or 400 or 500 of those people out there that I could find on the internet and I think a lot of people get caught in the market. They're like what's the problem to solve? It depends it. The. The answer is always, you know, the true answer is always it depends.

Darren Lee: 6:07

You know if you coach people on fitness.

James Kemp: 6:09

It's like how much weight do people want to lose? It depends how fat they are. You know how much money do people want to make? It depends how little they have, you know, it depends on what they believe. So solving one problem for one person is the singular focus, not only in the beginning but as you go along.

Darren Lee: 6:25

And the vehicle.

James Kemp: 6:25

then Well, yeah, the vehicle is only conditioned through experience, and one of the primary vehicles that people choose nowadays in terms of in the knowledge economy, which is services driven, is coaching, consulting, mentorship and services. I'm a believer that you have to try all of them in the course of solving the problem to know where your innate aptitudes and preferences lie, because you will sit in a category of one of those which you index higher on. You know, I've got a book coming out shortly Awesome. I've got a guy who's building the funnel who's you know, I give him the book coming out shortly Awesome. I've got a guy who's building the funnel. I give him the book.

James Kemp: 7:07

He builds everything out. I've given him the strategy I want to run and the products, but he's building the stuff and he's one of those builders. He sits there, he builds it. He doesn't want to coach people on it, he doesn't want to consult people on it. He's tried that, he didn't like it. So that's his preference. He likes building the stuff, deploying it, optimizing it and having that viewpoint, and I think you need to go through those things to understand that.

Darren Lee: 7:31

You've gotten a lot of great results with your medium, which is like the coaching side, the consulting side, and I often would say that's nearly the hardest. It seems the easiest to deliver. It's like, oh, just hop on a call and just tell them to do this, yeah, but all you've found is personally, like getting the real results with that, yeah, it's tough because it's so dependent on the third person. And uh, there's like, um, there's like a, a graph you can chart on this, which is like, on the y-axis, it's someone's commitment, so the higher it is, the higher, most committed, lower, least committed. And then it's like the opportunity. So, on the x-axis, and the way I see it sometimes is that sometimes, like people just are not committed enough to go get the result that they could get right, and it's same fitness or to do with business, whatever.

Darren Lee: 8:14

That's how I ended up and done for you, because I was able to say. I used to say, hey, look, this is what you need to do, and they'd be like all right, I just don't have the skills or the ability, yeah, and I was like, all right, we'll just fucking do it for you, yeah, uh, which obviously is more, you make more money from it. But what I'm trying to say is we're removing the third party dependency but then taking the risk, right? Sure, because that's it you're. You're an escape goal if it doesn't, if it doesn't work. But that's part of business, right? Yeah, it's the guarantee. It's the guarantee you build. So how have you been able to deliver so much value and scale it right? Because I saw your numbers for Black Friday. It was like 250K in that month. Very low operations 13,000. How do you get such good results in that setting?

James Kemp: 8:55

So the way to think about that frame of like the done for you, done with you, diy kind of frame is coming back to first principles, which a process must be followed to get a result right. You have chosen to do the process for people to remove or reduce third party inputs to the minimum degree. If you again graph that at the other end of the spectrum, the DIY version is you giving them all your process and their systems but them doing it, so it has a lower relative time, input and cost for you. So therefore it's potentially even higher margin than you can do that. So I just surf that spectrum.

James Kemp: 9:33

I understand that there are people out there who want 50 hours of training and videos and and templates and those things for me, like I have in a community, and they're going to diy it and they'll be prepared to pay that much you know, on an ongoing basis for access to those.

James Kemp: 9:47

And then I've got people who are like, fuck, all that learning stuff. I know a process needs to take, I don't have to take, but just tell me what the right next thing for me is right now and I'll pay you for the time of what I'm not doing and consuming that 50 hours. So I, so I surf that spectrum better than most people because I just surrender to the fact that the process must be followed and I allow people to follow that process from doing it completely themselves to all the way to let's write this offer together on Zoom and then let's send it out. And the last person I did that with you know in two hours they did $1.2 million. But their time, the investment of that time, is very high for them. You know it's very expensive for that time for both of us, but the ROI is huge and the opportunity cost of that time for them is high. So I just see everything as a process and just make it very easy for people to follow that process. You know, relative to where they are.

Darren Lee: 10:44

How do you know? How do you create those additional offers? Because you know, I heard you mention you make them To Dan Lloyd. You were saying you could have like six ones that don't work. Right, you could have like six offers that don't work, and that's kind of something that I'm it's a limiting belief. Right, we have like one, two offers that work really well. Sure, two offers that work really well, sure, and sometimes I'm afraid to add in like a coaching element, because one it's like mental bandwidth, focus and all this kind of stuff, and if I spend four months building out this or whatever, like a month, yeah, therefore, there's that kind of edge and I, I see your business model now so nicely with the low ticket community group, together one-to-one, and it's a build-up to the mastermind or whatever it's almost like. How do you build up from scratch without having shiny penny syndrome?

James Kemp: 11:27

the bundling and unbundling. So, for example, you do done for you services to with people, right? There is a consultative element to that 100, correct? Yeah, there is a services element to that which is bundled, where you do the work, and then there's a consultative element where you need to collect data, communicate with the client, et cetera. So technically, you have two products inside the offer for simplicity's sake. You have a consulting component and you have a service delivery component. So there's two products in there already, right? So then it's okay.

James Kemp: 12:02

I've got a hypothesis that there are some people in the market who can't afford, don't want to choose not to pay for the full service suite. Would they just pay for this consulting piece? So business is about it's. People think entrepreneurship is like taking risk, but it's actually about mitigating risk, and the mitigation of risk is like I'm already doing something, I'm already delivering something on this domain, in this area. Will other people buy it, but only part of it? Will people just buy the consulting component of that and pay a relatively smaller proportion? But my effective value rate is higher because that's leveraged, because we packaged up the done for you way to do it. We gave it to them. They followed the process with a little bit of help and input. So it's not so much the big principle for everybody, it's a sequence. If you're a one-on-one coach, for example, you tend to find a 90 10 relationship and those you've got 10 clients. You say the same shit over and over again every week, every month, etc.

James Kemp: 13:01

So documenting 90% and building a course or a methodology and allowing firstly your core clients to access it and then people on a leverage basis gives you that next incremental step. So I think the internet as a place observes the overnight success. I just signed up to school and I threw all these people in and then bam, I'm at a hundred K a month. The the right next move for most people is an incremental step down up to the side of where they are now, by bundling or unbundling something that they're already doing, because that has a level of proof around it.

Darren Lee: 13:42

Yeah, because, like, the offers are just so fucking mad right now. This is so much involved well, people are promising is so big and there's so much in an offer that if you were to which we would you do really well, which is segment this and break it out and dn declutter it or unbundle it. You have way more opportunity and you're still yielding the same results. Right, and it's almost like people expect different results because they're not paying you 8K a month, they're paying you 1K a month or 1K in a one-off offer. That's super interesting. Okay, let's look at some other philosophies I want to break Because this is like, honestly, a consulting experience for me, and I heard Tim Ferriss say this morning he was like they're the best podcast. He was speaking to Sean Buren.

James Kemp: 14:21

Be selfish, just be selfish.

Darren Lee: 14:22

He's like that's who's going to help, right yeah, he mentioned you're in the sales process and you know you sell during chat, right yeah, A chat process. Where did that come from, that idea? It came from pain.

James Kemp: 14:38

It came from pain, yeah, so I, you know I came up through marketing director, traditional consulting, going to an office, big invoices, getting paid daily suits and all that kind of stuff, Packaged up through the encouragement of a young man called Sam Ovens Welcome back to him Some of my ideas and the things that I'd learned in the e-commerce space running a $100 million company and the marketing for a $100 million company. And then I sold access to that by the early days of Facebook ads. It cost 10 cents a click, you get a phone call for 50 bucks and I could sell a $2,500 to $5,000 thing on the telephone. So I did it 1,500 times and then, if you looked at my calendar back in those days, that's what it was. You know between 15 and sometimes 25. You know 45 minute calls a week and I just printed cash and it was great. How much were you making? Uh, the, the peak of that was 235 a month, 235k us and that's all for you, wasn't?

James Kemp: 15:45

okay, anything I have my sister. I had. My sister came on board about a year in to take calls with me and I had Alex, who's my current some assistant now.

Darren Lee: 15:54

He joined me ten years ago and that would there were one-off payments yeah, no, just sold.

James Kemp: 15:58

Everyone had a Facebook group, had a weekly, had a weekly call and and like a I can't even remember what platform I use. Maybe cut, but that's the thing though, right I?

Darren Lee: 16:07

didn't mean to interrupt you, but like you've done those hard yards yeah, right, so like yeah, you're so.

Darren Lee: 16:13

You're super fucking intelligent the way you write emails, like I've been following your stuff and it's so, so well done. Right, but you didn't just get to that stage, right, like I'm 28, you're 43. There's a roughly like there just needs to almost be that to go through it to say like, oh, like, here's how we'd make a better process, right? Yeah, the fact that you've done 1500 calls is and that was like a year or something on total 1500 in total.

Darren Lee: 16:35

No, 1500 in total okay so when I look back, there was two two different offers, two different programs to two different markets as well exactly and what have you like the way that you've learned, either consciously or subconsciously, will be so profound during that period of, like human psychology, how it changes, how we can change the copy as a result, and there are the subtle nuances that people don't talk about, right? Yeah, it's like when you speak to people, it's a customer interaction, and then you go back and you write better emails as a result.

James Kemp: 16:59

So, yeah, yeah, I just want to make that point no, because the big insight for me was that I thought I was an amazing salesperson and I am but every time I went off-piste of the script, if you like, that worked off a call, I'd have lower results Interesting. And so when I looked at the principle of I'm actually running a script here, if I say these things in this order, with this tonality, this person's probably going to buy right. And when you actually look at that as a script, it's as written down. And so the first instance was me going I'm actually just following a script and repeating it anyway, so why the hell do I need to do this five times a day? And then I met, um, a dude called travis sego, and travis was like, had all this language that was really dense to you know tapping and T1s and T2s and these, and it worked out.

James Kemp: 17:50

The thing that I was coming to the conclusion of is that you didn't need all this talking to people, stuff and you know, and because you were following a script anyway and Travis had, you know, developed a way to sell it, you know, without a sales call. And so he taught me the principles behind that and then, in the way I do, I just innovated on it and and added my own twist to that, but the basis of that was you know we're all standing on the shoulders of giants. Travis had worked out that you know we were following a script and if we replicated the, the back and forth and the, the rapport building and the pre-selling, and if these things were present, then someone was going to buy something.

Darren Lee: 18:27

Is that limited to the cost of the offer, the price of the offer?

James Kemp: 18:32

The assumption that it is, but in my experience it hasn't. I've sold things at $100,000 on a Google Doc, right? So if there's things present in the pre-selling and there's things present in terms of if you think about all the components in the sales process, if all those things are present, there is nowhere really else to go apart from buying something. So it's not just at the moment of, like, sending someone a google doc and a few people have tried to simplify it to that there's some magic and you know, writing something on a google product, that's what happens leading up to that and it's also what happens before that. You know you need to set the scene for those things in terms of the world you're building, the identity that you're talking to people, the transformation and the transition that you're undertaking and, more importantly these days, the mechanisms that you're using, because the market's got pretty sophisticated on like. They have preference. I'm not going to do Facebook ads or I'm I'm going to use webinars or these things. So the market has a lot of preference. So if you're selling to people, they need to understand what the mechanisms you're using so they can achieve a result that you know with, which is in within their agreed mechanisms. So give me an example of how that works in your program. So a mechanism would be you know I have something called the hybrid offer.

James Kemp: 19:43

A mechanism would be you know I have something called the hybrid offer. A mechanism is we have a two-tier offer that lives inside generally a Google Doc. Some crazy people use Notion and, you know, really go against it. But that essentially allows a low level of access with a community product, usually about $100 a week, and then a higher level of access with, you know, a coaching product, usually between $300 and $600 a week. So the hybrid offer is my mechanism. What is it? It's a google doc with some well-structured words in it, etc. And it and it is presented in a certain way and it's sold in a certain way. So if people, if someone comes to me and they're like I have to do sales calls, I'm never, I'm never going to get off the phone and those things. We are not right from the, from the very beginning. So people need to be bought into the mechanism and the idea of it before they get to an offer being made, otherwise it's unpalatable what about?

Darren Lee: 20:32

from the customer's experience? You know the the prospect might be like, oh, like, as in. They're trained to be on a sales call. They're trained to be sold to. You know they almost expect it and they want some clarification. Questions like how would that? How would you approach something like that? Do you want to launch a podcast for your business, but you don't know where to start? Remove the stress, pressure and all the overwhelm that comes with it by working with podcast university. If you're an ambitious individual who wants to build your influence online, grow your own podcast and also stand out from the crowd, podcast university is for you. We help you with the strategy, equipment, the content, your guests, everything you need to create a top tier podcast. If you want to learn more, check out Podcast University and start your podcast journey today.

James Kemp: 21:17

Just when people ask to get on calls, 99% of time you ask them what questions they have and they'll ask them then and there, yeah, 100%. Most people want the relief of uncertainty. If you think about making someone wait for a call and you make them, you delay that relief. You're actually building tension that you don't know where it will go. Yeah, that relief. You're actually building tension that you don't know where it will go. So you know one of the. I know a lot about call funnels because I run them and I still help people strategize them. The longer delay between them opting in to the call funnel and the call actually happening, the lower the conversion rate because of tension.

Darren Lee: 21:56

Same with client services If something goes wrong or if they have a question. Generally you don't want them to leave like a day or, you know, overnight, because they'll like sleep on it and ponder on it, and ponder on it if you can get back within like two hours or whatever. It generally quells that part of their brain, yeah, yeah.

James Kemp: 22:13

so delaying the tension, you know, um, and and letting them have an outlet to that, to get clarity on it, keeps people in motion. And you'll hear me and quite a few of my clients talk about that a lot, because I basically drill it into them all the time about keeping people in motion, because once a prospect or a leader is in motion, they tend to stay there, they tend to start because the pain, problem solution cascade starts to set in and then when results, results kick in, then the flywheel, you know, keeps going can you explain that more?

Darren Lee: 22:46

so you're saying that they'll keep on moving when there's an issue or they won't yeah, because solutions create another problem.

James Kemp: 22:51

Yeah, problem solution continue. Yeah, um, the person you mentioned before put a message into our client community. What the heck do I do with all this free time recently? Right, that's the fundamental change in its business model. You know, an increase in profits. The fundamental change in its business model, an increase in profits and a complete change in its team structure. And those things has created the spare time.

James Kemp: 23:08

That's actually a problem Like it doesn't look like one. It's probably they describe them as luxury problems, I think, but it's actually real, because the void that people can sit in with lots of time and money is actually quite dangerous and potentially destructive To the business, to the individual. So, in the process of change, if you deliver services, if you deliver coaching, mentorship, consulting or anything, you'll create problems for people by solving the one, the last one Abundance of anything or extreme scarcity of anything is a problem, and when you start helping people solve that, you create the next one. You know abundance of anything or extreme scarcity of anything is a problem, and when you start helping people solve that, you create the next one.

James Kemp: 23:46

You know a lot of people are I want more leads. Then they have all these leads, and then they've got a lead conversion problem because they can't get to all of them right, and then they've got a sales conversion problem because they're poorly qualifying the leads, and then et cetera, et cetera. So the cascade of problems when you agree to help someone, on whatever domain, however you agree to them, you know it needs to be kind of continued to the point where it makes sense for both of you. You know, I'm reaching that line now where clients are going asking me how to structure their tax and their global and I'm like there's a lot of things in my wheelhouse but I'm not going there, right, yeah, so you have to have a boundary on that. Where there's, there's problems that you're not going to be the one to solve, but you've you as a trusted person, it helps that you've got the answers to put, to put them, put in front of them is that an opportunity too if it's within your wheelhouse.

Darren Lee: 24:42

So, let's say within the marketing realm, because that's something that we've been kind of focused on is that we get the podcast down for people. So, for context, we do B2B podcasts, we do entrepreneurs podcasts. Better way to do it we grow, we manage them, we scale them, but when that's running in BAU, always the next thing is monetization, like can we fix the offer, improve the offer? Once that's done, can we work on the emails, can we work on the lead magnets? And what I'm saying this is because we continue to move up that value value ladder.

Darren Lee: 25:08

Yeah, um, but at the same time, you had a call yesterday and it was just just a miscommunication. The person was like all right, so I want you to make this change to the website and change this drop down menu, and I was like, whoa, we don't even work on the website. You're like, oh, that's a different vendor we have, you know. So it's like there needs to be guardrails, for sure, and you talk a lot about boundaries, but there's also the opportunity, right, yeah, follow the opportunity when it comes and see what other parts of value you can add in yeah, for me that's always a timing piece.

James Kemp: 25:37

You know, um, recently I I ran and wound down a business in the last couple of years that placed 180 Filipino VAs in coaching businesses right, had a recruiter, had a thing. It was a great business, real binary, easy to sell, product right, real demand there Because we found a virtual assistant, trained them on things that coaches needed and put them in there right. I wound it down for reasons, all personal reasons, were my kind of business wind-ups in the last two years and, um, recently people have been asking how does alex run the back end of our business? How does he run? You know, the admin and the and the pieces, as my assistant and so did a poll, did a survey where now we're enabling my clients to get access to alex with their virtual assistants, to have an educational piece to say how do we run the backend, et cetera. But 20% of the people responded were like I don't have an assistant, but can you help me find one?

James Kemp: 26:29

Again, opportunity I'm not doing it because of timing, because of commitment in terms of relative resource commitment, but everything, every problem uncovered, creates that opportunity and I see these things like a spider graph as well. You know the thing that you're in the business of is in the middle and it kind of you know ebbs and flows and changes on different dimensions. But the further you get out, the more risk you take, and the more reputational risk you take, the more resource risk you take, and both of those things are relatively scarce. Your reputation if you fuck it up, you don't get many chances. If you squander resources, you won't get the opportunities to get to the next opportunity, etc.

James Kemp: 27:16

So me turning into an international tax advisor and wealth consultant about how to optimize your residence et cetera, might be a thing one day, but at the moment, if I plot it on a risk graph, it sits well outside that. So therefore it's not an opportunity I can outlast. And I think the context to that is I'm now old enough to realize that opportunities don't go away. I think when I was younger, I'm now old enough to realize that opportunities don't go away. I think when I was younger, I know when I was younger it felt like that opportunity would just evaporate into thin air, like if I don't do this now, it's all going to disappear. My experience is not that. There are some things that are maybe technologically driven, where you talk about crypto or AI? Where there?

James Kemp: 28:02

are particular opportunities that were there for the time. 99% of opportunities that people come across aren't that, and they're going to be there in a year, they're going to be there in two, they're probably going to even be there in five. And so that pressure to take the immediate opportunity, I think is a scarcity mindset for most people, because if I don't do do it, this will go away, and if it goes away then I'll make less money, and if I make less money I'll be broke behind a dumpster and the cascade of catastrophe sets in in the head it's like an internal thing, though right, because it's like, you know, a lot of entrepreneurs a lot of the best entrepreneurs kind of grow up with nothing right, and they have that like back into the wall thing.

Darren Lee: 28:39

They're like I need this to work. And if you're like I mean like me you've tried like five different things over the past six years and nothing worked until you found one thing that worked and it's like we have to double down on this because this is the window of opportunity. It may not be a hundred million dollar business, but it's something that's working right now and that's kind of what I had felt over the last couple years. For sure is it's like this is working. We need to put time into it, because I've tried all the other shit and this one is working right. So there's like, again, it's somewhere in the fucking middle, right, it's like you do need to capitalize on that, but the smaller opportunities are not. So let me give an example of that.

Darren Lee: 29:13

In the conics art business, a lot of our clients have been like oh, can you book up our guests for our podcasts? And we could, but we just don't have the infrastructure. We don't have someone to do the outreach. Uh, we don't have custom scripts per individual and we just have to say no. But even though that is an opportunity that we could bring to people, it's just again wrong timing, yeah, um has anyone ever made the distinction to you between scale and growth?

Darren Lee: 29:39

um no, I've read your email on and I still didn't actually really understand it.

James Kemp: 29:43

Yeah yeah, it's. It's very nuanced because it is very specific to the person right at that particular moment in time. It's because that's all they all they can see. But growth is a. The metaphor is like throwing spear to get the wall and then seeing what sticks. During growth you need to launch a lot of stuff. Throw a lot of jabs. Throw growth you need to launch a lot of stuff. Throw a lot of jabs. Throw a lot of right hooks. Put a lot of offers out there, double and then find the one that lands right, one that's scalable, profitable, repeatable.

James Kemp: 30:14

There's strong market demand that you can, you know, acquire at a reasonable cost and you can make a margin on it. That gets you in business. You know profit and the things that drive business at a reasonable cost and you can make a margin on it. That gets you in business. You know profit and the things that drive business. Then, once you've found that, you scale it, which is, if I put these inputs in, if you've got a, if you've got a coaching program, if you've got a service right, I I I can pay this much money to acquire a client through this advertising medium or this referral partner. That is profitable after 30 days and I can do that indefinitely until we run out of resources at this point here, because we can only do 50 clients. So you scale from client one to client 50 by doing that equation over and over again. I'm paying $500 to get get a client and he's making me a thousand dollars. When you reach that ceiling you need to grow again, which is interesting. We have reached a capacity of our current scaling piece, usually operationally on a delivery side, if it's more services heavy, where we can't service the current clients to a high standard, high standard quality. So we need to hire people, grow something. In the process you may have built up opportunity to consult to people who you don't want to do, done-for-you services, et cetera, and you might add that as well into the new piece. Then you grow that until you're like okay, now we've got capacity for 150 clients, we're just going to scale into that Interesting.

James Kemp: 31:46

The art of big growth is spending as little time in growth as possible in the maximum amount of time in scale, where you're going I'm putting $1 in and I'm getting $5 out. I'm putting $1 in and scale is kind of boring because it's very, very process and mechanical driven, because you've got an input and you're doubling down on it. So if I'm working with people more intensively and closely, my first piece is like are we in a growth phase or are we in a scale phase here? And I had a client join me recently and it was just very obvious that the age-old consulting advice is spend more fucking money Like ramp your advertising, everything's great here. You've got massive capacity. You're bored out of your mind because you know the opportunity is there. You've got a product that wants it for a good cost of acquisition. We're just going to grow it.

James Kemp: 32:40

And all he needed was permission and clarity on the numbers and it's just scaling up. You know, add a 40K in four weeks. You know because he had a product that was right there to scale. But equally, I've had someone join me recently and I'm like you're just going to bonk against the ceiling if you try and sell more people into this right now. So we need to, you know. You know unpack it, recalibrate the product, get, get things right before you can actually scale it up.

Darren Lee: 33:05

It's really interesting. It taught me, true, but that kind of limitation because that's something that I'm kind of struggling to understand myself. So like we're doing like 75 000 rev a month, uh, 70 margins, and trying to get that to 100k profit, um, and because it's like service, obviously you have like employees and you need to add more people in. So I don't understand the limit part. It's like what does? Where does the limit hit in and why is there a limit on adding in more people? I don't know.

Darren Lee: 33:38

So the the main, the main limit reached in services business is delivery if you had pods delivering, so like you had like a section here of like 10 people on a section here, yeah, would that not remove that quality issue?

James Kemp: 33:52

it would. It would mitigate your your delivery constraints but it may exacerbate quality where you see churn put up. So for services, businesses that offer any kind of recurring ping like, churn is the heaven killer. And if you talk to a VC or someone in terms of what's the optimal around SaaS and those markets and you transport across the services about 20% annualized, that is like gold standard, it's like healthy. You're losing the pain in the ass clients and you know the ones you don't want to serve and you're keeping the good ones.

James Kemp: 34:27

So usually the constraint is around around delivery, because the skill set of the, of the only the operator, only runs up to to a certain level. The abstraction of like hiring one person who works for them, who can look over their shoulder, is very different to hiring one person who looks over that person's shoulder and like cascading down. So you have a quality issue usually at the bottom, where churn kind of kicks in because you're just not keeping the clients long enough. And subsequently, on the other side, the major constraint is cost of acquisition, that it gets uneconomical in some markets where they just run up against the addressable the available and addressable market so their costs of acquisition start to spike. So I've got a um, I've got a long-term client in the uk who works with in-person personal trainers, right, they've been going for three years now coaching program, and if you look at their cost, you know, to acquire a customer they had this kind of gradual rise and then, after they'd saturated essentially the market, it just started to take off. So they doubled the cost of acquisition.

James Kemp: 35:34

So other things need to be more efficient and getting the client. So it depends whether where the constraint is, because it could be on an acquisition side, it could be on delivery side, it could be on a churn or an operational side that you need to kind of solve first. And that's like that's the art of it, is like looking down the track of going where is this problem likely to occur? Because you you haven't experienced that problem any before, so you don't know where it's likely to kick in and that and they come suddenly.

Darren Lee: 36:02

That's the thing with entrepreneurship, right. You don't know what's coming next, yeah, and we don't run ads, right. That's why it's kind of interesting. So our is low, yeah, but deal flow is less yeah so pay attention to sales cycle.

James Kemp: 36:16

Yeah, so with it in an organic environment, the you start to stretch out in the sales cycle, so that's more costly yeah because the other, the other metric is not just monetary cost, it's time cost 100.

James Kemp: 36:29

So if you're, if your sales cycle starts to stretch out and you see this in b2b or enterprise as well 100 long sales cycle is horrendously expensive. Yeah, so that's the hidden cost. There you're like well, we're not paying for customers. Well, you are. Yeah, because your sales cycle is doubled or tripled from what it is because you got the low hanging fruit 100.

Darren Lee: 36:46

So we you'll find this interesting and hopefully this is like valuable for you too to think of. True, this is like we started out with doing enterprise. So, because I had a finance background, I was like we're going after the goldmans, we're going after, like, city banks, because they all run big podcasts. They all, every single one of them, have them and I know a lot of people that run the shows for them. So we started going after those and even though I was getting intros into the companies and stuff, it was the 6, 9, 12 month and it's a very famous bank who we're going to work with that said, there would be six months before they pay an invoice. So I was like fuck that. And when we needed cash, we just swapped towards entrepreneurs one to five mil a year. It's just way easier to sell.

Darren Lee: 37:21

Yeah, obviously, different client stuff, but it's kind of like we're kind of like evolving back to the higher ones just because, like it's a longer contracts. Yeah, one to three years in general for the most part. Uh, but it's a different beast, right, completely, it's just. It's just a different beast. It's a different way to view it. Uh, completely, okay. So let's have a look at the audience side. So you're a small audience. Uh, how true. To want to get is like do you need a big audience to make money online?

James Kemp: 37:48

you need a responsive one, but you don't need a big one. What's responsive? Responsive is and they respond to offers you know, by either accepting them or telling, telling you why they won't accept them.

James Kemp: 37:58

So you can make another one to them and you do email yeah, predominantly email, um, because it's a, it's an environment where you can make an offer on a high frequency so you can learn and test a hell of a lot. Yeah, um, and it's also conducive to people having a personal response, like when you're in someone's inbox, even though you're sending it to. You know today, 4870 people. If someone responds, we're having a personal conversation, just like, just like messaging, and you read it too right.

Darren Lee: 38:25

It's the thing I'll always read sahil blooms, justin welsh's, mac ray and yours. Yeah, I just like filtering out the noise and then keeping like. I think the sweet spot for newsletters is like eight. I heard um matt as a matt barry founder of convertkits that basically more people are subscribed to like eight and they opened.

James Kemp: 38:44

Yeah, you know, I've had people on my list for most a decade in some cases, and I've got people on my list for a decade who haven't bought anything too. What do you think that is? I don't care. What do you think they don't buy? Though, I haven't made an offer that was attractive to him at the time, so it's, it's on me. But, um, I think that the in today's world as well, that goodwill is, you know, something you can scale. I mean, mr homosi talks about this quite a lot. It's something you can scale faster as well.

James Kemp: 39:13

I've got people in my world who don't give me a lot of money, but they give me a lot of goodwill in terms of, you know, sending people my way and referring, because they understand what I do. That is that they had just also have decided it's not for them, and I always respect that. So I think there, if we, if we look at audiences you just look at the average kind of YouTube or Instagram influencer to say that a big audience isn't necessarily valuable. There are people on Instagram with a million people you know and are making close to nothing from those people because they haven't got either a monetization strategy that works or an audience that they've engaged with to actually, you know, get them to buy something. The the creator world, you know, and the influencer world can learn a lot from the coaching world that has got very good at monetizing very small audiences very efficiently. You know, there's plenty of coaches with 2,000 people in their audience who make a million bucks a year who could teach quite a lot to someone with 2 million people in their audience who make 2,000 bucks a year.

James Kemp: 40:11

So for me it's. You know, I came through the daily deals world for quite a few years and I got sold on the fact that if you made frequent offers to people, then you understood the intent behind it. If someone buys something about offers from me, I have a signal of intent from them that they want to improve an offer, create a new one, make something. If they buy the social code or one of my insights around writing, around writing and creating, they probably want to make more content etc. And then it's just a straight question of like do you want some help with that? Which is, you know, these days, if you've got a craft and a mechanism and things, it's the ultimate question if you're a coach, consultant, you know, service provider or mentor, do you want some help with that as a magic question after someone's demonstrated intent?

Darren Lee: 40:56

and, of course, like when you have an offer that can help people, you're actually doing a disservice by not offering it right.

Darren Lee: 41:00

If someone's in the dms and they're asking you about nutrition. If you're a health coach, it's like hey, dude, I also have this program and this life coaching program. Now, you know jk, as we mentioned several times his kind of approach and this is like you don't want to give, you can give, be giving too much value with your content. I mean, that's very interesting to get into too, right? Is? I want to get your takes on, take on this. So I've tried both.

Darren Lee: 41:21

Um, proper, like russell brunson expert secrets approach. It's more like give the strategy and then you pay for implementation. And I've I've seen that really work really well with our stuff because it's so operationally heavy. Sure, you know, and I can see how if, as a coach, if you were to give the tactics, people like oh fuck, I'll figure out the next 20, I got 80, I'll take, I take next 20. How do you think about that? Because, like what, our clients, which are in different spaces, you know, some of them are health coaches, some of them are have sass companies. We're trying to get them to deliver a lot of content through their podcast which is valuable and insightful and strategic, and then people will come and pay for the implementation and it's been effective right, but you can almost not split test both right. Does that make sense? Yeah, giving away everything versus not giving away everything and seeing the benefit. How do you think about?

James Kemp: 42:09

that. Again, it's both valid, like both work, and I could show you examples of both being true. So for me I don't even remember where it was, but six, seven years ago maybe I bought russell brunson's magic webinar or secret webinar formula, or whatever it was ultimate, yeah, ultimate webinar kind of thing, and you know you makes perfect sense and my friend liz benny, you know a protege of she's like it's the best.

James Kemp: 42:38

You just follow this and then you give the three secrets and then you have the stack, the dominoes, and I tried it a few times and it was just so contrived for me, it was just so robotic and mechanical, et cetera. When I hold a webinar or a workshop, I am full send, like autistic, like this is everything I know about it, etc. Etc. If you want my help doing it, cool, yeah, like that's my whole thing, because that's natural for me, because I'm not attached to the need of like I need these people to buy into these secrets. I need these people to buy into my offer stack and I need these people to initiate a feeling like they're missing out on something. I'm just like. Here's everything I know about it, here's all the insights. If you can see something you like in there, come and chat to me right and your, your customer base are quite varied.

Darren Lee: 43:27

So how do you run your webinars if there are different audiences in it? It's not like you're selling, I don't do them for them.

James Kemp: 43:33

I do that. All my workshops and all my creation is for me. It's the thing I'm interested in and the thing I've got the most energy in, because I am in love with my clients but I'm not in love with their problems. So I have the detachment, which means that I can see a way to solve a problem through running a workshop or hosting a call with them, and then I just teach the thing that I know will. That will get them out of the way the most, and that's. I'm way more inspired by the results my clients get than the money right. Every, every time I've, you know, set a strike scene, looked in stripe or seen the screenshot, I'm like great, cool. But every time I get a I've just retired my wife and and these kind things it hits way more.

James Kemp: 44:18

So I make stuff for me because it solves problems for those people and I don't really care in the sense of like. I don't need a response or reaction on a certain level and that's my data Like, did it shift something for one person? Did one person get an insight that they could use immediately to do it? My head's not out in the market. It's not like. What do they need? You know, I know what people need because they tell me, but I shape things that I'm interested in and lean into those and get people to respond to. So that's how I've been able to have a very diverse customer base in terms of who they are and the type they are. There's some principles and some characteristics that are the same, but also how I'm able to have a community right now where people who are making their first dollar online and people are doing two million a month that's so interesting, right, because that's the opposite guru voice you've been getting right.

James Kemp: 45:11

That's like another limiting belief and so ben um ben said all the email copywriter talks about sociological businesses. He doesn't. He, he does talk about psychological business if it's sociological and sociological, like just means human powered. Right, and myself and you know, dan, we we've built businesses that allow us to thrive in our lives, right, and so it means that the things we're excited about that we push out there, we get other people excited about them and get them engaged with it.

James Kemp: 45:45

A psychological business is, you know, corporate businesses that are data-driven. We're building you've been a product manager right. We're building this product because the market says in this survey over here that they want it. It doesn't mean that you guys want to build it, it doesn't mean that you want to even deliver it or serve it, et cetera, but the market commands it and you can tell what kind of businesses people have in terms of those two frames. The people who are in it for the craft, for the art, act much more like artists and creators in these pieces. They just have a very solid business model so they monetize it in that way. The people who are direct response and psychological are always out in the market. You know the market will pay for this, etc. It's like do you like it? No, I hate it. I hate delivering. I hate coaching. I hate them. I hate calls. They've always got a. They've always got something that they're compromising on you know, something that they're tolerating. Yeah, they don't want to be doing, but the market demands it. But is there?

Darren Lee: 46:38

a kind of um, an inflection point, uh. So I interviewed gad sad. He was on rogan a few times and he came up with this concept called inverted u. So it's like an n, effectively, and if happiness is on the y-axis and like effort is on the x-axis. Basically, the more you put into something, the diminishing returns you get. Right, it's like fitness if you train 10 times a week you're going to start getting negative returns, but if you train five days a week it's the optimal. So as you go up there to happiness, like curve, same relationships every together, 24, 7 versus a couple of hours a day.

Darren Lee: 47:09

So I think about that sometimes in the context of business and this could be cope right on my own side, limiting belief, it's like, no matter what I do, when I'm putting a lot of time into it, I'll start to not like some aspects of it, not everything, but just some aspects of it. So do people kind of use that as a scapegoat to be like I want a lovely business, even though, like, there's difficult times in all businesses. But you have the skills to be like, yeah, you almost have like the internal mechanism to be like. I know this, this is tough. I'm launching a new offer. But I see the other side of it. It's kind of like perspective in a frame right.

James Kemp: 47:39

Yeah, I think one of the most dangerous pathologies for the average entrepreneur is that their pain tolerance is just super high and so that there you know, if you think about the, the education system, you're conditioned from a pretty young age that you're just going to do shit you don't want to do. This is what you do. So by the time these people kind of break out of a corporate world or break out from that experience and say that's for me, they've got this conditioned, you know, kind of pain dulling, kind of well, business is hard because life is hard and work is hard. So they've got this pathology of like hard, et cetera. I guess I just don't believe it, where I'm like yeah, there are things that I had to send receipts to my bookkeeper and accountant this morning. Did I want to do that? Fuck, no, it's, it's terrible. Is it a 15 minute job that's going to kill me? Or, you know, is it a natural consequence of just running a business? Of course it is. You have to do it. So in those moments I'm like I get to do this, I get to send receipts for my tiny, tiny expenses and my gigantic relative to my gigantic revenue and I just depreciate it.

James Kemp: 48:43

But I think for everybody, their pain tolerance depends on what they do. Some people can see a market opportunity and just can't not do it and will go through that pain to the ends of the earth. I think some of the greatest entrepreneurs in the world do that. You know masks and jobs and those. It didn't matter how they felt about it Right. I'm more like prioritizing my feelings because I see those as a responsibility that I have to my children and my partner, because I'm optimizing for myself. So I think it depends on the individual, their pain tolerance and also their time of life. When you're young, you should grind, you should do a lot of reps, you should do as many reps as possible and then you should stop and look and decide which reps you want to do more of and which you want to do less of. So it's also a time of life and an attitude thing.

Darren Lee: 49:32

That's making me think so much there's so much going on there because it's just different, right, it's a different way to view everything, the way you're being able to kind of like so what would have those big changes for you to be able to say, all right, I'm going to slow down and do it a different way and focus on what I enjoy and leaning to that versus just like, versus some scarcity, like how do you have that change?

James Kemp: 49:53

yourself, so that, um, the same answer that most people don't want to hear, which is a shock to the system. So, um 18 months ago, my wife and I separated and I was in the middle of running a business, which was you know I said it was you know white labeling, software, platforms with coaches, etc. Running a team and all these things. I was running a psychological business. I was running a business that the market demanded but I didn't particularly enjoy running. That paid extremely well. Right, the market opportunity was there, but I but the tipping point for me was that I was no longer married and I at the time I was sole um caregiver to the children. So for five months I was dad and occasionally mum, okay, and that meant as a partner to my business partners. I couldn't be there at any time of the day and any hour. I was like my life and the kids had to take priority to do it.

James Kemp: 50:54

So my change was hitting the wall of reality of going. I can't run this business anymore and I have to prioritize something else. So the phoenix out of the ashes of that is going. I'm going to build my life first and then use the deep skills that I've got in business to build the ultimate structure for that, and that's why I work two days a week. That's why I, you know, barely get on zoom and one-on-one course. That's why I am a pain in the ass to get hold of, you know, a lot of the time because I guard these things and have boundaries around it and my observation is that most people just hit that moment.

James Kemp: 51:34

You know, I'm 43 and I've got. I'm in a time when some of my friends are having health issues. You know, I know someone who had a heart attack recently, suddenly going to the gym for the first time in his life, right, so the catalyst is often, unfortunately for people, when you hit reality, when you hit the skids of going I can no longer do this anymore, and unfortunately, for most cases, it's a blow-up. You know I can no longer do this anymore and unfortunately, for most cases, it's a blow-up. I know people.

James Kemp: 52:01

I lived in London, just like you did, and I know people in that world who literally almost worked themselves to death before they made a change 100% and still, 12 months later, they came back into the fold in the tech and the startup scene because they were addicted to the meaning and the things it gave them. So it doesn't mean that people are going to break out and you know, go and live on a boat in columbia or something like that, but it is. Um, it's definitely in my experience. Most people have a moment where something happens, where everything's peeled off and you have to look and see things differently Otherwise the outcomes are catastrophic or deadly.

Darren Lee: 52:43

Are you an entrepreneur who wants to build your influence and authority online? You may have tried some of the hacks and tricks, but none of it has worked. And it makes sense. 90% of podcasts don't make it to episode three. Of the 10% that are left, 90% of them don't make it to episode 20. That's where Vox comes in.

Darren Lee: 52:58

Vox creates, manages and grows your podcast for you, on your behalf. If you've not been getting leads, not been growing consistently, you haven't found your tribe and you don't know what to do, vox is the answer. Don't just take our word for it. In the past couple of years, we've managed over 35 podcasts. We've also been able to generate over 55 million views with 500 episodes produced, and not only that, generating over $1 million for our clients in products, services and sponsorships. So if you want to learn more about how you can build a great podcast and have it fully managed for you, schedule a call with me at Vox and we will help you achieve your podcast goals. And you're obviously playing with higher stakes, right, because you have children, other responsibilities.

Darren Lee: 53:40

I feel like when you're like young and dumb and you can kind of run up these businesses and stuff. There's almost like no risk, especially in your twenties, right, like you have no risk, there's no real downside, like you have that time to grind and try things. But you made a really good point about how most people don't come through like the. I always think about people that I know that went on to become mds and all this shit. Right, because, like they've ultimate diamond fucking handcuffs at that point. So it's like if they try to unravel it, what would they unravel through? Because you can take all those skills that you've had through your 20s and 30s and repackage it. Uh, but a lot of these guys can't do any other things. Yeah, which is like the biggest and that's why people are getting divorced. So a lot of people leave break up because there's a lot of knock-on effects and time is ultimate determinator, right?

Darren Lee: 54:25

yeah but all this shit, I always analyze time and that that concept comes from sam ovens. You know he always talks about the impact of time. The habits you're doing, the activity you're doing, the events you're doing right now, that will play impact three months, six months, three years, six months, nine years, 12 months from now.

James Kemp: 54:41

Um yeah, sam's a wonderful example, because sam only briefly got sucked into the. The modern frame of the entrepreneur, which is the modern frame of the entrepreneur, is it's more important what it looks like than what it is. It's more important what it looks like than what it is. It's more important your reputation and what people think of you and your brand than what you're actually doing on the inside. And Sam had a moment where he wore blazers in New York and these kind of things, that kind of he convinced himself at the time that it was that. Subsequently he's kind of said, yeah, it wasn't really me. And now he wears woolly jumpers and his hair's down to his ass and those things. He convinced himself at the time that it was that. You know. Subsequently he's kind of said, yeah, it wasn't really me, and you know, now he wears woolly jumpers and his hairs down to his ass and those things. But that is him, that is him.

James Kemp: 55:23

And I think for a lot of people they've bought into the entrepreneurial optics of what do people see me as rather than who. How do I see myself? Yeah, rather than who. How do I see myself? Yeah, and for me, I. I love the work that I do and I'm a real business geek.

James Kemp: 55:45

I find it massively interesting and the people, the dynamics, you know, psychology and all the things that are in that kind of melting pot of skills but I try my best not to derive my identity from it that there's two, two young people that you know who are growing there that don't give a shit really how much money, they like the things that it enables, but they don't really, you know, give a shit what, how much money I make.

James Kemp: 56:10

Yeah, that I'm the model of what I'm putting in my mouth or how I'm speaking or how I look after myself or those things, much more than how many clients do I have and how many six figures do I have in my, in my, you know, monthly, monthly stripe shot. So I think, I think the, the, the optics of the entrepreneur have become a lot of people's priority because they think everybody's watching them and they need to be a certain thing. Yeah, and it gets to a certain time of life where, like, living on other people's basis is just catastrophic, because if it's too far away from your core, you're living a shadow life, you're living a false one how do you draw the distinction there?

Darren Lee: 56:49

because you know there there needs to be, so we get influence from other people we always get influence from other people and it's good to have like good influences and good mentors and if you're paying into your program or whoever's right or even like something like that. And the way I kind of view this is like across, like wealth. We have like health wealth, financial, mental, like spiritual and so on and I almost have like mentors in all different verticals, whether they know it or not. So someone like sahil bloom would be someone like, uh, relationships, he's a fantastic, like family and so on. Well, our freedom could be like justin welsh or someone similar to yourself, you know you very similar top bosses, and then someone like welts.

Darren Lee: 57:26

Then I don't really know how, you know, everyone's a millionaire. Right, it could be anyone, uh, but then it's about like freedom and time freedom and stuff. So it's almost like having these like verticals to lean into, but then obviously having but using it as like a way to say, okay, this was the path that was paved, yeah, without taking on like all of the identity and becoming a, you know, a derivative of sam woven's back in the day with the blue suits, so like, where is that kind of line drawn? Because, like, I think to some degree for young people it's good to have those like blind mentors you put money into and I've actually invested in a mentor recently who's all about like growth and scale and he's grown a very big business and he's helped me a lot. But I'm taking the business aspect from him, not the lifestyle. So, but there's a filtration process which is you're fearful that it might come in in other ways or you don't know that it's coming in other ways. So how do you draw those distinctions?

James Kemp: 58:13

The same way that I watch um, my daughter young daughter play and and move through different experiences in life. She tries it on right. She's got costumes and you know, princess dresses and those kind of things. She's trying it on for a period of time. And then the outfit that I bought her three months ago of you know what was it? I was, it was an Indonesian kind of, you know, traditional kind of outfit. You know that's like no, I don't want to be there anymore and that's at the back of the cupboard.

James Kemp: 58:43

So you have to try them on to see how they fit before you can decide what the models. You know, I had a client the other day and he deployed this process and he came back to me and he goes I don't like this. And there's one particular piece of the strategy that we deployed and he's like I don't like this and I'm like that's awesome because you didn't like it on preference, because you tried it right. He's like clients responded to it and it kind of worked and I can see it, but I'm not going to do it and I'm like'm like brilliant because you did it through experience rather than going back and going I don't like that, it's not going to work or you know, or or most other reasons that people give.

James Kemp: 59:29

I think trying it on, of being, of modeling other people, is how we learn and how we grow, and I don't think that's isolated children. I think we go through that our life and then we have these moments where you know your heroes, you know, maybe lose their tarnish as well. You hear, you hear something or you find something out about something that was they're not the person you thought they were, or they're a fake and or whatever. In today's world that's very common, but we've've also had that in our. You know, when you're young and you see your father and he's, you know, the biggest, tallest kind of you know big man, you see, and nowadays I'm slightly down to my daddy's and he's that much shorter than me and I'm like I used to think you were huge. So you know, it's trying those things on and going through those kind of processes and understanding that the movement through those things is more important than the, than the snapshot you are.

James Kemp: 1:00:19

So many people judge their current place, the snapshot of life, like that, you're that and that we because humans want certainty so much they're like you're this and you're like I'm just this at the moment.

James Kemp: 1:00:30

Yeah, you know, and there's evolution to me, there's changes, there's um, there's, there's things that will change in the future that I can't even see, just like there is for you. So you try them on and you go through those things and say, well, I'm going to discard the things that didn't work for me based on this preference, but I'm also going to open the door that I'm coming back. Right, you know, if we, if we're going to get real specific, I've got a lot of people who want me to start an agency and build my business for other people, you know, and that requires building infrastructure and and all these things, and I'm like I haven't taken off the table that would completely go away from the core and those things that I currently have now. But then you're like, okay, I'm not, I'm not married to, I'm not, I'm not taking that off the table forever, but it's definitely not something I'm doing right now and like that it's really sobering talk because you know the advice is like stick with one thing, do it until it works, stay with it.

Darren Lee: 1:01:25

You're that identity, you're known as that thing, and then you're not going to change. But like the cycle of evolution is that we adjust, right? Yeah, it's part of the individual to change. Yeah, just like it is that nature is changing. Talk to me about, um, increasing revenue without increasing costs in a business. So what I've kind of observed is not at a high cost at all. Their costs are very low in the context of things, but you know they are increasing. So how do you think about, how do you can increase your revenue by stabilizing or maintaining costs?

James Kemp: 1:01:58

um, it's a difficult one because that maintaining cost doesn't mean like growing costs isn't bad. Yeah, maintaining margin would be a healthier viewpoint. Right, because costs mean that there is some level of delivery going on in a services business, unless they're frivolous or you've got poor management etc. But there is not necessarily an imperative to lower costs, but there is an imperative to maintain margin up to a certain point. So you got to kind of choose the goal. Right, because higher costs aren't bad if revenue goes up and the margin is maintained, because you know subsequently out the other end it's a bit more profit. So first is the question is that actually, is that optimal? Because you can again have a pathology of like we've got to keep costs etc. And you can cut quality while trying to increase profit, and then you have the inverse effect, or are you trying to maintain margin?

Darren Lee: 1:03:01

interesting I've seen. I've observed that we are profits increased as time has gone on, um, but then to evolve we obviously need to increase costs, to like higher and further. So give you a perfect example we've built out an offer that not only will we build a podcast, but we use linkedin, and I've always been using linkedin. It's been huge for me over the last couple years. It was that we know how to write on linkedin, but we don't have the infrastructure to write at scale for clients. So we're just tinkering with that right now, like what would a ghostwriter look like? Do we need a copywriter? Could they do some youtube too? And then it's like, well, how much is that going to cost A good writer, english speaking, based in the US? Probably 5K a month at the very least. So it's like we could do with what we have right now. But it's like, oh, to increase quality. This is just always a challenge in my brain. There's no answer.

James Kemp: 1:03:51

Well, there is because to contribute, for that cost to be a meaningful contribution to the bottom line, it must drive incremental revenue which derives a margin to it. So in the course of that, you don't need to wonder whether people will hire the copywriter. You just go and sell it. Yeah, I get you. We're looking for five clients right now who want professionally written content on LinkedIn. On this cadence here we're taking the first five people.

James Kemp: 1:04:18

It's at at this rate you'll be grandfathered in for life and you just have margin on it right so you don't need to wonder, because ultimately it's pointless to hire the copywriter if there's no actual demand in the market as well. Yeah, because sometimes demand is like a mirage. People go it will be nice if we could get this, but doesn't mean they'll pay for it, right, so that you know it's overly simplistic. But for me offers solve everything. Yeah, you know, going out in the market and going okay, well, we need a minimum of three clients to to cover the cost of this. Then we get a high caliber copywriter. The maximum capacity of this person, you know, based on the the fees, is like 10 people a month, for example. If we get three, we've got a small margin or a break even and we've we've validated there's a demand in the market and then we focus on getting that up to 10 because my approach has always been to sell it and then figure, figure it out.

Darren Lee: 1:05:10

Always, yeah, it's a seller service, see, is available in the market and then just figure it out. Like you know, in our network that we have, like I could get my friend who runs a ghostwriting education program to give us. What I'm trying to say is that we've access to those people, yeah, to be able to get what we need a lot of time, which is like insane, right. Yeah, it's just leveled the playing field completely. Yeah, um, the.

James Kemp: 1:05:30

The deception comes when you've you've got in services businesses, when you've got interdependent products that then look like you're. You know we got the ghost writer and he's 5k a month and we're charging him out to five clients at 2k a month. So we're making a gross margin of 5k. But but the one of the leadership of the company had to spend five hours a month at an equivalent cost of a thousand dollars checking the content, putting the structure in place, etc. And that opportunity cost was lost elsewhere because we lost a customer, because we took the hour off the ball right. So it's like kind of monkey branching. But those things are saying what are the interdependent relationships to those things? So I I usually do and it works in pretty much every service industry when I make the distinction between products and offers. If you have a product suite, then you have. Okay, we've got a ghostwriter and he's 5K and we charge him out of this. We've got podcast production, we've got podcast editing, we've got podcast distribution, et distribution, etc.

James Kemp: 1:06:36

Each of those is an individual product. If you understand the margin on all of those in terms of how their contribution is to an overall offer, and then you understand the management costs and the running costs and the operational costs of those is a fixed cost and you contribute to that then you like. Actually, we do about 10 different things but we only have like one offer. Do we want to add to that? Take away from it? Where's the margin actually coming from? So it creates opportunities to go. We can have a lower tier plan or a higher tier plan there's actually, and start to explore the bounds of that, because there are plenty of service business that make more margin off their lowest tier clients than they do off their very highest ones because of the levels of service that high-end clients demand super interesting.

Darren Lee: 1:07:23

I'm trying to think about, like, if you have the higher ticket, lower ticket services, like, is it worth it? Right, because it's still time being invested, whether it's you, as, like you know, the overarching ceo making sure things don't blow up, or the team, and that's kind of how I think about sometimes. Like the lower ticket services is like is this even worth it to do like a 2k a month consulting offer because, like, there's the eight and a half k opportunity we can chase and say more, but it's like the, it's the unit economics of it, it's also the that it's.

James Kemp: 1:07:56

Also there's two other factors as well as what is the contribution to the overall growth of that? If I told you that 50 of the people who started the 2k then went to the eight and a half k within 30 days, would you look at the 2k differently? Right? It's like I have a. I've got facebook ads running right now. It's got a free download on the front right, a template you know one of my Google Doc templates et cetera. It's got a $100 offer on the other side of it. The layman would look at it and go well, you're just trying to make $100. I'm actually just trying to get a customer out of the leads. So if 8% of people buy it, which is roughly what it runs at now, then for every 100 people that download it, eight people contributed eight hundred dollars and I've got eight hundred dollars to spend back in marketing. If that whole thing liquidates itself, then what was the purpose of that product? It was to get a customer. It wasn't to make marginal money. So it's also.

James Kemp: 1:08:51

I also learned this in daily deals. You know, back in the day when we're people were kind of exploring the discount space and people would come and go and be like I want lots of customers and I want like lots of money. And I and I realized that those two things were, for 99% of people who had hard physical costs, were like completely impractical. And when I started kind of with some of the bigger clients because I was, I was only sales side, briefly, I was mainly in marketing and product for most of the time. So I only really interacted with like really big clients when I was brought into like how do we close these deals off? I explained to them that they could make tons of revenue off this and probably move some products that they really wanted to get rid of. Or they can get a ton of customers and then I could help them kind of strategize what they sell to those customers afterwards.

James Kemp: 1:09:32

So products don't necessarily have the sole focus of making margin of money. That if you're prepared to sacrifice some of that margin because you know we're going to get a two thousand dollar a month client doesn't make us much money, but 50 of those people then you know, ascend to that. You could have a whole business unit that did the two thousand,000, that just did the $2,000 a month clients that were conditioned to go. Actually, if we go from 50% to 60% to people who upgrade to $8,500, then that product takes on a different meaning. So it's also understanding. Like where do the products fit in your view of the market? Like, where do low-ticket products fit? You could have a suite of low-ticket products where you made a million bucks a year but you spend a million dollars in marketing. What would the incremental effect of that be on your eight and a half thousand dollar things at the end?

Darren Lee: 1:10:23

so how does that fit in the context of your business? Because your costs are so low? Because, like the way you're describing, it makes a lot of sense to me and it feels like that we need more to do that right. We might need the comedian buyer, you might need this and that. How do you think about in the context of what you're doing as a result?

James Kemp: 1:10:38

I just had benefits of high, of just ridiculously high margins because I've kept my costs low. Because of those constraints and also once I passed a couple of hundred thousand a month, I just turned into a game. To be honest, it was like how big can I get this thing without compromising my values?

James Kemp: 1:10:55

and without compromising the things. I set up my syndicate client community, which is we're getting a couple of calls a week and et cetera. That's capped out at 100 people. I'll never take more than 100 people. So I pre-built those constraints in there. But that constraint also forces creativity of like okay, well, how many people can I get into just the community level for 100 bucks a week? Okay, because I can serve way more than 100 in there. So okay, then I got 100 people in there and oh, there's a group of people inside the syndicate who want closer access to me. So I started the circle and put 12 people in that and then we have a one call a week and then my effective value rate on that because they're paying 750 a week is gigantic, right, so I get paid 10 grand to come up and talk to them as an effective value rate because people just wanted a higher level of access to me yeah so it's just like to me after a certain piece is like it's not the money and it's.

James Kemp: 1:11:51

I hate it when people say that, yeah, when when people who have money say it's not about the money, but it's not about the money because you start to play. How far can I push this idea of a solo consultant that all the people in this world have direct access to me? Like if you're in my community and you ask a question and you're paying a hundred bucks a week, I'll answer it. I'll respond to it. If you're, you know, on a call and you know in the syndicate who get you know, weekly calls over and above the community will jam on your business, you know, and I'll whip the ipad out and we'll talk and I'll ask questions for as long as it needs. Like people get direct access to me and in that world. So I think about these things of like, how far can I go? You know I'm exploring ai at the moment. Can the speed to the question get even higher with people talking to a version of me? Because I have hundreds of hours material I can feed into a large language model.

Darren Lee: 1:12:39

Yeah, I've seen a lot of people do great jobs out of cohorts too one of my friends at that. She's like made like 100k or like 400k basically from our cohort and instant responses yeah, because that's what she built into it. It's just really interesting because, like you're decreasing your amount of time you're investing in the business or you're stabilizing it because your constraints when, when you're building a community, you would think that it's blowing up and you're putting more effort into it. You need a community manager, you need all this shit, but it's almost like the systems that you've built for yourself are very tried and tested as a result, to give you this freedom. You know, I feel like that if anyone else was to walk into your business, they would like be working six days a week, seven days a week, just because they don't. They don't have the frame that you've been having yeah.

James Kemp: 1:13:22

So one of the things that happens with coaching and consulting specifically is your job changes from um helping to diagnosing right. So I've solved 99 of the problems that my clients are currently experiencing or about to experience already and they're in a video or a template or some kind of training or a community thread or something where I've given some nuance or those things. So I've already produced the answer. So my job shifted quite some time ago to diagnosing the actual problem, so I can then put the solution in front of them, and that's much higher leverage than solving the problem over and over again, like you need to solve the problem over and over again until you've like, fuck me. I've asked her this question 50 times. I'm going to make a video on it.

James Kemp: 1:14:11

Yeah, I hate, I hate running Facebook ads. I hate talking about them. I hate make a video on it. Yeah, I hate, I hate running facebook ads. I hate talking about them. I hate people, the questions about them, etc. So I said to my community I'm gonna run one facebook ads workshop on this date and I'm gonna give you everything I know about running profitable facebook ads and how I spent a million dollars of my own money, and then I'm never talking about it again. Everyone went perfect, right, yeah, so I think there's a, as you highlight, there are phases to go through where you need to solve the problem first for yourself and then for someone else, and the faster you can replicate an answer that works over and over again, the faster you get to the diagnosis piece and the higher leverage you have, because you've seen all the problems.

Darren Lee: 1:14:53

Yeah, the way I've heard this before it was like if you do it once, you don't mind, if you do it twice, as annoying. If you try type, you want to automate it? Yeah, right, and it's kind of walking through that process. Most people just don't even know how to do it. Right, just making the video, that's enough to automate it.

James Kemp: 1:15:05

Yeah, you know, I mean, as you have a way, a process to deliver it I think there's a more dangerous frame and and that kind of coming back to that entrepreneurial identity. A lot of people need to be seen as the source of all answers to their clients or to the market or to the world. So they place themselves front and center. They resist that because they fear being removed from the process rather than just setting the knowledge free. And one of the sovereign principles you know it's in the book and I've written about extensively is like set the knowledge free. And one of the sovereign principles you know it's in the book and I've written about extensively is like set the knowledge free, get out of the fucking way. If you know how to solve the problem and but you won't get out of the way and you're not setting that knowledge free, then that will cost you over time much more than that.

James Kemp: 1:15:49

You know small transaction that you think you're missing out on yeah so a lot of people who form their identity of being the man or the woman with all the answers get tragically stuck in the person who has to have all the answers and they don't say, hey, I'm going to package this up and make it easy for you to consume and use on your time, or I don't know, and I'm very comfortable with both of those, and that means that I'm able to get myself out of the way much more effectively than than some other people taught me about sovereign yeah, about about seven years ago I started.

James Kemp: 1:16:23

I write a lot, you know I write. I write more to myself than I write for other people, despite me writing for other people pretty much every day because that's how you become a good writer.

Darren Lee: 1:16:32

You yeah.

James Kemp: 1:16:33

So I was, you know, going through the going through the years of like, living in london and going back to new zealand those things I always like craved freedom and I was looking for models of freedom, like I had these guys on this podcast, you know, who were in bali with one megabit internet and at the time living in seminyak and you know as, and you know the tim ferris kind of world and those things of like. I started to assemble what my idea of freedom was. You know, max, my son, was, uh, kind of 18 months at the time when we moved back to new zealand. I was like, I want to live this life of kind of freedom. I want to be able to do anything with anyone, anywhere, anytime. I want 100 right.

James Kemp: 1:17:16

And then it was like, well, what encapsulates that? And I was like, well, I'm building my own world. I have to have my own beliefs, my own. You know, I'm the ruler of this. I've got to lead this family. I've got to make the money. I've got to you know, direct where we're going. And this idea of sovereignty is, you know, largely being it's, it's got a masculine frame in terms of the king. But you are that, you are the middle and the ruler of your own world and as someone who grew up in a very comfortable environment and conservative new zealand and was indoctrinated and all those kind of things, it was like I had to break out of that. I think my mom to this day still is upset that I don't have an Audi and a white picket fence and a Labrador and live in you know Central Auckland Probably my mum as well to be honest, this entrepreneur living in Bali, stuff, it's just too much to handle.

James Kemp: 1:18:03

They've got it over and done.

James Kemp: 1:18:04

They're soon going to see it. There's still a pining of like the traditional life, yeah. So I had to come up with a frame of my own world. You know, here on earth, you know I'm spiritual, but I wouldn't say I'm religious and those kind of ideas are very much like I'm building my kingdom here there's, I'm the center of it and I'm bringing people in and people come and go. I'm going to make the rules and they're my values, they're my character and and these are the things that happen. And then, as I started talking about that, people resonated with it, because it wasn't me going out there and say this is the way you need to live life and because I was always allergic to that kind of guru judgment of like the binary, of like gurus who try and manufacture carbon copies of themselves.

James Kemp: 1:18:50

And I love the fact that people engage with the sovereign ideas and take what they want.

James Kemp: 1:18:56

I've got clients who come to Bali and despise it and hate it.

James Kemp: 1:19:00

And I've got people who are like I got stopped at Malia.

James Kemp: 1:19:03

I was with my daughter the other weekend in Malia, the hotel down there, and a client came up to me and then his wife comes up and then their kids come up and they're like this is our Ricky trip to Bali and we want to live the life like you and tell us about the schools and the business is going well and I'm like they want to replicate large elements and ideas in my life and that's beautiful because it's a conscious decision. I've got other people who are like I want a little bit more time, I want to get off sales calls like all the way down to a really tactical level. So sovereign for me was always a non-prescriptive set of principles instead of values, instead of you know world building, which enabled people to build their own version of that, and I trust them to do that within the bounds of that, rather than saying you must be this thing and I need you to be that thing because I don't need them to be that thing that's what marketing was meant to be.

Darren Lee: 1:19:47

It was like create the enemy, throw fucking stones at the enemy, and then that's how they will get people into their their universe. Right, they believe that's how it's done. It's like entry-level marketing, to some degree, is like this is how it should be, and you often see that over and over again. How do you think? Uh, that's played out in like the west because I know you mentioned that, you, you know you're happy here and everything. Like, what's your kind of views on that? Like, do you just focus on yourself now, get rid of all the bullshit, all the noise?

James Kemp: 1:20:14

yeah, I think I'm just trying to look for where the kind of risks come from and for me, I think life's kind of moved to like protecting wealth and protecting family and protecting the things I value, rather than you know, a desperate need to make it, you know. Then the number go up, but it's, it's very much. That's a learned behavior. So it's switched for me to um, building my definition of wealth and I know where I want to be and I know how much money that's going to entail and I want life to look like. But I I mainly want to know what.

James Kemp: 1:20:53

I mainly know what person I am now and what person I want to become yeah so for me, it's much more having the vision and stepping into it, um, than than like trying to tap into the next need or or surf towards the next kind of thing. I found that with like um, crypto and those things, I started like you know, I pride my, I pride myself as being relatively intelligent I started leaning into it, you know, and and going into these things and going, oh shit, this is like this is a not trivial distraction that someone like me could get into, because the danger is that I'd lean into it and be really good at it. Yeah Right, but what was like? At what cost? And I was like, peel back and I'm like, okay, just buy Bitcoin and just shut up. So I'm like, okay, what's my, what's my version of that? To, to, to, to, to conform with that.

James Kemp: 1:21:48

But I think over the past few years of like Bali as well as like it was a place that gave a sense of freedom, and like bali as well as like it was a place that gave a sense of freedom. And then the next kind of it will be like a place that's a base that we can rotate around. You know we're going to travel three or four months of the year, you know most of the most years for the next little while and those things are like okay, the, the place, that place and that environment then transforms into something else. You know, it was a place where I kind of got out of the west and got out of under those things and crafted a new environment. And then the next iteration of it is a.

Darren Lee: 1:22:21

There'll be a place I come back to, like new zealand was for me or like the uk was, briefly yeah, it makes sense because, like, people get caught in no ways right, you get caught in london, caught in ireland, caught in bali. You see that quite often too right, but it's almost like slowing down, having that realization of what you really want and, like I often find that too, no matter where you're traveling. So everyone's talking about where they're going next. But if you can just kind of be happy not be happy, but understand where you are right now, look at the numbers, look at your scenario you can kind of have that sense of I don't know fulfillment, right, and I've always found that to be the case. Uh, the more I've detached from, like what people have been telling me that I want and figuring out what I want, of course, just the goals, like does it go? There's a growth goals or revenue goals, all that kind of shit but it's like you're almost playing your own game versus playing someone else's game.

James Kemp: 1:23:08

Funny, yeah, when I said big thank you man I think, um, you can't grow things that you dislike. And you know, one of the regular things I ask the people I'm in relationships with, and also clients, and those people is, like, what are you tolerating right now? And many people are want more, but they're tolerating a lot of stuff that they're merely tolerating and they're not enjoying or they're, you know, they're compromising on those things. And a lot of people are like, got this massive tension because they're compromising on those things. And a lot of people have got this massive tension because they're trying to grow, but they're tolerating a lot of bullshit in their life, whether that be actions they're taking, behaviors they're doing, relationships they've got or situations that they've committed to that no longer serve them.

James Kemp: 1:23:48

And if you do that order on a regular basis of, like, what are you tolerating, it's amazing what, if you clear those things out, what space you create to do things you, you can actually grow because we're we're pretty preferential beings. We like, we like to do things that we like to do and we'll do more of them, and the energy flows with them, yeah, and so a lot of people tolerate stuff, um, and then simultaneously wish for more. But if they remove the things that, if they remove the things they're merely tolerating, then it creates space for the things that they actually want to do, and the energy will flow into those and their wishes can come true.

Darren Lee: 1:24:25

Yeah, it's not going to be out of like a complete scarcity, basically because I think what's happening is like you're building the wrong business or building the wrong lifestyle. The business is just a component of it, and then you want more, but you don't even know what more is right. That's not the problem, right? Yeah, I obviously that with fitness too. Like people get in good shape and I want to get in better shape and better shape, better shape, better it's just a pretty slow because, back to the inverted u-curve. You know, there is that point where you define enough, and I know you speak about enough quite a lot too, and so where is enough in this fucking curve? Uh, and it's always ongoing. Yeah, it's always ongoing, yeah, but yeah, man, it's been great.

Darren Lee: 1:24:58

I hope, hopefully, you enjoyed the session. Yeah, um, great chat. There's a lot more to get into too, but I think this was really, really good. It's really sobering for me too. It's a. It's just very insightful and really helpful. I really appreciate this. It's been very unique, um, and, yeah, it's gonna be awesome to see how you're building for the next couple years. Thank you, sir. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it, man.