Daniel Priestley runs business accelerators for entrepreneurs. In this episode, he discusses the Dent rebrand, Lifestyle v. Performance boutique, and the new edition of his book Oversubscribed

• How the entrepreneurial revolution shifts people to earn money through entrepreneurship and starting and growing their own businesses as the Industrial Revolution changed the way we live and work.
• Why visual identity has to work harmoniously with the rest of the brand identity and has to be simple and clean
• What happens when you nail your vision and it’s simple, clear message becomes a turning point for your business
• How having a strong culture and vision allows you to attract the right kind of people when you’re recruiting talent.
• Why Daniel incentivises new hires to leave quickly if they discover his company isn’t a good fit for them 
• What presidential elections can teach you about the evolution of marketing
• Daniel released a new edition of his book Oversubscribed: How to get people lining up to do business with you in February 2020
• The two main successful business variations are Lifestyle Boutique. 3 - 12 staff, profitable and lots of fun. The second is Performance business that employs 40 to 150 staff who are a talented team, it has recurring revenues, assets and a good niche in the marketplace.
• How businesses are valued by various methods including benchmarking, multiples of profit and based on their brand, market position and systems like Uber for instance.
  
  

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Daniels's book Oversubscribed: How To Get People Lining Up To Do Business With You and his website dent.global.

Shireen: Hello, and welcome to Brand Tuned, successful brands successful business, the show for entrepreneurs and brand creators, where we discuss personal and business Brands to give you ideas and inspiration for your own brand. I'm Shireen Smith, lawyer, entrepreneur, author, and advocate for developing purpose-based brands to change. 

So, onto today's conversation, which is with a man who has been incredibly important in my business education, in less than 10 years, Daniel Priestley has built a brand. That is an example of what's possible when you build something for a group of people who want what you offer. I'll be asking him how he created his brand. So without further ado, let's hear from Daniel himself about what his business is, and does. 

Daniel: Sharing Thank you very much for having me on the podcast. And I'm obviously a big fan of you. And you've had a great influence on me and my brand as well over the years. 

Shireen: Oh, good. Lovely to hear that. So what do you do? Can you explain your business what it does for the benefit of listeners?  

Daniel: Yeah, so we run a business accelerator program, where we take entrepreneurs in Australia, in the UK, and Singapore, USA and Canada. And I didn't even mention the UK. Anyway, we are all over the world, we've got about 3000 clients, and we put them through a Business Acceleration Program. It's a combination of training, and accountability, peer group networking, mentoring, and access to tools and resources that they can focus on their business. And the idea behind it is to help entrepreneurs and develop entrepreneurs to stand out in the noisy marketplace, scale up to their full potential, and make a positive impact in the world by aligning themselves to a United Nations Global goal. 

Shireen: Great. And obviously, you've been very successful with your business. How did it start out? 

Daniel: Well, my background is as is as an entrepreneur, I started in Australia, building a company in Australia that it was a national business. And I discovered in that process of building a business that I had a real passion for entrepreneurship, and the entrepreneurial journey. And I wanted to kind of share that passion. And I, you know, the times that we're in, so I started writing some books. And also, I started attending some training programs, I couldn't find some of the things that I wanted to attend myself, I started developing some of my own insights. And I started to launch my own accelerator program in 2010. So we have the first key person of influence program about 10 years ago. And since then, you know, we've got people who have told their friends about it, we've run some great marketing campaigns, talking about our success stories that we've been able to generate. And that's led one thing to the next. And now we have a global business. 

Shireen: Right. So you were initially called and Entrevo. Is that right? And 

Daniel: Oh, yeah, you want to talk about our branding mistakes? Yeah. Well, actually, I'll go back even further than that, Shireen before that I had a company called triumph and events, and triumphant events was an event promotion company, we specialized in event marketing and event roadshows, and doing event product launches, in the UK, and in Australia. And, you know, came a point in time where we realized that events weren't the center of the dial, it wasn't the most important thing people should know about us. So initially, triumphant events, you know, was about running really successful events. But eventually, we kind of morphed and pivoted. And we asked ourselves the question, well, what do we want to have at the center of the business? What's the most important thing, and at the time, I was really playing with the concept called the entrepreneur revolution. And the entrepreneur revolution is the idea that successful and talented people are going off and starting businesses. And actually, in the same way, the industrial revolution changed the way that we live and work. The entrepreneurial revolution shifts people to earning money through entrepreneurship and starting and growing their own businesses or being part of small businesses. And I was writing a book about this. And the, you know, the genius idea was to create a company called Entrevo, which was a contraction of the words entrepreneur revolution. So Entrevo, entrepreneur revolution. And this was a real problem because no one could say it, spell it or remember it. And actually, there was a turning point and I don't know if you know this Shireen but you were the catalyst for me changing the name of the business and not in the way you would think. So no, normally you're giving great advice, and you knew us well, and you knew my books, and you pronounced the name on Entrevo. And I thought to myself, if Shireen mispronounces the name or doesn't pronounce it the way that I wanted pronounced, then this isn't gonna work. And I remember we had a conversation I said, I said to your Shireen, why do you use the pronounce it on travel? And you said, because it's entrepreneur revolution. So it's on Entrevo. And it's actually I think of it as Entrevo. And she goes, Well, you said, it's, it's not it's coffee and creamer, because that's not how you say entrepreneur revolution. So entry vote doesn't work. And, and I just thought to myself, You know what, Shireen, if she can't, if we if we can't even agree, the company name is Dent. So that was actually the straw that broke the camel's back and made me think I have to rename the company. 

Shireen: That's funny that really is, but it is so important to have a name that everyone can pronounce and spell. And so you chose Dent, which is obviously impossible to mispronounce or misspell. 

Daniel: Yeah four letters, one syllable make a dent in the universe, the only the only thing is, is that people, people sometimes think Dent, it's a negative connotation. It's bashing something that what we're when they hear about what we're all about. And we're about making a dent in the global goals and tackling a big problem and dent in the universe comes from Steve Jobs, quote. And anyone who has sort of any negative connotations pretty quickly, does or does a 180. And they love it very quickly, really fortunate to have a brand strategist, a guy called Mike Symes, and he, he wrote me a report. So we paid for a report to be written. And he basically wrote down all of the ideas around our branding. And he said, he said, Look, you guys are really botched this up, you've done a terrible job. He said, he said, Look, you're doing these things called color coding. Color coding is when you're sitting inside the company trying to make sense of your products and services, and you color code everything differently. And you've got different fonts, and you're trying to get to clever, you know, the key person of influence logo had three different fonts, one for key person, one for all, and one for influence. And he said, you've got three fonts, two colors, circles, he said, you know, you're talking about having different logos for all your products. And as you're just making a mess, and it’s not going to be something that you'll be able to scale at all. And so he wrote this, he wrote this report that told us all the things that we're doing wrong. And he suggested that we did go ahead and rebrand Dent, and confirm that for us. And then he came up with a few corporate identities, which we didn't really like. But we kind of took the essence of his feedback, gave it over to our design team at Sony technology. And then they came up with they, they applied what he was saying. And we created very simple fonts, to colors. And really nice clean brands, the company and the products all look like they're part of the same family. The logos are used sparingly, and it just creates a nice, clean corporate identity. And as soon as we did that, we suddenly went from looking like a small business to looking like a big business. 

Shireen: Wow, incredible. And what about the vision values purpose? Did you go through that internally, yourself? Or did you need help with that? 

Daniel: We worked internally, and we had a couple of facilitators do a little bit of boardroom facilitation with our team to refine it. But ultimately, we said look, we're going to get really clear the vision is to get entrepreneurs solving the world's most meaningful problems using their business as a force for good. Our mission is to develop entrepreneurs that stand out, scale up and make a positive impact in the world. Our values are to be brave to have fun to make a dent. And and as soon as we got all of that nice and clear, we realized, you know, I mean, it was just a turning point for the company. Everyone in the company was like excited about the brand. Our young members of the team, they wanted a hoodie, they wanted a t-shirt that had never happened before. So it was kind of like a vote of confidence that they, they loved the idea of sticking the stickers on their laptops and their phones and, and just kind of you know, everyone wanted to be part of the brand in a very, in a very real way in quite practical ways. Even our clients started sticking stickers on their phones that said Be brave, have fun, make a dent. And, you know, it just kind of took off from there. 

Shireen: Yeah, it's become almost like a cult your brand which is what's supposed to be really desirable, isn't it? 

Daniel: To be a highest standard if we can, if we can get people drinking goat's blood, then that is definitely the gold standard of having a great brand. I'm yet to see someone tattoo it on their on their skin. But, you know, I'm I live in hope. 

Shireen: And how do you ensure that your vision is to the forefront for employees, you know, in terms of recruiting them and having them on site? 

Daniel: Yeah, so because we have such strong elements of the brand and the culture. Whenever we're doing recruiting, we send people over the Brand Book and the culture book and we get them to read it and watch some videos that we've put together for that purpose. And we basically said, you know, if you if you want to be part of a company that has strong culture, go ahead and apply. If you're not looking, you know, if you don't think you'd fit this culture, then there's really no point applying, it's not going to work. And we've got we send through a little video that talks about our Maxim's we've got some Maxim's that we use internally, things like you get what you pitch for. And you're always pitching prolific beats perfect. We get famous on the success of our clients. So we've got all these Maxim's that we, that we explain to the new recruits, we bring people in for a trial week. And, and they shadow, you know, the shadow the team around, they talk to the team about what it's like we have, we then begin a three-month trial, at the end of three months, we give people a backpack full of goodies. That means that they're part of the team, they get a really cool backpack and water bottle and had, you know, great headphones, Bose headphones, and they get their laptop and stickers and T shirts, and basically all the all the dent things. So it's like, at a not including the laptop, it's you know, couple of 100 pounds worth of cool swag for for making it through there three months, we offer people. We offer people a fee if they quit. So if they decide that it's not for them, they can pick up a bonus for leaving early fast. 

Shireen: A bonus for leaving? Well, that's interesting. Why is that? 

Daniel: Well, because I would rather incentivize people and say that, if you get a sense that this is not the kind of workplace that you want to be working in, then you can leave on really good terms with 1000 pounds in order to quit. And, you know, when when you look at the cost of having the wrong person in the role, I would much rather have someone who owns up to that fast, and then we can get back into looking for the right person, as opposed to prolonging it and making someone who sticks around too long. When when then when they know they're not right or that, you know, it's just not not the right fit. The other thing it does is it creates kind of ownership, you know, by passing up on 1000 pounds in order to stay, it creates a moment of ownership. It's like a moment of Yeah, I'm actually committed to this company in this vision 

Shireen: That sounds really, really innovative to have that sort of approach. Are they all office based? Or do they work remotely, 

Daniel: Both, we have a really high degree of flexibility, we do have an office, but people can work from home. And there's really no problem with that people can choose when they want to start and when they want to finish that they can kind of kick off at 10 or, or nine or they can kick off at 1030 Sometimes they end up doing a full day some people are afternoon and evening people some people are really early morning people so they can you know there's a bit of flexibility around start time and finish time. And, and there's flexibility around where they work physically as well. 

Shireen: We'll take a short break at this point as I'd like to mention the Brand Tuned series of webinars, which support founders to think through their brand, taking IP into account at the right time, which is good for you make firm decisions about what to create. Just visit brand tuned.com. And the webinars are reference right there on the homepage. Okay, back to the podcast. So, are you still involved in decisions that are made the important decisions or have you reached a size where you can delegate? 

Daniel: The day to day running of the business is not me. You know, so we have you know, team leaders who lead various parts of the business day to day and each team leader is kind of leading a team of about 1010 people and that you know that works really well. But then every month we have something called a Your leaders meeting. And that's where we get all the team leaders together with myself and some of the other leaders for the team. And we have a process that we take everyone through of, you know, looking at our vision, our mission, our values, looking at a value proposition, looking at our awareness list of anything, that's not not right, we look at our dashboard. So we have something called our sand metrics, which stands for sleep at night dashboard met metrics. So we have our 12-month gameplan, we have our one-month gameplan, we have our 10-year moonshot. So we kind of go through and review everything, are we on track, are we off track, if we ever don't have our sleep at night, dashboard, metrics, green, so we call it green sand. If we don't have green sand, and then we have to get green sand before we can go do anything big. So sand is just the sleep at night dashboard, which means there's about five metrics that, that make us feel that we can, you know, relax and sleep at night. And we don't have to micromanage the business. But if any of those metrics are turned red or yellow, we have to really pull stocks out and focus on getting them green as quick as we can. 

Shireen: Okay, knowing you, I suspect that's new clients coming on board. 

Daniel: Well, it's things like cash and bank, it's things like, you know, accounts receivable and aged, you know, age payments, it's, it's any, it's any really serious client issues. It's also Yeah, of course, it's having a sales pipeline as part of it. So we've got a series of metrics that are the minimum standards for us to be able to sleep at night. And if we, if we know that those are green, then we can get on with the big picture. 

Shiren: Yeah, so talking about campaign reminded me of oversubscribed, because you've just released a new edition of that book. So can you tell us a little bit about how it's changed? 

Daniel: Yeah, so the new edition has just come out. And it's just gone straight to number one, which is really cool. And the first edition came out in 2015. And then in 2016, something seismic happened, that changed the nature of marketing, permanently. So I had to kind of think about, oh, wait a sec, we better redo the book, because, you know, a book about campaigning needs to have some changes. And what happened in 2016, was the US presidential election where Donald Trump won.  

Shireen: Yeah. 

Daniel: And US presidential elections are the Formula One of the marketing world. So if you imagine that in Formula One, they develop ABS braking, and then ABS braking gets rolled out into every, you know, all the cars. And you know, the high technology innovation goes into the presidential election, because it's the most high stakes campaign. And then it teaches you what what is coming next from a marketing perspective. So Franklin Roosevelt, he did a fireside chat, a radio campaign, and that's how he won his presidency. And that actually moved the budgets in the in the 10 years after that, the marketplace moved from print advertising to radio. And then JFK did a television campaign, where he was doing televised debates, and he was on talk shows on TV, and that he won the election. And then that moved the marketplace, from radio to television. And all the advertisers went across and started using television as their main vehicle for marketing and campaigning. Barack Obama, he changed the game with social media marketing and social media engagement. And then in the 2010s, everyone piled in and became social media active and they started running social media campaigns and all the budgets moved over to the social media platforms. But then in 2016, Donald Trump won the campaign using data analytics, and hyper targeted data driven marketing. And essentially what he did is he gathered up lots of data using the controversial Cambridge Analytica approach. They gathered up the data, they segmented people into lots and lots of different segments. And then they started marketing to people in completely different ways depending on upon which segment they fit into. And if you're using that methodology to derail democracy, or in some way influenced democracy in a in a negative way, then obviously there are ethical lines to consider and you know, that's obviously right that people look into that. But if you're using Cambridge analytic as approach to marketing to sell your books or to fill an event or to generate some clients for your coaching business, essentially all you're doing is talking to people in the language that they like to be spoken in, and you're targeting You're marketing in a really clever and sophisticated way to people's needs. So there's not an ethical dilemma when you're just selling your services. But the key thing to know is that in the 2020s, the big game in town is data analytics, marketing. It's all about understanding how to use data. So the people who are going to make the real money in, in the 2020s, they're the people who built their brand in the 2010s. They've got a personal brand, they've used social media successfully in the 2010s. And now they're going to leverage that brand using data and data analytics and data marketing in the 2020s. So I just want to update the book on that. 

Shireen: Well, I'm really looking forward to reading it will have mention of it in the show notes for this podcast. So the problem often for businesses is how, how they're going to end up, you know, Stephen Covey says in his Seven Habits of Highly successful people that start with the end in mind, but with a business, it's actually quite difficult to envisage what the end is beyond some sort of vague goal of exiting one day, you know, making money from this business that you've created. What does that picture look like? For most businesses?  

Daniel: Well, there's only really two pictures, you know, that how businesses end up and kind of the two different variations. So there's one picture that is essentially what I call a lifestyle boutique, and a lifestyle Boutique is. And when I say two pictures, there's only two pictures that are successful, that are that are worth shooting for. So a lifestyle Boutique is a business of three to 12 people. And it's doing, you know, hopefully more than 100,000 pounds per person as a minimum. So maybe you have, you know, 300,000, minimum, you know, going up to maybe 1.2 million minimum, but I've seen lifestyle boutiques that do three or 4 million in revenue, they're profitable, they're little cash cows, they're fun, they're flexible, it's a great team dynamic, it feels like a family. There's lots of freedom, in that in that sort of business. And essentially, it becomes a really fun boutique business that you own, and you enjoy. The perfect scenario is that you don't have to work in it all the time. So you know, it might be three days a week, four days a week, take a couple of weeks off for holidays, the business runs without you when you when you're away on a holiday. And it's a great business to own and it's built around a passion, it's often built around your own little mini celebrity status or key person of influence status in your industry. And that is a really cool business to own as a lifestyle boutique. So that's like what I think about 75% of business owners should be shooting for that's kind of like the, my default position. As far as what what it should look like, that you go for. An important characteristic of this is that you never ever go more than 12 people. So less than four people is a self-managing team, it's always going to be fun, and everyone's going to just get along and kind of you'll sort problems out pretty quickly. And, you know, if someone doesn't fit, then it's not hard to get, you know, get someone else in and that person can move on to something else. So it's it's kind of like a bit of, you know, a group of misfits and rebels all working together for for the fun of having that, you know, three to 12 person team and everyone's earning good money and having lots of flexibility. So that's that's kind of variation, one that you should shoot for. And variation two is what I define as a performance business. It typically is a 40 to 150 person business. Now you've got a board, you've got an executive team, you've got project teams, or location teams, you typically, you know, you've got a good niche in your marketplace, you've got a specialty, you've got some technology that you've invested in, and you now own some proprietary systems or proprietary IP. You, you've got your own assets, you've you can get funding if you want to get funding, and you end up with three magical ingredients in that business. And one is a talented team of more than 40 people, which really is great, because once you hit 40 plus people, if someone leaves the businesses just fine and you know, you can get someone else in but you know, each person is 1/40 of the business. So it's not, it's not a disaster. So the business tends to transcend any one person including the founder at that point, you know, certainly in the short term. And so you end up with a team, you end up with recurring revenues. What you really want to have is just recurring revenues that that are fairly predictable. They come in year upon year upon year and you end up with your own asset. So some sort have assets in the business that are proprietary, you've got some uniqueness that essentially this business does something special because of its unique assets that it has. When you have those three things, then you have the potential for exit, someone will come along and buy that business, you could buy it, you could have it sold for a life changing sum of money for people who didn't grow up in a wealthy family, you know, you could actually be a life changing moment for your family. And even if you keep it, it's going to produce enough profit that it will event you know, in a very short space of time in five to 10 years, it will have changed your life anyway, because those businesses tend to spit out half a million to a million plus per year as profit. So you end up with you know, pretty reasonable business one way or another, you end up doing well financially making an impact having a having a pretty sizable team. So it's either a lifestyle or performance business for most people that that's the level of ambition you should shoot for. Now, if you find yourself in the right place at the right time with the right funding partner and the wind is in your sails, you might end up with a unicorn, you might end up with a performance business that goes really big really quick and sells for a lot of money. But nine times out of 10 you should assume that that's not you, and and just run a really good game plan one way or another. Because if the wind is in your sails, and fabulous, if not, you'll still end up with a good quality business. But it's one way or another it's a lifestyle or performance business.  

Shireen: Okay, so could you sell the lifestyle business as well? 

Daniel: Yeah, it's highly unlikely that you sell a lifestyle business, what what normally happens is that we let's say you've got, you know, 1.2 million pounds worth of revenue and a couple 100 grand with profit, it's far too small for big business to buy big businesses like to buy businesses for 5 million and up, they love to buy businesses for 20 million to 100 billion. They don't normally like to buy businesses for one or 2 million or, you know, anything like like that. So. And there's no small businesses that are going to buy a business, small companies are run by entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs like to compete, they'd like to kind of rather than buying your business for a million pounds, they'd rather take out a loan for 100 grand and see if they can compete with you, for 100 grand as opposed to buying a business. So it's unlikely that you'll be able to sell it. There's a few exceptions. And the exceptions are what's called a management, buyout and management. But as you identify the two or three people in the company, who might be the people who are best to run it, and you put them on a like a four or five year deal where the business earns enough money to buy you out and buy them running a good quality business, they can generate enough profit to buy you out over the course of say, three to five years. So that's a management buyout. The other one that sometimes happens is called a share, swap. Share swap is where you get a bigger company that's doing say three or four or 5 million, and they want to get themselves across the line and become a performance business. So they give you some shares in their business, in order to roll in to their performance business. And typically, you're going to have to work in the business for several years in order to integrate into their business, and then get the exit as a performance business. And that could take two or three years anyway. So what you don't typically have when you're a small business less than 5 million in value, you don't typically have anyone come along and write you a check, or, you know, give you a proper exit. It's very rare that that happens. 

Shireen: And how are businesses valued? Do you think just the traditional accountancy approach is the way it goes? 

Daniel: Well, so businesses are primarily valued based on what you can negotiate and what you can what people are willing to pay. So if you think about at the big end of town, or PLC, a public public company has a floating market of shares, which indicates roughly a market capitalization or a valuation that it's worth. And the reason that gets its worth is because people are transacting at that, at that valuation. It's a little bit misleading, because if the company were to try and sell all of the chairs in one hit, that would actually that action would change the price in some way. So, you know, but it gives you an indication of what the company might be worth as a total market capitalization. For medium sized companies, you get benchmarks, so you actually, you know, you might say, Oh, well, we manufacture this type of food. And there's a company that last year sold, you know, that was slightly bigger than us. They're 1/3 bigger than us, and they sold for 30 million. So we're 1/3 smaller, so we'd probably sell for 20 million. So, so you can have those kinds of things happen. So that's benchmarking. The other one you can do is roughly kind of industry multiples. So there are certain industries Have a multiple of profit. And for small companies, the the multiple is lower than big companies, the multiple is bigger. So a small company might sell for four times profit. And the big company might sell for six times profit or medium medium sized company might be six or seven times profit. And a really much bigger company might be 10 times profit as a as a multiple. 

Shireen: And what about the brand value of the brand? Is that taken into account? 

Daniel: Yes, so that's, that's part of the multiples of profit. And there are also exceptions. So there, there are companies that don't make any profit, but they have quite a high valuation. And it's a combination of their brand and their market position. And the systems that they've developed, and the fact that they have a market leading position. So Uber would be an example of that it hasn't actually made a profit yet. And yet, it has a valuation in the billions or 10s of billions. So, you know, so that's an example of a company that is valued based on its assets, and its potential. And, and essentially, the marketplace is saying, Well, you know, it's not profitable yet, but you're certainly pioneering a new kind of technology and the new and you've got the leading brand in the industry. So we're back. You know, those kinds of metrics? 

Shireen: Yeah, I've known a client who was purchased for 17 million just because of their products. They didn't have any any profits. Really? 

Daniel: Yeah. So what in that situation, the profit would have been the profit to the acquirer. So let's say that business wasn't making a profit, because it's small, and it's it's innovating and it's trying to create the products and and then a bigger business that already has a market and already has 30,000 clients that it can sell those products to its valuing that business and saying, Well, you know, if we sell these products to our client base, we're going to make lots of money. So there's no question we should you know, we should buy those products and get straight to it before someone beats us to the punch. Yeah, it's a strategic fit. 

Shireen: So thank you very much, Daniel. It's been really interesting listening to you. 

Daniel: My absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for having me on your podcast. 

Shireen: Thank you for listening to this episode of Brand Tuned, where we aim to answer the question, what does it take to create a successful business and brand? I'd love it. If you would take a moment to give me a review. If you have any questions, send me a message. You can find me on LinkedIn, or most other social media platforms, or on my personal website, shireensmith.com.