What are the Benefits of the PopUp Business Model?

Note: This transcription has been generated with AI and there may be errors present. 

Okay, welcome to the pop up business school Facebook Live. You’re actually here with about 6570 people from Newport, who are all building businesses. The purpose of this was to well answer the most important questions that people have. And to let you come to one of our events live if you haven’t seen them already. And we have our first question from the audience right now. Oh, I was not expecting that question. I thought it would be about your businesses, not mine. But of course, my plans for expansion over the next 12 months, we have a franchise in New Zealand, Joe, fabulous guy called Tony is running. He’s run about four events in New Zealand now. And that’s growing. We’re expanding to America, we got invited to Puerto Rico. And we’re planning on coming back to Newport next year. That’s the kind of plans we are currently recruiting for another trainer. Because we found that the bottleneck, bottleneck of our businesses, the deliverer. So we’ve got Simon and myself and Henry who can deliver the workshops. But actually, you come to a point where you can only run two workshops at once. So our expansion plans, we need more people to help us actually deliver the workshops, and grow the business. And the long term mission is to change the way entrepreneurship is taught. So there’s no more business plans in debt, we can actually help people get going from profits and sales is the long term mission. Thank you for asking the question. I love that. Hello. So the question is we have to, to people we sell to, and do we market them differently. Actually, there’s about four or five different groups we sell to, and we market to them all differently. And I think this is a really important point for all of our businesses. For every audience, you need a slightly different message. So for the people who come on our courses, it’s about building businesses making money doing what you love, starting up getting going all of those messages. For the housing associations, they care about helping their residents to make their own money, they care about building stronger communities they care about, if someone starts a business, it helps everyone in the community. And it means their residents have enough money to pay their rent. That’s always a good thing for a housing association. And then if you switch over to local authorities, the council, they have a completely different desire, they’re looking at building the economy, they’re looking at launching businesses, they’re looking about the health of their high streets, and how you get people to launch businesses that can do that. So they have a completely different desire. And the final one, you look at corporate sponsors, if you’re selling to a corporate sponsor, they don’t care about any of that. They care about PR, they care about getting their brand out there. They care, sometimes the corporate social responsibility, they care about the community. But there’s lots of other stuff. So I think for all of us, you’d need a different message depending on who you’re pitching to, which is why we talk a lot about who’s the customer you’re selling to, and then tailor that message to the exact customer. So we sell, I sell the same product pop up business school, but in five different ways to five different people. And your product, like different people are going to want different things. So you’ve got to sell the same thing differently to them. Did I answer the question? Okay. Excellent.

We have a question from Facebook.

You have a question from Facebook. Hello, Facebook.

Nearly Brian Jones wants to know, what are the benefits of pop up business model over the traditional business?

Okay, what are the benefits of the pop up business school model over the traditional model? We went through this on Monday, but very briefly, the traditional model is write a business plan. Do some customer research ring people ask people do a survey whatever it is, speak to your friends, ask them if it’s any good. Then work out how much money you need to borrow. borrow the money, spends the money and then right at the end it is sell what you’re doing. That comes with some massive risks because you’re borrowing the money before you know if you’ve got customers and doing a certain Have a like people will be nice to you when you’re doing surveys. The only time you get the real answer is when you ask them for their money. Up until that point, people will be nice to you, then it’s only because they care and they don’t want to hurt your feelings, but it’s not great feedback. So the big risk is you do all this stuff. You spend six months a year you borrow the money, and then no one buys it. Our suggestion is do the complete opposite. So instead of ending in sales, start on sales. So go out for the real feedback. Ask for the order. Like We had biryani on sale, we had burgers on sale, we have pies on sale, that’s the way to know if your product will actually sell is by selling it. And the biryani like that was sold yesterday. And then they made or manufactured, what they had sold. And did you sell out the biryanis they completely sold out. So there’s no wastage, then there’s zero risk. That’s the opposite of traditionally what people would do. Traditionally they’d go home and make 50 biryanis turn up and hope that you’re hungry for biryani. That’s a danger. She’s got one left, you got one left, there’s one biryani left. If you’re in Newport, it’s in the market now. Thank you, Neil. But the pre sales, the sell your value before you create, it completely changes business and it takes the risk out of it. And I think that’s the interesting bit. My advice, you start a business with sales, then you’re starting with your customers money, and you’ve completely removed the risk of doing it. If you invest 100 grand up front, there is a big risk that no one buys afterwards. So I suggest sell First, there’s many ways to do sell first, many ways. Awesome. Hello. How important do you think it is to support a charity? And the question is, how important is it to support a charity in your business? I think I’m not sure. I’ve got mixed feelings. I think everyone has jumped on the bandwagon that you can sell more if you say there’s a charity supported, I’ve become more cynical. And actually, like, I see it pop up now on Amazon. It says which charity would you like to support? Like, leave me alone, like give me a cheaper price. And I’ll support the charity I want over here. So I’ve become more cynical about it is definitely not necessary. But business can make a massive impact in the community. I would suggest make more money and then use your profits to really support what you want to support. I don’t think it’s necessary at all. But it has made a big difference in businesses like TOMS Shoes, you heard of TOMS Shoes, they sell shoes, you buy one and then they give two away to people who don’t have shoes in Africa. Like that’s that’s quite a clever way of doing it. They grown a massive business based on that exact model. But actually saying well you pay me here and then I give away your money to this charity over here. I’m not sure

Hello, there’s a question from the back day Yes, so the comment was at the vegan fair, we give away a stall to the animal charities. I think that’s perfectly in line with what you’re doing. And I can see how that ties up beautifully. I think the bit I fight against is when it’s a business that sells whatever it sells cakes, and then they giving money to a cat charity. And it’s there’s no there’s no logic to that. Not that I don’t care about cats, but you know what I mean? You know what I mean? Awesome. Yes.

Do you have five different places to get that message? social media platform. So the question is, if you’re marketing to different people, but how do you do it? Do I have a different page to sell to housing associations to local authorities to corporate sponsors? The answer is, we do actually have different pages on the website with different messages that are aligned to the different audiences. When I’m doing Twitter, we will align the bio to the people I’m messaging. So I will actually change my bio to speak more about housing associations, if I’m going out and sending hundreds of messages to housing associations. And then I leave that there for a month. And then maybe the next month, I change it to focus on corporate sponsors when I’m messaging them. So I make the bio in the message reflect who I’m talking to. I definitely have not gone to the extreme of setting up five accounts. I think that’s way overkill. The key is when you actually get in the meeting, you completely tailor the message to who you’re in the meeting. Before that you tailor the messages on social you tailor the emails, is all tailored to the specific audience.

So we have some more from Facebook, we’ve got one from VAs Lewis, and she says, which social media channels do you recommend for which type of businesses for example, would craft b2b training or food craft?

Is this a Woodcraft business in the room per chance? Well, I think every social media platform has a different audience on it. And the question I would ask is, Who are you trying to reach. And then depending on who you’re trying to reach, we choose the channel to reach them. If you’re selling business to business, it’s probably going to be LinkedIn and Twitter. If you’re selling to an end user, then it’s a physical product, it’s going to be Pinterest. Twitter’s incredible for finding like you could literally go on Twitter and search would craft and find anyone who’s talking about Woodcraft. If it’s gifts, that’s a bit more generic, and it’s harder to pin them down, you’re going to be going back to Pinterest. Or we find Facebook groups. Like you can find the Facebook group for interior decorators, and start to talk to them about what they put in the houses. There’s so many different ways to use these tools. And I think you are only limited by your imagination of who you want to reach and how you want to reach them. And my suggestion would be have your audience in minds who you want to reach. And then let’s brainstorm ideas about where they hang out and what they want. And then we can come up with lots of creative ways to find them. That would be my answer to that one. Was that okay? We’ve got a thumbs up from the Woodcraft business in the room. I love that. Excellent. Oh, hello. Excellent. The question is, what is a profitable niche and where you can find them? I was a bit confused, because niche doesn’t have a T in it. I’m on American spelling correctly pronounce it correctly? What is a profitable niche niche? And how do you find it? There is different amounts of profits in all sorts of different industries. And there’s different ways to do it. Let’s just take a couple of examples. Knitting as one example, knitted actual knitted products, there’s not so much money in those anymore, because places like Primark have killed the price. However, in the niche itself, there is a huge amount of people who want to learn how to knit or go on knitting courses, or buy patterns. So a niche can have within it. Some ways have been killed in some ways are very profitable. And I think sometimes it’s about finding what’s your angle in the niche? And how do you support people in a niche market. And everyone, there’s so many things you can offer to that niche. There is a bit about the number of people who are actively talking in the niche. So I would say if your niche is knitting, go to Facebook and look up every Facebook group and see how many people are active on it. Go to Google and see how many blogs there are go to LinkedIn and see how many people are talking about it. Because if it’s a very active niche with lots of engaged, passionate people, there’s a bigger opportunity. So there’s not a very straightforward answer to that. Because you can sell lots of Different things to the same niche. So the same niche, I would check online to see our activities, and how passionate people are about it. There is a bit about how passionate people are. If we were just to take food businesses for a second, people get very passionate about vegan food. People get very passionate about cheese, people get very passionate about chilli sauces, no one really cares about Spanish. One person cares about Spanish. But people get passionate about certain things. And you can feel the energy around it and you can feel what people excites people. So there’s some of those products that already have a massive following an engagement around it. And that signifies that there’s energy there to tap into. Awesome. Another online question, we have another online question,

Can you give examples of successful joint ventures and their benefits and

successful joint ventures benefits and risks. This all depends on how you set the joint venture up. If you do the joint venture where we decide to work together, and we’ll sell the product together, and then we’ll split the profits. Like if it doesn’t sell, you’ve not really risked anything. And you’ve both marketed it, if it works great. If it doesn’t great. I think the joint venture is where it gets risky is when you’re starting to set up legal structures to work together. And you’ve committed funds up front and all of that stuff. My preference for joint venture is to find someone I like the look over and that we could work together. And then to do a deal where like maybe you promote my product to your audience, and we split the profit or vice versa. And that’s a very low risk joint venture. If you’re setting up a joint venture with lots of like legal structures and documents and all of that stuff, there is risk if it goes wrong, especially if you’re borrowing money to do it. My preference is always sell first. Because if you’ve got sales and you’ve made profit together, most of the rest will evaporate. One little bit on paperwork. The size of the contract you need is directly related to how much trust you have with the other person. If it is a high trust relationship, you might only need to exchange an email saying here’s the details. If it’s a low trust relationship, you need a big contract. And lots of solicitors. And actually if there’s low trust, I would be saying why are you tubing? It is actually a danger there. If you don’t if there’s no trust, I would avoid that. I would avoid it. If there’s high trust, we don’t need that much. We just need a very clear. I’ll do this, you do this and we’ll split it this way. That makes it really easy. But I would definitely before going into joint venture is how much do I trust the person? How much do we enjoy working together? And we had a recent instance of this. One of the largest universities in France HTC came to us and said they’d like to partner with us. They actually organised what they called a chemistry meeting, where we got to go over to Paris, we met with six of their staff. And the purpose of the meeting was do we get on? Do we trust each other. And the decision was made on for the entire day. And we got on pretty well and it progressed to the next stage. But I think there’s a really important bit about the chemistry in the trust. business should be fun, you should enjoy doing it. Life is short. Why waste it working with people you don’t like work with people you engage with you get along with you enjoy and don’t tell my business partner Simon but I actually really enjoyed working with him. Like the energy we get from each other when we’re together we feel like we’re invincible and he he builds me up and I built him up and it works really nice together. So if you can find someone that it works together with can be absolutely fabulous. Hello sir

Oh, so we got a couple of bits. How aligned is my business philosophy with how we started it. And the buzzwords fail fast fail forwards. We have a slightly different version which fail fast, fail cheap. Like if it’s going to go wrong, get over the way with quickly and don’t waste any money, which is the opposite traditional traditional is write a business plan in loans that’s failed, slow, and fail expensively if it goes wrong. So my suggestion is fail fast and fail cheap. Actually, my business partner Simon kept at the end of the course, each time we do, here’s the 12 pop up principles. And we’ll be doing this at the end of the course in Newport. Simon sent me the original flip chart, piece of paper from the course the first ever course we ran seven years ago, with the 12 principles on it, that was a fascinating read, and actually fail fast and fail cheap is on there. And it still is, I started this business, because I don’t believe business plans and debt are the best way to help people make their own living. I believe it’s actually a terrible way by Neil, I believe it’s a terrible way to help people. So I started this to be the opposite. And I’ve kind of been on an crusade ever since against startup loans. If you have a startup loan company, naughty, stop lending vulnerable people money. And I’ve been on a crusade against it, and I’m still on it. The same mission changed the way entrepreneurship is taught, eradicate debt, help people make money, doing something they actually love. And I think actually, like, I had a wonderful expression the other day, which was don’t start a business, start a revolution. And I really resonated with that. And for your area, there’s something wrong with what people are doing already revolutionise it, whatever industry that is, however it is, make your dent on the world, and talk about your revolution and your philosophy and how you’re doing it and you’re changing the way food is cooked and you’re changing the way people are eating or changing what they’re doing or this, I think that that kind of language really connects with people and is worth doing. Did that answer your question? We have a thumbs up from the back. Excellent. how passionate you talk to the House Association counsellor. So the question is, how passionate am I when I talk to housing associations? Do you remember the expression from Sales Day sales is the transfer of enthusiasm from one person to another. So the quickest way to infect other people with your enthusiasm is to be enthusiastic yourself. And I love my subject. I love helping people. Hopefully you love your subject. Well, if you don’t then choose another one quick. But if you can infect people with enthusiasm, you’re half the way to making a sale. And it makes an incredible difference. So yeah, be passionate, be enthusiastic. For every customer, you lose, because you’re too enthusiastic. Like there’s 10 year old game because they’re enthusiastic. And I think definitely in a British culture, we need to up our enthusiasm levels, 25%, maybe 50%. Maybe not quite to American standards, but we definitely need to be more enthusiastic. Because that’s what infects, and that’s what’s contagious, and helps carry your message for what you’re doing. Excellent. There’s whispering behind me.

We’ve just had one come in live. That’s quite a loved one. So Colette has just said, what action do you take? If you’ve partnered with someone whom you did trust, but then he lets you down? And you have some written agreements between you because of the presence of trust?

Oh, so the question is, what do you do if you partner with someone? And it doesn’t go well. And it doesn’t go? Well. There is a thing called Zero Based Thinking. And Zero Based Thinking is, Let’s imagine we’re starting from zero right now. Would I continue this relationship? Like, would I not? Like if I was going right back to zero? Would I choose to do this again? If the answer’s no, get out as quickly as possible and change and move on and cut your losses. There is something in business called sunk costs, that keeps people trapped. And sunk cost says, I’ve spent months building a website. I’ve sunk my time into it. So I feel like I can’t change. And sometimes people get trapped on WordPress or trapped on the platform because they’ve sunk time into it. And actually They would do better if they did change, but they’re trapped because they’ve invested. So the Zero Based Thinking bit is, if I was to go back to the start, what would I do? Would I get off this platform? Would I change partner? Would I do this? Would I do that? And if the answer is I would change and I would move, then just get it done as quickly as possible. It’s not nice. The recrimination bit, I have a viewpoint on that as well. In business, you can either be on the offence, and selling growing your business getting out there. Or you can be on the defence and you can be suing people and fighting people and protecting your idea and all that stuff. You get to choose where you spend your energy. Where do you think I spend 90% of my energy? Actually, it’s more like a 95 98% of my energy. I spent it growing the business. A few years ago, we had a guy from Scotland copy our idea. I got a Google alert saying he’s running a pop up business school in Scotland. I got quite frustrated, because it’s my brand. This is what I built. What do you think I did? Someone actually listening to me live on a phone. Now you know, I’m here. I can hear myself in stereo. It’s a bit weird. I didn’t, I didn’t fight it. I did not fight it at all. There’s actually enough room in the marketplace for everyone. I was a bit annoyed. He copied my idea. But I could waste my time fighting it. Or I could go out and contact 50 housing associations to sell more to. So what I did was I put all my effort into growing my business, rather than arguing with what went on or fighting or courts and that stuff. So my suggestion is, if you ever get in that situation, cut your losses as quickly as possible, which I know is easier said than done, but it’s important. And then spend all of your time getting out there and growing your business, finding customers and use your success is the biggest positive thing you can do. That would be my suggestion. Did we get a thumbs up from the internet? Who knows?

Does time have a cost?

Oh, John Padmore, who came on the swale proper business school says does time have a cost? I guess the answer is yes. Well, the definite answer is yes. I guess there’s several bits here. Where you are within your business depends what value you put on your time. When you’re first starting, and you don’t have any customers and you don’t have any income, you’ll spend your time a lot more freely to get customers. As you progress and get more successful, then your time becomes more valuable because you can earn money out of it. And then you start hiring other people to help you expand. So time definitely has a cost. The bit I’d love to get to you with is actually most people say that it’s a lack of time that stops them starting up or growing their business. I would argue it’s not time, its energy. Because what I have discovered and this is the same for me don’t get don’t think I’m any different. But at the end have a hard day you come home at eight o’clock. You sit on the couch to chill out? Is it time you’re lacking? Or is it energy you’re lacking. And it’s the energy so the healthy diet, the exercise the positivity, like it’s actually most of the time, it’s not time, it’s being able to have that energy, that power to put the energy into the time to get the most out of it. And I think actually the wisest thing you can spend is where you spend your energy. Because most people have time left over at the end of the day, but they don’t have energy. So my focus will be Where are you going to put your energy? How are you going to spend it? And is that energy spent growing your business helping other people? Is it spent on the telly is it spent watching Game of Thrones is it spent like where are you spending that energy? And do you have enough left to actually build your business at the end of the day?

Ah so there is a question how do you increase your energy cool. So the focus is on increasing your energy. There’s many ways you can do that. Drugs, coffee, not the other stuff. But yeah, your diet, your exercise. And I don’t know if you’ve seen me before some of the presentations I kind of bounced around at the site. Why do I bounce around, gets my blood flowing gets my energy going and then I have more to give you

oxygen to my brain, someone bringing an oxygen mask tomorrow. Focus on building your energy so that you have more energy to give. Most of the time. It’s not time its energy. Its energy. Awesome.

We have time for one more question. It’s from Facebook and angel would like to know when are you going to Sheffield

I have no idea. You know, am I going to Sheffield? I don’t know. Do you know that’s been the highlight of the whole thing. We will say Our salesman James on contacting Sheffield Council and the housing if you know anyone in the housing associations, let us know. We will come. I know we’ve got one in Bolton which is not a million miles away. And one in Manchester. So like we’ll be in your area come and say hello. Awesome. Excellent. Thank you for tuning in. We’ll do the Q and A’s live again. Thank you for playing along. This has been fun. Goodbye Facebook.