With money there to chase, and powerful digital tech on offer for free, there has never been a better time to be an entrepreneur, according to Daniel Priestley. He spoke to Emily Moore
“IN many ways,” muses Daniel Priestley, “starting a business is very much like robbing a bank – not that I’ve ever done the latter,” he hurriedly adds.
And neither, stresses the founder of Dent Global and ScoreApp, does he have any intention of breaking into any financial institutions. Instead, the analogy is a reference to the teamwork required.
“You never start a business alone,” he continued. “Instead, you gather together all the rebels and misfits you know and make your plan. At the beginning, it usually sounds implausible, but, after a while, you begin to think ‘hold on, we could get away with this’. Before long, that stupid idea sounds reasonable and the focus then moves on to making it happen.”
It may sound far-fetched, but the headline speaker at Greenhouse – a sales and marketing conference organised by Ink Blot Creative founder Jacqui Patton – has the CV to support his philosophy.
“It all started when I was 21,” reflected the Australian entrepreneur. “I had dropped out of university at 19 and started working for a friend who was just setting up an agency focused on event marketing. We started from nothing, just sitting around the kitchen table. Two years later, the business employed 60 people and I had gone from being top dog of a start-up to the bottom of the ladder in a big business.”
But it wasn’t his “demotion” in the company hierarchy which prompted Daniel’s next step.
“I was very cheeky and, having worked for the company for two years, I approached my mentor and said: ‘John, I’ve been working with you for 10% of my life. Isn’t it time I had some shares in this business?’ His response? He turned around and said: ‘If you want shares in a business, start your own.’
“I’m not sure he expected me to take his advice quite so literally though.”
While it might have been an impetuous decision, there was also, reflected Daniel, a certain inevitability about it. After all, as a 14-year-old earning $3 dollars an hour in McDonald’s, he had responded to an advert in the local newspaper for people looking for financial planning advice.
“At the end of the talk, the speaker handed around his diary for people to schedule appointments,” he explained. “When the diary came to me, he suggested that I wasn’t ready for financial planning advice just yet.”
Unperturbed, three years later, armed with money he had earned from running nightclub promotions, Daniel returned for another session – and that when something struck him.
“It was the same guy, delivering the same talk and following the same format with the diary, and that’s when I discovered the concept of perfect repeatable weeks,” he said.
And so it was that, after leaving his friend’s start-up, Daniel established a “cut-and-paste copy of what I’d seen him do”.
“I was 21 when I formed Triumphant Events and, following that pattern of perfect repeatable weeks, we generated a turnover of £1.3m in the first year, going up to £10.7m in the third year,” he said.
From that beginning, Daniel, who is also a best-selling author, has gone on to establish seven successful businesses and has been listed in the top 25 of the Smith & Williamson Power 100, as well as being named Britain’s Top Business Adviser in Leadership and Management by Enterprise Nation.
But while saying that there has “never been a better time” to be an entrepreneur, Daniel admits that there is an element of risk in going solo.
“I always think that entrepreneurship is attempting to do three things,” he said. “You are trying to make money by coming up with a commercial venture; you are taking a risk as you are launching something which hasn’t been proved or tested; and you are trying to access resources which are beyond your current level of control. You have to accept that, at the beginning, you will not have all the resources you need to do whatever it is you are trying to do. And it is trying to balance all those elements which makes it difficult.”
And the challenge, he says, is greater because it goes against many of the lessons people have grown up believing.
“The world of school and traditional employment doesn’t prepare you very well for entrepreneurship, because you are taught that to succeed in a particular area, you have to have a certain set of skills,” he said. “But a lot of entrepreneurs don’t have those skills. In fact, a lot of them are drop-outs or people with no qualifications, but they find people with the skills they need.
“Similarly, in the world of work, you usually need to have the resources in place before you can do something, or you need permission to do something, whereas with entrepreneurship, nobody gives you that permission and, often, you don’t have the resources. You are effectively a loose cannon.
“That’s why you see entrepreneurs pitching – in the style of Dragons’ Den – for support, whether that is in the form of resources, people or investment.”
While he acknowledges that this could be scary, having launched his first business at such an early age, he says that he “doesn’t know anything else”.
“From the age of 21, all I have done is buy, sell and own businesses,” he said simply.
“While some of those businesses have been sold fairly quickly, others, such as Dent Global, have been much longer-term. Dent, an entrepreneur accelerator business, is now in its 13th year, while ScoreApp is now in year three or four and, although it has been built to sell, I’m not ready to sell it yet.”
Based on a system of generating business leads through quizzes, which see people exchange data for a rating, ScoreApp, Daniel explains, is based heavily on the use of AI, a tool which he says is one of the reasons there has never been a better time to be an entrepreneur.
“It’s a great time,” he said. “Firstly, there is more money out there than ever before. In fact, the very definition of inflation is too much money and not enough goods and services. Secondly, there has never been more amazing technology freely available, while the global culture of remote working caused by Covid has given entrepreneurs access to both a global talent pool and the tools to enable them to work remotely.
“Years ago, you had to rope in your neighbours or poach teenagers from your local McDonald’s. Now, not only can you form teams of passionate people from across the world, but, with the permissionless nature of social media, you can upload anything and start finding clients anywhere in the world. Yesterday, for example, I signed up clients in 29 countries, including one from Suriname, which I’d never even heard of.
“In fact, geography is irrelevant. It is all about identifying a customer problem. Imagine that customer who is struggling to achieve something, and come up with something that’s better, cheaper, faster or which has more emotional benefit and put that in front of them. It doesn’t matter where they are.”
To help entrepreneurs both to reach customers and to generate leads, Daniel says that no one can afford to ignore AI.
“This is your free employee,” he said. “AI is a greater invention than the internet and it will disrupt every industry very rapidly. At the moment, it is being deliberately held back but, when it is fully released, it will transform everything. To put this into context, in the not-too-distant future, the best GPs, accountants, wealth managers etc available will be AI, because it can read absolutely everything and it doesn’t forget anything.
“While this could be scary for middle-class professionals in Western economies whose skills will suddenly be available free of charge, there is great potential for business owners to harness AI to carry out their basic work, freeing them up to focus on the really important areas.
“I liken it to running a bakery. If you use AI to make the basic cake, you are then free to ice it in a way which makes it special. In other words, AI brings the functionality and you bring the vitality. AI can do in a month what used to take people six or 12 months to do, so you have to be the point of difference, the life force of the business. Take the ingredients that AI gives you and bring them to life, but don’t ignore the power that this tool can give you.”
lThe waiting list for Greenhouse 2024: Marketing & Sales, which is due to take place on 12 October at The Freedom Centre, is now open at greenhouse.je.
