Patrick Noel Daly is not your typical entrepreneur, he's from a quaint seaside village in County Cork, Ireland, and he's been entrepreneurial from a very young age. And his most recent book is for children. It's called, Noly, A Young Hero Triceratops Named Noly. I said it, I said the word! which Patrick has written to help young people to think about entrepreneurship and to be resourceful for the good of others. He donates a portion of the proceeds to the children's charities and hospitals.
Patrick is also an inventor. He's been recognised in Ireland's 30 under 30 entrepreneurs. He moved to the US six years ago. His first book was actually for startups and entrepreneurs called Just Startup, a guide to building startups from an entrepreneur who has learned the hard way. Can't wait to dig into some of those stories with Patrick.
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Patrick, welcome to Resilient Entrepreneurs.
Thank you very much. It's great to chat with you today.
Yeah, we're excited too Patrick, because you're an author, you're a businessman, you're into startups. I mean, nothing gets Vicki and I more excited than those topics. So this is going to be a good one. So let's start because your bio mentions that you were entrepreneurial from a young age. So let's start with that story. Can we?
Sure. Yeah. So growing up, my father had a small business and we were always talking business in the house from the age that we could speak, we were probably sitting around the dinner table and having a chat about what happened that day and what was going to happen the next day and how the business was running. So that was, I guess, the seed. And then at 14, 15 years old, we lived by the seaside in County Cork in Ireland and every summer, tourism would kick off and we'd have three months of tourists coming to our local seaside village. And my mother said, let's get a family food truck, a food van so we can sell as we call them chips and burgers, but they're burgers and fries on this side of the world! And we did that for the summer, summer holiday was working in that food van and enjoying, well, maybe not enjoying sometimes some hangry people at five o'clock looking for their food and they want it instantly. So that was a challenge from a customer service perspective, but I understood it because I was often standing outside that counter as well, not just working inside the food van.
So we were taught really from a young age too, if you want something, think about it, plan it and go get it. And that set that whole train in motion in our mindset, and I think that's what drove me. I remember actually being in school, early stage of school, we call it National School in Ireland from four to twelve, and it's our primary school. I was eight or nine years old and I was sitting there and we were six hours in at this stage and I was thinking, I could have probably learned all of that in a few hours and I could be outside selling with my lemonade stand or my food truck or whatever it was going to be.
But from the youngest age, I was thinking, I've got to make things happen, I’ve got to do things. I love the idea of converting an idea into something, and that was stuck in the mind map and went on from there. So that was the start, that was the genesis of it.
Where do you think that comes from? Was it the nurture nature, because you were sitting around the kitchen table and you were brought up in the environment or is there more to it?
That's one of the most challenging questions in entrepreneurship, is are you born with it or is it developed? I probably think there's a little bit of both. You have to have that fire. You have to have that ability to take challenges. You have to have the ability to kind of go, if this doesn't work, what's my next option? What's my fallback position? And for me, people say, did you develop it? Absolutely, you have to. Skills are necessary, you've got to learn how to do it and all that. One of the reasons that I wrote the Just Startup book was to teach and help either early stage entrepreneurs or aspiring entrepreneurs to think, what do I need to do here? How do I avoid mistakes? Because I made a lot of mistakes when I started out. For the first few years, I was learning on my feet. I was kind of going, will I go left? Will I go right? Will I stay put? I didn't necessarily have mentorship because I was gone into a different type of business. I started with a search engine. It was, Autolink was the name of the search engine. It was like a car search, car find search engine. And that went really well. And the people in my circle at the time didn't have a clue about that kind of technology. So I was winging it and I had to learn as I went. To answer your question, I think there has to be a little bit of interest from a genetic perspective. You have to have something that's in you that says, okay, I want to achieve something. I want to do something. I want to make a change. And when that fire, that can even be just a little spark, but I think then your environment is very important. And what I like to do going forward and what I do now is I mentor, because I want to see that the spark that is there doesn't die, that you want to make the best of it. It should get the chances to do it. I'd love to and I hope to in the next year or two to set up entrepreneurship academies, which are basically roll up the sleeves, get in there, ask the hard questions, receive the hard answers if necessary, but receive direction. Get told without doing a 12 month program, just get told straight down the line, is this going to work and are you going to spin your wheels and waste your time? Or if we move left or right, then get on the ground. That's on the map at this stage. How I do it in the next 12 months or so needs to be kind of written out, as they say.
Well, I am so excited to hear that because it is my big thing too that education around entrepreneurship is so important because so many of us grew up with this, you go to school, you go to college, you get a good job, you work for 40 years and retire, and that's the path to success. And no one really tells you that entrepreneurship is a whole different path that you can take, and no one educates you on the things you need to understand, the mindsets, the challenges, the things that come around entrepreneurship. I mean, almost all the entrepreneurs we have ever spoken to, we've spoken to a lot now on this podcast, they've fallen into entrepreneurship. It's because of some life circumstances. They burnt out or they got made redundant, or they quit their job and they just could not get themselves back in the workforce so they figured something out, or they just saw this incredible need and went for it.
And like you, they all fumbled along the way to create something, right? And many of them have created success through that process.
But is there a way to prevent some of those failures, to get rid of some of those speed bumps along the way, to help educate people that this is a way forward, that they don't have to necessarily take a traditional path? So I'm obsessed with this idea, and I love that you've got some plans for the future so we're going to stay in touch about that. But why is it you think it's important for children to understand about entrepreneurship? Because you've written a book about it to obviously help to connect at a young age. Why do you think it's important for that to start so early?
It's never too early to start thinking entrepreneurship. And I love what you say about the expectation is when we're growing up that we become a doctor, a scientist, an engineer, whatever, a teacher. But in reality, we need to add entrepreneur to that board collection. Because up to probably about maybe five or six years ago even, the word entrepreneur was seen as some kind of salesperson trying to hustle something. But yeah, entrepreneurship is a profession and we need to treat it as a profession. We need to have it on that same level. What do you want to be? I want to be, like I said, doctor, engineer, scientist, teacher, entrepreneur. It needs to be on the same level. It's not about like a sales job, somebody trying to hustle something that you don't want. People are discerning, we make our own minds up. If we want something, we'll buy it. If we don't, we don't. And previously, I think the impression was that of a shiny salesperson trying to sell us something, but that's not the job at all. The entrepreneurship job goes from conceiving of an idea where you're passionate and you focus on it and then you have to go through a sequence of steps to make it happen.
To answer the question about what should we do and what can we do if that spark is there, ask people. There are experienced people out there and I share my experience now, just ask the question. Traditionally, we had six degrees of separation, we now have two degrees of separation. You can contact anybody anywhere online, through social media platforms and ask a question. Generally speaking, I find that entrepreneurs, experienced entrepreneurs, we're more than happy to share knowledge and information. If we can help you to avoid a pitfall and to avoid falling into a hole, we'll do it. And anyone that has the right mentality or a focused mentality and honestly, probably every single entrepreneur, experienced entrepreneur I know wants to get involved, wants to see the next generation do well to ease the path for the upcoming generations.
TH is a challenge for me when I say PATH, it's an Irish thing, right? TH, we can't say the kind of like, we go PATH, not P-A-T-H, that is PATH. So, you say like, the ting is this, if you go back to Ireland, the ting is this. So, forgive my lack of being able to pronounce TH.
It's so charming. It's charming. So tell us, you said that you struggled in the early stages and now you're in this position where you're wanting to share your experiences and knowledge and learnings with people. So let's get back to those times. What piece of advice could someone have given you that would have smoothed your path?
The piece of advice that would have been crucial for Autolink would have been to keep it for longer and sell it later. Because Autolink was pretty much early stage search engine era and I had the equivalent of $400 to start this business. And I started it from a bedroom and we put in, it was a service where we would sell the advertising service to a car dealership and we would say, OK, we'll find buyers for you and they'll shortlist, and they'll find your cars in that shortlist and they'll come to you and buy a car. Everything was done online. I started out with that four hundred dollar budget. A year later, it was doing OK, it was generating, let's say, a nice salary. And then I was going to college by night, I was working by day and I had AutoLink in the middle, which is like a two hour sessions trying to run the business. And that was a lot of plate spinning at any one time. It was like a six o'clock start and 11 o'clock finish. And I did that for a year. And I was kind of exhausted at that stage. I was even testing my own capacities to take stuff on. And I said, I looked at it and I said, I can't give up college because I need to get a college degree. I had gone to Germany for two years prior to going to college and I came back and I was a young dad. So I had responsibilities and I didn't want to just be silly about it. I had to take that risk calculation view on things and I said I need to keep the job because that's bread and butter. I need to go to college because I should have done this a few years ago, probably would have been easier, and what I do with Autolink. So it kind of fizzled out and I should have kept it because if I did, it would have sold probably for a fairly significant sum a few years later. So if somebody had said to me, hang on to AutoLink, press pause on college and focus on AutoLink. Keep your day job for that bread and butter income, but hold on to AutoLink and keep it for another couple of years, I probably would have gotten a very nice exit from that business and a very nice check at the end of it. That would have been a nugget of advice.
Now, do I look back on that with regret? Not at all. I look at it and say, “Life is a series of crossroads. We make decisions and there are fundamental decisions that we make which will direct our next step and I was at that crossroads and I thought okay this is a decision at this time with the responsibilities I've got. I've got to be able to make the right decision.” I'm glad I made that decision in that sense and as far as the business is concerned I'm 100% confident that I'll come back into something like this probably in the next few years. So I just put it aside for a while. I didn't close it in my mind, I put it aside. And I'm going to come back and I'm going to get those returns. And I don't do this necessarily. This is going to sound like I'm Saint Patrick now, but I'm not, right? I don't do this for the financial part. I do this for the buzz of building a business. I do this for the excitement of seeing something go from nothing to something. And invariably, thankfully, the financial returns come with that kind of thinking. But if you get up in the morning and go, I want to make a million dollars, that's it, I'm going to do it. Wrong attitude. Get up and say, I'm going to build this product or build this service and a million dollars will come along. That's a different mindset, and it's a focus on getting it done and if you focus on getting it done invariably with all things falling into place, it should be a right road, but get advice, get advice.
Yeah, solid. Exactly. So important. I love that and I want to talk about that a little bit more because you do help work with startups and the startup phase is also where Vicki and I excel with what we do. We do marketing, we help people market and launch the business. It is undoubtedly the most exciting time for business, right? It's when you've got all the energy and all the optimism and you have no idea what's coming down the line, which is sometimes a really good thing because it's where you just have to, like you said, get the work done. So let's think about what's some advice for someone who's in that stage? So they're starting up, they're getting ready to launch, but they're at that hesitation point because they're not sure if it's going to succeed or fall on their face. And hesitation is slowing them down, stopping them from launching because so much of it is mindset and so much of entrepreneurship is personal development and pushing through your comfort zones and all these things. So what advice would you give someone who's got the idea, they've got their $400 bootstrapping going on and they're about ready to launch, but they're afraid to hit that play button. What would you tell them to do?
First and foremost, the idea stage is important, you’ve got to make sure that your idea has commercial value, that it is worth the squeeze. You write it down. What I typically do is, I write something down. This could be like at four o'clock in the morning or four o’clock in the day and I'll get some idea and I’ll just go okay, maybe I should go with that. It sounds a bit nutty but It’s not. We just get these, everybody gets random ideas and when you're walking around, or you're in, could be in your kitchen and you pick up something and go, well, if I did that to that, now that probably would be a better product. It's just this random idea that comes to everybody. But we lose so much of those potentially good ideas because life takes over. Life gets in the way of those ideas. So what I do is I write them down. I look at them a day later, I look at them a week later, I'll probably look at them a month later. I'll take the foot off the gas for a while. You've got to be realistic about it as well. And if it still makes sense, then it's worth at least, at least getting advice and putting it in front of somebody. Somebody that you trust, always have one or two trusted people that you know that are within your circle and they've got your interests at heart. And show them the idea and say, what do you think? Get a second opinion.
And as I said in the Just Startup book as well, it's very easy as enthusiastic entrepreneurs to gloss over the facts that are coming back at you. Somebody might say, “I don't think that's ever going to work.” And you go, “No,no no. I believe in this. It's going to work.” Don't ignore the reality factor. If somebody says “This is highly unlikely that this is going to work, or you need to move to the left, move to the right, you need to tweak it, you need to change it.” Take that advice on board, because these people are giving you that advice for a reason. I remember a situation where a guy said to me, he said, “I'm going to remortgage my home and I'm going to put my money into this business and I'm going to give up my job and all these factors”. I said okay let's sit down now let's take it easy for a while I just need to understand what the business is about I won't tell you about the business but it was like he was going to have a David and Goliath battle, he was just up against the giants and he didn't need thousands of dollars he needed millions and millions of dollars to even make a dent on that radar so I just said, “Look, do you have kids?” He said, “I've got two kids, got a house, got all the trappings of day-to-day life and got all the costs and responsibilities.” And I said, “Please don't remortgage your home.” I said, for this one. I said, “I would suggest that you license the technology, put your patents on it, put intellectual property around it. And 5% of something is much better than 100% of nothing. And you can go along and you can go to one of the big players that are in the market and get your 3%, 4%, 5%, sit back and keep your job and you're not remortgaging your home. Think about it.” And I said, if you take on what you're going to take on, you have uphill struggle from an operational point of view because you've got to fight against those giants. And number two, if you remortgage your home, your risk level has gone out through the sky. It's off the scale. So that risk is too great. And I very much take calculated risks. I think calculated risks are okay. And don't bet the farm, you've got to keep a safety net. There has to be food on the table, as we say back in Ireland, probably. You've got to be cautious to the extent that the risk is managed. You can afford a certain latitude of risk, but don't bet the lot. So I said, look, take it away, think about it. And I'll help you if you want to license it. But just think about the option and I'll send you some more detail by email. And I said, come back to me in a couple of days or something like that. Some throwaway comment at the end of the conversation. A couple of days went by and I said, oh sh*t, he's just going to, he’s going to ruin his life here now by taking this on. Couple of weeks went by and I got a call and he said, I thought about what you had to say and he said, I'm going to do the licensing gig. And he said, I'm not going to take the big risk. And I said, yes, I'll help you to do that.
But it's fundamentally about using that knowledge and information and advice and help that's around. There's an awful lot of incubator systems that are out there now for businesses as well. Some of them go on for far too long in my view. Some of them, they need to be shortened. They need to be like I was talking about the Entrepreneurship Academy. You don't need to be in a program for 12 months to figure out a business. You can have that figured out in 12 hours if you've got the right people around the table, and you got to be able to then because the race is on, right? From a business perspective, we've got to get things moving. If you want to win, speed is key, especially as a startup, as an early stage company one of the biggest advantages you've got against the, I call it speed boats and supertanker. We're the speed boats, we've got to move fast. And the supertanker with 10,000 employees and 5 billion revenue on their balance sheet, on their accounts, they can turn that supertanker very easily, but we're speed boats. We can turn on a pin, that's our advantage. So use it as much as possible. I've given you about four answers in that there now.
All good ones.
I love how exciting this all sounds. Patrick, you just make entrepreneurship sound exciting. And sometimes we fall into a trap of going, oh, being an entrepreneur is hard, running your own business is hard, it's lonely, it's this, it's that, and all of that is true. Yet I'm just thrilled to hear this energy and this excitement that comes with it. There's one thing that you said there in your last part of your conversation about risk. And I'd love to lean into the conversation about what is calculated risk? And how do we use leverage as a way to decrease risk? If you may even have a story, the licensing one is an example. And maybe you have another story of how someone can achieve a result, but doing it a different way that means they're not leveraged, they're leveraging other people's money or skills or knowledge.
Yeah, you just led into the answer actually, because I was just going to say if you've got an idea that's really that good, and if you put it in front of somebody who has deeper pockets and who is willing to invest, then that's a risk sharing exercise. And you've also got somebody, if it's in the space that you're going into, use that experience, use that knowledge, because investment isn't just about money. Investment is about having an investor and the investee fitting together. Number two, the non-financial value. So you've got somebody to pick up the phone to and say, “Hey, listen, we need to get into this sales channel. Who do you know?” The world is still about networks. The world is still about, we have this social media world right now where everybody's connecting virtually and so on. And that's all fine, that's all good. But it's still fundamentally about speaking to somebody who knows somebody. And my way probably is traditional in the sense, people would call it traditional now, but I think it's fundamentally tried and tested. If you pick up the phone to someone you know, the great thing about, I've been traveling the world for the last five years, particularly, I left Ireland in 2018 and I got some time to take the foot off the gas and see the world. But I still kept building contacts and networks wherever I was. I would contact the startup agencies, I'd contact the entrepreneurship hubs, I'd contact the people in there. So now if I need to give somebody a contact in, it could be anywhere. It could be Seattle to Slovakia. I'll know somebody somewhere that will be able to kind of go, give them a help along, give them a leg up and give them that kind of springboard to some degree. But ultimately, if you want to minimise your own risk and minimise your own exposure, share with other people, share that exposure with other people. Bring them on board as investors, bring them on board as advisors, bring them on board as mentors, or all of the above. And it doesn't feel so lonely then when you have the ability to pick up the phone on a Friday evening and say, hey, this is what we did this week. And we kind of hit a crunch on Wednesday because we went into this meeting and this was the feedback. That sounding board stuff, hugely important.
I agree, and what's your thoughts on partnerships? Have you ever worked with a partner or have a good story on that?
I have both good stories and bad stories. I’ll focus on the good ones first. Always try to ensure that you keep a broad view on the partnership. It's multifaceted. You've got different levels and different ways to look at it, and fundamentally you've got to be able to get on with that person or that other company, that partnership. If you don't get on your chances of success are reduced at least. So there's got to be a kind of a chemistry and got to be an understanding. And there's an Irish saying that says All God's people have got a place in the choir. So use those skills, match skills that fit perfectly with what you're trying to do. If you're good at science, then get somebody who's good at commerce and the commercial part, vice versa. But fundamentally, if you want to test whether they're going to be a good partner or not, go for a meal with them, go for a beer with them, go for a cappuccino with them, whatever you're having yourself, just get to know the person. Don't just look at a CV or a resume, and don't just look at a bio. You need to know who you're going to do business with, and if you can do that, and if you get on, your chances of success are multiplied dramatically, in my experience.
I would say that also counts for clients too. If you're a service business especially and you’re looking for a long-term relationship with a client, having that sort of relationship is also super important, yeah.
Totally. It's not only that, but people buy from you and you have clients because they trust you and like you. You can have the best product in the world, and if somebody doesn't trust or like doing business with you, then it's probably not going to happen. So fundamentally, it's about - business and life is about getting on with people and relationships and understanding people and having an open mind and getting to link and connect with people.
Yeah, trust is key and trusting yourself, trusting your gut, trusting your instinct. It doesn't sound scientific, but I think self-trust and trusting your partner or your clients is a big one.
It is definitely, and sometimes that trust gets diluted because we're told to follow a certain orthodox route and we've got to follow A, B and C and this is the way it's done. In entrepreneurship there is no way it's done. You figure it out and you make a map and then you test the map and then you check the map and then you double check it. And once that's done, that's your map. But you've just created a new page, it's not something that's coming out of traditional orthodox learning. It's coming from you, and you've just created that map and that page in conjunction with other people. Because fundamentally you can't do anything without other people. People say to me, what's the best product you've invented and what was your best output from, and I said, the best thing about the thing that was most important to achieving any kind of success is people. If I've got the right people around the table, our chances of success have multiplied by a big, big factor because they're the right people. If there's a mismatch and if the people aren't right, you'll probably still get there if the product is that good or the service is that good, but it's more lifting. So try and get your team on the same page, thinking the same way, pointing in the same direction. And that's our job as an entrepreneur as well. We've got to manage expectations, we've got to manage direction. And when we sit down at a meeting, we say, we are here today, we want to be here in 12 months, we want to be here in 24 months.This is our target. If anything changes in the middle, we'll tweak as we go. But right now, this is where we want to be. Are we all good? Does anybody have any red flags that you want to raise right now? And you keep going then, and then it's full force. Hit the gas. Once you choose a target and choose a plan, really go for it. Because as I said before, speed is key, as long as you're not foolish with that. As long as you kind of make the right decisions along the way and recognise that if you are at another crossroads that you look around and you take a breath. And you kind of go, hold on a second, I've got a team, I've got advisors, I've got people around me. I got to recalibrate, maybe got to recalibrate here. It's time for a chat, and I don't say it's time for a four hour meeting. It's time for a chat. We got to get on the table.
I love that. Steve Jobs was interviewed at the end of his life and he was asked, what is the best product you've ever created? What are you most proud of? And his answer was the team.
Wow, I didn't know that. I didn't know that.
Yeah, I love that so much because it's exactly what you're saying. It's so key to surround yourself with the right people and it doesn't matter if you're a solo entrepreneur. Just starting out, been in business for 10 years and have a 20 person company, It's all the same. It's who you're surrounding yourself with which is exactly the point you're making.
Totally. You can have a mediocre product with excellent people. Let me reverse that. You can have an excellent product with, I'm just going to use the word mediocre team or kind of your average team, and it'll take you X amount of time and it'll be a heavy lift. You can have a mediocre product with excellent people and you'll get there an awful lot faster. And that's not to say that people don't have, this is not about an IQ thing. This is about a fit. This is about everybody fitting in that collection. It's like that jigsaw puzzle of skills that you put together as a team. So my first focus, once I've defined what I want to take on board as a product, I look at it and then say, right, I need person A, person B, person C around me now. These are the skills that I need to make this happen. And then I'll fit a person to that skill set. And then it's motivate like hell. Just get everybody pumped up and enthusiastic about what we're doing. While at the same time, as I said, keeping that safety net of reality. You've got to have that because rose tinted spectacles and all that and coming out into the world and thinking everything's going to be a lovely place and lovely day and all that, not reality. You're going to get pushed around by competitors. You're going to get pushed around by the market. Customers are going to put you through your hoops, jumping through hoops to get a sale done. So to that aspect, I don't want to make it sound too rosy. It is a tough gig. Entrepreneurship is a tough, tough place to be. But if you minimise your risk, maximise your leverage with people and the team and your advisors and mentors, and then you've got to have boundless energy because you will end up on Saturday morning drinking a cup of coffee in your kitchen and thinking, holy sh*t, what happened that week? I'm exhausted. Where did this go and what happened, how do I get out of this? You will get those points. It's definitely not in any way, and I don't want to dress it up here as being, the be all and end all of life. Entrepreneurship is tough. However, if you do the right things, get to the right end point, or exit in your business, for example, if you sell your business, or if you licence out your technologies, or if you've achieved what you wanted to achieve, it is the most satisfying thing in the world because you've just put yourself through a storm and the sun is shining. And when that happens, it's a good place to be.
That is poetic, pure poetry. Patrick, how important are the details? How important is it to really keep your eye on the ball and finesse the details?
It's really important because you've got other people that are checking in on you and you've got to have your I's, dotted and T's crossed. And there's a responsibility to those. If you've got investors on board, you've got a responsibility to them to keep them informed and mind their money, get them the return that they're looking for. If you've got team players in there, you have an equal responsibility, which is like to make the business a success so that everybody wins. I think everybody around that table in that business should have some piece of the pie in terms of success and win. But as a secondary, that's going off the point.
But the point is, it's really, really important to watch your details, watch your numbers, watch your costs. Costs are crucially important. You can take a harder hit if you're managing costs. If a sale doesn't happen and your costs are under control, you can probably breathe again. If your costs are off the scale, out of control and you don't get the sale this month and you don't get the sale next month or whatever you're expecting, then it's red light time then you're running on empty. Another aspect of detail is around finance and funding. Make sure what you're doing that you can fund either personally, with family and friends, with investors. Make sure you've got enough fuel in the tank to get it done and plan for the best, hope for the best and plan for the potential worst. What is the worst case scenario here? And maybe have secondary facilities around that. So detail, as I see it, is largely around your cost control, your financial structure, your business, mechanics of your business, and that's where I put a lot of time into the detail in that space, in that part of the business. As far as the front end of the business, which is the sales and marketing channel and the sales marketing flow and revenue and all that aspect, sales for me is probably the most important word in business. If you don't have sales, you have an idea. You have to have sales. And so many people go out and say we're pre-revenue and that was probably maybe 10 years ago. Companies were coming up getting like 500 million valuations from venture capital and they were pre-revenue. For me, there is no better way to test your product or your idea or your service than getting a sale. If somebody is willing to give you their hard earned money for your product or service, that validates what you're doing. So never lose sight of that most important word which is sales. Sales generates everything in the business. You can be a cost controlled superhero but you can't control any costs if you've got no money to control.
This is true. This leads so much into the question I want to ask next, because to be a good sales person, which is something we don't often like to be, we think of sales as icky and sales as smarmy and sales as trying to get something for somebody for nothing, but it's not at all. If you flip it on its head and really see what sales is, it's like you're saying, it's just selling your product. And you can do that through lots of different channels, but in order to become a good sales person, you have to build resilience. Because you're going to get a lot of no's, whether you're asking for selling your company or selling to investors or selling to customers and clients, it all is a super important part of doing business, but we need to be resilient because the no's are going to come because you're not going to find the right fit. If we look at it that way, it just wasn't a good fit. These investors just weren't a good fit. These clients just weren't a good fit. If you change it from like, oh, they're all rejecting me to that's not a good fit, let me keep going out to find my fit. How does one build the resilience in order to be able to face that part of business?
Yeah, resilience is your sub-degree, it's your sub-qualification in business if you're an entrepreneur, you have to have it because you're going to hear nine no's and one yes invariably, and that's the way it works. In most cases, I guess you need to engineer your mind from the beginning. I'm not going to hear yes, I'm going to hear no more than yes. I'm going to get more refusals than acceptances. And if that is it, so be it. I can live with it. But if you go out with the wrong attitude, which is, Oh, everything's going to be rosy in the garden. We're going to just knock this out of the park. Not happening. It's not happening unless you're really, really lucky. And if you are lucky, if you are that lucky, I want to invest in it. I've never seen a business that doesn't have knocks and setbacks and pushbacks. So resilience is fundamentally important to getting through that, as I call it. Sometimes it's a storm, but most of the time, if you manage it correctly, it's a nice ride. It's a nice drive. When you start out, if you're not familiar with sales, if you're not familiar with business, and if it's completely new territory, educate yourself on resilience. Give yourself the expectation that you're going to need to be resilient.
If you are, let's say, unable or unused to taking hits along the way, get somebody who's near to you, and that you trust to be your resilience sponge. Somebody who needs that resilience. If personality-wise, you think that you don't have the resilience factor, then get somebody to partner with that does have that resilience factor and you focus on what you do and let the other person then take the heavy hits when they do come in. I think, outside of business, we need resilience in life anyway, life throws us a curveball. I've had cloudy spells along the way many times and that's both from a work perspective and a personal perspective. But if you can engineer your thinking to fit, to manage that, then that just makes you fundamentally more resilient in life and in business. And in the entrepreneurship space, life and business tend to mesh together a lot because you need to love what you do. And people say to me, geez, you work really long hours sometimes. And I go, well, I think it was Confucius, the Chinese philosopher said, “If you enjoy what you do, you never work a day in your life.” Or words to that effect, it's a hobby. It's a hobby that creates income if you're doing well. It's a hobby that hurts you if it's not doing well. But in the overall scheme of things, all things being equal, keeping the right attitude and relying on the universe, I think we can probably say in the overall scheme is it's not so bad. And if you do happen to hit a wall, I don't like to use the word failure. But if you do have to either close your business down or change your business, dust yourself off, get up, take a breath, look around, smile, chill, take it easy for a while and then recharge. And if you want to do it again, and if you can do it again, like I said, without betting the farm, you've got to give it another go. Maybe change the page. In a lot of cases, it could be changing the formula of the business that you're looking at or the idea that you've got. In other cases, it could be hang in there for another year. Maybe it's just not its time. I've seen great ideas just not being ready for the market yet. And I've told people hang on for about a year. Prepare in the meantime. Do your slide show preparation, keep your bread and butter income and have your slideshow preparation going on at all times because what is presented as today's technology could be tomorrow's technology and keep that in your basket. Good ideas, if they're good ideas, will rarely go away. There are certain things that are time dependent so something will be fashionable and trendy today, that's not going to be fashionable and trendy tomorrow, and vice versa. So you wait for a year or two and it could be that time. So yeah, resilience is fundamental to life and business and if we train ourselves to be resilient, but don't be paranoid and don't be fixated on the negative. Stay positive, but be resilient, just in case. As I said, in life and business, you're going to get hits every now and then, you're going to get pushbacks, you're going to get surprises, and that resilience core is necessary to manage those at least.
That's such incredible advice for anyone in any stage of business because it's exactly right. It's exactly right. We've talked to so many people and we just know that resilience is the core, which is exactly why we named the podcast this. So thank you so much for that incredible summation of what it exactly means. So with that, I would love to test our resilience out here because I like to be the one doing the interviewing and not so much being the one being interviewed. But we've been doing this fun thing at the end of our podcast recently, which is flipping the script and giving you as the guest the opportunity to turn into the host and ask a question of Vicki and I and we'll take turns answering. We have no idea what you're going to ask us, but the floor is yours.
Okay, here goes. We've got another hour to go, right? I'll ask you two questions and I'll give you both questions so you have time to kind of process while we're going through the first answer. Entrepreneurship Academies, from your experience, what do you see as the key factors for me to consider if I want to start entrepreneurship academies? And the second thing is fun and happiness and fun, health, happiness in the entrepreneurship space or in life in general. Give us your recipe for all those three. So you got me and my entrepreneur academies to help kids and young entrepreneurs and aspiring entrepreneurs and every edge entrepreneur to get into business. What are your key points? What are your key suggestions? And then fun, health, happiness in both entrepreneurship and life. What's the recipe for success in there?
We might need an hour to respond to that. Okay, I'll do my best because I'll start off because I am very obsessed with this idea of entrepreneurship education. It's very much what Vicki and I have been basing our business on in the last few years since COVID started. And when COVID hit, we had a whole different idea for this business. We were going to go into employer branding and help employers learn how to communicate better and more effectively using marketing and all this good stuff. And then COVID hit and everybody started working from home and it was like, well, that's out the window. So we started helping small business owners to learn how to just get online, figure out their marketing. Some of them were retail businesses that now had doors shut and didn't even have social media set up for themselves. So we started with a lot of webinars and workshops and just education in general. How to do the marketing when you can't physically be in person. And it opened our eyes to how much of the market didn't understand the fundamentals of marketing. And I guess Vicki and I took this as, doesn't everybody know marketing? We know marketing so well. We do marketing our whole career. You don't even think that other people don't understand this. And I think in the same way, you don't realise other people don't understand what entrepreneurship is. Because once you've been in it, you started working it out. I've been an entrepreneur since 2012. So I've been figuring it out along the way, making mistakes, hitting the roadblocks, hitting the ceilings, busting through, whatever I've had to do. Then built a business with Vicki over the last four or five years now. And then all that learning that has happened there and all that development. You just take for granted that people figure this stuff out. But it's really recently that… and I have a 15 year old son who's really into building an entrepreneurship lifestyle for himself, that now I'm questioning the whole education thing. Is the traditional path right for everybody? Is it right for him? I think it is, but I'm not sure. If he's going to go to school, what's he going to study? So I've got all these things as a mom too, that's in my brain, well, what is it? And why is entrepreneurship not a major in university? But I like your point that we don't probably need four years to learn how to be an entrepreneur. You probably need 12 hours, right? But it's the inherentness of who it's for. But I think if we can give younger people an understanding of what entrepreneurship means and how you can start up building a business and just try and test and experiment and know that it is a real legitimate path that you can take.
I think it will help those, especially those who are a little bit of the misfits, a little bit of the ones that struggle a little. If you start researching entrepreneurs, you learn like Richard Branson has dyslexia, for example, and Elon Musk is on the spectrum somewhere. They're these great, incredible entrepreneurs who have struggled down the path and become massively successful because they think differently, because they're more creative. Maybe they're bigger daydreamers in class and they don't want to just rote learn maths or science or whatever. They're not interested in that, but there's not a path for them in school because they have to learn X, Y and Z to get a degree. We can help them just understand that their unique gifts are exactly what can make them successful in life as an entrepreneur. Those introverts in the back of the class, afraid to raise a hand, those people who just don't feel like they fit with traditional society's mould of an employee, go, wow, there's another whole thing out there. I think you can get people to success so much faster. They'll be braver, they'll be more likely to take a risk, rather than, I think you can fall through the cracks and go down a dangerous path when you feel you're not good enough, you don't fit that society's mould. So that's what I'm passionate about, I'm really big on this and I'm really excited for you. So for me, I think it's the mindset piece and the education behind it that helps young people know that there's other options in life and they shouldn't give up because they don't feel like they fit in. That's I think the biggest piece for me on that. And then the second question, fun, health and happiness. How do we get that into entrepreneurship? I think it needs to be such a big part of entrepreneurship. And I think that's where the community comes in. So I think if it's you by yourself with entrepreneurship, it feels so overwhelming, so terrifying, so stressful. I think when I found Vicki as a business partner, that's when I found the fun in entrepreneurship because having the brainstorming sessions and the discussions, even just after the podcast, we're like, oh my God, I can't believe it. And just having that person that's so in business with you that you can have that community with, makes all the difference. It makes it so much more fun. Focusing on health, that's a tough one, but as an entrepreneur, you know your health is you. So if you're not healthy, you can't work, you're not making money, therefore there's responsibilities. So you've got to focus on health. You got to prioritise it. How you do that, I think, is very, very individual. Whether you're a gym rat and you go to the gym every day and do an hour of hard lifting, cool, that's great for you. Or if health is more doing yoga and meditating, amazing. Like what it is that you need to keep yourself grounded and feeling strong and healthy is key. And happiness is just, I think it's embracing even the bad and working through like so much of what you said about failure and optimism and calculated risk and all of that. It's can you be happy through that? And how do you get back to happiness when you're in the low? What does it take and figuring out for you what it takes? Is it journaling? Is it talking to a mentor? Is it finding a community that understands you? Or is it getting some therapy to heal some inner childhood trauma that told you you weren't good enough a long time ago? There's a lot, a lot of paths. I think it's very individual, but I think the community aspect helps in all of that because you got a community of healthy, happy, fun-loving entrepreneurs that you can talk to every week. Right? That's it, right? I think that's it. Anyway, I've talked a lot. I'll give the floor over now. Thanks.
Great answers.
I love your answers. How am I possibly, possibly going to walk in those shoes, in those footsteps? Okay, well, luckily we have very different personalities and different views of the world. And as much as I agree with everything you said, and I love it, I'm going to come at it from a slightly, I suppose, potentially more scientific or a bit more, I'm going to put my practical hat on. And thank you for the time, because my brain's been ticking, I've basically just written you a course, Paddy. Whilst Laura was talking, I was thinking, Okay, I know exactly what he needs. All right. So here are the main points you want to touch on in your academy. You want to definitely have a course or a category. What are we going to call them? Subject. You want to subject on resources and being resourceful.
Okay.
I can unpack any of these later if you need it. You'll want a subject about environment, internal and external. So that impacts what kind of environment you need to be in. What do you need to succeed? What kind of a mindset? What kind of a person do you need to be? That whole environment, internal, external. And then I'd go with your structure. What do you need to set up to succeed? This is your basic ABCs, right? And then your implementation, how are you going to implement, what you've set up, understanding that you've already set up your environment, your tone, your state. And then the last but most important one is people which you've spent some time talking about today. And a part of that resourcefulness is knowing where to tap into. Is it podcasts? Is it further readings? Is it mentors? And obviously the networks and connections are all under the people. So there you have it. Another subject I'd definitely include is storytelling. Absolutely, because we know that people relate to what they hear and they'll remember how you made them feel through a story, or they'll remember something in the story that really touched them before they'll ever remember facts and figures.
And another subject I'd love to see in there is how to integrate AI effectively in your business model, not just to help you write copy, but how is AI going to impact what your idea does today and fling it forward 10 years and see it for what it's going to be then, before you start.
Very interesting. AI with reality. That's the best combination, I guess.
Yeah, I'd say so. Absolutely. Yeah. And look, as far as being fun, healthy and happy. I love that your life got more fun when we started working together, I'm taking that, I'm owning that and I reckon, the bottom line to that is be yourself. Be yourself, and be honest with yourself and others, do what you love, stand by it, and lean in on it.
Mm-hmm. That's amazing. That's good. That's good. And both of those answers are excellent from my perspective, because it gives me the kind of thinking pattern that I need to get these entrepreneurship academies on the way. This is not our last conversation on this. I'm going to tell you that right now. We're going to have to keep talking about this.
We'll hold you to it.
Brilliant. Great stuff.
Great questions.
Thank you. Thank you so much. Honestly, this has been, I think, a master class on entrepreneurship. This is one of those conversations that peels back the curtains and really gives people an understanding of what entrepreneurship is in its fullness, not just a piece of it, but just everything from the risk to the loneliness to the community to how you can really evolve, bringing the right people around you, the entrepreneurs. There's so much to unpack in this episode, I'm actually looking forward to listening to it again and again. So I just want to thank you so much for educating.
I enjoyed the chat. This is my sweet spot. It's the profession that I've chosen. I love it. The author aspect is, I guess it's attached to it. And I try to take that core experience and interest in transmitting the message and getting the message out there to help as many people as I can. Overall, I've had a good run and I'm just in the middle of it. There's a lot more to come, but I'm happy to share what I've learned to help other people to get through and minimise the storms, maximise the sunshine.
Oh, exactly. I love that so much. Patrick, thank you very, very much for this incredible conversation and for what you do. We'll link your information in the show notes so that people can find your book and you as well and how you help and how you mentor and eventually that academy, which I'm super excited about. We will most certainly have you on Resilient Entrepreneurs again very soon.
We might even ask you about some of the things that you invented, because we haven't even gone there yet!
Yeah, we can have like four or five of these programs, no problem.
Easy, easy. So thank you so much. We really appreciate your time today. Thank you for being on Resilient Entrepreneurs.
It's a pleasure to chat with you. Have a great day.
You too.
