Sean: Now I'm wondering you are also the managing director of Penbrothers with maybe more or less 70 people working with you.

What are some of those lessons that we can learn from you right now?

Josef: Yeah, so I mean a huge amount, right? I don't think Humble would be anything like if it weren't for those experiences in Penbrothers. So I'm very, very lucky and thankful to my co-founders at Penbrothers and the entire team because I've had there over three years of really learning what it takes to lead a team, to build a startup, and to scale a startup.

Right. I think we only had 17 people at Penbrothers and now we have pushing 80 people and we employ 500 people for other startups around the world. So I've been very lucky there, I think. But funnily enough, it also has no downsides, but it has as a funny, a couple of curveballs. And I'll give you one, which is more of a personal thing, it’s my fault, not anyone else's.

But like, at Penbrothers right now I have a C team, right? So I've got a COO, a chief transformation officer. I have extremely senior people who I can rely on for all these different things. And so going from that, which is really just, okay, hi, Patrick, Tom, whoever it might be. This is the problem. Let me know what help you need to go and fix it. I'll speak to you in a week when we've got brilliant solutions on my table. Right? Fantastic.

Compared to when I experienced a problem at Humble. I'm kind of looking around, where's my Patrick, my Tom, and my guy and there's no one, right?

So there's no more delegation. It's almost like you've gone back 10 years in kind of how you run an organization and go from really delegating all these tasks to a big stable team, to getting your hands very dirty and doing it yourself. When normally that progression is the other way around. Right? Normally you kind of go from doing it yourself all the way up to eventually leading on this.

So that's quite a, I hope slightly amusing kind of curveball there, but in terms of lessons learned, I mean, I think managing people, in general, is always one of the most crucial, if not the most crucial lessons learned. Because whether it's an intern, whether it's a COO, whether it's an investment board, whether it's a client or a customer, being able to manage relationships and speak to people, and understand the maturity of how that changes through time and how you need it.

Adapt the way that you're speaking, depending on the culture or the person, the stage of the person, the feeling of the person is really an art form, which I think we never stopped learning. And that is something in Penbrothers. That's, I've really, really learned because I'll speak to sometimes very junior people, other times my co-founders, and completely different sensitivities as to how to speak to people there.

So that's one I think. Another one I think is culture building, which again is, it's got similarities to that one. But culture for us is so important. And I think you learn that only when you've been in it, because of course we can see the big, beautiful companies, the Googles, the Canva's of this world, and we see all of this amazing culture.

But to actually be there and experience how to build culture and is really, really important to then understanding what you do need to do, right.

Things like that are so difficult and I learned that in Penbrothers, by making lots of personal mistakes, but also seeing some good times also with regards to culture development as to blossoming into what it is now. Because then of course in Humble, when you're starting from scratch, you get the chance to do it all again from the beginning.

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Any advice to people who are starting a startup?  

Toni: Sean’s the perfect person to ask.

Sean: The most important thing is cash flow. Make sure your revenue is greater than expenses. Don't let other people tell you otherwise that passion is the most important thing, sleepless nights’ the most important thing. It's not. It's cash flow. As long as your revenue is greater than your expense, you're doing well. If expenses are greater than revenue, you're screwing it up and you're bleeding out and you have to stop that.

So anything to make sure your cash flow is good, keep on doing that. If you have to sacrifice your own lifestyle, to make sure cash flow is positive, do it because I did it. If you need to sacrifice sleep for it, do it because I did it. You have to sacrifice a lot. That's why they say your startup is like a baby, it needs you. It needs a lot of nutrition. It cries, you know, it brats out.

Toni: Attention.

Sean: It needs a lot of attention. There you go. So you have to sacrifice a lot for it. The word sacrifice. That's why they say passion is also important because passion, the Latin word is pati, which means sacrifice. If you're not passionate about your startup, you're not going to sacrifice for it. But that doesn't mean if you're passionate about it, it's a good business. If cash flow is negative, no matter how passionate you may be about it, it's not a good business for you during that time.

So, yeah, that's my advice. You really have to save. Sacrifice. You're going to go through a lot, but here's the great thing about it, you learn a lot. You learn a lot, not just about business, but about life and you learn a lot about other people. That's your tuition fee. The tuition fees are your sacrifices, the tuition fees are your effort, and if you lose money, that's also part of the tuition fee. I know people who started up and lost money in their first few startups.

Now it's a blessing for me, I didn't have to go through that. My first startup SEO Hacker is already doing good, but I still had to pay the price by learning a lot from the wrong people I got in the company during the first years. So yeah, maybe that's the second advice I'm going to give you, make sure you hire the right people. Prolong the hiring process. Take your time in hiring them and hire ahead.

Don't hire when you need them, because you're just going to hire whoever comes along because you need them. So hire ahead. If not, you’re going to be a hostage. And if you hired the wrong person, they're going to burn up your company, your startup. They're going to burn your baby. And since it's a baby, it's very vulnerable. So yeah, I hope that helps.

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Sean: Joseph, one of the first things that I usually ask my guests is the startup journey because that is one of the things that I find people super interested in, I am super interested in and I find that my guests are super delighted to tell us the story. So we'll start with that. How did you get the idea of Humble?

Josef: The story of Humble is an interesting one because. It's not like there was one clear moment and then suddenly humble was here. Right. It was really kind of a series of events I would say. And it really started when I met my co-founder, which was three and a half years ago, Nina and we were both working for a different company and we met and we really realized that our values are extremely aligned.

And we really want to create something that was meaningful with genuine impact, but we just didn't know where to start. And we felt that our impact was almost insignificant because we were just a couple of people. So that sort of stalled the practicality of coming up with an idea, even though we knew we had to create something. Even sustainability back then really wasn't necessarily at the very front of our minds.

It was just creating impact in general. So then the years kind of went by a little bit and we got to the end of 2019. And Nina and I went on a trip to the UK to visit my family actually, went to see my family. I tried to go back once every year. See it has been more difficult recently, but I still have family back in the UK.

My mother happens to be a very active environmentalist. She's actually a member of this group called extinction rebellion. Non-violent protest groups really encourage governments to take action on our climate emergency.

And I think she was probably the first real catalyst to show us, okay, sustainability is really, not just a problem, but it's an opportunity. And we saw that so many wonderful organizations out there trying to address this problem, you know. Greenpeace, extinction - so many, but not many of them were actually coming at it from a kind of solutions-driven, tech startup, positive points of view for consumers.

And it's essentially a numbers game. The more people who take small steps towards living sustainably, the greater impact we have and the greater chance that we have of actually achieving sustainability. So all of this sort of spiraled into one and, you know, we were thinking of what kind of idea can we come up with?

How can we do something towards sustainability startup? and Nina and she first came up with the idea of clothing, and kids' clothing. And I'm sure you can probably identify with this, but kids' clothes are very short in lifespan, right? And very quickly you buy and you spend on something new, and then you realize - okay, if I have a younger brother or a younger sister to hang this down too fantastic, then you get one use.

If you have 2, 3, 4 children and fantastic, even more use. But at some stage, that stuff is just going to go to waste. So she came up with this concept of really circular kids' clothing and making sure that you know, how can we give one child's clothes to another, once they're finished using it and create this kind of circular ecosystem.

I heard this idea and just thought, why don't we think a bit bigger, right? It's not just children's clothing that we're not using properly and actually enjoying the rest of our lifetime, but it's everything. We looked around. All of the clutter in our place looked at the plastic in the corner, the furniture that was kind of over here, but a bit dated, the clothes, the electronics, and realized what if we actually gave this service, which makes it extremely easy for someone to be able to declutter their home or office even, and give it a meaningful outcome, free of charge and will turn up when they want us to?

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What are factors I should consider before investing in anything?

Toni: Okay, let's go back to the basics. We've said this first, determine your investment objectives. The second factor would be your timeframe. Are you going short term, medium term, long term? The third would be your risk appetite. Are you a conservative, moderate or aggressive investor?

And then I would say the fourth would also be, another factor is the size of your fund because the strategy for someone investing 10,000 is different from someone who's going to invest a million. So you also have to take the size of your fund into consideration. And then the last one would be your knowledge in that investment. So how much do you know? Again, we're going back to the golden rule, never invest in something you don't understand. So those are factors to consider. Is there anything that you can add to that?

Sean: I'd say, you should have something for emergencies first. Because if you invest and it hasn't made money yet, and usually investments take time. Right? So usually you’ll have losses. First couple of years, maybe the first three years, usually you will have losses. And then an emergency happened, you had to pull it out, you're going to pull out with a loss, which is, you should have not invested it and you should have just kept an emergency fund first.

So make sure you follow the five steps to personal finance management. I would say that's very important because a lot of people make that mistake. They have no emergency fund, are not yet insured, and they went straight to investing. So I feel like that is a common problem because you get penalized when you pull out that investment to pay for an emergency.

Toni: Right. So, establish your foundation first. Like what you mentioned, emergency fund and get yourself insured. In other words, you protect your wealth before you start accumulating it through investments. Because it’s also a waste, if you're going long term, you need to pull it up because of an emergency and you’ll be back to zero. So it’s a waste, it's just going to pull you back. It's going to pull you back further from reaching your long-term financial goals.

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Sean: Now, the last question would be what do you do when you did your best to secure the first page of Google, top 10 results, you got your website, fantastic stuff.

Get your social media platforms, edited it as best you could. And here comes a scandal that has your name on it. How do you get rid of that? Because we got people asking me that stuff. Well, not all the time, but there are those difficult questions that come by. What do you usually say to them?

Jason: Well, there are multiple aspects of this, some of it - in fact, looking after your brand SERP, I've just said not only is it a great business card, it's helpful to your audience, it drives your digital marketing strategy, but it also protects you because if you've got control of the first two to three pages through content that you've worked on actively either you control your semi control.

It's difficult for that negative content to then rank because it has to prove itself to be useful and valuable to your audience in Google's eyes. And that's very difficult to do from page five or page six. If you've done what I've just told you to do over the couple of two to three years. And you'll probably get very, very stable and that's the other thing is brand SERPs tend to be very stable once you've worked at them properly.

You will have protection against that kind of problem. Then you have the question once it does happen, I'll tell you what not to do, and that's trying to drown it. Traditionally, ORM will say, let's create lots of articles and we will create so much content that we will do.

Now, if you think that through it doesn't make sense and it simply doesn't work. Because what you're doing is creating brand new content that has no value in Google's eyes and expecting Google to put it right in front of your audience front and center. It won't do that. What you should do is what I call leapfrogging, is find the content underneath that is valuable to your audience that is helpful to your audience. And help Google to understand, that is better content for it to be showing your audience more representative of who you are more helpful to them than the negative content that's currently ranking. And then leapfrog over itfor it.

Sean: Got it. I got an answer now. Thank you for that.

Jason: In fact, as the brand search guy, I'm going against traditional. ORM techniques, online reputation management techniques, and saying the best way to do it is to control your brand SERP, then you control the message. If you control the message, that negative stuff has trouble getting anywhere near it.

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Sean: Is it better to save or invest? I'll let you answer this one.

Toni: Well, normally we all start by saving first because that's how you develop the habit. That's how you develop the mindset of simply doing delayed gratification. And then once you've established the habit, then you can start investing. But again, like what they say, if you just put, if you save most of your money in the bank, it loses to inflation, so might as well invest anything excess of your emergency fund. It’s like that. What's your take on that?

Sean:  It goes hand in hand. It's not an either-or. It's not an either-or. They don’t compete. I would say, you have to save and invest. So you save first, build up your emergency fund, and then you save some more and use it to pay for your insurance, and then you save some more and that's what you invest.

So, yeah, it's not an either-or. I can’t say one is better than the other. It's a process that you have to have both.

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Sean: One of the things that I'm wondering about, so whenever I pitched to clients about SEO, it's going to be all about them and the ROI cause so a lot of business owners, that's the bottom line that going to matter, you know. How much money can you give back to me if I invest in your company, in my SEO, what's the search volume that I'm going to get every month, and how much of that am I going to be able to convert to leads or sales.

But I could see that in your case, your branding is more of protecting your brand, making sure that your brand is ranking for what it's supposed to be. And you're represented well by your search engine results page. And I wonder, how did you have that conclusion that, oh, this is going to sell well, compared to selling SEO and selling them ROI, which is a lot of business owners like hearing that stuff?

Jason: Yeah. I mean, if you look back at my career, which I've now walked you through, I didn't do music because I thought I was going to make boatloads of money. I did it because I enjoy music and I wanted to play music and entertain people. I didn't make cartoons because I thought I would make boatloads of money.

I'd made cartoons because I wanted to educate children. I wanted to create something positive for the world, and I wanted to be a blue dog in a cartoon singing silly songs, which is a brilliant job if you can get it. By the way, anybody who's interested in getting it, it’s a great job. Those are two of the best jobs in the world.

I do things because I believe they're fundamentally interesting, important, or helpful to people, whether those people know it or not. And I think brand SERPs is a great kind of follow-on, although, but it is saying, Hey, this is really important. It's actually really interesting. And you will get an awful lot out of it, even though you've never thought about it before.

My job is to educate everybody. To say you don't have to work with me, but think about it. Think about how important that is. Think about how important that business card on Google is for you, for your business, for your bottom of the funnel, for your post funnel clients. In terms of conversions for the prospects, but also keeping those clients on board and not, not having them jump ship because you've got a bad result pitching up.

And making sure they've got that consistent message all the time when they're coming to your website. As I mentioned earlier, their journey with you starts when they search for your brand name every time. Most people or a lot of people will come through to your site through Google and that message, they can see it potentially multiple times a day if they're using your services multiple times in the day.

And you know, that's kind of message that sticks it's as important as your home page on your website, I would argue. And from that perspective, I am now saying, well, if I can push forward the idea that this is phenomenally important, even though I can't measure the ROI. From my perspective, personally, I'm doing something I'm really passionate about, and that is worth making less money as it were.

So if I could make a million dollars doing SEO for people, which I probably could, I would rather make 500,000 doing brand SERPs and enjoy myself.

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Sean: Where can I spend my money if I'm 13 years old?

And if you're 13 years old, save it up, dude. I mean, if you have money as young as now that you've saved up. When you're as young as 13, the behavior is more important. The behavior, the mindset is more important because you're not yet worried about a lot of responsibilities if you're living with your parents. So just save as much as you can so that when the time comes when you have to support yourself, you have to support a family, you know how to save. You have that discipline, that behavior, and that mindset already with you.

Money is all about behavior. Just as business is all about behavior. Most businesses close down 9 out of 10. It's not because of the economy. It's not because of the pandemic. It's because of behavior. A lot of business owners, the behavior is let's wait it out. March 2020, it’s ECQ, let's wait it out. Let's just wait and see. The government says, oh, by May or by June, we’re already okay, we're going back to normal. What happened? In May and June, nothing was normal. And those business owners are still in a wait-and-see mode and they've been bleeding out. It's a behavior problem. And finally, they closed business because they couldn't bleed out further.

But those businesses that have the behavior of, we can't wait this out, we have to do something right now and pivot, they're the ones actually thriving right now. So business is all about behavior, just as money is about behavior. And when you're young and you're still in your formative years, I'd say 13 to 20 years old, it's still quite formative, although independently formative, rather than parental formative. So your parents aren't influencing you as much now when you're a teenager, all the way to when you're 20.

You're being influenced and you're solidifying yourself, your identity, and your behaviors during these years. And so I'd say save up. Make sure to solidify that discipline that you can save money and you can say no and deny yourself some things that you want to buy. How about you, Toni? What's your take on this?

Toni: You've said it all. When I was still, I wasn't even thinking about where to save yet and all. Actually, no. I posted a video back then of me making a video about how I budget my 20 peso allowance. So if you guys haven’t watched it, go ahead on my TikTok, you'll be able to see it. I was 10 years old and I was showing my 20 peso bill. And yeah, during that time I was already learning how to budget.

Wow, at 13 years old. Okay. So if you're thinking about it now, then definitely in the years ahead, you'd be able to establish yourself. You'd be able to learn how to manage your money better because you're already thinking about that as early as now. It makes me proud.

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Sean: A lot of people miss that out, don't they? When people search for their name or their company name, there's just stuff that gets in there that is not something that the person or the company would want in their brand. What led you to focus on being the brand SERP guy?

Jason: And that's the interesting point. And that's a great question is from saying actually I didn't want the blue dog to be so prominent. It's not that I didn't want it there. I don't want to deny that I was the blue dog, but it's now relegated to a little image in the knowledge panel on the right-hand side.

And the left-hand side is dominated by digital marketing stuff. The brand SERP guy, the knowledge panel guy. Basically, me expressing the brand message I want to project to my audience and the brand message I've built up so carefully on my own site, on my social media platforms, on every piece of content I publish, and in this podcast.

The brand SERP guy, Jason Barnard does brand SERPs. He's a specialist in what appears when your audience Google's your brand name or your personal name. And that brand message is reflected in my brand SERP. And if you look up your own company name, I will bet my bottom dollar. The message you've worked so hard to build on your own website and on your social channels is not reflected accurately by Google that your brand message on that brand SERP is distorted and it doesn't need to be, you can actually control it.

Google wants to show your brand message, if it can understand your brand message and your brand messages relevant and helpful to your audience, it will show the exact brand message you want. And it's up to you to make sure that Google knows what it is. It should be presented to your audience because of what's Google trying to do with that.

When somebody searches your brand name, they're trying to get to your site or find out more about you. Google wants to show them your audience who are a subset of its users. The information and the opportunity such as videos, Twitter boxes, knowledge panels, links to your site, site links to the login page on here, or the contact page or the newsletter page.

It wants to show all of these things if they are helpful, relevant, and useful to your audience. All you have to do is demonstrate in your videos, your Twitter boxes, your contact page, your newsletter page - are helpful and valuable to your audience searching your name on Google.

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Is there a specific budget rule on how to save money?

Toni: There's actually none, like we always say, personal finance is personal. In terms of the percentage of how much you allocate your savings, your investments, your operating fund, that's for you to decide initially. But they say, the old rule is the 50-30-20. Like 50% to your needs and then 30% to your savings and then 20% to your wants.

But again, it also depends on your income. So the higher your income, then you also have to change the percentage that you set for your savings or for your investments. But in your case, how did you do it, Sean, when you first started out, like when you started having a system for your money?

Sean: I went through a phase in my life where I was eating a pack of Skyflakes for breakfast and lunch. The thicker one.

Toni: Me too.

Sean: Yeah. You probably understand me when I say saving is a must for survival during that time. And I carried that over up to today. I mean, the toys that I buy are, it's just like you, you get your budget for crypto investment from your brand deals, I get it from my public speaking money. So whenever I have a talk and a client pays, I tell my wife, oh, this is my play money. This is not the company's money. This is my play money because I spent time and it's my one hour when I spoke there at that conference.

So yeah, when I was starting out, I saved a lot. I probably saved 50% or more. Now I save 95%. So I only spend like 5% or 10%. I don't spend too much. I don't spend too much, especially now during the pandemic. If you keep buying stuff, your house will easily be filled with things and I already have too much stuff in the house and I have to get rid of some actually, so I save a lot. So for me, the rule is just to save as much as you can.

Toni: True. What can help also is just to simply automate your finances already. Even in my case, what I do is when I receive income already, I set, I allocate a portion of that straight into my savings and straight into my investments, and I just spend whatever is left. It helps me better. So that at least with whatever money that's left, if I end up blowing it again, then at least that's fine because I've already saved initially before I started spending. So that can also help you.

But if you're asking for a more specific percentage, just like what they say, if your cash flow is healthy if your operating expenses or your needs don't go beyond 60%, so maybe that can be a benchmark for you, but it still depends. It depends on how much you're earning. It's going to be different from a minimum wage earner and different from someone like Sean. So he saves 95%, which means 5% of his income goes to his needs. Right?

Sean: Yeah, I just save as much as I can and live a simple life. Don't try to keep up with other people because you're never going to be happy. And you have to be at peace with yourself, meaning, you’re okay with yourself, who you are, you know who you are, you're aware of your character, you're aware of your identity and you're at peace with that, you're not going to need more stuff. What you're going to need is more maturity in life and in your spirit, that's it. You’d come to that point.

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