The Livelihood Podcast

Join us as we talk with inventor Arnold Du Toit who's story starts off pretty ordinarily until  his product gets so popular it spirals out of control in a flurry of huge order lists investment rounds and eventually legal disputes. He won a Britain's Best Young Entrepreneur Award and gained a lot of attention for his venture.  Arnold shows a brilliant level of resilience during this time and wouldn't change his experience. Now he advises and invests for a fund, where he can use his incredible inexperience to help would be founders as they experience whirlwind success like he did. Arnold is now a Senior Associate with True Altitude who invests and supports businesses as they grow.
If you're interested in knowing what it takes to take a fairly complex product to market - this shows for you. If you're interested in hearing the highs and lows of a proper adventure capitalist, you're in the right place - this one's a gooden'. 

Social Media Marketing - Where We’ve Gone Wrong & The Right Way to Drive Organic Engagement

1. Treat social media like a tv channel - go there for the social media and put up with the ads - intersect this valuable content with ads. 
2. Means that the customers that you’ve built up actually might want to buy your products.
3. Gretta Van Riel - The guru of social media marketing who built 5 six figure businesses is now out of date and wrong!?
4. Create a page that reflects a lifestyle - people want to follow things that resonate with their world view. 
5. Organic reach is important, later down the line you don’t want to heavily rely on paid acquisition of customers.
6. Pinterest - visual marketing and how to do it properly, it has the highest authority for images.
7. Content is like real estate and engagement/visitors is like footfall past your shop.
8. With Fameswap.com you can actually buy existing social media channels with an existing level of engagement! 

In this episode Luke and I discuss our favourite entrepreneurial books from the last ten years of educating ourselves each in the space. We heavily caveat this episode to say that if you really want to start a business, don't bother reading all or any of these books - better to start actually doing business and get better at that rather than reading the rule book inside and out before getting started. If you are interested in finding out our favourite picks and a summary of what makes them great then this is a good episode for you. If you're too busy and just want the list now, then here it is: 

1. Shoe Dog - Phil Knight - The best solo entrepreneur book and a bit of the inspiration behind the title of this podcast, as Phil Knight pretty much embodies the best aspects of an Adventure Capitalist. Top book, more like a movie than an educational book. 

2. The Snowball - Warren Buffet. Biography of Warren Buffets journey from selling coke and pepsi tops to buying out companies and stripping out their assets and making the last few bucks having fired the entire workforce. That little guy has got some pretty ruthless stories in the vault, but also tells you how you could see business as a functional capital creating machine rather than people's livelihoods. He's currently the 4th richest person on earth so it's packed with value, he's also very straightforward in his advice in general. If you want to learn the fundamentals of value investing this is a good read. 

3. The Personal MBA - Josh Kaufman. This is like a cheat sheet for an entire MBA course, good set of theory and principals for business. Very academic and a little bit dry but Alex read this back to back and got a lot of value from it. 

4. Atomic Habits - James Clear. How can you build new productive habits and break bad ones. Worth a read and could spell the difference between building a future you want and shrugging off elements of your personality you'd rather not live with. 

5. Critical Business Skills for Success: the Great Courses. (Audible) This is a 36 hour long lecture series and covers everything from Marketing, Strategy, Operations, Finance and Accounting for people wanting to learn the full suite of what it takes to run a business. Honestly, Alex listened to most of this as he was driving to and from work, in hindsight he should have been taking action at this point and not just theorising all day long. (his words)

6. 4 Hour Work Week - Tim Ferris. It's a classic, if you haven't read this it's worth a quick read. All about how outsourcing can build the fundamentals for a life without work. He's the ultimate work-life balance guru and it's inspiring stuff. 

7. 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. An old one with some still very relevant and good advice. 

Enjoy. 

This episode is a rant about the problems with using Amazon FBA as your business model. Alex and Luke have both been selling on Amazon for a few years, and like any seasoned Amazon sellers they have encountered the countless issues that Amazon sellers face.

If you ask any Amazon seller (who's not selling a course), they could tell you a handful of times using Amazon FBA has been a frustrating experience. Alex and Luke breakdown the worst things that have happened to then over the years.

At the end they talk about why they do sell on Amazon....

The reasons why you shouldn't sell on Amazon FBA -

1. They charge you higher fees than any other platform and aren’t that clear with when you get charged.
2. Organic Ranking - You are at the mercy of the algorithm. You are competing with hundreds of other sellers for the top 10 positions, and the competition is fierce.
3. It’s sold as a get rich quick scheme and not a proper business model. In reality you have to invest thousands or tens of thousands into stock before even knowing if a product will be successful
4. Expectations vs reality of creating products and packaging is difficult. Alex is a seasoned product designer with over 10 years experience, and even he still encounters issues.
5. You can’t necessarily control the review or sentiment created by customers. The review average seems arbitrary that’s set by amazon. A bad review can destroy a products sales.
6. The competition can change very quickly and your brand positioning is unstable.
7. Your listing can get hijacked by fraudsters.
8. Amazon customer service for sellers is one of the worst customer services for businesses.
9. Amazon has a number of programs for sellers, and not all of them work how you expect them to, and it's hard to have a direct conversation with anyone working in those departments

Side hustles are an important element of becoming more financially independent. Since we believe business is a skill that takes practice, it's also important to familiarise yourself with making transactions with customers. The more customers you serve, the more confident you'll be with your other ventures that may be slightly bigger.  An important element of this episode is that we give our honest opinion on whether we would undertake any of these and the reasons why. Usually this boils down to the type of work that's involved, how competitive the particular service is and most importantly, how scalable the side hustle is. Basically, if you can't outsource it, it's not very scalable and will always boil down to exchanging your time for money. The seven side hustles we discuss are: 

1. Freelancing
2. Teaching English Online
3. Customer Interviews
4. Selling on Etsy.
5. Car Wash and Detailing / Carpet cleaning
6. Airbnb Services
7. Small business marketing - take good photos and help list business and images. I also think there’s still money in making better websites for small businesses.

In this episode Luke talks about his Etsy store that he created from the first Fast Bucks Challenge in episode 14 from nothing to doing his first $1,000 day.

The store generated $4,700 in sales in the last 30 days, and Luke discusses the profit margins on the product later on in the show.

He also discusses how he used Etsy ads to drive traffic, but how Etsy rewarded the spending by driving more free traffic; and how that has really propelled his sales in the last 30 days.

The store is a customised portrait store, which requires a lot of customer service, 30 mins to 1 hour of design per order as well as logistics and ordering. Luke talks about how he automated this, so he has a small team in the Philippines who manage those tasks; and uses print on demand services in USA and UK to fulfill the canvases and posters.

Later on in the episode Luke and Alex talk about Alex's successful Etsy store, as well as some useful marketing tips for Amazon and Etsy.

Join us as we talk with Jim Rhodes, who along with Barney Mason, designed, crowdfunded and manufactured their product. We discuss the highs and the lows of running a hugely successful product launch and then the realities of getting the product manufactured. 
Jim reflects on the 3 year journey that him and co-founder Barney have been though, and how he's a completely different person from when the crowdfund originally launched. We learn that from the outside, it may seem like a business is booming, but when you look behind the curtain, it's often being driven by just a few very determined individuals. It's an inspiring, and maybe a little bit intimidating look at the realities of getting something manufactured. The adventure was a long and difficult one, but ultimately taught both the founders so much that they wouldn't change a thing, well maybe one thing... 
Thanks to Jim for coming on the show & hope you guys enjoy.

If you are a small business owner you have probably felt the feelings of being stuck in a rut or that your business is stagnating. It often creates an overwhelming stress in your life that can have a negative impact on your own mental health and relationships with those around you.
 
So, How do you deal with a bad spells in business? In this episode we try and tackle the problem head on, using our own experience and a real world example of exercises we completed to try and get the podcast out of a stagnation period.

We go over these 9 tips for getting your business back on track -

1. Start with you, do an audit on life and health, including mental health. Running/meditation helps clear the mind.
2. Be very analytical of your original objectives.
3. Be smart about it. 
4. Celebrate your wins - try to remember your original goals and calibrate your perspective.
5. Don’t make things worse by doing nothing. 
6. Create a list of actionable steps that are measurable
7. Write about it and talk through the problems and be very analytical of the current situation
8. Time to try harder or give up - sometimes things aren’t worth the effort.
9. Attempt a root cause analysis of the problems.

In this episode Alex takes us through how he's gone from a nervous / petrified public speaker to feeling a lot more relaxed and feeling confident. You get to hear the most embarrassing stories from when Alex fell apart on stage and how he's used some simple tips to train his brain to feel more relaxed. 

Here are the points we discuss:

1. Treat your brain like a muscle, continually exposing it to the stress of public speaking will improve it
2. Use a mind map instead of making notes: research. 
3. Focus on the other person’s facial expression takes the pressure away from you
4. The worst thing that can happen isn’t really that bad. 
5. Use changes in tonality in order to keep the audience engaged.
6. Beta blockers - definitely advise against it
7. Each slide needs one single point
8. Ability to record yourself for a webinar, host a skype call, sales call with a group of people, pitching for investment etc.
9. Drinking and drugs makes it worse so avoid these if you have a public speaking event coming up in the week ahead.

In this episode we argue that capitalism is a force for the good of society, by driving innovation which has given us an incredible quality of life compared with our ancestors.

WARNING: This is an opinion piece. We are not experts on the subject of economics or politics, we just think it's important and fun to discuss subjects like this, and we hope that we give a good argument to why capitalism is good for everyone.

The main points we go over in this episode -

1. Fosters innovation and continuous incremental improvement
2. Allows at the higher end of the spectrum, the ability to gain financial freedom
3. Actually creates a vacuum where arts and creativity are appreciated, outside of a financial reward incentive.
4. Capitalism is pretty much dog eat dog. 
5. Generates huge income for governments to be able to pay for services.
6. It can help people from lower economic backgrounds to change their situations. 
7. You are inevitably going to see extremes - the very rich and the very poor - what do we do about homeless, people who aren’t able to compete etc. 
8. Capitalism doesn’t mean right wing - the government takes a cut and it can operate in a way that is supportive of societal goals.

Some definitions -

CAPITALISM - An economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state.

SOCIALISM - a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.

COMMUNISM - a theory or system of social organization in which all property is owned by the community and each person contributes and receives according to their ability and needs.