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In this thought-provoking episode of the Service Based Business Society Podcast, we sit down with Olly Richards, a serial entrepreneur whose unconventional journey through multiple career paths has led him to redefine the metrics of success in the business world. From a jazz musician to a language educator and beyond, Olly's story is a testament to the power of following one's passions and the strategic inefficiencies that can lead to unexpected success.
Olly shares insights from his latest venture into the online education space, revealing how an audience-first approach, coupled with a willingness to embrace strategic inefficiencies, has propelled his businesses to remarkable heights. This episode is not just about the journey of one entrepreneur but serves as a masterclass in understanding the dynamics of modern business strategies, the importance of continuous learning, and the courage to challenge conventional wisdom.
Listeners will be treated to a deep dive into the philosophy that has guided Olly's decisions and growth, including the pivotal moments that led him to pivot his strategies and the lessons learned from embracing the unpredictable. Whether you're a seasoned business owner or just starting, this episode offers valuable lessons on the importance of adapting, the power of an engaged audience, and the surprising benefits of not always taking the most efficient path.
Join us as we explore these themes and more, offering listeners a unique perspective on building a business that thrives on authenticity, strategic innovation, and the relentless pursuit of passion. For those looking to shake up their approach to business and find success on their own terms, this episode is a must-listen.
Available now on podcast.servicebasedbusinesssociety.com and your favorite podcast platforms.
About The Guest
Olly Richards, the visionary behind the $10 million language education company StoryLearning, is a beacon of innovation in language learning. Moving beyond traditional methods, his story-based approach has transformed how people acquire languages. As a mentor, author, and polyglot fluent in eight languages, Olly shares his journey and expertise through a transformative newsletter, empowering educators and entrepreneurs in the language education space. His remarkable transition from jazz musician to language expert and successful entrepreneur offers actionable insights and inspiration for anyone looking to thrive in their teaching careers or entrepreneurial ventures.
Connect with Olly
Mentorship: https://ollyrichards.co/
StoryLearning: https://storylearning.com/
Instagram: @realollyrichards
X: @mrollyrichards
Facebook: OllyRichards.co
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ollyrichards/
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBTz3Np62RSDc8XneG9avrA
About The Host
Tiffany-Ann, an astute business strategist, balances life as a podcast host, agency leader, and mother. Her unique blend of strategy, technology, and passion for genuine connections offers a fresh perspective on modern entrepreneurship.
Connect with Tiffany-Ann:
YouTube: Bottcher Business Management Agency
Tiktok: @ta_bottcher
Website: bottcher.io
Facebook: @bottcher.io
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Creators & Guests
What is Service Based Business Society Podcast?
Attention entrepreneurs! Are you looking for ways to scale your service-based business without sacrificing your sleep? Look no further than The Service Based Business Society Podcast, hosted by Tiffany-Ann Bottcher.
Each week, Tiffany-Ann shares valuable insights on productivity, business strategies, marketing trends, and tech secrets that you need to know in order to take your business to the next level. She firmly believes that a successful service-based business must prioritize an amazing client experience and sustainable, predictable, repeatable profit, and she'll teach you how to do just that.
But that's not all - Tiffany-Ann also invites expert guests to share their knowledge and experience with you, providing even more valuable insights on service-based business growth and sustainability. You won't want to miss a single episode!
If you're looking to create, grow, and optimize your service-based business, The Service Based Business Society Podcast is the perfect resource for you.
And don't forget to join the community on Instagram by searching for Service Based Business Society Podcast
MINDSET
Focused on helping entrepreneurs cultivate the right mindset for success in their businesses. Hosted by experts in the field, the podcast covers a range of topics related to mindset and business, including self-improvement, goal setting, visualization, and meditation. The podcast provides practical tools and strategies to help listeners develop a growth mindset, overcome limiting beliefs, and build confidence. Through inspiring interviews with successful entrepreneurs and thought leaders, the podcast shows that a positive and resilient mindset is key to achieving business success.
DATA-DRIVEN DECISION MAKING
Dedicated to equipping business leaders with the knowledge and skills they need to lead with confidence, based on data-driven insights. Hosted by experts in business leadership, the podcast covers a range of topics related to data analysis and interpretation, strategic decision-making, and effective communication. It provides practical tools and strategies for interpreting complex data sets and using them to make informed business decisions that drive growth and success. Through engaging interviews with successful business leaders and industry experts, the podcast offers valuable insights and examples of how to use data to build strong teams and drive innovation.
RELATABLE ENTREPRENEURSHIP STORIES
A great resource for aspiring entrepreneurs looking to learn from the experiences of successful business owners. Through relatable and engaging entrepreneurship stories, the podcast provides valuable insights into the challenges and opportunities that come with starting and running a business. Hosted by experienced entrepreneurs, the podcast covers a range of topics related to entrepreneurship, including idea generation, product development, marketing, and fundraising. Each episode features inspiring interviews with successful entrepreneurs, who share their personal stories and provide practical advice and tips for those looking to start and grow their own businesses.
BUSINESS TOPICS
As businesses continue to evolve, it's essential for entrepreneurs and business owners to stay informed about the latest trends and best practices in marketing, bookkeeping, technology, and innovation. The podcast is a valuable resource for anyone looking to keep up with these changes and stay ahead of the competition.
Whether you are just starting out or looking to take your business to the next level, this podcast is a great source of inspiration and guidance from real-world examples of entrepreneurship success.
Brought to you by Bottcher Group of Companies
Hey, Olly, welcome to the show.
Thanks so much for having me. It's great to be here.
Well, let's dive right in and, you know, kick off with how did you get into this?
So I've had a rather random series of seven year careers. all my careers seem to be about seven years. This is the longest thing I've done so far. I'm kind of wondering what's next, so I started life as a jazz musician. I did a degree in jazz piano. I played professionally here in the UK, for many, many years, ended up sort of falling out of love with the jazz musician lifestyle. Music's great, lifestyle, not so much. And I decided to go and see the world. So I trained as an English teacher and then I went to live in Japan to teach English. Then I moved to the Middle East, lived in Qatar and Egypt, and was following that career for a while. But in the background, this whole time I had a passion for learning languages. I think that came from living in London, having many friends who are from all over the world. And I didn't want to be that typical monolingual British guy who couldn't speak to anybody. So I went down this path of learning languages. I taught myself eight languages over the years. And so when I finally started getting bored of my English teaching job, I decided I needed to do something a bit creative. So, evenings and weekends when I should have been working, I was writing a blog. I decided to start writing a blog about my ways of learning languages, how I did things. This is 2013. So it was over 10 years ago. And, I took the blogging thing quite seriously. I enjoyed the writing. I understood that blogging could be a path to having a business? And so I started listening to podcasts, reading books, reading blogs, things like that, learning to grow my blog in a more serious way. I did it quite well. I was very consistent for a long time, grew a decent sized audience. And then from there, it was really just a question of monetizing that traffic, building out the product, building the team. Everything else was kind of downstream from there, but it was completely random really, and just came from me being very stubborn and just refusing to do anything that I wasn't interested in, just following my interests.
You know, it's interesting because I think that story is so different than a lot of business owners who start at the other end. They start with the, " I need to be monetized. I need to monetize something. I need to make money. What can I do to make money?" And they are going in reverse rather than building up that valuable blog, learning what your audience liked, going through that process and then going, "now I have something of substance. How can I turn that into income?" It's the reverse and it's such a different journey.
You know, the funny thing is I always think that when you, as a new entrepreneur, you're always battling a knowledge deficit. So you don't know anything when you first get started. You don't have any of the core skills that you need to actually run a business. So the way that I think about someone getting started is you need to kind of optimize for the ability to learn as you go and the issue that people find when they're kind of product first, a lot of people kind of, you know, they invent a widget or a product or a course or something. The challenge they have is from day one, then they've got to sell and selling is really hard. You've got to learn copywriting, you've got to learn funnels, you've got to learn email marketing, you've got to learn phone sales, all these different things. It takes many years to learn this stuff. And so it's not really surprising that someone who takes the product first approach finds it difficult to get traction because you just haven't given it enough time. It's unreasonable to expect to be able to start a successful business overnight like that. The audience first approach is what I took. I mean, typically this is done through content marketing. You have a blog or a YouTube channel or a podcast where you just teach people the stuff that you know, show people how to do things, you know, like for example, a plumber on YouTube, just teaching people how to fix their homes, building an audience that way, it gives them time to learn the business skills in parallel. For example, when I was building my audience, I didn't sell anything for the first year or two. Nothing at all. I was just doing it alongside my full time job, but then when it was time to make a course, I went and I studied how to do it. I launched the course. And because I had an email list of two and a half thousand people or so at the time, I made some money. That money then went back into the business, et cetera, et cetera. If I'd had to do that on day one with no audience, I wouldn't have made a penny. Would have been impossible. So being audience first is not the traditional way of doing business, but it gives you a lot of interesting benefits that I think make for a slightly easier journey. At least at the beginning
Yeah, it's interesting because you look at, the current marketing space, you look at influencer type marketing and they are really following that, you know, they build up an audience of loyal followers, who are entertained or educated or, whatnot. And then, they can go and, sell, could be their own product, could be somebody else's product and there's a lot of people that come down on, you know, these influencers are making so much money and this is crazy and what not. But some people, there's great influencers who have gone on to do amazing things. And then you think of the, you know, tens of thousands of people who attempt to be an influencer, create that audience, and can't do it. And so there is a skill, a talent that comes to create a blog that can create value. They're creating short form content, YouTube content, podcast content that actually lands and goes on to do things because there's technical widgets of business, but that piece and learning that piece from the very beginning, I think is such a powerful step. So whether it's blog or emails or, however they're reaching their audience, that piece is such a significant part of the journey, often not even considered in a business plan.
The interesting thing about the influencer or the creator economy, as it's known, is that, so I've been doing this online thing for, you know, getting on for 11 years now. And when I learned how to do stuff, how to make money online and to build online businesses. There were people teaching this stuff, but it was very much business. Like you had to learn what is a lead magnet? How do you capture emails? How do you write an email sequence? How do you strike? Like, that's how you made money. And so you had to get your education somehow, or you would not succeed. What's happened since the kind of professionalization of the influencer economy. Now, you can monetize so easily. So if you have a YouTube channel, not only will YouTube host your videos for you for free, they'll also pay you AdSense money. And then brands will come along and pay you money to give them shout outs. It's embarrassingly easy for a creator who knows how to build an audience to make money. But that comes with its downsides because what happens is that creators get very, very precious over their audience. They are very concerned about the parasocial relationship they have with their audience. They don't want to risk selling them anything cause that would be bad. And so they never actually learn any business skills a lot of the time. So something as simple as what you just mentioned, they can create their own products and sell them to their audience. But virtually nobody does this because either they're scared to do it or they don't take the time to learn how to actually go about, you know, selling in a cool way, online. And so what I have observed happening in the online space is that you've got the gradual dumbing down of knowledge as the kind of big tech companies give creative ways of making money for free. They just don't need to learn business skills anymore. So it's very powerful for anyone listening who already has a business, a way of generating income to then add the audience component to that and to be building an audience on the side is great because then you can funnel people directly to your business. And it's often not necessarily good to do that directly, which we can talk about. but it does mean that as you grow your audience, you have a way of monetizing that audience straight away.
Yeah. One of the things I often talk about is as a business owner, we wear so many hats at the beginning. And so if we think of, you know, let's go back to the traditional boardroom style business. If you're going to make a decision, you've got your CEO who's sitting at the table and who's got one focus and priority and, you've got, may be someone from HR. Someone from accounting, you've got your salesperson, you've got legal, you've got all these people. And so someone says, "I have an idea," and they're going to go through and someone else will be like, well, that's not going to work because of this or, and so we need to adapt that. And so you end up with different influences on a step. But now as a business owner, a lot of people, you know, they're hiring and they're hiring people who are going to go and perform the service in their business. They're not helping with the management of the business. Well, now one person's mind has to be thinking operations, accounting, HR, marketing, sales, you know, and you were talking about, well, they don't want to sell the wrong thing because it could damage the relationship. And so you've got all of these things going on in one person's brain. And so many people then just think, "Oh, it's overwhelming. I don't know." And they just don't go on to action anything because there's all these conflicting thoughts. And there are conflicting thoughts. It's just that one person is dealing with them. So, when we're looking at what you're talking about in this, taking the audience, I think that those people who are really great at making analytical business decisions are often, it's not the same skill set as building an audience and building an audience is not typically, not to say that there aren't people amazing at both, but typically, you know, they're that person who is amazing at creating that community influence sometimes isn't as strong in those analytical business decisions. And so it's learning the skills and recognizing that it is a separate skill set and going out and learning how to do those things.
Yeah and I think to a large extent, it also despoils down to familiarity with the online world, and the fact of the matter is that people who have come from a brick and mortar background are just not familiar with the way that the online world works, just in the same way that someone who's grown up on TikTok has no idea how to run an actual business, you know, it works both ways. So really their step number one is education is listening to podcasts like this to figure out when people are doing stuff on YouTube, what's the game behind the game here? Like what's actually going on and just becoming familiar with that because the asset that business owners have is that they're smart and they're forward thinking and they're pragmatic. So once you understand these things, then you can start to put resources behind it and, potentially grow an audience far faster than, you know, some guy in his bedroom.
Right. And, you know, it comes back to you don't know what you don't know. And so learning that something is even out there, that there is something going on behind the scenes, you know, is step one as a business owner. And then, you know, the business owner who's typically resourceful, then can go on to actually learn those pieces. So you had your blog and then you develop this course. So walk me through what types of things did you include in the course? How did that serve your audience?
My audience and my website and all of that was all around language learning. So I was targeting people who were typically English speakers in the US, the UK, those countries who wanted to learn, for example, French or German, and would come to my blog to find out a better way of learning languages. Now in the early days, the early products I made were. Very specialized, I was making products on techniques for improving your language learning efficiency and stuff like that, because that was the stuff that I was thinking about is what I found interesting as a language learner. And it was interesting for anyone who was into language learning. But what I quickly discovered is that most people in the world are not what you might call systems thinkers. What most people who are interested in learning a language, thinking the conversation going on in their mind is, just give me a Spanish course, please. They're not asking what's the most efficient way of learning a language? They're like, give me a Spanish app, give me a Spanish course. And I started to realize this and I realized, well, if I, if I want to scale this business and reach a broader market, then I'm going to have to create something that is more,not the right term of phrase, but speaking the language of my audience, right? Something that you would typically call product market fit. I tend to call this product audience fit because the internet's really not so much a marketplace, but there's lots of like mini personal marketplaces that you create for yourself. So I realized, okay, if I'm going to be expanding my audience, I want to grow. I'm going to need to create courses that are a good fit for my audience as it expands. So I went from creating these meta courses around language learning techniques and stuff through to Olly's Spanish Course. Wasn't called that exactly, but it's basically what it was, right? So I made the Spanish course, did really well. I made the French course. And then I kind of carried on from there. And then I realized, there's such a thing as or customer lifetime value. And actually, if you want to make more money, the easiest way to do that is to sell more to your existing customers. So my Spanish course developed from level one into level two and level three, four, five, six. And now if you come and learn Spanish with us at Story Learning, you can go through six different levels of learning Spanish and you can take a course or you can take the coaching option and all of this became ways of increasing our LTV. And then we would replicate that across now 15 different languages. And so essentially, as our audience grew and, also our product range grew and our brand became better known. That's how the business very quickly scaled, you know, from five to six or seven figures, because we were able to really find this tight fit between our audience and the products that they were looking for.
So you highlight something interesting in your journey and that's we started with this, but quickly found, and then we did this. And I think that it's interesting because so often we start with something as a business owner, and we think, this is it, this is the idea. And we can all think of someone in our life who's very passionate about something where they've got an idea. But so often, we come at it with a knowledge of, for your case, it's the learning of the language in a way that the person who's at a different part in the journey doesn't have. And so often, you know, we do have to modify, we do have to adapt. And as business owners, sometimes that piece of it didn't work becomes it failed. It didn't work. It's not a thing. And they, just, you know, abandon the entire plan, but it's the looking for those abilities to modify to make it a better fit for the person who is the direct audience, that's where the magic happens. You know, it's not the idea, the concept requires a course correction, not a, complete cancellation.
That's such a fantastic point. And when I think through every year of business that we've been in at Story Learning, the business that we are today is the culmination of thousands of small iterations. And one of the interesting things about our team in this business is that we mostly hire from within our own audience. It's one of the hidden benefits of having an audience. You get to hire people who are already passionate about what you do. And, the reason I mentioned that is because all these little iterations, like, you know, I sent out an email and someone replied about something interesting. And that tells us a bit more about our customers. And so we tried a product and then that happens. And so we tried this, all of these things, they form, I guess, what you'd call institutional knowledge about the audience and this kind of emerging dynamic, I mean, what's so exciting about this is that none of this stuff has any right to exist, you know, but we will it into existence by having the kind of impetus to start it in the first place, but then gifting our personal individual energy to the dynamic that you're creating between the audience and the product over time, day in, day out over a period of years, and you then create something out of nothing.And it's, this is the result of thousands of tiny little iterations and we have a team now of about 15 people who are permanent staff members. We have hundreds of freelancers we work with, but of the people who work with us, most of these people have been with us for years and years and years. My COO, for example, has been with us for eight or nine years or something like that, very long term. And what that meant is that all these little learnings that happen because our team tends to stick with us, we're able to build this institutional knowledge and it kind of spreads throughout the business and it just creates this, kind of culture of, just experimenting with stuff, I go to great pains to encourage this and we always try to kind of feedback, I heard that I heard this and I heard that, and we've always been quite agile in acting on all of that stuff that comes back, but it is really striking to think of the product lines we have today, the different services that we now offer, often you can trace it back to one tiny comment in a forum or something that someone noticed, fed it back. And then we just took action on it. Doing business online as well is particularly conducive to that because you tend to have lower barriers to iteration.
Yes. And, you know, something I learned a long time ago when I started my corporate journey, it was very small. It was five people. The business owner worked in a closet, basically, in the office because, well, we needed more space, you know, typical kind of startup. And over that length of time, hundreds of people, added multiple locations and whatnot. And one of the things we often talked about, because people who had been there since the beginning really struggled with this, was that when the business was small, it was almost like a speedboat, if you wanted to make a change, you could turn and go and as the business, you know, over a decade, adding locations and departments and layers of management and team it became like a bigger and bigger ship, you know, if a cruise ship wants to turn, it needs to start turning well in advance. This is not something you just, you know, spin it around and go the other way. When the business is small and it can adapt much faster to different things, that's when you really need to utilize that skill and be able to do that. And as the business gets bigger, keeping in mind, because you almost start to lose at some of that. Keeping in mind that you want to keep that is a, you know, as you grow that you still want to be able to dynamically change things and that your team understands that and is part of the values to me is something very valuable in a business that grows because as you get bigger, it does get more challenging. There's more people involved in the decision. There's more training to be done. And so it does become more challenging, but not being overwhelmed by that and thinking, well, it's so big, I can't change it.
I often wonder what it must be like to be the CEO of a fortune 500 company or something like that. And how. I mean. The size of the task ahead of you whenever you want to make any kind of change. I can't fathom that, but my feeling is that that really boils down to a cultural thing, right? I mean, company culture is one of those things that you can almost dismiss at an early stage. Cause it's like we're trying to make money over here. Don't talk to me about culture. But then as you grow, you realize actually, culture is everything that you do. If you want to cultivate this spirit of testing and iteration, then it has to start from the culture. It is quite something really.
Yeah, I don't know if you're familiar with Alan Mulally. So my, previous business partner was huge Alan Mulally fan. His book was often, talked about in terms of, you know, a leadership learning, perspective. And so Alan Mulally, is this huge part of Ford. He came in when Ford was in a really bad way and change the culture and change the management style and whatnot. And one of the really interesting parts of the journey is he had implemented this interesting, management, meeting style where people would come in and have to report back. And so the company was not in a good way when Alan started and that's why he was there. And all these, you know, department heads and team leaders would come in and they'd be like, yeah, everything's good. He had this kind of green, yellow, red scale. All these things were green, green, green, week after week, meeting after meeting. If everything really was green, the company would probably not be in a bad way. It took, you know, quite some time and someone came and said, this is red. And in the book, Alan really talks about, it was such a moment where it was like, finally we were ready. The team was ready. The culture was ready to say like, "hey, actually my stuff's not good. Like let's dive in. This is a problem and I'm willing to bring it to the team, let's dive in and discuss it." And that was such a pivotal moment in the journey of changing things around because you know, it's, and it was very much a culture piece, but allowing, you know, getting in with the management, getting into a kind of that trusted now we can actually communicate and dive in and get going.
Let me ask you this. Do you find that people who come from a corporate background, in any way have a disadvantage when it comes to entrepreneurship? The reason I ask is because. If you come from a company which has, you know, big corporate hierarchy and structure, and you are used to things, everything operating in a professional way, it must be quite a shock then to be at, to be at ground zero of, of a company and realize that actually you don't have time for any of that stuff and everything's chaos and you're permanently fighting fires for years. Do you find that people from that background have disadvantage?
I mean, I can comment on my own journey because that's where obviously I came from and it was definitely a shock, but I think that there's a reason why those things work and it's knowing the time and place, knowing when there is no time and place for certain things and, putting it on the shelf and, you know, it doesn't matter. But there's also taking the time to still use techniques that work and implement them in different ways. I refer to it as kind of working in the business versus on the business taking the time you know, there's so many business owners entrepreneurs that don't look at their financial statements if there's money in the bank we're good and it's just head down go go go go go and not taking the time to look at the, data and the metrics and those types of things. It does a disservice in the business journey because it's an area for fine tuning. Ultimately it's like anything. The blend that works for someone. typical traditional kind of hustle entrepreneur enjoys that style. That's why they went into to doing that. People who don't like it don't necessarily go that direction. I think it comes down to a blend. It's actually the reverse that, entrepreneurs trying to join corporate that is actually because it's a struggle in terms of like, well, but I, I could do it faster. I could implement it faster. We could impact things because they're used to being able to do so. It's just such a different situation. I think there's so much to be learned from both sides and the most success happens, you know, in a nice blend in the middle.
Yeah. well, I'm certainly finding that the bigger that my company gets, the more that I find myself turning to stories like what you referenced at Ford, because people who run big organizations have to manage things this way. A quick example of something that I found very impactful. I read about Amazon's senior leadership team meeting protocols and, you know, I read this on the internet, who knows if it's true, but what was said was that, if there's a meeting with a bunch of important people whose time is valuable, obviously there's an agenda to be discussed for everything that's to be discussed, but what you must bring to the meeting is you must have received the agenda. Work through all the problems, define your own suggestion for a solution to each of the problems. And so at the meeting itself, the problem is not discussed. It's everyone's solution. That is how, where you spend the time discussing. And when I heard that, I thought, "wow, now that is efficiency." And so I've tried to implement that as far as possible. I mean, it's really hard to get people to do it, but I guess that's when the sort of strong leader comes in and says, "right, like, if you're not prepared, you don't come to this meeting." I'd have to crack the whip a little bit to make it work, but, learning little nuggets like that from larger businesses, I'm finding more and more useful.
Yes, and it's not taking it verbatim, but it is adapting just like you said, I'd have to do this to make it work or whatnot. I think here's the piece, when you think of the team that they are implementing those strategies with, they've maybe been in the organization for a while or similar organizations in a corporate style. So it's a new technique, but the landscape is not new. When you are an entrepreneur, you have people who have been with you for a variety of lengths of time, all with different backgrounds. Sometimes it's adapting things and just being patient in the implementation because the people are different, you know, the players of the team are different. Going back to we were working doing some consulting on a business last year and, they had some really talented managers, oftentimes it's the best people at a skill, if they are, you know, the best plumber now they are going to run the plumbing department and just because they're amazing with the customer and amazing at the actual job doesn't mean that they're great leaders or that they have done any of these kinds of different things. Back to our original discussion of, you know, being able to create audience versus do the business, all of these different pieces, people have different attributes and different skills and sometimes stronger in certain areas than others and really helping focusing on the solutions once implemented, which it could take a year, for that really to work, but so powerful, so powerful once it does.
And all the time trying to keep that agility that we were talking about earlier is, I mean, that's, that's why great leaders are great leaders, right? For that reason.
Well, that's the thing, right? Because, when it doesn't, you're like, "oh, this isn't working and I, I'm trying to implement this and it isn't working." Then that agility makes you want to say, "okay, well, let's come up with a new plan." So it's really knowing when a new plan is needed versus when consistency and patience are required. And I think that, that's when we start to get that into those kinds of things. That's the difference between great businesses. Yes. And, you know, epic businesses.
I think this is such an important point because I mentioned earlier that I have a series of seven year careers and, I last year started a business personal brand, which is where I write a newsletter about online businesses, trying to just teach a lot of the stuff that I learned from Story Learning. Since I quit my full time job and went full time on my language business back in 2015, it was exactly seven and a half years, I think. So I managed to fit into the seven year bucket. And since I did that I've started to come into contact with many, many, entrepreneurs who work in the online space and occasionally I work with them and I get to see behind the scenes of their business and what they're trying to achieve and how they're going about it. Time and time again, I see the same fundamental thing holding them back, which is that they have been operating with the same instruction manual for way longer than they should have done. They are in 2024 working with 2015 knowledge, trying to market like, it's 2015 or building products the way that used to work back in 2017 or whatever, and not being up to date with almost resting on their laurels in a way, getting used to the way things are done and just not updating their knowledge to the point where they are able to spot parts of their businesses that need to change. And so you can get very entrenched with certain aspects of marketing in particular. I meet people all the time who have a blog that brings hundreds of thousands of visitors a month to their website, but they haven't touched it in seven years. And they're just hoping that it just kind of stays strong and that Google doesn't change any algorithms or anything like that. And, to me, like looking from the outside, I can look in on this and say, "look, like this is one of your key business assets. If you don't look after it, eventually it's going to turn." And so it makes sense for a certain proportion of your budget to go into maintaining and probably growing this thing, but it, really does often takes an outside perspective to do exactly what you said, which is to just understand when it's time to update your knowledge, to move on, to try something different. We were talking about how as a new entrepreneur, you're operating with this knowledge deficit because you don't know how to do things. And so you've got to learn stuff. I think the second piece of that puzzle is to keep refreshing your knowledge and your ability to look critically at your business over time and to maintain that because that's how you keep evolving. And that's why, you know, coaching and mentorship is typically so important because it just gives you that constant outside perspective.
Absolutely. One of the cringiest things I hear when you ask someone, "why is it done that way?" And someone says. "Because we've always done it that way." And I'm like, "oh no, oh no." Because there are some times where we do things that maybe aren't the conventional way that it's supposed to be done. We had a client and she did something that was in what would be traditionally so inefficient, but she had modified her processes, gone more efficient and her sales dropped so significantly that she said, "you know what, I'd rather just do this the old fashioned way and I don't care that it's inefficient, it's better for sales." If I go to her and say, "why do we do it this way?" And she says, "well, over these three years, we did these efficiencies, sales dropped like this, we changed it back. Sales went back up like this." I think that is an educated, confident, you know, decision. Great. Let's do it the inefficient way. I'm all for it. It's great. But if we go in and we say, "why do we do it like this?" And you just say, "Oh, well, that's, that's how we've always done it." I'm like, "Oh no. Oh no. We got, we like, we need to understand. We need more."
And the corollary to that, I think is, inventing your own dogma around the way that things are. So one thing is to say that, you know, this is the way we've always done it. That's one thing. Another thing is to say is to have these very firm, fixed, unmovable beliefs about certain aspects of a business. So our customers are this, and, this is what works. And we can't do this because this is the thing that makes sense. And I. think one example in particular, well, I'm not going to share with you cause it would get me into trouble, but, uh, someone that I work with who has a habit of being extremely. Like I, I find myself in almost every conversation having to say, "look, you just made a very definitive statement about something within the business and implies you have complete knowledge about the way that your customers are or your capabilities or something like that. What would happen if I encourage you to just critically examine that belief? How might things look differently? The ideas that you've expressed are not true and they are not as true as you think they are because often it's these entrenched beliefs that we can form that are so strong that nothing else around it can move because they're these pillars. Whenever I make categorical statements about things within the business. I tried to catch myself and just ask myself, " why do I have such conviction over this? And where did this come from? And is this still true?" And I think that can be quite a useful way to stay open to changes and new opportunities.
Well, I hadn't asked the question yet. What is that one tangible tip that someone needs to implement in their business? But that is such a powerful statement. Not just for business, but for life, because I think we really do. We have things in our mind that, you know, we believe to be true. We start to base all sorts of other decisions based on that one piece. Someone may say, "oh, I can't, I can't, I can't do video for my business. I can't." And then they start to plan all of their marketing, or they plan all these things all off of that one piece. I do believe that as business owners, we take on an additional level of risk and, all of these different things. And so if you have a non negotiable, then go all in on your non negotiable. But if It's not a non negotiable, and, and really those things that are those pillars you mentioned, the non negotiables, those really need to be, you know, the vision, and, the commitments to your business. But outside of that, really taking those times to re evaluate some things that you believe to be fact, and determine, are they really? Are they really fact? Should I be basing other decisions off of this? It's so, so valuable and important.
There we go. Love it.
Love it. So Olly, where can people connect with you? You mentioned this newsletter. I know I want to get my hands on that newsletter. So where is that?
So if you would like to join my business newsletter, I write specifically for online education business owners, but really, I mean, a lot of the stuff I write applies to any kind of online business or any business at all, really, but I do focus on online business. That is at ollyrichards.co, Um, O double L Y Richards. co. And one of the things that you get when you join the newsletter is a 119 page case study. It might be 118 pages. I can't remember. It's big. And in that case study, I have broken down all aspects of my online education business, Story Learning, the, language business and exactly how everything works, how I think about it from a sort of, um, from a business philosophy perspective, the strategies, the tactics, everything from marketing to hiring to mindset, to team structure. And people really enjoy this because it's quite difficult to see under the hood of how other online businesses work in general. It's not something that's easy to get access to. I decided to basically just open the kimono and show how everything works. And that's free when you join my newsletter at ollyrichards.co. So I hope you find it useful, if you do, drop me an email. Let me know. I'm also on all the socials. I've got a YouTube channel, I've got Twitter, all that stuff, but, um, maybe you can post those links in the show notes so I don't have to read out the URLs.
Absolutely. We always tag all the links in the show notes and on the YouTube channel as well.
Fantastic.
Well, Olly, thank you so much for being here. Such a valuable discussion and really one that helps shape the mindset shift, shape some of these bigger thoughts that really can make the difference because you know as we talked about earlier, it's not about just being a great business, but it's those specific pieces that go from great to amazing. There's a lot of really great businesses out there. And so, you know for those that are not just wanting to settle on being great and really wanting to take it even to that next level and really change the industries change the game then these are the discussions that need to be had these are the thoughts that we really need to drive home.
Well, I appreciate such a sort of inquisitive discussion. It's been really fun.
Awesome, thank you so much.
Thank you.