Currently I’m solely going in on this sports betting journey, through the years this has been a side project that I’ve tried to solve but never really approached in the right way until about 14 months ago, and only about 3 months with this all-in approach.

I wanted to clean my head on 2 things I’ve been thinking about.

The first is this theory I have that everyone already knows WHAT they want to do.

They just either do not pursue it as “it’s not something people can do” or logically talk themselves out of it…. Usually with really good, smart, legitimate excuses.

I truly believe people know what they want to do but just don’t pursue it or tell others/themselves.

This could be anything, but I think we find what we want to do very early on, but then get life-f*cked and decide to do something more traditional, less personal and more sh*t.

One guy I met recently was a genius, all A* grades, firsts, masters, going to do consulting in London. Also very friendly, down to earth, social, normal guy.

But the spark just wasn’t there.

It’s almost like in every decision he’d decided to take the most logical choice, and actually had got every single one right.

But he never once took a step back to think about what he actually wanted.

The other side of this is the more “bitter at life” person.

This was another person I re-met this month after not seeing for a long long time.

After 20 seconds of small talk, the phrase “life is a war” came up….

This feels like a bad way to live to me.

Whether this heavy pessimism is a primarily a British thing or it’s a mentality thing I’m unsure, but the symptoms are everywhere, usually with a general lack of ambition and enthusiasm about anything.

How to decide what you want to do.

As always, mainly writing this for myself, but just wish I’d made decisions based specifically on what I personally wanted to do sooner, so for anyone thinking about this now, here’s some thoughts.

Don’t start with pure passion but come at it from a game.

Naval’s quote on this is perfect.

“Find what feels like play to you, but looks like work to others.”

This translates to so many nuances:

• What do you find easier than others.

• More fun.

• Addictive.

• Where does your mind wander.

Most people have some loose ideas on this.

Some people draw or paint, ride bikes, read, sing, watch birds or trains, listen to music, cook, play Chess or any other a million things.

But unlike passions or things you like, these are the things you do actively.

I like stand up comedy.

I’m not writing comedy.

That’s something I passively like.

It’s not something I actively do though.

This is why I prefer nuanced small-talk phrases like “what are you working on” vs “what do you do”.

Or “what are you working towards” is my favorite one, as some people get confused at the question, others understand it instantly and start taking about something they are building/doing, which they find far more interesting than their job or current set-up in most cases.

This also gives you an opportunity to ask follow up questions to see how legit someone is.

Someone doing 3 hours a week or something they called “their dream” is kidding themselves, if someone is doing 40 hours a week alongside a full time job, you can be pretty sure they are invested.

The difference now, in my opinion, is that choosing what you want to do can be supercharged by AI.

If your choice is real, nuanced and specific (to you and the niche/market), there’s literally zero reason why you cannot do anything if you learn both the specific skillset of the thing + How to use AI to leverage that specific skillset.

The 3 Key Components

Start with 3 key decisions:

• Would you do this thing over anything else?

• Is this active not passive?

• Would simply working on this, by default = freedom?

Let me cover this last one so we’re on the same page.

By doing the thing, have you already won?

Let’s say your thing was coaching boxing, if you woke up everyday and coached boxers, both trying to get better yourself and helping people achieve their goals in that sphere, is that already success? Regardless of the level you or any of your students get to?

If the answer is yes and by doing-the-thing you have already won, then that’s your thing.

If the answer is no, then it’s not and you are still kidding yourself.

By doing the thing it gives you freedom.

The usual pushback I receive to this concept is about money or security.

Valid, but they are usually the same thing.

Money enables you to have more options, it’s a tool, but if you’re already pursuing your primary option that you would do above anything else, more money equates to doing the same thing anyway.

You might argue around having some variety, travel, nice things, all valid points, but the driver should be freedom to pursue your craft, to pursue mastery.

In some industries this concept is literally romanticized - artists, musicians, actors - that all grind for 20 years before “making it”.

Yet in other industries (literally everything else), it’s somewhat frowned upon? Or at best just seen as a bit weird.

If I had dropped out of Uni to become a professional sports bettor and during that grind period of X years had people ask what I do/how’s it going?

Ah it’s alright - I live in a £300/month rental space and program analytical models all day to bet on sports….

Sounds weird….

Yet painting or playing music till 4am is framed so differently.

But I think you have to talk about this during the grind.

After the fact is just almost cheating, when the musician is on 7-8 figure years, that’s irrelevant at that point, but the person sleeping in their van between gigs because they want to, that’s progress in the moment.

We’re taking this passion/game element, mixing it with the human desire to build or achieve something and layering on the freedom from the fact you can do it yourself.

It’s the 3 core pillars.

There’s obviously consequences because without it games are not fun.

There have to be stakes and risk.

There have to be downswings.

Without it, the game becomes boring.

In the same way that unlimited money, time and health actually sounds kind of boring.

Literally, a game you cannot die or fail in, is by definition boring, there has to be some kind of risk involved.

But the key difference is the type of risk, there’s always going to be risk in anything any of us do, but the type of risk is the key.

Opportunity cost is the risk.

What OTHER THING could you be doing?

Because if you have “no choice” (which is a lie but that’s a discussion for another time) then by definition you couldn’t be doing another thing anyway, hence there is no other thing to worry about, no opportunity cost.

Doing what you want to do, when you want to do it, for as long as you want to do it, is the most important thing to work towards.

8 days later I had lost £8,000 through betting sports models I’d created, where the “expected” return should have been closer to +£4,000.

Mixed this with November’s very flat results and it was time to confront some realities.

It’s not just variance.

The hockey prediction models sucked.

Something had to change.

Just before this mega-shift, I’d watched a very cinematic, well made video about someone who had business success in the past, but wanted to prove that is wasn’t luck, by not using their previous assets or resources or audience to achieve it again.

I thought this was an incredible idea and something that “proves” resourcefulness, skills and grit rather than just having 1 good idea in a lifetime and living off the proceeds of getting lucky (even though in reality there’s nothing wrong with that, it’s just the skill-of-business or skill-of-making-money is something I’m more interested in, rather than the money itself).

Building something that creates value, whether that’s a betting model or a business is an incredible skill.

The amount of money obviously matters but the process of it is something I find more impressive.

If you refurbish furniture and buy something for £20, spend a couple of days and £10 of supplies and sell it for £150 in the same week - that’s an incredible skill of value creation.

The same with a business but on a longer horizon, if you put in 2,000 hyper productive hours (more on that in a sec), £20,000 and 5 years later you are making £10k/month, £50k/month whatever, that’s incredibly impressive to me personally.

So, long story short, this video idea of, what essentially boils down to “prove it to yourself”.

The guy in the video grinded and eventually one of his iterations worked really well, blew up and I think they do a couple mil a month now.

It was extremely impressive and they did it without leveraging those previous audiences, connections etc.

Which was the most impressive thing.

It wasn’t a direct wake up call as I’ve been thinking about this for years at this point, but it was a bit of a spark to come up with a sentence that in the business world is terrible advice but on the sports modelling side is incredible; aim for perfection.

The best (and most profitable) sports betting models I’ve built have been built because they use super granular data, on an individual player and play by play level.

Some of the most insane shit you’ve ever seen.

And it works well, really well in some cases.

Problem is, it’s incredibly difficult to do, takes ages and you don’t know if it’ll even work…

Other stuff I’ve built in a day, without technical knowledge of specialised (sport specific) insights and expected it to work the same.

Obviously it didn’t in most cases.

But I think misunderstanding really how big the upside can get is what stops alot of people from putting in the insane work, the real grind not the BS fake grind.

The upside is enormous.

Literally, once a model is built (the hard part), it becomes not far off; press a few buttons, place a few bets and earn.

There’s no customer service, no operations, no HR, no marketing, no returns… So because of all the insane upsides, the process is hard to do.

As a result, go all-in on it.

I also think it’s essential to go insanely deep on a concept when you have these ideas, building momentum in the process.

I’ve just finished building the best betting model I’ve ever built by a mile, joking that it’s art.

Although it took “years” to make, in reality from the idea to execution it was about 21 hyper productive hours across 3 days (with 2 overnight scrapes).

That’s not crazy, but 21 hyper productive hours is really tough, but the returns that that time should generate would lead to the “hourly rate” being £10,000, maybe £50,000 over the next decade, it’s just tough to get the focus for those 21 hyper productive hours (**cough, link launched now).

But it’s not even this, it’s the framework from that 21 hours that leads to the next model, that should only take 15 hours and have similar ROI and the next, and the next, so you get this leveraged, momentum effect of hyper productivity, if directed in the correct way, towards the correct vehicle.

So instead of having 1 hockey model that earns 10% on a few bets a week, you have 5 hockey models that earn 10% on dozens of bets a week (in-season).

But too many people (me for sure included) put off that 50, 100, 500 hyper productive hours, settling for “good” in a game where good is a really really bad outcome.

In markets - whether that’s sports or financial or business, good doesn’t get “good” returns - it gets below average, because the best models, earn larger amounts and hence shape the market, so the top 0.1% of models earn disproportional amounts to the top 1% and the top 10% probably are down despite being “good”.

That’s the core issue.

Instead it’s better to aim for perfection in one super niche area and become maniacal about that.

So aim for perfection (100%+ ROI) and what will likely happen is you’ll get good (5-10%).

But when you KNOW for a fact that’s real + secure + repeatable, that gives you incredible confidence.

5-10% x 500 bets a month x £2,000 units is £50-100k/month, if it’s real you’ll know very quickly, you just have to ensure you’re not kidding yourself and becoming “excel rich” as I like to call it.

But we live in a world of extremes where the person who’s the best at anything makes exponential returns vs someone who is above average at everything.

This is sped up 100X with AI as well, making your 21 hyper productive hours balloon into the equivalent of 2000 hours just a few years ago.

It’s always the way I seem to get shit done is to have something really shit happen first, the only way to make better betting models was to lose a bunch of money on the shitty ones, and use that “dark” or negative energy to create hyper productivity and progress.

It was the same in business too.

Especially nowadays, with AI leveraging everything so quickly, there’s literally only GRIT as the key skill left to achieving anything.

If you do not know how to do something, go to AI, screenshot the fucker, ask “how do I do this” and it’ll tell you. Learn how to use these tools, the exponential-ness (that’s not a word) of these is incredible.

Sports models I built just 6 months ago, vs new ones created in early 2026 are worlds apart in quality, thanks to improvements in the AI itself, but also improvements in how you/I approach it (aim for perfect), but also just improvements in actually how to use these tools themselves.

Time.

This is quite easy from a modelling perspective as if I’m reaching a point where I need to run a full season scrape on data that will take 2, 4, 6 hours and there’s not much I can proceed on in the mean-time, schedule that for overnight, so you do not waste productive flow-state hours.

It’s tough to draw parallels to this in other businesses or industries but one example would be never leave any messages, questions or requests unanswered overnight, if someone is waiting on you for something (that you actually want to progress quickly) just make sure you are never the bottleneck in your processes and growth.

Another example would be if you are going to utilise AI to its most, any very complex, long prompts will take a while to be processed, especially if you are asking AI to build something, write code etc., so ensure you align that with other specific progress tasks, but stay on track so don’t try to do two separate tasks at once.

Leverage

Building a prediction model that’s 2% better will not only be 2% better ROI, it’s going to be that amount multiplied by time, by capital, by mood, by confidence.

Putting £5,000 on a play is easy if you’ve seen how 100 of those same plays have performed (live) and have earned £50k already off the back of them.

Putting £500 on something new is more difficult.

Prove It To Yourself

This concept is something that’s stuck with me, doing something once could be luck, doing it multiple times proves its skill.

Something interesting to think about.

Finally, after 2 and a half years in the making, I’m launching the Sharper Human focus brand.

Many many things in the future but the short version is as follows.

This is a product for founders and entrepreneurs looking to improve focus without stimulants, with the core idea to focus for decades to build something great, not minutes.

It’s been a very long road to this point and it’s going to be an long one after. But this is the initial culmination of selling all other businesses, to focus (ironically) on Sharper Human.

Focusing purely on SH, to build something I truly believe in and enjoy, as well as something I believe will help founder and entrepreneurs enhance their focus and hence upgrade their businesses as well.

Any support, purchases, shares and subscriptions are massively appreciated, it’s currently just in the UK/EU but in March we should be launching in the USA as well.

Cheers.

December will let us know if this was true.

3 very important business related things will be happening in December:

1. Launching of Sharper Human. There will be a lot more on this in the blog in the coming days.

2. Massive sports betting volume + sizing + model improvements - which should equate to high profitability.

3. Supplement business re-build, solving cash flow and prepping for Q1.

I wanted to do this post almost to clear my head rather than anything actually useful or tactical (the reason I started the blog in the first place).

The one tactical/useful point might be around how to approach hard things when its getting stressful, there’s only a few tips I have for this that I’m trying to use.

1. Zoom out - Both physically (aka your problems are nothing in the scope of the universe) and time wise (this won’t be a big deal in a year or a decade).

2. Exercise - self explanatory.

3. Environment - Doing hard things but in an environment you enjoy (both physically and mentally) makes those hard things easier.

Some thoughts.

Sharper Human - Launching this new business has been tough, I’ve launched a fair few businesses through the years but I don’t remember it being this difficult before.

Whether Sharper Human is just more operationally complex or I just care more about it, or more things have gone wrong I’m not 100% sure. But after thinking it through for far too long, I think it might be down to the fact I just know more now and hence expect more, so the stakes feel higher and the bar is set higher as well.

Whereas at the start of business 1, the naivety level is incredibly high.

Closing every other business (aside from the Amazon supplements one) and going all in on Sharper Human is quite an unnerving feeling.

Obviously I think it’s an incredible product, idea and concept otherwise I wouldn’t have done it in the first place, but physical product or ecommerce businesses are just cash flow killers, which makes rapid success also pretty difficult.

Sports Betting - On the other extreme, you have the sports betting models, which have none of the same issues as any physical product business and feel so so close to creating massive profitability but still just aren’t quite there.

We still haven’t hit that mega month yet with good ROI + good volume. The bugs within these models are being fixed constantly, close to a dozen issues and bugs (of varying importance) fixed in November, which should make December onwards vastly more profitable, but we’ve yet to have the insane growth moments, where good luck + lack of bugs + volume of bets + high ROI align, hopefully it’ll be next month.

Futuro Labs - The Amazon supplement business has caused more stress and issues than I expected it to since taking this over.

It’s needed a fair amount of cash injections, realistically down to mismanagement in the past. Mix this in with Amazon’s absolute BS costing us a month’s earnings and losing some money due to negligence on their part, this has been another nice sprinkle of added stress in November.

But, I think we’re over the hump. The valley of despair in business is a real thing, most people quit in the “informed pessimism” stage, but the stages are surprisingly accurate in my experience.

This is the same reason you have a ton of naive energy when you first have a business idea or start a business. You just have uninformed optimism.

Sometimes referred to as the The Dunning-Kruger effect when it’s about knowledge of skills.

Simply put “ignorance is bliss”.

I think this can be quite dangerous for entrepreneurs though, as if these “valleys of despair” are at the same time aligning in multiple businesses/profits, and if you hit other non-business related issues at the same time, this is where resilience can take a massive hit and people can slide into depression and other bad shit, making it even more difficult to get out of the individual valleys of despair.

Which is why I think the zoom out + exercise (sweat it out) + Environment (physically get out) works so well.

It’s not surprising that all of those elements are linked to reduction in depression as well, it’s just if you’ve seen real depression (not the Instagram version), those people can’t even get out of bed, so getting them to sweat it out in the gym or a sauna is not really an option.

Which is why mental health issues / depression etc have to be solved chemically first, then mindset, then physically, but that’s a super complex conversation for another day.

Some exact stats:

Sports Betting:

Down £1k, which is not a big deal in the raw monetary sense, however, it is a big deal due to there being 624 bets made for only 0% ROI.

That high volume of bets equaling no ROI means either; 1.) A very unlucky month, 2.) The models are broken (some were but most are fixed) 3.) Underlying structure issue.

Slightly concerning, which is why December is so high leverage for this as well, volume will be even higher, likely 700+ bets, £350,000+ total wagered, so if that’s down/even we have an issue.

Sharper Human

Will launch in December, very excited but nervous too. Will update here once it happens.

Futuro Labs

Should have been a really good month but with Amazon causing a £3k issue and a direct hit to the bottom line we’re basically where we were before. Again, December will be key.

All in all, November was pretty stressful, more so than I would have liked but it seems a lot of underlying progress was made, the core issue, which is always the issue with businesses/projects, is that you don’t get to find out if progress was made straight away.

I think people know this intuitively as growth happens from pain, if everything is going great with a business or betting model then why would you change it? Just keep doing more of that thing, it’s only when you’re losing clients or lighting money on fire are you going to take massive action to fix this thing.

At least that’s been true with me.

But, we shall see in December how things go, will update on NYE.

These are: building (and earning) from sports betting models and creating an ecommerce start-up.

Both are very different and difficult but in different ways, they also contain very different forms of leverage.

Leverage is one of the single biggest factors I use to understand if someone is legitimately thinking about business in the right way.

Leverage, in the words of the wise Naval, when it comes to business can be in 4 forms:

• Labour

• Capital

• Media

• Code

You want to have at least one but ideally as many of these as possible.

Labour

This is the oldest form and the weakest.

This involves hiring people (real humans) to do things for you.

It’s a very misunderstood and over-valued metric people use to gauge someone’s success (in business). “How many people do you have?” — Generally the higher the number the more successful you are.

Because just asking “how much money do you make” is not really a thing in the UK.

You then need to hire labour to manage labour and on and on.

Of course this works as a form of leverage, but it’s a weaker one.

Capital

Capital is what most people think of when they hear the idea of leverage in business or investing.

If you start with a million pounds, at 10% a year, that’s £100k/year. If you only had £100 to start, that’s pointless.

Capital is where most of the 20th century wealth was made.

Deploying capital in assets that grow over time and playing the broken wealth game we discussed last week to your advantage.

This can be the banker or the Warren Buffett, there’s levels to all types of leverage.

Capital is a good form of leverage, you can deploy capital to make more capital with zero additional “units of effort” on your part.

This is why it’s greater than labour, which needs to be managed, taught and watched in most cases.

Media

Media’s leverage comes from attention.

This is why platforms, news channels and influencers win.

They have leverage as they can say “this product is good” and drive millions or tens of millions to a product they own or are associated with.

It’s so clear how effective this is and even how manipulated this is, yet it continues to work with even traditional media as well as (generally more effectively) modern platforms and influencers.

Code

How the most recent billionaires have been made.

Utilise technology (in the form of code) to have zero or marginal additional costs to sell or produce a “unit”.

Think platforms: Amazon, Facebook, Chat GPT, Google etc.

But even on a smaller level; apps you use, SAAS products.

Code is the most potent form of leverage especially when mixed with another (media or capital).

Network effects is also probably the purest form of leverage but that’s tough to build so we’ll ignore for now.

Code and media are permission-less (you can start today), while capital and labour are permission-required (you need investors or employees to say yes). This flips the difficulty equation - the “best” leverage types are actually the most accessible, which is why they’re crowded.

Scale vs Leverage

I was having a conversation with a business owner earlier this week and we got onto how scaling is a very misunderstood concept.

It’s something I personally did very wrong as well, building processes to run at £100k/month before reaching £5k/month.

I think people think about scale or scaling before they’ve understood leverage.

Decide your leverage first, then implement/build the business, then worry about scaling as you go along.

Thinking leverage first solves scaling issues anyway.

Think about what your leverage will be and decide what it is then build the business.

Select the form of leverage that works best for you personally.

Understand effort vs reward —> Effort of labour leverage is lower than software/code, making code/media leverage more difficult (because it’s better).

The reason why everyone is flooding to SAAS vibe-coding slop builds at the moment is because the barrier to entry is so low and these people intuitively know SaaS has leverage.

But of course the issue is, because everyone is doing it, it’s becoming incredibly saturated, making it not a great opportunity.

Leverage Types Compound at Different Paces

• Labour: Linear (more people = more output).

• Capital: Exponential but slow (10%/year is good, decades not months).

• Media: Exponential but delayed (audience building for years, then monetizes).

• Code: Exponential and fast (one algorithm can scale instantly).

As a result, each leverage type is more difficult than the one before especially at the highest level.

• Labour: Hire/convince someone to work for you (very easy).

• Capital: Save some money + invest it (easy).

• Media: Create excellent content for a long time (hard).

• Code: Build something valuable with zero or marginal unit costs (very hard).

That’s why earnings (both on the individual level and the business level follow the same trajectory). A laborer will be less well paid than someone who can program an algorithm that creates immense value.

Personality First Leverage

Start with finding the leverage type that suits your specific skill set (aka what you are good at and what works best for your personality).

If you are a creator, leverage media in the right way, build a following and monetize in the future, you don’t need to do this now.

If you are the analytical type, think code first, think how can I build a model that will earn forever based on a one-time-effort to build.

If you are a good manager and operator, think labour + local first, it’s the quickest way to earn as well.

If you’ve started the capital game, play it properly, actually aim for mastery of an industry and utilise that leverage.

But just understand the game you are trying to play and if you are made for it.

People sometimes can naturally gravitate to leverage types that don’t suit them because they think it’s the QUICKEST way to make it, (introverts forcing media, code-averse people building SaaS).

This disincentives innovation, business and growth.

I recently watched a Rory Sutherland, probably one of the top two minds in OG marketing (along with Seth Godin) on the Modern Wisdom podcast.

Good pod, worth a listen in full.

The core takeaway I wanted to deep dive into was this idea of Georgism.

About being a “Georgist” instead of more vague labels; left/right/communist etc.

For someone pretty interested in economics, finance, investing, business, this is a term I hadn’t actually heard before, but something that resonated pretty quickly.

The main policy idea reduces income tax and fixes the housing crisis… So worth a crack.

The Problem - “Land Hoarding”

Land and rental monopolies are obviously a massive issue, especially in big cities (where more people want to live).

The issue is house prices and rentals have become incredibly unrelated to income whereas before the “gap” was narrower.

This is obviously nuanced, but to simplify the point, average house prices rise more quickly than average salaries.

Which further causes wealth (not income) inequality.

This naturally causes a shortage of good housing at affordable prices.

This (as supply is reduced), increases demand (rentals, buying etc) and hence price goes up.

Economics 101.

That’s a (very good) fact of the capitalist system.

If supply increase and demand decreases price will decrease, and vice versa.

You can view the OG chart below and think about examples, just move the lines and the equilibrium point will change, along with it price.

This is actually good for 99.9% of industries.

“Price go up, I buy less.”

Logical.

The reason why it’s fine is because you do not HAVE to purchase.

No one is forcing you to buy a specific good or service.

You make a purchasing decision based on the price vs value you think you will receive.

If the value is greater than the price, you purchase, if not, you do not.

It really is that simple in 99.9% of cases.

For an extreme example, if coffee was £500 per cup, or a banana was £50, people wouldn’t buy these items (or they would change to a status game/signal not a normally distributed good or service, but that’s a discussion for another day).

The consumer behavior would shift, from coffee and bananas to tea and apples presuming they stayed roughly the same price (although f*ck apples, the most overrated fruit).

Anyway.

If trains were cheaper, more people would use them and coaches/buses would suffer and vice versa.

You can build these incentives into systems, such as increasing taxes on alcohol and cigarettes or subsidising public transport to increase usage.

All logical enough.

But the issue with this logic when it comes to housing is that housing is not a choice.

You do physically need somewhere to live, a roof over your head.

I can’t say “I think house prices are a bit high at the moment, I’m going to wait for the dip” Or switch to apples instead, it just doesn’t work in this sector.

This is the core issue with house prices themselves and this issue is caused (albeit I’m simplifying) by how these assets are taxed and as a result hoarded for “easy wealth accumulation”.

I’m someone who’s business-first, so anything that reduces tax is generally good for business-first minded people, the issue is difference between taxing non-value-adding wealth and businesses or income.

Wealth; Property, stocks etc are taxed in a better way than income.

It’s a little hard to demonstrate simply but in short, you pay less tax on wealth related earnings than you do on income related earnings.

In most countries but specifically the problem is getting extreme in the UK.

So here’s the crux of the main problem.

Wealth inequality is more of an issue than income inequality

The example that’s always used is to explain wealth inequality vs income inequality is if Bill Gates walked into a football stadium with 50,000 people, the “average” person now has a net worth over £1,000,000.

But income is distributed more closely, the average income of that stadium does increase when he walks in but not by the same amount.

• 50,000 people, average net worth prior: £200,000.

• Add in someone with 100B net worth.

• Each person just added £2 million to their net average net worth (100B/50,000).

Income though doesn’t work like this.

• 50,000 people, average income £30,000.

• Bill Gates net income for the year, I couldn’t find a consistent figure but it’s estimated around £300 million.

• £300M / 50,000 = An extra £6,000 to each person’s income.

Impactful but nowhere near the same skew.

So why the f*ck is income taxed so much worse than wealth?

Incentives, corruption, all the usual fun stuff….

Simplifying…. Barely.

The UK £250,000 Example:

If I make £1,000,000 net profit in my business per year, I pay over 50% tax on this.

Despite all the effort, energy, risks, years of work, travel, expenses, stress and positive economic growth (jobs and all that good stuff) that this took to create.

This might be 10 years of grinding 10 hours a day, every single day, hiring and paying PAYE and National insurance on 5-10-20 employees and all the other knock-on benefits.

Here’s the breakdown:

• 25% Corporation tax: £250,000.

• Of the £750,000 left over (to simplify, I’m taking all out as dividends): £278,648.41 is the dividend tax hit.

This is not even including all the actual taxes that a business owner already pays in NI and PAYE, but let’s just ignore that for now.

So £1,000,000 - £250k - £278k = £472,000 in pocket.

Essentially 53% taxation rate for successful business owners.

Monumentally dumb, but this isn’t just a rant on how bad UK tax rates are.

Instead let’s look at if I made this from property, stocks or “wealth” vehicles.

I’m going to keep this simply and just take the CGT (capital gains tax) rates for this example.

24% CGT….

£240,000.

But the real kicker is the lack of value that was provided, assuming these gains were from property related earnings as that’s the main discussion here, something that provided far less (sometimes even negative) economic stimulus, jobs, growth etc, gets taxed at 29% less than active income.

A real real problem.

Probably THE real problem.

It just massively disincentives UK business owners and founders.

This is why proportionally the UK has the highest exiting of millionaires.

This is the highest net loss for any country on record.

Thinking this through logically… What happens if all the smart, innovative, rich f*ckers leave?

I’m no economics expert but it’s probably not a good thing.

Less jobs, less economic growth, all the fun stuff.

There’s some debate onto how many of these HNWIs are leaving, but purely from people I know in my industry, and myself, one of the reasons I’m considering leaving is due to the massive disincentive and high taxes on businesses in the UK.

So that’s the problem in a nutshell.

Yes it’s nuanced but the core issue is this.

Anyway, Georgism.

Created by Henry George, is an economic philosophy with the main idea of “when land value increases, the profit should go to the “community” not the individual.”

Now if someone said “profit should go to the community” to me out of context, I would think they are a commie and we all know how well that turns out.

But this is a bit more balanced.

Land Value Tax (LVT)

Land value tax is the idea that only the underlying value of the land is taxed, not the businesses/developments on top.

So this does not discourage any other business/economic developments. It just penalizes land hoarding.

The reason why this is different (and more of an issue) from capital hoarding/investing (which has similar tax rate elements but isn’t so much of an issue, in both my and Henry George’s opinion) is that land and capital is not the same thing, so it should not be taxed in the same way.

Land vs. Capital

George made a crucial distinction between capital and land.

Land is not created by human effort and is fixed in supply, unlike capital.

Therefore, taxing land doesn’t discourage its production (since it can’t be produced) and doesn’t create economic inefficiency.

AKA doesn’t f*ck over businesses or even investors, it just discourages raw land holding.

Imagine two identical empty plots of land:

• Plot A is in rural farmland in buttf*ck nowhere.

• Plot B is in central London.

Plot B is worth millions more, but not because the owner did anything to the LAND itself.

It’s valuable because of the city, infrastructure, and economy around it.

LVT essentially means:

• You pay tax based on your land’s location value.

• You pay $0 tax on any buildings or improvements you add.

The key: you can’t create more land, so taxing it doesn’t reduce supply or economic activity like taxing labor or business does.

Modern Day LVT Concepts

(We get a bit technical).

LVT would be a percentage not a flat rate.

• The land’s value would be assessed (ignoring buildings).

• You then pay a annual percentage of this based on this valuation (1-5%).

• Only on the land value not on the property/business/frameworks built on top.

For Example: £500,000 plot. LVT of 2%:

• Annual LVT: £10,000.

• If you built a house on this, still £10,000.

• If it’s empty, still £10,000.

Multiple Properties:

It doesn’t increase per property owned—each property is taxed independently based on its land value:

• Person A: Owns 1 London lot worth £1 million = £20,000 tax (at 2%)

• Person B: Owns 10 plots worth £100,000 each = £20,000 total tax (at 2%)

The Key Difference:

Current system: Building a £500k house increases your tax bill.

LVT: Building a £500k house = £0 tax increase. The penalty is on holding valuable land unproductively.

Speculation becomes expensive → less land hoarding → more land available → lower land prices.

So the whole idea is to reduce unproductive use of valuable land.

I tried to make this as specific to the UK’s housing problem and this is where we got, utilising AI to clarify exactly how this solves the renter/first time buyer problem, as so far to me it just seems like a more effective way to reduce income tax and replace it with a better method.

Solving UK’s Housing Problem

The UK Housing Problem as we discussed above, simplified:

• High net worth individuals own hundreds or thousands of high value properties.

• Current system: Low ongoing taxes (council tax is capped, also paid by the renter, no wealth tax).

• They can hold properties, low administrative/energy costs, collect rent, wait for appreciation and benefit from improved tax advantages we discussed earlier.

• This reduces supply for buyers → drives up prices and quality of overall housing decreases, and we are where we are right now in the UK.

How LVT Solves THIS Problem:

Current UK Example:

• Own 1,000 UK/London properties worth £500k each = £500M portfolio.

• Capital appreciation: £20-30M per year (4-6%) with ZERO tax hit (unrealised gains).

• Rental income: £10-20M per year (taxed as a business/income generally).

• Net position: Extremely profitable and incentivised to hoard.

With 2% LVT:

• Same 1,000 properties worth £500k land value each.

• Annual LVT: £10,000,000 (2% of £500M)

• This £10M annual cost must come from:

  • Rental income (eats into profits).

  • OR selling properties to cover the tax.

LVT makes passive property hoarding unprofitable:

• The wealthy investor bleeding £10M/year in LVT.

• Can’t just sit on appreciating assets anymore with UNREALISED gains.

• Must either maximize rental returns OR sell.

• Selling 50 properties to reduce tax burden → more supply → lower prices.

Plus: LVT revenue could replace income tax, making it MORE attractive to earn through business/work rather than property speculation.

But.

If like me your next thought was “wouldn’t this 10M cost be passed down to the renter in the form of increased rents?”

So doesn’t this INCREASE not decreases rents?

Not quite.

Rental prices are set by landlords, who charge the most they can for the property they have. If they could charge £2,200/month instead of £1,800, they already would in 99% of cases.

They’re profit-maximizing.

Valid, no qualms with that.

Rent is set by supply/demand, NOT landlord costs.

Why LVT Doesn’t Get Passed to Tenants:

1. Can’t Reduce Supply (Unlike Other Goods)

• Coffee tax → suppliers can make less coffee or exit market → reduce supply → price rises.

• LVT → landlord can’t make land disappear → supply stays same → can’t push price up.

• Land is perfectly inelastic - fixed supply.

2. Landlords Who Can’t Afford It Must SELL

This is crucial:

• Wealthy investor with 1000 properties now paying £10M/year

• Can’t increase rents (already at market max)

• Can’t cover the £10M from rental income alone

• Must sell 30-50 properties to reduce tax burden

• Those 30-50 properties hit the market → supply increases

• More supply → rents fall

3. Forces Development of Hoarded Land

• Empty plots in prime locations now bleeding money.

• Must be developed into housing → more rental units → more supply → lower rents.

The Paradox:

Yes, individual landlords face higher costs, BUT the system forces so much new supply onto the market that overall rents fall.

Economic Term: Tax incidence falls on whoever has inelastic supply. Land supply is perfectly inelastic, so landlords absorb 100% of the tax.

Let me know what you think about LVT and whether it’s a good or bad idea and specifically why, there’s a few counters I’m thinking about that I dive into below, this gets a bit technical so feel free to bounce.

Counter Opinions

A good post on why it’s a bad idea by Tom Forth, his 2 main issues (simplifying) are:

• The valuation problem.

• The centralisation problem.

Valuation problem crux: No land only models, hence valuing land separately would be very difficult (agree, true).

But it’s not like this hasn’t been done well elsewhere (Australia, Denmark, states in the US etc).

Just because it would be difficult, there are techniques that exist and if Australia and the US can do it successfully I think we can work it out. It’s a challenge but “fatal flaw” is incorrect.

Centralisation problem: “UK LVT proposals are national, would kill local democracy by replacing Council Tax”.

Valid point, but again it can be local anyway (US does this by state not federally).

The last argument is the fairness one, which I think is invalidated before we start based on the framing of this post, if tax rates were flat(er) then this would smooth (not solve) the housing problem anyway.

The fairness example: “£150k Blackpool house should pay similar local tax to £5M Westminster mansion because they use similar services.”

I think this is the least valid point based on;

• Ignores economic value created by the location (AKA you couldn’t pay me to live in Blackpool).

  • Westminster land is worth £4M+ not because of similar services, but because of agglomeration effects - access to jobs, transport networks, economic activity. That value was created by business, community and infrastructure, not the landowner

• Local services in expensive areas often DO cost more (staff wages, facility costs).

  • Local economics still work - Londoners get paid more, hence more HNWIs, hence prices increase.

• Localised LVT solves most of this (centralisation problem).

• Everything we’ve discussed above being a larger issue anyway.

Examples: Tom Forth’s System (Current/His Preference):

• Blackpool: £2,000/year on £150k land = 1.33% rate

• Westminster: £2,000/year on £5M land = 0.04% rate

• Result: Westminster super cheap to hold → encourages hoarding

LVT at 2% rate:

• Blackpool: £3,000/year (2% of £150k)

• Westminster: £100,000/year (2% of £5M)

• Result: Westminster expensive to hold → forces development OR sale

Key difference:

• Flat tax (Forth’s idea): Both pay SAME AMOUNT → backwards incentives

• LVT: Both pay SAME PERCENTAGE → correct incentives

This is why it needs a percentage value not a flat rate.

OK, long technical one but hopefully an interesting concept.

Thanks for reading, open to thoughts and ideas.

Reading a good book next to your cat, drinking a tea or coffee should bring you happiness.

Life is the small things.

Although I like playing the business and money game, if you HAVE to do this all the time and cannot be at peace, you will reduce your overall life happiness.

2. Play a game you want to win.

Purpose.

Design a life you enjoy.

Optimise for peace and experiences.

Ask yourself the question “what would I do if I knew I couldn’t fail” and then do it anyway in a way that of course tries to reduce the chances of failure.

We hear it all the time but the “don’t waste your life, you only have one” premise is key.

Optimise your life for what you specifically want, not what your friends, parents or society thinks you should want.

Dive into this and build a life you want, with goals specifically created by you, for you, playing a game that you actually want to win.

Most people play a game with rewards they don’t want to win, this makes absolutely no sense.

3. Read & Learn for a specific purpose.

Reading for reading’s-sake or “performative reading” is a poor use of time.

Read for a specific purpose.

That purpose can be point 1 from above, to help relax, because you enjoy it, to inspire you, but don’t read or learn something because you think you need to or because others will find it cool or it “might be useful in the future”.

Read and learn because you are interested in it now or have something to solve in the current project or business right now.

Reading books for the sake of reading books does not increase knowledge, it’s intellectual procrastination from what you should be doing (usually point 2 - purpose or even point 1 - find peace).

You will make far more progress by learning things at the time you need them than trying to “read for the future”.

This goes for any skill, languages or process.

Just a quick one I was thinking about this week.

The Problem

An example we’ll use here is one from a podcast where they discussed an older woman who lives in a house that she bought in, say 1975, for 3 tuppence and a turnip, that is now worth £3,000,000 (London, obviously).

You can use relative numbers, the concepts will work all the same.

But she has no income, limited retirement funds and as a result lives fairly poorly, circa £20k a year. 2 kids.

To make matters worse, her children, albeit less poorly, don’t have it great.

Let’s say normal jobs, 30-70k/year range, maybe higher if they are still in London.

Nothing wrong with all of this, I think most people have this similar structure, albeit likely lower numbers.

But, things are broken.

Going from £30k —> £70k a year is such a massive jump in life quality.

Even all the happiness research shows a plateau around this £70k/year mark vs steep increases in happiness per income bracket prior.

In short from these studies:

• A large peer-reviewed study (1.7 million people worldwide) found that happiness/life satisfaction peaks around $95,000 annual income and doesn’t meaningfully increase beyond that.

• Emotional well-being maxes out even lower, around $60,000-$75,000.

This all makes sense as living on £15k vs £30k would be substantially different.

So having: 3 people below the “peak happiness income level” yet having £3,000,000 of “assets”….. Just because “that’s how it’s done” seems (and is) mental.

Both the children and the mother are living sub-optimally just based on “social norms”.

Most of the older generation, such as parents (of friends and family that I know) are wealthy but not rich.

They own a £750,000 house outright.

Maybe more than 1 car.

Maybe a bunch of stocks, ISA’s, investments and so on.

But act like they are on the poverty line.

Yet, they shop at Lidl (albeit nothing wrong with that) and penny pinch on parking or chicken or will spend an extra 15 minutes driving to save £5 on fuel….

Essentially the difference between wealth and income.

Net worth and earnings.

Die with Zero

Die with zero for anyone unfamiliar is a book that basically centralises on one concept around of avoiding over-saving and under-living.

It’s something I think we all inherently know but it’s explained very well and concisely, worth a read in full.

I tried to distill the whole book into a couple of sentences:

Don’t work more than you want or need to, to over-save for things you do not want or need. Invest in experiences over “stuff” and borrow from your future self.

Some parts sound quite similar to the line in fight club:

Albeit I think most people replace this with work now.

The key part for this post though is “borrow from your future self”.

Why Inheritance is Backwards

This structure is caused by the underlying issue outlined in die with zero.

Over-saving (in the form of net worth).

Giving at the wrong time.

Not understanding the differences between savings and earnings.

It’s super common.

Inheritance is a broken system because it doesn’t benefit the parties involved at the correct time, not from a tax point of view or anything like that, purely from an actual die-with-zero point.

One of the key points in die with zero is to basically borrow from your future self.

Kind of like how if I could lend my 15 year old self £1,000, how far that would have gone, or my 22 year old self £10,000.

The author talks about this “borrow from your future self” idea in regards to experiences.

To optimise your life for fulfilment and happiness.

“Doing shit you want to do, when you want to do it”.

100% agree with that.

But let’s assume we’re only talking about it from the economics point of view.

£10,000 to you today vs 10 years ago will always be proportionally different.

It’s kind of like when you were a kid and £100 seemed like an incredible amount of money.

Even when you are a teenager and you make £500, it’s probably the richest you will ever feel.

But when you are older this continues in scale, so when we are 30-40-50-60, you likely (hopefully) won’t “need” the £10k or even the £100k.

And taking this to it’s logical extreme, the day before you die you won’t need ANYTHING in the bank, whether that’s £3M, £100M or £500.

On a less extreme level, most people won’t be starting businesses at 60 or 70 or travelling around the world for an entire year.

The problem is, that’s the exact age at which most people (if they are lucky enough), will get it, usually through inheritance.

This is broken for EVERYONE involved.

One of the best nuggets I like in die with zero is the idea around when to give your children/whoever you want to get your wealth when you die.

Talking in terms of kids is easier.

Because when you think it through it’s so backwards.

It’s the same as our borrow from your future self idea, instead of 10 or 20 years, it’s a generation.

We create wealth to give to our children when we die?

When they need it the least, usually, assuming we have a good innings, when they are already 50+, 60+ in a lot of cases.

Imagine thinking giving your kids wealth when they are already retired and cannot enjoy it properly a good idea.

Yet 99% of people do this.

Maybe more.

It’s also so backwards as you can’t even see your kids or friends or charities enjoy it.

Personally I’d rather give it away earlier and see the benefits firsthand.

So all parties are worse off.

The kids get it after they really would have needed it and the giver themselves is dead so they don’t get to see the good it does.

Such a broken idea, like so many others related to this concept.

One really easy thought experiment for this.

Assuming you are planning to give you kid(s) some chunk of inheritance, let’s say £300,000.

Wouldn’t it be better to give it to them now and have them live in a £800,000 house, versus living in a £200,000 or 300,000 house?

The gap is probably even larger than this given how far a £300k+ deposit would go.

But hopefully that illustrates the point.

They get to benefit 20 or 30 years earlier, without it impacting your life in the slightest.

How much better is THEIR quality of life and all you’ve done is given (what you were going to give them) earlier.

Everyone benefits.

Let’s Run The Numbers

Let’s go back to our London mum’s “issue”.

£3M house, no income, “poor” lifestyle.

Let’s also say that the £3M house never goes up in value again and this individual had 2 children.

In “X” number of years (when RIP), the “kids” get (call it £1.25M after inheritance tax, likely 1.5M as it’ll probably be set-up in a trust anyway) of inheritance money.

That means in our super extreme example, they could (literally) not work (or work and party up the rest with crazy experiences, travel, everything you want to do whilst you can do it, such as backpacking when 20 not 45 for example) and have a net-loss of income of £30k a year.

Literally 30k a year of debt…. For 20 or 30 YEARS.

Call it 30 years, let’s say mum takes her vitamins and lives to 90. And you had an “excess” life for 30 years between 30-60.

Come inheritance, you now have £1.25M minus £30k x30years = £900,000 = £325k in the bank AND in that time you actually lived.

But no one would do that….

If you did you’d be seen as a crazy person, without a plan or it would somehow seem morbid.

Option 2

You still end up with 1.25M at 60.

But instead you grinded it out, worked up, got up to 50/70/100/140k a year.

Income tax gets you, but you save up, made “smart” decisions and that 30-60 timescale you actually created £1M of net-worth.

Most of which is now tied up in your house.

Now mum croaks at 90 again and you have 2.25M net worth.

Now what?

Are you going to go backpacking at 60?

You can definitely retire.

You literally doubled your net worth overnight.

But the health is probably not great.

I can’t imagine skiing is on the menu either.

What you WANT to do is probably more relaxing (and cheaper) anyway.

SO THE CYCLE CONTINUES.

A Personal Example

On a personal level, when I was starting businesses in 2012-2015, even 2018 range, before getting the profits up from the existing businesses, like any start-up I needed cash.

I had zerooooo money.

Instead of getting cash from the bank of mum & dad, I just grinded a bit, got some loans and short-term financing options (at silly rates) and grew at a slower rate.

Long story short, it worked out fine but could have been a lot better, faster and more effective.

2019 onwards things started to go alright for me, scaling up, learning skills, making some disposable income etc.

This is where these concepts merge.

The idea of die with zero and “traditional wealth building”.

From here (albeit I didn’t do it) I could have used this to build “traditional-wealth” and taken the traditional route by buying property, savings, index funds etc, but especially property.

Instead I wanted to re-invest the profits into other ventures, businesses, bankrolls and so on.

Some of which worked, others didn’t.

The important point is that nowadays I don’t really “need” the money as much as before, albeit scaling would be faster.

The Solution

I also re-read die with zero this week to try get this idea across better.

Another good concept related to all this is the idea around working the optimal amount and time-bucketing - essentially timing your experiences (do things now you won’t be able to do in your 50s, almost regardless of costs).

It is of course far more nuanced but the core concept is pretty simple to understand.

Optimise your life for positive experiences not saving money.

What if I run out of money?

The pushback is always “what about X” “What if X goes wrong” “What if I run out of money”

The main rebuttal to this in the book is to assign what is yours and what is “theirs” or what you are going to give away?

Let’s say you £1M of net worth and (is usually the case) people do not spend down the principal.

So it will continue growing even when expenses decrease.

There’s so many ideas in this book but I’ll leave it at that for now.

Cheers.

Although again this contained the mega swings we saw similar to last month with all the profit coming in the last week of the month.

1.) Sports Betting

Up about £13k on 428 bets, 56% win rate in October.

Importantly, the ROI and total wagered amounts.

ROI was actually quite low this month but because our total wagered amount was near 250k we made a good profit throughout.

Primarily this profit was made through Rugby Union, within “URC” there, but these swings will happen within leagues just due to natural variance.

So although URC seems incredible, this 70% win rate isn’t going to last.

Even “DEL” in hockey had crazy profitability in this time, near £10k on one hockey league in one month is not really sustainable and I expect this to retrace but it’s interesting to see how quick the upside can be with a bit of luck.

I do think some of the hockey leagues might not be perfect, there’s a few different “models” or approaches throughout those that were tweaked in mid October as well to improve profitability and stability.

In general though, happy with SB’s results this month.

2.) Futuro Labs

Next up is Futuro labs.

October saw good improvements vs September for a number of reasons.

The first is due to how volume tends to increase in Q4 for Amazon in general.

Although supplements really increase in January, we still get a small increase in profit based on this info.

This was aided by running a KWFS campaign, which improves rankings and reviews for a number of products.

Nov/Dec profits will very likely be similar and my main goal with this is to simply get over the cash flow issues I inherited with this company, get some float in the bank and then potentially push a couple of products before the January rush.

As long as this can stay around £3k/m net profit that’ll be fine for FL.

3.) Sharper Human.

Good progress on the big one as usual, still hoping to launch on the 1st December if everything goes to plan but we are relying on a number of suppliers for packaging and transport to run smoothly so we’ll see.

Will be tracking paying subscribers as our primary metric for this business once it’s up and running rather than profit or revenue directly.

I’ll also be writing a bit more extensively about this business as it’s the key brand for the foreseeable future.

What’s the actual worse thing that could happen.

I’ve failed so many times, even more recently when I should be “older and wiser” I’ve made some pretty stupid mistakes.

Not just small ones either, we’re talking 6 figure blunders.

Looking back it’s so dumb.

But looking back at the 5 or so biggest mistakes over the past decade of business, they seem to have one clear correlation.

One recurring theme, regardless of niche or project or industry.

That was being in a rush.

Trying to hack or cut corners or make money easily.

This being in a rush comes from a place of fear as well.

Fear of failure.

If I’ve spent 2 weeks doing something and failed, no biggie.

If I’ve spent 2 years though, that does suck, that hurts the ego.

But there’s also the flip side.

I’m launching something big, it’s taking an incredible amount of money, effort and time.

It’s built right.

I’m not in a rush.

But I still have to eat.

So you have to have “runway”

The amount of time you can work on something before you run out of money.

So you have runway, call it 12 months.

But growth takes time.

Even if you succeed you need more cash.

Success or failure both take cash-flow.

Failure - This is obvious.

When something is losing money you have to do something different, invest more, start over, work it out. They all take cash.

But success.

That’s also a cash-flow killer.

You have to order more inventory, quicker, with massive lag-times being ordered + being paid, you have to re-order whilst another batch is “in transport”….

And what happens if sales decrease and you’re stuck with 1,000 non selling units?

Successful businesses also die through cash flow issues as much as unsuccessful ones.

The stress is real.

But back to my point, “so what if you actually fail?”

Actually think it through.

Think through the downsides, the back-up plans….

How much different would your life actually be vs having not tried?

I call this the survival vs epic life task.

I did not create this concept, but it’s something I think about when I’m about to take immense amounts of risk (the coming 8-12 months or so).

Where there’s a real possibility things don’t work, investing all your savings into something that explodes.

The core idea is you create 5 versions of your life.

1. Survival.

2. Basic.

3. Good.

4. Great.

5. Epic.

With what the absolute minimum amounts look like in each “life” at that level.

I think the most powerful ones are the survival and basic lives.

Great and epic are powerful for another reason which we’ll get onto later.

These life-based tasks involve writing every cost you’d have/want at every level of your life.

So in the survival stage it’s the absolute minimum, food+shelter.

In the basic life it’s this + the things you value the most (gym, phone, internet, slightly less dodgy living arrangement) and so on.

The idea is to see how low the bar is for you in these 2 levels, and how close you might actually be to the great or epic lives with everything YOU personally want.

Here’s my survival life for some context:

If everything hit zero, this is what my survival life looks like.

What’s interesting is I created this doc back in 2017.

So even with how things have changed over the past almost decade, the concept remains absolutely rock solid.

What’s the worst thing that could happen?

Let’s work through, I blow up all contacts, friends and businesses.

I plow all savings and investments into the businesses that don’t work.

So we’re at ground zero + debt of X amount.

Then what?

After being pretty bummed out for a few weeks I’d meander my way back to Cardiff and pay my parents £300/month to live at home.

You might think I’m very lucky to have parents that would let me live at home / even possible to come back home with a wife, a cat and 2 rabbits…. That’s a funny image… But a valid point.

Your survival level will be different, if you have no family left that you could live with for 2 months then adjust your survival life thresholds.

But in this survival life that is it.

So now I need to get £700/month.

What I’d do to get this amount is probably sell anything of value to start and at the same time is create an offer that’s free to deliver but has high value.

For me personally this would be a local service business of some sort.

I’d then offer the first one for free to get customers.

Nothing fancy yet.

Based on the skillset I have and the understanding of sales, to get back to £2,000+ a month would take probably a few weeks.

I know to some that might seem crazy but you have to remember this would be rock bottom.

<Mini rant> What I’ve never understood is why people can be in a sh*t situation and just carry on living life like nothing is wrong. Why watch TV if you are living with your parents at 25? Why spend money going out if you hate your job so much you physically shudder at the thought of going in on Monday? Bizarre to me. <Mini rant concluded>

In other words, have some AGENCY.

Take some action.

After a couple months I’d upgrade my lifestyle to the basic life.

This is what my basic life looks like.

This is how I lived for about 3 years whilst building the businesses.

It’s actually not even that bad, although in 2025 money, this would likely need to be tweaked.

The idea here is you are not broke, but you want to live off the bare minimum and re-invest everything else. Time + Money + Energy.

You need to be extreme.

Say no to everything to grow and proceed.

Doing this everyday you will quickly reach “the good life”.

Which might be the perfect name of anything ever.

The good life is the level I despise.

It’s comfort without purpose.

It’s where most people live their lives for decades.

Yours will look different but write every single cost you’d have to build this “good life”

Once you’ve completed this section you can go onto the 2 top options.

The Great & Epic Life

Depending on what you personally like, you need to get into what you would do/have if money was almost no object, but think through this on a day to day basis.

My versions are below and although they’ve changed since writing this, you get the idea.

From here you have 3 really important decisions/tasks.

The first is to create your “action threshold” at each level.

Let’s say I’m living the epic life but I lose all my income for whatever reason.

From here I probably don’t need to jump all the way down to survival but I do need to maybe jump down to great, depending on 3 things;

1. Runway of savings/monies.

2. Personal risk tolerance.

3. Confidence/time to increase income.

These will be custom to all individuals but the idea is let’s assume you had £150,000 in savings/liquid cash/assets.

That’s 10 months at living the epic life.

Chances are you wouldn’t want to just live this life for 10 months and then go straight down to survival.

Instead you’d gauge your risk tolerance and confidence/time to increase income.

From here, you’d either go down to great or good and suddenly instead of 10 months runway you have 22 months or 45 months!

That not only takes the stress off, but it allows you to avoid BEING IN A RUSH!

This helps you avoid stress when making decisions containing immense risk.

Simply decide when you will downgrade if situations do not change.

Make it action based and absolute.

If savings decrease to £X I’ll simply go down to good life until earnings increase to X.

I think people make these financial decisions emotionally, when they really are just logical decisions.

There’s obviously a ton of ego involved in money and earning related things, but that’s an issue for another day.

It’s a simple way of saying, downgrade your lifestyle before you need to and dissolve the ego.

Not easy but simple.

But another key to this process is it works on the upside.

The Upside.

This is what I originally did this task for.

In the year before I did this task (2016) I made £24,880.

Yes, I track personal income every month.

Yes the ADHD is strong.

But it helps reframe things.

If my EPIC life, the life that has everything I’ve ever wanted is only £15k a month (that’s after tax mind).

Then what actions do I have to take to achieve this.

And work backwards.

So if I have an agency that sells something for £1k/month and we have £500/profit per month on that.

We need to get to £30k/month profit (due to taxes) to get to £15k/month net.

That’s £60k/month revenue, that’s 60 sales per month.

That’s 2 a day.

How do I make 2 sales a day is far easier than how do I create the best life I can imagine.

So in summary.

Take more risk, the downside is not as low as you think.

Build the ultimate upside, it might be closer than you think.

I built 5 businesses worth $100,000 or more in 8 years with zero start-up capital.

But I failed at every single one to convert them into 7 figures valuation.

Which was unbelievably frustrating.

Now I know why.

In this blog I’ll explain what this mistake was, how you can avoid it pretty easily, and the 5 rules you have to follow to build a 7+ figure business and avoid all the mistakes I made.

The mistake was not understanding the real power of brand.

The mistake was being in a rush.

My first business to partly succeed was an SEO agency.

This took a really long time to get anywhere because I didn’t know anything about business or sales.

During this time I DID NOT build a brand, instead I built off the back of a keyword-based-mentality.

I built a process. An Edge.

Edges are essential in business, more on that later.

But it’s not a brand.

“If a customer searches X and I appear for X, therefore I win”.

Throw in some sales training, learn some ops and I thought we’re good to go, we’re rolling.

No.

What would have better is to decide why I actually want to work with.

Even though you’ve heard it all before, start with WHO your target audience is. Or at the very least WHAT problem you are solving.

But most importantly.

Point 1: Actually give a F*ck about your customers.

I put this first, before the more “interesting” mistakes because it’s the single most important thing you can do as a founder.

Just care.

If you actually care, everything else is downstream from this.

You make decisions based on the best interests of your customer, not yourself.

If you truly care about improving the lives of the people you sell to, you will create better products and services, market better, sales will be easier and all in all people will trust you because they can see and feel authenticity.

This is what frustrates me so much with all these drop-shipping, micro-saas creation businesses.

You don’t care about the people you are selling to, you are just trying to make a quick buck.

They are get rich quick… Without adding any value.

If you charge someone more for a product and it takes longer to get to them, isn’t that borderline a scam?

Don’t get me wrong I’ve definitely been there too, but it’s not the right way.

The SEO agency took nearly 4 years just to get to £100,000/year.

That’s 4 years of every day, not a slow side hustle.

The second business I built was off the back of the SEO agency.

The second business took 8 months.

I understood marketing properly.

I STILL did NOT understand the power of branding.

Here’s the “business name”.

It’s actually embarrassing looking back but this is the keyword-mentality version of me.

“Amazon SEO Consultant”.

That’s the actual “brand name”....?

It’s confusing as well as just bad.

It’s a keyword yes, but not a brand.

Which leads us to point 2.

Point 2: Build a brand that doesn’t confuse your customer.

The next business was almost-better.

It was an Ecommerce company that we actually exited for mid 6 figures.

It was closer to a brand but still not really there.

The reason? -- Commoditisation of customers.

We had a brand-name, the site was good, branding/design it all looked like a real brand but it didn’t really stand for anything, there wasn’t a target customer or individual that we wanted to help.

It was too broad.

Targeting too many people and hence targeting no-one.

Which brings me nicely onto point 3.

Point 3: Don’t commoditise your service OR your customer.

Let me explain a bit more.

Everyone knows not to commoditise your service or product.

A commodity’s only differentiation is price.

Think gold or petrol or flour.

You just get it from the cheapest source, it’s the same product to 99% of consumers.

There’s very little brand affinity.

But you can accidentally commoditise your product within your branding and marketing.

This is extremely dangerous as it disintegrates profit margins.

If you sell “SEO services” or “CBD Oil” for example….

It’s simply too vague.

SEO for who?

CBD for who?

It’s too broad, despite the fact you might have an elite product or service offering.

If you market it in the same way as 99% of other businesses. The consumer will group you in the same way.

The customer will shop around, they’ll just look for the cheapest version of this product as they have grouped you with competitors.

Despite this actually NOT being a commodity product.

This is personally what I ran into with both our SEO agency and our CBD business.

We didn’t differentiate in the right way.

As a result we cared less (point 1) and because we didn’t niche down our customer was confused whether this was for them (point 2).

And although (as always) the marketing and SEO side pushed us through to make the businesses work….. It could have been so much better by just understanding these things.

It was like pushing a boulder uphill.

That’s the power of a brand again… Or lack thereof.

Point 4: Build 1 incredible business - not 5 mediocre ones

Focus.

Don’t do 5 or 8 things well.

Do one thing incredibly well.

This is the same in business as it is for sport, or music or art.

The more you focus on one thing the better you become.

The athlete doesn’t try to compete at 4 different sports.

They would lose, however talented.

Focus on your biggest calling.

This is the whole reason I built Sharper Human.

To be my one singular focus for decades not months.

To work with a target audience I care about the most; founders (which is point 1), who want to focus and build businesses (point 2), with a product specifically designed for them (point 3), with personal accountability and focus by me (point 4).

Check it out at SharperHuman.com if you are a founder or entrepreneur.

Focus on one thing.

Building a business is complex enough with the hundreds of moving parts, don’t overcomplicate it further by trying to build multiple at the same time.

Founders who spend 20 years on one business win.

“Humans overestimate what they can achieve in 1 year and under-estimate what they can achieve in 10 years”

We saw this just this week with Mr Beast.

He posted a video he recorded back in 2015 and set it to go live exactly 10 years after.

His main goal was 1 million subscribers.

He’s currently approaching half a billion….

Human’s truly struggle with the idea of compounding and exponential growth.

It’s the idea of mastery.

Depth beats breadth.

Especially now in our AI world, all the surface level information is already so easily accessible.

I’ve seen a lot of people talk about how AI benefits the generalist , I disagree.

I see the point, you need to have a borderline understanding of a lot of things and skills, but I believe that’s just a requirement to be in the arena.

Depth and hyper specific true knowledge and skills in one area is what will set you apart, because if I can create a one paragraph prompt that results in the output of your entire life’s work and skillset - that’s the dangerous part.

People with hyper specific specialised knowledge do not have this worry, they can use AI to put all the other pieces together on top of this frame.

Having depth of knowledge and implementation is the real edge now.

Which brings me to my next point.

Point 5: Build your repeatable profitable marketing edge

This one was the one part we got right.

And why we managed to get to 6 figures instead of nothing.

This is creating the true edge.

For us, it was within marketing.

We could rank any medium competition keyword in Google (or YouTube).

In quick time with a very limited budget.

In another business it was ranking Amazon products with a custom process we created.

In another if was leveraging authority website + powering those up to create curated list type articles (that you see everywhere now, “best xxx for xxxx”).

The repeatable edge became:

1. Find a keyword/content topic our target audience is searching for.

2. Build a page or video on this topic

3. Run the ranking process.

4. Generate clicks, sign ups and sales.

Sounds great, but there’s a massive piece missing.

The product or service.

The BRAND.

There’s no knock-on value being produced.

You can be an incredible marketer and generate sales and customers quickly.

But if the brand sucks, it becomes moving the boulder uphill, with an increasingly steeper incline over time.

Our products and services were good but our brand was poor.

For a real brand, a real effective product it’s inverted.

It’s the snowball effect.

It’s tough to get started (like any business or product).

But the network effects and what I call “seeding” works in your favor.

One sale is more likely to lead to another, not less likely, if you do the little things right, the things that don’t actually scale.

Now if you drive your marketing edge and go all-in on this, you create momentum, you create velocity (in the right direction), leading to a wave of sales because you focused on the first 4 points before building the marketing edge.

That’s my biggest mistake in business, doing this the wrong way around.

I described this as a wheel.

The hub is your brand.

The spokes are your marketing/sales/operations/services/team/product etc.

We had strong spokes.

But a weak hub.

So things break.

And restarting and switching (point 4) mitigates success.

The most successful founders I know aren’t the best marketers or the best product people, they just haven’t stopped doing one business for 25 years.

Focus for decades not minutes.

If you’re a founder or entrepreneur looking to improve focus and cognition, check out Sharper Human, the only business that I started product and brand first. The forever business.

Thanks for watching, comments welcome on what point has most impacted your business journey.

Also to see how everything performs over time.

It’ll be just quick monthly updates with results, earnings and whatever looked interesting within the project.

There won’t be anything mentioned of the agency, SEO or previous businesses as they are boring and not the goals moving forward either.

1.) Sports Betting

-1% ROI on £100,000 is quite a funny one.

I don’t think I’ve had a more extreme back and fourth month in a while.

Let alone how bouncy this year has been.

May and June were great, July was terrible, August was meh, September was strangely essentially close to break-even (being down £1k in the end), although removing 3 days either way would have made insane difference either way in profit or loss.

For example, removing the 3 worst betting days would have led to the overall results being near +£13,000.

Removing the 3 best betting days would have led to the overall results being around — -£11,000.

These runs included a 10-0 run, that is winning 10 in a row. Very ideal.

As well as a 2-12 run, that’s having 12 losses in your last 14 bets… Not ideal.

Sports betting has a ton of variance, that’s not news.

What’s interesting is how dramatically this can switch even with relatively low unit sizes, with average stakes near £600 per bet.

So although I’m disappointed this was not higher, given how much volume will happen in October, I’m glad we didn’t have a heavy negative month.

September also “felt” unlucky.

Tough to realistically say whether there was “run-bad” or just normal variance but we’ll see how the October results shake out.

October volume is going to be dramatically higher than September so we’ll likely know pretty quickly if there’s any issues with the models or specific leagues within each model.

September we had 181 official bets, October will likely be 500+ with £250,000 wagered…

2.) Futuro Labs

As I mentioned in the post a few weeks back, I brought out my co-founders share of a business that has very good underlying metrics but needs some cleaning up + some cash flow solving.

As expected this business bounced back well from the PPC debacle.

About £3,000 net profit. Slightly lower in reality when you add in fixed costs, similar to what I mentioned in the post on buying out co-founder but still a strong bounce back.

Aside from the cash flow cleaning up, reducing costs and some other small tweaks there wasn’t a massive amount done last month, just a clear seeing “where we are” in terms of monthly net profit.

Moving forward with this we’ll be pushing marketing pretty hard, nothing crazy due to the cash flow issues in the business but we should still see some increase in gross profit in October, espically with the normal Amazon Q4 upticks.

3.) Sharper Human.

Good progress on the big one.

Hoping to launch on the 1st December if everything goes semi-smoothly but given the number of moving parts this might be tough.

Will be tracking paying subscribers as our primary metric for this business once it’s up and running rather than profit or revenue directly.

This is probably what I’d do if I had to start over.

With the core business element of utilizing AI but on the back-end rather than front-end.

Think operationally rather than building a SAAS company itself.

This is essentially what the sports betting play is, by leveraging AI in a very narrow field with the specialized knowledge of sports + betting industry.

But that’s not a business and it’s more of a long term approach.

This post is more around leveraging AI to create a profitable business from week 1.

There’s tons of these niche AI businesses that aren’t just the generic crappy “automate your business” type emails that I’ve been getting.

In this thought process, the “starting over”, we’re assuming the same skill set but zero resources.

So anything physical product related, at least initially is out of the question.

I also think Ecommerce has been the least impacted by AI so far in the business sector, vs B2B services or software/automation.

As well as the lag time, start-up costs, suppliers etc, just makes the timeline too long and the start-up costs too much for our example.

Which has been the case with the new build project…..

When you are in the early days, you pretty much are at the whim of other people’s timelines and pricing, if you have time + cash flow that’s not the end of the world but if you are starting up without these it’s a killer.

In business-to-business service based businesses though, that’s not the case.

In theory you can make a website using one of the AI builders, I like lovable but there’s a ton of great ones out there, learn the basics of Google ads, start running ads to the website and do some active outbound marketing at the same time and potentially have a paid client before the end of the day.

That assumes you have the skills to do that, but the physical tools are there and the timeline is short enough to be achievable.

For an Ecom store or a physical product business, unless you do this in reverse (either build the audience first or kickstarter route of pre-orders) it’s impossible to generate sales from day 0.

That’s why the B2B service based space is a good place to start.

Solve a problem. Add value. Get paid.

Option 1 - Video Marketing Agency

Video is one of the last authentic marketing channels in my opinion.

Although my writing style is very casual (and would be worse than AI), there’s a chance that anything/everything you read was written by AI.

Although the same issue can/will happen with video, there’s a reason people are still drawn to the authentic long form podcasts or interviews.

The depth of the connection is there and I don’t think AI will replace that long-form human conversational need anytime soon.

The perceived value of video is also a lot higher, mix this with social integration, shorts creation, imagery, copywriting and you could make a full video and social marketing agency that’s powered on top of a few AI softwares with 3 or 5 people that powers 50+ large clients.

Easily creating a £3-5+ Million a year agency with as little as 3-5 people.

Whereas a lot of social/video marketing agencies now are full of corporate bloat despite being start-ups in a lot of cases.

<Interesting Tangent>

This actually reminds me of an “advertising agency” I went to see whilst still based in Cardiff.

This business, at the time was seen as the best in Cardiff, “award winning” and all that BS.

I’d heard pretty bad things, but we had a mutual client (we did SEO they did Ad stuff) so I meet up with their team in their offices to discuss a few ideas and implementation.

I remember thinking, “this place is meant to be a start-up”.

It was a real dichotomy in person.

It was more like a mix of wannabe Google, mixed with a hundred year old corporate, dull insurance company.

30+ employees, all of which didn’t seem to be doing much at the time I was there.

Yet there was a ball pit….?

All very strange, and I remember thinking the maths wouldn’t add up.

Running the maths on how much value you’d have to add or output to have 30 employees standing around not doing much on a company that’s meant to be tech-first.

This isn’t a labour force or people-first business.

Looking back at this company for this post didn’t surprise me to see how this “leader” turned out.

Ball pit and all….

<tangent end>

Anyway, tangent over.

Video marketing agency.

I’d also mix this idea with one of the options below to get the true power out of this..

To be on the forefront of video AI and have the implementation capacity to record, edit, produce (albeit easier than 2 years ago) still takes a lot of time and energy, most won’t stay at the cutting edge of it, especially at scale.

If you can however you’ll benefit from the tech and economies of scale both sides

Option 2 - A Boring Business Powered by AI Marketing

2 examples come to mind straight away.

Accounting & legal services.

Both need some baseline levels of regulation, which is why these industries are so archaic and broken in the first place, but if you have this baseline qualifications, creating that B2B service model and just doing things WELL and properly makes life incredibly easy.

It’s easy because of the people you are competing against.

Competing against other businesses, many of whom have 6, 7 or 8 figure businesses that know absolutely nothing about marketing and very little about accounting practices for small ecommerce brands.

The issue with trendy digital marketing, affiliate marketing, influencer marketing, ecommerce etc is you are competing against high level marketers and people who know what they are doing.

It’s the same thing in trading and investing.

If I’m trying to make money in a market, is it easier for me to try to beat the S&P 500 market where trillions are traded by thousands of people smarter than me with infinite resources….

Or try to beat 2nd division French Rugby union…

Where there’s a real chance I could have a top 3 betting model for this tournament in the world.

It’s the same thing in business.

Compete against people and other businesses you can demolish with great product + proper marketing.

Power both with AI and you will win, as 99% of these other businesses in this space won’t even be using AI and definitely won’t be using it to it’s full potential ability in the space.

Another industry that comes to mind is estate agents, everyone seems to bitch about how terrible estate agents are (me too), and with good reason.

Most suck.

This is another example of a broken industry that will be destroyed by Ai + innovation in the next 10 years.

In the same way that the transport industry was with Uber.

The reason was Taxi services just weren’t that good.

You used to have to call, maybe someone picked up, told you they were coming and from there you just hoped they got to you, not knowing if they even would at all or annoyingly when they would.

Early Uber was f*cking magic. Even though Uber nowadays is not as good as it once was, early early Uber was incredible; cheaper, faster, tracked.

Obviously it won.

The same thing will happen in all these industries mentioned.

So if I were starting out I’d pick a niche industry within one of these boring, ripe for innovation spaces and niche right down into a narrow vertical.

If you want to get super creative with this boring business AI approach you can try to build a niched-down version of Uber in one of these verticals.

Probably something along the lines of freelancer-uber set-up instead of estate agents, where you have a freelancer show people around houses and do tasks, they directly communicate with landlords and SAAS companies like Goodlord cross the regulation barrier.

Almost like Taskrabbit for house viewings.

Something like this could connect landlords —> Marketing sites (Rightmove, Zoopla etc) —> Tenants —> <The Product in question> —> Goodlord —> Rental process completed.

Instead of waiting for useless estate agents that have the same issues of taxis.

In the same way that no-one only checks houses for sale are 1 estate agent now, they’ll use rightmove, zoopla and all these sites.

In the future I cannot see individual, old school estate agents surviving the next property pivot.

You can already see these things coming through the pipeline in other countries, but obviously the UK housing situation is pretty broken so I wouldn’t hold your breath.

The key would be utilizing proper processes built on top of AI to handle 99% of the grunt work, that other legacy businesses have not integrated.

The only issue is this is solving a big big problem so if we’re just looking for a cash-flowing business from day 1 this probably doesn’t make the cut as we need network efforts for something like this to work well, which take time and money to get to.

So instead we’ll keep out niche idea but niche down even further.

Option 3 - Industry Specific “X” Service

In this example I’ll use “marketing” as my “X", but in reality it could be any type of B2B service that’s specifically targeting a narrow niche or industry.

Design, Advertising, logistics, HR, legal, accounting, lighting, construction, hiring, anything.

Literally anything, the key is you just need to make this hyper specific to your industry (and ideally sub-industry), because this increases your value 100x vs being a generic provider.

People also know I joke about companies that provide “digital marketing services” - as in every single online marketing service under the sun? For £500/month….? What a great deal….

It’s the same idea as just doing one thing very well.

Do you want the person who’s a inch deep and a mile wide or a mile deep in the really specific problem you have?

This is also why I think GP’s are useless for a lot of things, but that’s a rant for another day.

The power of industry-specific-X was brought home for me when I went from being just an “SEO agency” to “Amazon SEO agency”.

Although the example is a little difficult because along the SEO agency journey I was really just learning a lot about actual business shit as well, which I didn’t know much about starting up, but the overarching point remains.

It took maybe 4 years to get to £100k/year revenue with the SEO agency, potentially more like 3 just because University/placement year makes it a bit messy and I’d been doing SEO (the skill) for years before that, but we’ll call it 4 years.

That’s revenue as well not profit, so a very long time considering the input of time and energy.

For the Amazon SEO branch, it took 8 months or so.

Even the organic traffic value went from essentially 0 ($183 value/month)

To over $20,000/month in less than a year (Oct 2017 —> Sept 2018).

ASC worked so well just because I understood the niche marketing side that was within an already developed broader skillset.

It’s very similar to the exact industry target, this was just an exact channel target, but I think industry works even better.

If you are trying to do any B2B service on a broad sense, imagine how much easier it would be if you double-niched-down to one target customer.

This is also why whenever someone says they do something very broad, espically if they haven’t been in business for a while, it’s almost always trash.

Think about the person who does “online marketing” vs the person who does “Instagram ads for accountants”….

If you are an accountancy who are you going to choose?

Who’s probably better at getting leads?

The double-niche-down idea is to go one or two levels deeper than you think necessary.

For example; “online marketing” — broad, useless.

One level down: “Search engine optimisation” — better, still generic though.

Two levels down “Conversion rate optimisation” — Good.

Three levels down “Conversion rate optimisation for supplement brands” — Perfect.

To some people that will seem crazy, far too niche.

Those people are idiots.

It is far far easier to massively niche down at the start and create insane value for a really targeted selection of people, and then as you become successful niche back up.

The funny thing is, non-health brands will still ask for CRO help…. That’s why it works so well.

A more common example would be something that follow this structure: “X Service for Y business”

E.G.:

• Window cleaner for skyscrapers.

• Florist for weddings

• coffee shop for hippies

• Home insurance for caravans

It can be in any type of business but when starting up on the service side, the more you niche down, the more value you can actually provide.

And the more value you provide, the higher you can price your services.

This is the key factor, because you become the perfect fit for that person its;

1. Easier to sell them..

2. You earn more.

3. You provide more value.

4. You become THE expert in the field.

You become the PERFECT fit for your target audience, so they automatically select you.

On some level we intrinsically already know this.

If a restaurant stated they did Chinese, Indian, pizzas, pasta, burgers, salads, BBQ, Mexican… You’d probably think it was shit.

You’d probably be right.

If they ONLY did chicken.

It would probably be pretty good.

If they only did Sushi for 75 years, it would probably be world class.

This holds true in B2B services as well.

Build the absolutely most niche offering you can and power it with AI.

This is more about the one professional trait that actually makes me want to keep talking to someone or get to know them.

At least for me, there’s a certain type of person I could talk to for hours and others who I simply cannot stand the small or “normie” talk.

“Normie shit” is how I refer to this.

Which might be a bit harsh, and for the record this doesn’t mean I dislike or look down on the individuals.

Instead they just seem to lack this specific trait that I value above almost everything else (aside from the obvious stuff) and when it comes to focusing on building something real, founding something, growing — there’s just no place for the normie shit to be in the same conversation.

20 minutes on the weekend with people you like, fine. 3 minutes with a neighbour to be polite, absolutely. But hours that could change how you think about what you're building? Not when people can't see the vision.

This divergence doesn't relate to absolute success either.

Industry, careers or even just aligning interests don’t matter in this frame.

Having similar interests and industries can help but it’s dwarfed in importance.

It’s interesting and fun to chat to people who are successful but if they lacked this trait, it would always seem like they were lacking something.

Someone who’s extremely successful but lacking in X just doesn’t sit right.

In the UK as well it’s tough to get this out of some people, to see if they have it.

It’s seen as egotistical to discuss in some settings.

Any guesses?

The trait?

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Ambition.

With clarity and a plan to achieve it too.

Without clarity or a plan, ambition is delusion or naivety.

With a plan, the skills, some resources and grit, even if success seems unlikely it's incredibly interesting and engaging.

This doesn’t have to be business related either.

Ambition in mastery of a craft, a physical endeavor, a sport.

Doesn’t really matter what the actual thing is, what matters is just the attempt of mastery and the ambition behind it.

This is why I love most founders.

And why my next business, the real shit, focuses on founders itself.

They are ambitious, interesting people.

Early September I bought out my co-founder’s 50% of the Futuro Labs (health supplements on Amazon).

This is after saying I wanted fewer things…. One large project….

So this might be hypocritical, but the maths was just keeping me up at night based on the actual potential profit to hourly rate.

This business is NOT a very time-intensive business.

The hours of input per month (before doing this) was very low, probably under 5/month.

After the admin, cleaning out the costs, fixing a few processes and around 50 hours of work one-time, the business should be very much in the 1 hour per week range (to keep the same).

That’s not to grow but to just keep the same.

Growth is another decision which is a post for another day, as this is not a brand I want to be working on, the big SH brand which will hopefully launch at the end of this year is the one that will take the most time/energy/capital etc.

But for today I wanted to discuss the economics with FL and add this to the business reports monthly along with the sports betting P/L’s and (once launched) the big SH project.

To reiterate: FL (Futuro Labs) is not a lifelong project.

SH: (big real brand) IS a lifelong project. The brand I want to be associated with, potentially forever.

Futuro Labs Maths, Buying out co-founder & Next 30 Days

Buying out co-founders (in general) feels very similar to acquiring companies, except you already know everything about the business and don’t have any “hidden risks” (for the most part), if you trust the individual you set it up with, which I do.

So why not continue together then?

I think it comes down to different goals and skills.

Futuro Labs is low time intensive business.

The issue is it’s also very difficult to grow.

We tried PPC (which I knew was a poor decision) but tried anyway and this didn’t work.

And moving into 2025 onwards neither of us had any ideas on how to grow the business and wanted to work on other things.

As a result, we asked around and my co-founder found a “buyer” that put in a loose official offer of $55,000 (about £45,000) for 100% of the business, valuing my share at around £22.5k.

This was an incredibly lowball offer, but based on the issues we faced when we sold Evopure and the crazy delays with payments, if the offer was 100% cash and all upfront we considered it (and were going to accept it), until it just bugged me too much and I decided to purchase 50% at the same valuation.

So in short, £25k for 50% of the business.

Valuing the business at £50k.

Despite this going against the “one thing” point that I do believe is incredibly important.

But from a pure time-to-money (and energy) point, here’s why I made this decision.

The maths

I think the business will/is doing around £100-120/day gross profit. Which can easily increase to 120-150/day GP with a few tweaks.

Over the first few days of September so far we’ve been higher than this but if we assume a lower-worse-case scenario of £120/day GP figure.

For anyone unfamiliar of the difference between gross profit and net profit, below should explain;

Although I don’t love that explanation, so in this business, an example would be simplified to: “Gross profit is simply the cost associated with fulfilling one order” So if your product costs £5 and £4 amazon fees and delivery. You sell this product for £15 it would be: £15-£5-£4 = £6 gross profit.

Other costs such as accounting fees, marketing expenses, staff, everything else comes off before the net profit figure.

So in the first 4 days of September (although 4th has not completed yet so should be higher), we’re sitting at the below figures. **NOTE: the “net profit” is actually gross profit here as the software we use to track all this data does not bake in other costs.

So gross profit of, call it £560.

/ 4 days = £140/day GP.

To be sure we’ll just use the £120/day GP figure I mentioned above to be safe.

£120 * 30ish days/month = £3,600/Month Gross profit.

Fixed & variable costs are around £600 currently (although should decrease) so we’ll call this exactly £3,000/month net profit.

From here you can just decide how “good” your business is.

In general businesses that are “better” (yes I’m simplifying), get a higher monthly net profit multiple.

The bigger the business, the higher the multiple as well.

In general for this size, I think a 25X monthly net profit multiplier is valid.

So that’s 25x £3,000 = £75,000 business valuation.

I’d also argue that because this is a very easy business to manage (from here not from day 1) that the multiple could even increase to 30x, but we’ll leave it like this for now.

If the business tripled however, not only would the net profit double (obviously assuming no changes in relative ops cost/fixed costs etc, but let’s assume not for this example).

The monthly net profit would be £6k, but your multiplier would also increase.

So instead of your business being worth £225,000. Based on the marketplace multipliers and this industry (screenshot below), you are looking at more of a 28-35x multiplier.

*the column "Multiple"

With some businesses getting as high as 40x and others a lot lower at 25-26x.

The reason these multipliers vary so much can essentially be boiled down to 3 things;

• Risk of the business decreasing - Do you rely on one product for 90% of your profits? Do you rely on one supplier only? Etc.

• Risk of the market decreasing - Are you selling newspapers or magazines in 2025.

• Reliance & Control - Amazon FBA businesses are reliant on Amazon’s sales channels. If Amazon changes something or new competitors come in, you have no control over those factors.

This is also why the more sales channels you have (Ecommerce, Amazon, Walmart, Socials) the better multiple you will get.

So back to my point around the maths & buying the business itself.

This is why it all boils down to the multiple, even between 2 co-founders.

If I value the business at a 25X multiplier.

But my co-founder values the business at a 15X multiplier.

That’s where the difference lies on the pure maths side.

There’s obviously a million more nuanced points; will sales increase, will margins decrease, is the market shrinking, does Amazon suck (yes, easier one) and so on.

But factoring all these in, you get a multiplier.

15 x 3000 = £45,000.

25 x 3000 = £75,000.

It’s kind of that simple.

Along with the fact I think the multiple AND the net profit will increase over the coming weeks and months.

As a result, that value difference of opinion is where/why I purchased it.

Over the next 30 days.

The goal will be simply to cut the costs of the business, simplify operations and see where we are on a gross profit per day basis throughout September.

After this, I think the business will be around £4k/month net profit (not gross, but our fixed costs are pretty low, about £600/month, which will try to be reduced further).

Also after this period of 30 days and about 50 hours invested, assuming the normal expected outcome, the business will do around £4k/month on about 4 hours invested per month (operational time invested not growth time). So about £1,000/hour.

Which sounds great but it is only the operational time invested, tracking sales, reordering inventory, customer service etc.

This is not growth marketing time invested (as per below).

Over the next 90 days.

This is the tougher one, this is where the growth marketing investment (both capital and time) will be input.

It’s easy to say “get to 6k/month net” or some arbitrary goal, but that 50-100% net profit jump is a lot more difficult to do (especially in this business) than many people think.

It’s also a bit naive to use this as a pure concrete goal as very rarely will you do something that *exactly* increases your business by 50% or 100%. Usually you’ll implement things that somewhat work over time, bit by bit and the occasional home run that might increase things by 200% or more.

So aiming for X amount of growth can be a bit dangerous is the short version.

The 90 day goal is to just think about low time investment marketing strategies that can increase the growth of the business both gross profit and revenue.

I’ll be adding the FL data to the end of month reports, starting again in September, writing up the results of FL sales and gross profit as well as sports betting profit/loss and the new SH project once this starts up properly.

Everything else such as the marketing agency / skincare business I’m winding down and these are boring anyway vs those 3.

Thought I’d write about a very interesting concept that came up again today, after I finally learned the official name for this effect and why open-loops are so frustrating.

The name of this effect (that has been bugging me for about a decade and a half) is apparently called the Zeigarnik effect.

Here’s the definition.

Or; “Open loops stay in our minds” “unfinished business” etc.

This effect is something I only found the name for 3 hours ago (Reading $100M money model’s lost chapters PDF), so I thought I’d write about it due to the fact it’s something that’s been bugging me for the past decade, albeit having partially solved the issue without defining it….

The effect is very well explained in business with the maker vs manager concept, originally written about by Paul Graham in his June 2009 post on Maker vs Manager which is well worth a read.

This psychological phenomenon directly explains why the maker/manager schedule conflict is so disruptive.

Maker vs Manager

The core idea is there’s two types of schedules -- which he refers to as manager schedules and maker schedules. There's nothing inherently wrong with either, but they don't mix well together.

The manager schedule is the time-blocked calendar type schedule where you input meetings, tasks, calls etc into said blocks, and the practical approach is to meet with someone when you are both "free" aka an empty slot.

But the "maker" schedule, examples of which include but are not limited to; programmers, writers, artists, woodworkers, most founders, doesn't work like that.

A maker schedule is chunky, usually in half day chunks or “all day” until it’s done in some cases.

Which might literally be entire days or weeks in a row.

The issue is when these 2 schedules try to mix, it ruins the latter.

This is so much of a problem (that I’ve experienced firsthand as well) that this is how Alex Hormozi (business guy) refers to it;

But for a maker, it’s a mind-parasite. For them, the open loops and pending tasks eat up attention, disrupt immersion, and destroy a maker’s productivity. Even if you know something happens in the afternoon, you know you must limit your morning work. You have to pay attention to make sure you end on time. Never mind the intrusive thoughts interrupting your day...now you must also watch the clock at a regular interval which interrupts the work you do leading up to the meeting. And at some point, you begin to think about what needs to be covered in the meeting, wholly removing the maker from their project at hand.

This is also why so few people whether by internal or external design get into real flow state work when they are on the “manager schedule”.

Which is a real issue, as this flow-state-work, which is such an enjoyable experience that it should be the goal-itself according to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (original dude who came up with the flow state research), is hyper-productive as well.

Whether you have a job where individuals are more interested in being seen as working, rather than actually building something of value, or if it’s as simple as “keeping teams green” which is apparently a thing….

This all boils down to real issues with misalignment and lack of productivity or just straight up getting problems fixed.

Which misses the entire overall goal of productive output for any maker/builder/founder or business itself.

Even just an employee trying to build something real or of real value within a company, it becomes impossible to do in the 9-5 and most employees are disincentivized to do work outside of this anyway.

Many people I've spoken to in large corporations know the issues but think the incentive to fix the issues doesn’t align properly.

Both in the “it won’t get fixed anyway” part, as well as the actual financial incentive to fix a major corporate problem that could be worth millions or even tens of millions in saved costs or increased earnings.

Personal Examples & How to combat this

Currently I’m building some real-brand-shit which isn’t fully public yet.

This is an incredible amount of time in the maker schedule, it’s impossible to know how long each individual step will take and a (seemingly) infinite number of steps to get this thing off the ground.

But there’s obviously other business processes and projects that fall more into the manager phase, hence this maker/manager schedule is something I still have, albeit with the reduction of businesses and projects its getting a lot better.

There are still small amounts of time dealing with clients, customers, team members in other businesses and all these things knock you out of flow state…. If only there were something to help with focus….

Anyway.

There are some strategies I’ve used fairly effectively for this that might be useful.

The one I used when first starting up back in Uni was quite drastic and simply involved working 8pm-1am after work for 6 months to get some progress.

I don’t think that’s necessary but if you value success over sleep then you will succeed.

On a less dramatic note, here’s some strategies I use currently that are working increasingly well:

1.) Do not disturb mode - obvious one but under-utilised still.

2.) Brain FM on phone - Brain.FM uses “brain music” which is pretty similar to the idea of binaural beats which has been proven to improve focus and get you into flow state more effectively, scientifically proven in all studies on binaural beats, if you don’t want the app then just search binaural beats or similar ideas on YouTube but ensure you won’t get interrupted by ads or YouTube itself….

3.) Block or batch one entire day/period for “manager” tasks - if you run your own business or craft, block an entire day or a few mornings if one full day is not possible to complete these tasks. This is also beneficial to do with “life admin” tasks. Save yourself hours by batching everything at once.

4.) Stack small “manager tasks” into your schedule - I like to exercise in the morning a few hours after getting up, so I’m not going to be getting in flow state between 8-9.30am, so this is where I’ll stack a lot of mini manager tasks; emails, 5-10 minute daily tasks, alarm prep (below), betting model updates from the prior day etc, meaning after midday my calendar is completely clear so my one “task” is always just 12+ - Build SH.

5.) Add phone alarms - This is essential so you can “close the internal loop” - By writing exactly what that alarm is for will help you get out and back into flow state very quickly. E.G. A team-lineup for a bet I need to run the model for, I can set this alarm after teams will be released but before the match itself begins, so I don’t need to think about “timing” the model, I just do this for 2 minutes once the alarm goes off, run the numbers, make a bet if applicable and dive back into flow state work, knowing that if there’s any more games another alarm will go off later. Other things might be as simple as setting alarms for when you need to leave for an event.

Freeing up the mental capacity to work on the flow-state or heavy focus related things.

These are essentially models where you create one specialized edge (or input) you can repeat and earn from for a long period of time.

So instead of leveraging labour or time daily you can leverage the “value” you created in the past in the future.

But don’t mistake this for passive income.

Edges are still active, they can obviously be passive as well but are most commonly where skills meet process meet automation or leverage.

Edges can be creative marketing strategies that work every single time (a process, automated or not), information asymmetry, pure edges such as those in sports betting or even things like automated trading bots, fully managed airbnb assets etc.

But think of edges more in the “process that sets up a fully managed airbnb” rather than the thing itself.

Someone who did this once is not impressive.

If you did this 40 times, that’s impressive.

Today we’re on about an interesting business model that combines some of the elements I’ve been thinking through and how in some very unique circumstances you can get multiple knock-on effects by doing the same thing.

Creators (Done Right)

YouTubers or influencer-first-creators are pretty cringe.

Anyone who responds to the what-do-you-do question with influencer or Youtuber is generally someone who isn’t going to fall into this model.

Instead I’m talking about creator-first channels who then leverage really nice business models on both the front end and back-end, and in some cases have additional benefits by doing the thing anyway.

The Four-Fold Best Business Model Example

The best example of this I’ve seen is in the woodworking niche, with a channel called Blacktail Studios, it’s a guy called Cam who creates high quality, full furniture-build type videos and does this in an entertaining and well-edited way.

1.) YouTube Ad Revenue

This is one of four monetisation methods for this channel (YouTube ad revenue, this would also be streamer income/donations in a different field).

I don’t love this approach when creators start a channel purely for this monetisation.

2. Selling the Physical Product

The second monetisation method is that because you’ve got this piece of custom, really high end furniture you’ve built (and documented) and have a channel of followers who like woodworking/you/furniture. You now actually have an automatic audience to sell said project very easily.

Usually for low five figures.

This is the start of the genius or just the reason why I think woodworking examples work so well in this area, is that people don’t care if you’ve done something in 3 hours, but if you’ve taken a month to build a fully custom piece of furniture, thousands of dollars in costs, hundreds of hours in building and crafting and probably dozens more of video editing and audio voice overs… You have something of value.

But you actually get 2 things out of it.

If someone creates an awesome piece of content, of the same length, in a similar niche, let’s just say its more of a how-to type video, at the end of all that work, you don’t have a five figure table to sell.

You don’t get this secondary benefit that has a doubly-high perceived value.

So now we have; YouTube monetisation + A nice fuck off table/desk/furniture we can sell (to our already impressed/interested audience).

Of which, two of his three most recent projects have already sold for five figures it looks like.

3. Niche-Specific Sponsorships

The third angle is niche-specific sponsorships - These are great because they are long-term and real rather than the quite irrelevant ads or sponsorships you see in a lot of videos.

In this example I believe he’s sponsored by some tool companies (and just gives them a shoutout whenever he uses said tools) as well as Epoxy, which is super expensive so having a sponsorship for that probably saves a ton even if he’s only paid in free epoxy.

These work best when you actually use and would-use the products you discuss and are paid for.

Obviously.

Otherwise you’re just a shill.

4. Building a Brand/Business

The fourth is simply to build a niche-business off the back of your audience.

This is what I think some youtube channels get really wrong, despite still being successful with it in some cases.

There’s builder/maker type channels that have really overpriced products and treat these almost like donations.

Meaning if your audience wouldn’t buy-the-product-anyway, then it’s probably a pretty bad deal.

You are seeing a lot of these low quality food and beverage type products come through the lines from these influencers that have nothing to do with their actual brands or following.

In the Blacktail studio example he’s launched some higher end wood finishing products with some other more niche products such as a "Damascus Precision Edge Marking Knife".

The difference really is that there just seems to be some actual effort gone into this being a real brand created by the creator themselves.

Similar to another woodworker who launched a wood finishing product (that's different) called sample 73. Again done very well and I actually believe he created this, launched it, tested it etc.

They bring you on the journey of the build and it actually makes sense for their brand.

It’s not a pump and dump money grab from a greedy, almost predatory content creator, usually fueled by, let’s call it young or dumb money.

5.) Options

What makes this even better is if you want to be purely a content creator, you can ignore part 4.

If you don’t want the stress of building a brand or business around your audience or channel, then don’t.

Or just go with option 1 and 4, pushing part 4 “building the brand” in the right way.

There’s other YouTubers that have done this “part 4” of create a brand around your audience really well.

Such as Gotham Chess with his chess learning platform Chessly, and Mark Rober making kids smart again with Crunch Labs.

Both really well done but they don’t get that added benefit(s) of the part 2 and 3.

Especially the idea around “in the video creation process, you end up with something of massive value”.

I think people try to fast track this by actually trying to leverage this idea but simply spend 1 day, when they should have spent 30 or a piece of content.

Depth is appreciated over breadth as well.

Most people (me included) will be interested about someone who is the-best at a particular skill or thing.

Almost regardless of the thing if the context and content it is provided in is entertaining or informative.

This is why depth is so much more essential.

Depth or specialized knowledge, whatever you want to term it.

Actually even more so with AI taking over and speeding up progress.

If you have depth of knowledge already, AI super-powers your ability to create with that depth, but if you have only a one-inch knowledge of many things, you are literally replaced instantly by it.

Better to be a mile deep than an inch wide.

A lot of people are talking about how it’s better to be a generalist now than a specialist because of AI.

I think this is backwards.

AI still can’t go out and understand what ratings and calibrations I need for a sports betting model, or what’s more important batting or bowling in cricket?

But it can build me scrapers to collect data and write scripts to answer these questions.

But it doesn’t know what questions to try answer in each niche yet.

I also think this is why our woodworking example works so well.

With all the improvements in AI generative video, I think people are craving a bit of mastery-to-craft content, especially when it’s authentic.

Woodworking works so well in this example because it hits all these points.

The product that’s created is physical, it’s a very tangible end product, it also has a higher perceived value (one of a kind, tons of hours input, custom) both physically and on the content creation side.

It’s just more real.

I struggled to think of more examples around this without it feeling gimmicky, and as always there are caveats.

Caveats

1. Yes, you have to grow the audience

2. Yes, it’s difficult and time consuming to develop videos for months and probably years before you get anywhere remotely close to these numbers.

3. Yes, there are start-up costs.

4. Yes, there is a ton of competition.

But this is the same with all businesses.

There’s always tons of competition, costs and you start from zero anyway.

But if you can think about these future avenues it’ll motivate you (and me) to continue towards mastery of the craft, rather than just thinking purely about money.

There's a quote from Robert Greene's Mastery that's baked into my brain:

However long your project takes to complete, you will always experience a sense of impatience. The single greatest action you can take to acquire creative power is to reverse this natural impatience. You take pleasure in the laborious research process. Time is in fact your greatest ally.

This is really good advice.

Almost impossible to remember most of the time as well.

Personally I haven’t drawn the lines to my personal four-factor business model approach yet, I’m trying to get some ideas and think about how all the different skills and projects through the years can merge into this really nice creator, mastery evolving, multiple leveraged structure… Haven’t got there yet but open to ideas.

The last point I couldn’t fit anywhere else as well is within the mastery of craft 4-factor approach, every time you do this you become better at your craft, so when you approach it as mastery of your craft, business, video editing, brand, product creation, marketing, audience retention and everything associated, if you treat it as mastery towards said craft there’s less pressure and you feel less rushed.

Time is in fact your greatest ally.

Cheers.

A very short recap, go read the other one first if you haven’t already for a better understanding.

The Monty Hall Problem is not a maths problem about probability and switching.

It’s a problem around information asymmetry.

The host knows something you don’t, they communicate this, hence giving you a probabilistic advantage.

This concept led me down a rabbit hole I hadn’t heard of before.

Information Asymmetry

If you want to get better results at anything, you have 2 options.

You can build up either skills, try to build an edge(s), “grind” or you can create information asymmetry.

This information asymmetry idea applies to any professional and personal area of life and can be as simple as knowing something the other person “doesn’t-know-you-know” to literal illegal shit and fraud.

In dating/sex, knowing what someone is looking for, their hobbies, interests etc. gives you a massive edge vs going in without this info.

This also works just knowing WHO someone is, you can phrase your conversion to what you know they like.

This is actually just sales in a nutshell.

Another direct example would be in silent auctions, knowing how much someone is going to bid before they do so, obviously is a very direct example of information asymmetry as you can go £1 above and win instead of potentially thousands above if you wanted to make sure.

But I wanted to think of an example that’s a little more nuanced as this whole idea is best explained in multiple examples.

Here’s one.

Health/Insurance data

If you take care of your health and have multiple blood tests, genetic tests, even full genome sequencing as well as daily health tracking data (whoop bands, oura rings, apple watches), chances are you are pretty clued in on your health.

So imagine if you knew you might be pretty prone to a certain disease or illness.

Health insurers know alot about you, but they don’t know your full genetic sequence (yet). As a result, if you knew something that would change your health-insurance premiums/rates, would you tell them?

This is a very direct form of personal information asymmetry.

Usually this is the opposite way around based on all the data and actuary info that insurance companies have.

But in a very granular personal situation, they do not know this (yet).

Ethical line, and one you should probably be conscious of if your data is then sold to health insurance companies….

But assuming that doesn’t happen, considering you personally have gone out of your way, paid for and proactively done these tests/screenings etc, would you let them know?

Most like increasing your premiums in the process.

Personally my answer would be no, but not just for the obvious (less cost) reason.

Instead it would be purely from a logical standpoint, if I'm at a higher risk of disease X and lower risk of disease Y, I can take action (lifestyle, training, diet, supplementation) to decrease my risk of disease X further anyway.

But this pro-active prevention approach is not yet baked properly into insurance protocols.

Interesting one to think through that isn’t just related to money and professional stuff that I usually talk about.

Money & Professional Stuff Information Asymmetry

Simplifying money and professional projects into 2 to-do actions.

1. Create Skills - Ideally edges, as discussed at length previously on this site.

2. Create information asymmetry.

For me this acts as a really clear and easy to understand strategy for success.

Build more, better, relevant skills.

Find or create information advantages.

Simple.

Given the choice as well, always choose information asymmetry.

The funny part is that even if you have extreme skills, super high EQ & IQ, resources and all the advantages, you lose to creative information asymmetry.

Here’s a few examples.

The Greatest Investor of Our Time

The most obvious one that comes to mind as an extreme version of information asymmetry is insider trading.

There’s a reason why Nancy Pelosi is the greatest trader of all time, and it’s not to do with skillsets.

It’s the same reason why insider trading is super illegal.

There’s now also a Pelosi stock tracker with over a million followers on Twitter for this exact reason.

Another similar example would be crypto influencers.

If they have weight and a large following, all you need to do is know when they post, get AI tools to “watch” the video and give you the angles within 20-30 seconds. And front-run the angles.

Again, there’s obviously some ethics involves when you are talking about some of the trash that these people promote but that’s up to you.

At the end of the day this concept is what people do for the Fed interviews and announcements with billions of dollars, monitoring every word as it is spoken and making trades milliseconds after this happens.

Poker - 2 Versions of Asymmetrical Information

Another easy example to understand is in poker land.

The most extreme version is borderline fraud.

You can be the best player in the world but if the other player knows your cards its all for nothing.

If your in a fixed game, same thing, you are done.

But assuming that’s not that common in the regulated/online world and you have some kind of morals, there’s another more real version.

This is to know exactly what someone has done in every similar situation they’ve been in.

So you have data on what a player is likely-to-do given the current circumstances.

This is a massive asymmetrical informational advantage that is very possible to build with some determination and just putting in the hours.

It also gets multiplied in effectiveness the more people are added to this database/system.

If there’s 500 regular strong players in your field and you have data on half of them, you can leverage this in important, high-impact spots.

Leading to better decision making in very leveraged situations, leading to better earnings throughout.

My First Real Informational Asymmetry

In a personal, real example, years ago I had a massive information asymmetry, albeit I didn’t call it this or really know how extreme it was at the time.

The idea was simple - weather in cricket.

More specifically, how to use this in my favour.

So for anyone who doesn’t know, there’s a type of cricket (the long ass one that lasts days) where you can bet on the result being a draw.

To keep things simple, if it rains, they don’t play, if they don’t play, they draw.

It’s more nuanced but not really.

Even cleaner version: in some types of cricket, if it rains they don’t play, hence the result is determined by the weather directly.

Everyone already knows this, definitely not an informational edge or asymmetry.

But.

Which weather site(s) sportsbook use to adjust the odds or create the lines is important to know.

Meaning those actual weather-websites help make the line itself….

That’s a key bit of info, as last time I checked weather sites weren’t oddsmakers and these sites really aren’t great at predicting weather events, especially multiple days out (considering our cricket game lasts 5 days).

As a result what tended to (less so nowadays) happen is that sportsbooks over-adjust weather, and especially in some cases (Sri Lanka for example) it’s always raining but also never-raining, and hence massive value (40-50% edges) just because you knew which weather sites were “correct”.

So “raining all week” = probably about 5 hours of heavy rain across 5 days…. Not the same thing.

*There was also some specific knowledge here, that in-general cricket draw pricing is mispriced (the short version: less games are draws nowadays, so prices should always be larger than they are).

**You can also layer in cricket pitches/stadiums that historically have quicker games (tough pitches, more wickets etc.) but you don’t even need to go that deep here.

So, in short, the process was:

• Everyone thought it was going to rain more than it was.

• Due to sportsbooks using poor weather sites.

• By knowing which sites were more accurate.

• Versus which sites were used by sportsbooks.

• Created an edge of 40%.

The key is in the simplicity.

Zero code, zero player modelling or complex algorithms were needed to come up with this, it was literally just “it’s not gonna rain as much as they think”.

I even hired a dude on Upwork for a week near the stadium to text me weather updates, that’s the super lazy version of the above but that’s a story for another day.

Creating asymmetrical information is your biggest (and most obvious) potential edge.

In an SEO example, if you know exactly how to actually rank a website and can do so every single time, that’s asymmetrical information because 99% of people (including SEO agencies) do not know how to do this.

It might be a simple, slightly boring example but it’s a clear one.

The reason why trading or sports/betting is a better example is it’s very clear, granular and quick to get correct feedback. AKA did you win?

If you have custom data or key information (injuries for example before they are publicly available), nothing else matters.

If you know the best player on a team is out before the market does, you don’t need to know anything else about the teams, players or even sport - you just bet the opposition.

Unlike investing, this is not insider info or illegal, unless your playing in the game? Then I think it’s illegal to bet on your own matches…

Either way the asymmetry is massive in these spots.

<If anyone has this info please call me>.

Anyway.

When the market finds this information out, the line will move.

Then if you really want you can “sell out” the position, hedge or even just let a very good bet ride.

This is the “buy the hype, sell the news” type concept in investing, albeit you already know whether it’s real hype or not as you have this informational advantage.

Another example (that’s a real story from someone) is seeing a tennis player in a nightclub the day before a tournament starts…

Can’t imagine that’s good for performance, and you can always buy them a bottle to make sure.

Although all these information asymmetry examples are obvious and extreme there’s more nuanced ones too.

Getting your hands on good/custom datasets that other bettors/traders/businesses don’t use. That’s an informational advantage (depending how you use it).

On a individual smaller scale, understanding where the company you work for or your boss/manager is in their current lifecycle. Whether you have leverage or not.

Based on experience there’s people I’ve worked with that have leverage over me, meaning if they priced twice as much I’d have to just say yes, there’s others where if they asked for a 1% raise I’d say no, it comes down to value and leverage.

A company about to IPO, a start-up raising money, or even on a very small scale a team member in a company that is struggling to hire good talent.

These are all dynamic changes that result from informational asymmetry.

When you have a job, if you are a valued member of the team, you could always be thinking “how much fuckery would it be to replace me?”

This changes your positioning, so if you approach asking for a 30% raise, you are coming from a position of strength not weakness.

Of course it needs to be valid, earned, you need to add value already etc etc but from a pure positioning standpoint, it’s easier to do if you know that a company cannot afford to lose another person.

Creating Informational Asymmetry

The more difficult part.

If you are with me that info asymmetry is a bit of a goldmine, the next logical step is how do I build this.

This concept runs all the way back to creating an edge in any project or business you are working on. The whole concept of which was explained in one of the first posts on this site.

The very short version - create value by doing all the work upfront, to build something that enables you to benefit and earn on repeat.

How to create informational asymmetry?

First realise they exist fucking everywhere.

The more creatively you think, the more you will see.

Narrow down what area you are going to look for them in - professional, personal, health, relationships.

Next narrow down your specific skills related to the angle.

Although these aren’t essential, having some context about the project is valuable to speed up the process.

Next create a desired timeline/timescale - most of the examples used in this post are very short term timelines because they are easier to explain but information asymmetry can be used/created/benefitted from for years or decades.

This is more of a desired timeline rather than a concrete one.

Do I want to earn through my info asymmetry within a day, week, decade, the timeline is up to you but just define it.

Think creatively and list every detail, every input that impacts, effects or is related to your specific project.

The more granular and niche the better.

I’m talking things as deep as the following (if we are thinking about the cricket angle);

• Weather - mentioned earlier.

• Travel - where are people coming from.

• Pitch - what did it do last time, was it too much/little?

• Grounds staff - do I know anyone who knows them.

• Players - Who might be injured, who’s posting Instagram stories in-da-club.

• Incentives - Are there incentives or disincentives at play.

• Covid - this was a good one, who’s out with covid/near-covid points.

There’s so many but the more granular (and random) you can get the better.

You can also use 2 tools to think about this.

1. Inversion thinking - what’s the worst case look like. I thought it was going to rain for all 5 days every single day and it turns out it’s being played in a different fucking continent. Literally….. Not speaking from experience….

2. BEST CASE thinking - Working backwards from best case thinking. “Best case is I own the stadium and pitch this match is being played on and I know every single player personally to ask them who’s playing, who’s injured etc). Realistically could I know 1 person and 1 scout in the building…. Probably.

Another idea is to add in second order effects.

So another (cricket weather again sorry) example of a good second order effect was informational edges through a massive fuck off storm coming through the UK.

Everyone knew it was coming, everyone knew it was going to suck and not many results were going to happen.

But people didn’t realise the scale because there were still some unknowns, such as whether it would be bad for say 2 days instead of 3.

If it’s 2 days you might get some results in the cricket.

If it’s 3 days then it’s borderline impossible to get any (hence betting our draw option is a good idea at any price).

What people didn’t realise is that individually this didn’t matter but because this was a UK wide storm, if it’s really bad weather in Bristol, it’s probably going to be very bad in Cardiff, and Taunton and London and Southampton…

So if one game draws, they all do.

So now we’re correlating results but versus one outcome (shit gonna rain a lot).

As a result, something like 37/1 odds on a 60%ish probability of all matches being draws.

Not bad.

A bet of £500 has an EV of: £10,900.

Still to this day probably the best EV bet I’ve ever made.

Zero cricket modelling, zero stats knowledge needed, just a bit of creativity and specific understanding of situations.

It also resulted in this market getting removed, which is why I’m fine to talk about it publicly now.

Hopefully an interesting concept, let me know any creative information asymmetry ideas.

Cheers.

Tom.

Would you switch boxes at the end?

For anyone unaware of the premise of the show, here’s a quick summary;

At the end, presuming the player gets there before making a “deal”, they get the offer to switch with the last remaining box (with the one they choose/assigned at the very start of the show).

If you were the contestant, would you switch boxes?

If you said yes and you think you know where I was going with this, it might not be the case.

If you said no, then this is probably due to one of three reasons, that might have worked in your favour in this particular situation:

• You don’t understand shit about maths and probability.

• Loss aversion.

• Endowment Effect.

I want to discuss a few of these and get into some more real world examples about switching, the costs associated, biases against it and some other concepts around why its so tough to switch.

Starting with the most famous example of a similar problem where these ideas were first popularized.

The Monty Hall Problem

The Monty Hall Show: "Let's Make a Deal" was a game show hosted by Monty Hall where contestants chose between 3 doors, boxes, or curtains to win prizes, often involving dramatic reveals and psychological pressure.

The Monty Hall Problem: You choose one of three doors (one has a car, two have goats). After you pick, Monty opens one of the remaining doors to reveal a goat (every time), then offers you the chance to switch your choice.

The Correct Solution: You should always switch - it doubles your odds from 1/3 to 2/3. When you first picked, you had a 1/3 chance of being right, meaning there was a 2/3 chance the car was behind one of the other two doors. When Monty eliminates one wrong door, that entire 2/3 probability concentrates on the remaining unchosen door.

The key is that the host always opens a door with a goat behind, meaning he knows which door the car is behind.

So people assume this is a simple maths problem.

66.6% > 33.3%, but that’s not the concept I wanted to discuss.

The Monty Hall problem is actually not a maths problem at all.

It’s not a probability puzzle either.

I was going to write about how deal or no deal is a bigger version of the Monty Hall problem as an intro to this post, and from there go into real world switching situations.

But that’s actually incorrect.

It’s actually not even close to the same thing.

Because the Monty Hall problem is not stats or maths or probability.

It’s a problem about decision making and specifically something that I’ll call information asymmetry.

It’s masked as a probability problem because the host has inside knowledge!

He knows where the prize or car is, and hence to keep the show going he will always choose a door with a goat, revealing a probability weakness.

Obviously because it’s a gameshow we know he’s not going to go AWOL one day and mix up whether he shows a car or a goat first.

Whereas in the deal or no deal gameshow, the host (as far as I know) doesn’t know where the prizes are, so it is just pure chance.

So its a completely different concept.

So in answer to the very first question/title “should you switch?” —> In deal or no deal, the answer is: it doesn’t matter.

But in the real world, it actually does.

In general, yes you should switch more, because you have information asymmetry, both about yourself (internal) and about opportunities that exist (external).

They are also vastly larger than 66% to 33% probabilities.

They are even more asymmetrical bets.

Take a simple tweaked example question.

What’s the likelihood that the first job or industry you got into was the best one for you?

What about the third, or the fifth, or even the 10th?

Probably a pretty low probability that it was THE BEST.

But how many positions have you actually tried, or businesses or hobbies or projects or cities to live in….?

Usually very little.

Also these are usually the things that really matter.

That’s because it’s simply not that easy to get up and change industries or jobs or cities.

Which is why so many people don’t make this switch to just try something new.

It’s like being the host and being able to open doors/boxes but choosing not to, choosing to just stick with the one you have, making your odds so much worse.

From a human perspective we know why we do this.

Starting from scratch is just really f*cking hard.

It’s just we hate starting again.

It feels like losing or going backwards.

It’s sunk cost all over again.

It’s ego as well.

This whole idea contains so many human biases that its tough to breakdown into parts.

The biggest player though, in my opinion, is loss aversion.

As human’s we hate losing more than we like winning, by almost 2:1 according to all the Kahneman and Tversky research.

This just makes doing anything that has a 50/50 shot, effectively not worth it (from a mental standpoint).

Another reason why betting is tough as an industry, having one positive day and one negative day for the same amount feels worse than it should.

Another common bias in this same sphere is the endowment effect.

Essentially meaning that between these 2 biases, something you have (that you risk losing) vs something that you don’t have or know, that may or may not be better is a really tough trade off to make, and hence we don’t risk it.

Let’s say you have a 6/10 life in your current city.

Moving all that up and trying to build an 9 or 10/10 life in a new city, regardless of all the associated hassles of moving that life, makes this decision incredibly difficult to do, because in your head it could be even worse than a 6!

Information Asymmetry

I’m going to do an entire post on information asymmetry in the future as it’s a very interesting concept to me, so I’ll keep it brief, but in this switching sense there’s some obvious examples that relate back to human nature, biases and why switching is so tough.

Probably evolution’s fault thinking about it.

If we stick in a tribe with everyone we know we’re (probably) not going to get murdered or eaten or freeze to death.

But if we look for better options and leave the tribe, that likelihood probably increases 10,000%.

So why risk sacrificing a 6/10 life for a 9/10 potential one?

I think that, in essence is the issue.

If we had the information available to reduce that unknown gap, then it would make the switching way easier to do.

But more on information asymmetry in the future.

Switching In Business

Everyone who knows me, knows I always bang on about the concept of just doing one thing really really well.

Don’t start multiple projects, because you will suck at all of them.

Dilution of effort / resources.

The sum of its parts is not equal to the whole in this case.

This is advice I wish I took years ago, as by not doing this, I’ve had far more issues and less success, making it easily my biggest (of many) business mistakes.

It’s not to say you have to do one thing forever.

Instead it’s about going all in on one thing at a time.

You’ll make far more progress doing something 10 hours a day for 3 months than 10 minutes a day for a decade.

You also build momentum and success, which will build confidence in the flywheel.

There’s obviously exceptions.

You can’t lift weights for 10 hours a day for 6 months, but for skill/business/personal growth related goals, it’s a rule that applies most of the time.

The reason why doing one thing at a time, the sprint then rest mentality, is a good approach is that resources and energy only go so far, especially at the extremes.

Michael Jordan, arguably the goat of goats, literally tried competing in a second sport and failed miserably.

But choosing the first thing you do and aiming for mastery of that can also be a pretty bad decision.

The small-business-restaurant-owner who works 90 hours a week and earns 60k a year is not working any less hard than the founder of another “small business” with 9 employees that does 10 million a year.

They are just different.

They are just working on different things with different upsides and importantly different leverage.

Which is another post for the future.

This idea of switching, both intra-day (task switching literally makes you less effective both in the short and long term) — AKA do one thing really well.

As well as switching in the macro-sense — “I have this semi-successful business/project/job that is fine and if I grind I can make a lot of money…. But if I start again I’ll have to go backwards”.

AKA — Less money, less short term success, more chance of failure, ego bruising etc.

So in short, it depends.

Which is always a boring cop-out answer whenever someone says this.

So instead, some ideas and questions to think about in regards to this.

One question of which I think nails it, that if you are asking yourself more than once a quarter, then you should seriously think about switching.

Versions of; “Why am I here”, “I dislike this” “would I be better in/at X”, Googling other job ventures, proactively looking into other cities etc.

In this case the signal is super clear, it’s just the hassle around action.

The pain of switching is something we all know about, the same reason we stay in “fine” accommodation because the week of moving is such a pain in the ass.

Or why we stay in a comfortable city or location rather than something that would be great if we made it so.

You don’t have to switch “EXTREME”

You don’t need to switch from a restaurant owner to a day trader.

But if you feel like you perform extremely well in your industry but it’s seen as a commodity, going “up” the chain may be worthwhile.

There’s steps in-between, skills to learn and information to acquire that benefit you both in the short-term and longer-term.

Regret Minimization

When researching this idea, one concept that came up alot was the "Regret Minimization at 80" framework.

A framework popularized by Jeff Bezos.

Tweaked to our example would be something along the lines of “Will you regret not trying the switch more than you'll regret the short-term setback of switching?”

Most people over-weigh short-term pain and under-weigh long-term regret.

It’s a similar idea to delayed gratification.

The difference being you don’t actually know for sure if it will be better.

Unlike many delayed gratification ideas, working out, saving money, eating well, these are all pretty much definitely going to make future-you better than present-you.

Moving cities or jobs or businesses might not.

It genuinely could just be a shit idea or shit execution.

I also think it’s even more difficult to come at this concept if you are already doing “okay” or even “good” - because giving up that completely (remember just choose one thing) to go after something great is more difficult than starting with nothing and going after great.

If you have a 1/10 life and you are trying to get to a 9/10 life, if it doesn’t work out (after say a year) you’ll have a 1/10 life again. If it does, then jumping “8 points” is worth the risk. You literally have nothing to lose in the first situation.

If you have a 6/10, you might drop to a 4/10 for a while in search for the 9/10.

This is something that I think about personally alot, I think I have a great life, but I want to get to epic. So going from 8 or 9/10 to 10/10, to do that, I have to risk going down first.

Of course add some concrete blocks, never risk the non-negotiables.

But after that, switch more.

Risk more.

It’s not even a “try more new stuff” idea.

It’s literally a switch-more.

Go all-in on something important more often.

Obviously, do this in a smart way, but just remember we’re all basically programmed to hate switching big things in our life.

So if you’ve considered it, you should probably do it.

Going from high paying, dull, corporate job or semi-successful client facing business where you might make 100-200k a year, to switch to something you’ve never done (all in) before, going to literal 0 for X amount of time, it’s scary and tough both in practice and just mentally.

This is made even more difficult as you are not vindicated straight away.

It’s not like the guy that quit the job or quit the business to do something else gets vindicated on day one, usually not even year one.

It’s years before they or anyone else can look back and realistically say, I’m glad I switched. Or get a positive response around “that was a good decision”.

In the practical sense many people say “I’ll start this alongside <current thing> and once it reaches <X amount> (almost always what they earn now) I’ll quit the business/job etc”.

Side-bar: This is not about “do what you love” - there’s been tons of research around that not being the best advice, this is more about “do what you want to do”.

If you want to start a trash collection business because a.) they all suck, b.) you have the skills for it and c.) you could make tons of money and give your family/friends a better life… That’s probably something you’d want to do.

It’s also probably not your passion.

Still Not sure whether to switch?

Some final ideas and questions to think about.

Ignoring the obvious ideas around; opportunity cost, time value, pros/cons etc, here’s 3 final unique ideas:

• What option will give you a better social life? — Both by doing the thing and also have more (or less) time to spend socially. Removing money entirely what option is preferable (hidden costs in life).

• Energy - what activities give you energy vs drain it? — Which will you do more of in each situation? Energy is finite. Sometimes switching isn't about money, it's about not dying at 50 from stress (or boredom).

• Depth & Options - what gives you even more options in the future? — Are I in a dying industry? Do I think the people around my business will grow? Are the skills I learn in the next stage (of progression/business) even useful?

Some ideas to think about.

Cheers.

Tom.

July is the first real bad month since the re-tweaking of the goals and changing industries completely.

The first real tough losing period, both from a pure cash perspective and also a breaking of momentum side of things.

March, May and June had been awesome, even if you include the negative month of April which wasn’t horrific but still down, momentum was getting built, but this month… Big suck.

I don't mean the odd losing day or even losing week, I mean losing substantial money over the course of multiple weeks whilst still making the correct bets 98% of the time.

Previously November last year or January this year we had pretty substantial losing months, but was mainly down to there actually being clear bugs or logic issues in the model, essentially because I’m not a developer trying to do developer shit.

This, albeit frustrating, wasn’t that bad as it meant there wasn’t anything “wrong” with the model itself, it was just the sucky coding abilities, and obviously it sucks to lose a bunch of money but this falls into the “cost of doing business” type of bucket.

This time, the fucker that is July, (I think) that's not the case.

This just feels like one of those 1 in 100 type of month where every little thing went against you, every price or line, close game, injury, increased unit sizing edge, model variation, minor bug etc.

Culminating in some very rough days, some 1 in 50 type bad MF of a day, that realistically happens 2% of the time or 5-8 times a year if you are betting everyday (historically weirdly a Tuesday or a Sunday for me).

But this time, when you get 4 of these in a month, across all sports, you have a MF of a month.

Timelines & Zoom out

But zooming out.

The real issue is to understand "is this just expected bad variance, or is there a substantial real issue?"

Basically “is shit broke?”

This is the key in general with everything moving forward, it's also probably one of the less common things in business vs extremely common on the betting side.

Business is a little more cause and effect, more open loops. Especially if you’ve been in business for a few years, you know the cause and effect relationship well.

Betting though, is fully closed (which is good for me personally) but it also means the key question of "is shit broke?" Can be tough to answer.

It's also just a human nature thing, losing is worse than winning is good.

AKA Loss aversion.

Which I thought was funny that when I googled Loss aversion to grab an image, the first one is one that shows why this is so prevalent in betting.

Imagine this, every day, times by 1000x.

It’s tough, which is why zooming out helps.

I think this whole loss aversion thing is why gambling addiction exists at all but that's a rant for another day.

A bad day doesn’t really bother me nowadays, even a bad week not too much, the only one is a bad month as in-theory variance should even out enough that in that month you shouldn’t really lose if you have enough volume (number of bets per month) and edge (ROI per bet).

So if I make 100 bets per month at a 10% ROI/Edge, ($1 bets) that would be;

• Expected profit: 100 × $0.10 = $10

• Standard deviation: √(100 × 0.99) ≈ $9.95

Using the normal approximation (valid for 100 bets), the probability of losing money is the probability that your total profit is negative.

This equals: P(Z < -10/9.95) ≈ P(Z < -1.005) ≈ 15.7%

<took to Claude to create the above + these graphics>

Obviously nothing is truly 0.0%.

But for the purpose of this, if you’ve created a model that you think has a 20% edge and after 100 bets you are negative, the likelihood of that is only 1.5% (due to variance).

BUT, the likelihood that you’ve fucked up your model and overfit the shit out of it to trick yourself into thinking it’s good….. Is higher than 1.5%…. Speaking from experience.

And if you get to 200 bets at 20% edge and you are still down then that’s only a 1 in 1000 chance.

This is also why when I build models I aim for higher ROI and lower bet volume as mentally I think it’s easier to handle losing on 50 bets and thinking this might not be right than aiming for a 5% ROI and not being sure until you are in that 500 bet volume range.

But, this also does help once you get some volume of bets, as you can be more and more confident in your modelling. Meaning you can safely increase unit sizes if you match up to these performances.

Anyway.

When things do go bad, I to try counter these bad weeks or months, by zooming all the way out.

In my case I'd say it's been only about 7 months of "doing" sports betting this way.

There was years and years of previous specific knowledge of sports and betting principals and business knowledge that definitely helped, but the pure machine learning type creation of sports betting models only started in late October 2024.

And in reality the real progress only started to ramp up in Feb 2025.

So whichever timeline is used it's been 6-8 months of full real effort in this new method/business/project whatever you want to call it.

The speed of progress and profit in that time, including multiple weeks of very little, when travelling or moving around/house has still been impressive and promising.

By zooming out and asking would you have taken this profit/output during the first 6 months when you started? Even including any negative runs, bugs and all, the answer would obviously be yes.

Not from the money POV as I've had business that have been a lot more profitable than this, but those took multiple years to get to those points, instead the more promising point is how quick this has materialized.

By zooming out it helps to just put things into perspective.

At least for me personally.

It also helps to improve models in the future as well.

In the past the only times that these have been improved is when shit goes badly.

As when everything is going well, the saying of "if it ain't broke" comes to mind. But it's also pretty true.

For me, when stuff is going badly, massive improvements get made.

This month was no different.

That’s not to say that I’d rather have learned the lesson without the expense but everytime a drop happens the bounce back seems to be equal or better, and in theory you just run out of stuff to go wrong.

Losses are the only time when models get sharper, as by definition I wouldn’t be betting them if I didn’t think they were sharp….

Remember the goal.

As much as I’d like to have 20%+ ROI models for tons of different sports or 10%+ with crazy volume, in reality it’s unlikely, but I only need one or two.

You only need to be right once.

Apparently attributed to Mark Cuban relating to business, but it holds here.

If only 1 or 2 sports worked out after all this, those 2 would be so elite that it would pay for all of the fuck-ups of the rest….

Environment

Just a quick note on the environment impact of this.

Your physical environment is a massive predictor of success or failure.

Everyone knows this in the “the 5 people you spend the most time with sense”.

Or even how your postcode is more correlated to your wealth than your IQ.

But the environment in the purest sense of the word becomes valid here.

This bad run happened when I was back home (Cardiff), staying with the parents for 3 weeks waiting to move to a rental place in Bristol…

Correlated.

Obviously not causative.

It’s not to say that environments create results but there’s something to it here, I’m pretty sure I would have lost less this month had we still been travelling or back set-up in Bristol.

Obviously impossible to tell, but I have a hunch.

Travelling around Europe, working in Bristol, having great months, or going “backwards” and having the worse month of the year, even technically the 2nd worse month ever (in absolute terms, not relatively speaking though) when “back”….

Seems odd.

Anyway.

Future Stuff

I’m going to try write twice a month moving forward.

One will still be sports betting, niche related topics, with updates about the journey towards the goal and this switch of industries. Betting volume is still very low at the moment, but come late September and Q4 volume explodes so that’ll be a very interesting time.

The other post will most likely be about a concept or psychological theory that I’m trying to think about, might be interesting, might suck, either way, more to come.