Freedom & Money - April 2025 Update
Travelling around Europe, pivoting & Adding maths to goals to make them feel real.
Travel Stuff
It’s early April and writing this from the fourth Airbnb of 5 in just an 8 day period.
Properly feels like the digital nomad life, albeit that concept has a certain amount of cringe to it nowadays.
Just wanted to riff about what’s been happening the past 1-2 weeks and some future goal points and how to make these more achievable.
First up, Europeans eat dinner way to late.
Like you guys are mental. 9pm as standard…. No.
Anyway.
Whilst being in this heavy travel phrase I’ve been thinking about a few things around business + travelling at the same time and actually just doing what you want to do in cities.
I remember doing shit I didn’t want to do when travelling in the past and always feeling like I was in a rush despite rarely having to be anywhere at certain absolute times.
Having a “thing” when you travel is under-rated, especially when the thing makes you walk around new cities for 6+ hours a day just getting the vibe.
Most people like culture, arts, museums, food, wine, touristy type shit.
I like good coffee and although I wouldn’t say I’m a full-on coffee geek, when I go to new cities I’ll scope out European Coffee Trip and use that to just add 5-10 coffee spots and just walk between them whilst doing all the city shit, without the touristy cringe and BS.
Such as this…. Which was in the Guggenheim…. Na.
The reason isn’t just to walk around and grab coffee but it adds the chilled-explore element to going around a city without feeling rushed about needing to see XYZ thing.
Same with travelling between places, I really dislike air-travel mainly due to the massive amounts of waiting around, stress and rushing, arriving 3 hours early to wait around. It just seems like a broken industry. Whereas especially on this trip, driving (or being driven - big up Ems) gives you a lot more freedom and flexibility than “go here this time, do this thing, go home X time”.
This is one of the first trips where we’ve been travelling without a concrete plan, some parts are booked but there’s been a lot of last minute changes, driving into mountains instead because the vibes looked better, finding last minute airbnb’s (which are incredible and cheaper…) and all in all just the flexibility for everything.
Even just driving to a city and booking an Airbnb on the way.
Some people might find this stressful but when you are driving to a big European city, the chance of you not finding an Airbnb (assuming there’s not massive event on) is slim to zero.
The reason why I like this full on travel, off-grid element before a longer term stop in Lisbon for 2 months is because it’s two separate things.
I really don’t see the point of going to a city for longer than a few days, or a off-grid Airbnb for longer than a few days either.
You get bored and you can’t “be” in that place.
Living in a place is not being there for a week or 2.
Versus, if you stay in a place for a month+ (usually as a minimum), you can get a vibe for what it would be like to actually live there, make contacts and micro-connections, start big projects, build something cool and actually have a day-to-day.
This is why I like the oscillation of work, both intra-day and seasonally.
You aren’t going to produce great, flow-state work whilst you are traveling, you just aren’t.
You may be able to keep things ticking over, which usually requires a certain amount of time-per-day for business owners, the lower you can get that, the better in general too.
That’s the daily emails, maybe slack, that kind of thing.
For me nowadays this is probably about 60-90 minutes a day, which involves updating the sports models, running new games, betting those games, general emails, speaking to the team on the agency side and just making sure nothing blows up.
Which for 7-10 hours a week is a pretty good hourly rate when you look at the year-end profits.
In theory I could reduce that to about 4 a week if needed (and live full 4HRWW) but that time does help create other longer term opportunities.
But the issue is this is not growth-work.
You can only do it for so long if you want to grow and create.
This is not the building, creating, flow-state work that will actually grow and improve the businesses in the future.
That’s the type of work that I think you need to block off, both daily (4-hour chunks for 1 task) and seasonally (this 1-2-3 month/week stretch is all-in on X).
This is where real progress is made in tiny periods of time (relative to what others expect).
That’s how I’ve made the biggest progress personally, especially since re-framing all the goals in the past 6 months or so.
This is all based on the edge-business-framework (need to come up with a better name) that I like building.
Take the sports betting as an example.
120-140 hours to build a sports betting model in 2 weeks, full-on 10 hour / day productive flow state build. Which once completed can earn you 50,000-100,000 a year spending 20 minutes a day.
It’s not the 20 minutes a day that matters, you could even build processes to get that down to 1 minute a day with VA’s, automation etc.
It’s the 140 hour flow-state build that most people would stretch out to a year timeline.
Obviously it’s the “overnight success took 5 years” concept as well baked into that, as you do need specific knowledge as well first, but the principal remains.
Build the best thing.
Do it right once.
Project / Business / Work Stuff
Previously in the March post I talked about our £50k/month profit goal structure and how this would look. The near-term elements of this are already pretty solved, finish the remaining sports on the short-list that I "know" how to do, and continue to bet and gain confidence and traction in the ones that are already working.
It’s crazy how much confidence (and additions to the bankroll) you get from simply betting and earning through individual sports over a few months vs however good your back-testing looks.
Back-testing can lie.
Literal money in your bank every month does not.
Pivots
There’s 2 mega pivots coming in the next 30-60 days.
Pivots might not be the right word but the first is that the agency business (that I don’t love) might be slowly winding down, this wouldn’t be closed as such as there’s other earnings (and a f*ck ton of costs) that go through that side, but it would go from being the “main” business to a very small earner.
This is kind of a weird feeling as this is what earned the first million in profit (albeit over a longer than I would have liked time period).
So to now simply say “now we move on” is kind of a strange feeling, we’ll see how this plays out.
The other pivot is waiting on monies owed from a company that’s been sold, long boring story but something that would fact track the below points.
The Exact Goal Maths
The other pivot is basically how hard we dive into betting based on the bankroll additions.
Warning - maths ahead.
The net-profit monthly goals on the betting side, should just be an equation:
Place X amount of bets per month.
Have X amount of edge/ROI per bet.
Have X amount unit size.
Have X bankroll based on % of BR = unit size.
It’s actually quite simple on the math side.
Based on back-testing and live, real betting, you should have your edge or ROI per bet, let’s call it 10% per bet.
Based on the sports and league you bet per month and how many bets qualify as a position, you have your volume per month. So in very busy seasons that could be 300, in quite times it might only be 100-120. Let’s take 300 as when adding new sports this could be this high.
Then you can simply solve for the last 2 variables.
Or you can plugin any value you want, so let’s say we want to hit our £50k/month goal, we can reverse engineer this;
10% ROI of 300 bets = 30 units profit.
30units * (X) unit size = £50k.
50 / 30 = 1.67k per unit.
That’s such an awkward number so we’re just going to round up to £2k, so that if ROI is closer to 9% or volume of bets is reduced for whatever reason, we still hit our goal.
From here you need to calculate your risk tolerance to create the bankroll needed to be able to use £2k units.
This is actually more down to your actual risk attitude as this is the total amount of money you’d have in your bankroll, so theoretically you could lose this entire amount. Kind of like in a trading account, investment portfolio etc.
In reality how we do things nowadays it would be pretty much impossible to lose it all but its always worth being careful.
So for me personally I think having 3% BR per unit is fine, some people may think this is too high as on any one day you could have 20 bets on (60% of your BR) but because the edge is so high this isn’t really a big deal.
Which gives us a bankroll target of £67,000, which is an awkward number and feels a bit low, so we’ll round up again to £75k.
So from a singular goal we now have 2 super simple steps:
Generate a £75,000 bankroll (then use £2,000 units per bet).
Place 300 bets per month at an average edge of 10%.
To break this down further, you have sub-steps;
To achieve the £75k bankroll, you can either;
Continue to live-bet and let the bankroll naturally grow, do not take out more than 10/20/30% profits per month until £75k is reached.
Add funds to reach £75k bankroll.
Based on all the sports and leagues you bet, how many bets per month with an edge greater than or equal to 10%?
This is a more difficult one to answer but I thought it would be good to estimate:
Rugby union: Tough one to work out but estimating on 7 leagues, 4 bets per round per league, AVG rounds per league 21ish. Generally we’re making almost exactly 100 rugby union bets per month (in-season) but the season is also only 6-7 months = 600ish.
Rugby league / AFL / NRL: Not completed yet but estimated around 300ish.
Cricket: Majority of volume is T20 leagues, 8 tournaments a year, based on back-testing volume is around 200ish
Hockey: Eventually once completed should be 8 leagues at around 25% of games bet. Approximately 1500ish.
All that equates to 2600/year. Which is about 215-220 bets per month. Close to our goal.
As our ROI pet bet is closer to 12% not 10% this 220/month should give us enough to hit the goal once the existing plan is finished.
The other plan is simply to increase unit sizing as bankroll grows naturally, so once BR hits 90-100k then £3k units would be used and hence the units per month needed to get to that £50k/month figure would be quite a bit lower.
So all in all, use math to reverse engineer goals to very simple individual tasks and steps.
Cheers.