0:00:00.0 Wayne Brown: Hello, I’m your host Wayne Brown and welcome to the ET Project. We’re delighted to be delivering this live episode for executive talent all over the world whom we’re affectionately referring to as Team ET. Today we’re visiting Leeds in the north of the UK to speak with our guest who is known as a productivity and time optimization expert, Mr. John J D Munn.
0:00:24.6 WB: Let’s start with a very impressive statistic. In the year 2022, while John was living and holidaying around different parts of Europe and the UK, he was still able to help his six-figure clients earn an additional 24 million in revenue and save them 21,840 hours. And despite all the travel and the multiple months off, he smashed his own revenue record and achieved the most profitable year of his life. Today, John continues to work around 15 hours a week and normally goes on holiday four or more times in a year. In fact, when we caught up for this recording, he’d just returned from a week in Paris with his family. I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty damn keen to learn his secrets. Now, as a bonus, imagine working in an environment where you’re able to help your clients recover the most precious of all possessions, time. So team, in this episode today, John and I dive headlong into a discussion on ways that we might all be able to master the world of productivity and time optimization. I know you’re going to enjoy this.
0:01:36.6 Speaker 2: Welcome to the ET Project, a podcast for those executive talents determined to release their true potential and create an impact. Join our veteran coach and mentor, Wayne Brown, as we unpack an exciting future together.
0:01:53.8 WB: Welcome team to this live and I wanna say exciting October 2024 episode, where we’re going to delve into the world of productivity and time optimization. Yes, today we’re exploring the topic that I know is going to resonate with a large number of you and we’ll be chatting about the elusive skill, I wanna call it a skill, of clawing back our days and even nights, perhaps, shifting from a world of being time poor to one where you can be time rich and even have the freedom to consider optional activities like our guest, I’m sure, will share with you. We’re going to be learning from the master. John’s helped leaders around the world, just like you and I, find their power in managing time effectively and uncovering strategies to increase efficiency and focus on both personal and professional life. And also note that as we lean into productivity, that it’s not only about doing more in less time, it’s about making smarter, conscious decisions that lead to more meaningful outcomes. So with all that, let’s welcome our guest to today’s show, John Munn.
0:03:04.7 John Munn: Hi everybody, and yeah, thanks Wayne, glad to be here.
0:03:07.1 WB: I was really impressed by what you’ve experienced as well as achieved already in your life. And as everyone can see, if they’re looking at the video, if you’re only listening to us talking, you probably won’t be able to tell so much, but John, you look fresh, you look young. So how long back did you get started on this whole journey? Like how long have you been doing this?
0:03:29.3 JM: Yeah, so I’ve been running businesses since I was 15. So 15 years ago. The first ones were kind of small things. I was in a band, I managed bands, all that kind of thing. My first real business was when I was around 19 and I started a brewery. I started the world’s first brewery to do ancient alcohol. And I got some funding and I did that and it went really well. I ended up selling that business. I then started a social enterprise. It’s kind of like a charity mixed with a business that did digital education training at leading universities across the world. So we worked with the University of Leeds, University of Oxford, universities in China and Germany and Italy, all over the place. We were across seven countries. We worked with Google and Lego and Facebook and a whole collection, the who’s who really of things. And I ran that for a while. And then I ended up transitioning out of that business, starting another social enterprise called Zero Smart, which I actually still run, which is an environmental social enterprise helping individuals and companies reduce their carbon footprint. That takes me around four hours a month to run that business, four hours per month.
0:04:47.2 JM: We have a team, we’ve got lots of automations and things that help it run really smoothly. So I have that, that still runs. Because the way that, when I was running Global Digital Week, the digital education one, I ended up getting burned out. So, so bad, actually, that I ended up vomiting blood. And it was a difficult time. It was very stressful running a company across seven countries with more than 30 staff. I changed the way that I did things and ended up reducing my work week very significantly, which I’m sure we’ll talk about. But when people had seen that, they started asking me for advice. They were friends or friends of friends, and I just started helping people to do what I had done. And eventually, referral after referral from all these people that I’d helped ended up getting to a point where it was, I need to decide if I’m in or if I’m out. And so I ended up deciding that I’m in. I really enjoyed it, and I realized I was making a big impact. And that’s how I ended up with this coaching business that I currently run as well. So yeah, now my main thing, really, it takes me around 12 hours a week, my main business now is helping people like you, like me, entrepreneurs to reduce their work week, to work more productively and get their work week usually from 60, 70 hours a week right down to 15, 20 hours a week without any loss of income, without any loss of profit. It’s just making the business run more efficiently. So that’s what I do now.
0:06:19.5 WB: You’ve mentioned several things there. I really wanna touch on, if you don’t mind, the brewery. So ancient beer, where did the idea come from in the first place?
[chuckle]
0:06:30.8 JM: Yeah. This is always a popular one. People were, you started a brewery when you were 19. Ancient alcohol. Cool. So I actually started because I was at university and I started brewing my own alcohol because it was cheaper. I was a student, I just wanted to save money. And I ended up getting quite good and like my lecturers started placing orders with me in order to make things that I was just making for fun on the side. And I got bit of a reputation for it. And I found this recipe, which was an ancient Viking recipe called Braggot, which is kind of half mead, half red ale, half beer, so half mead, half beer. The beer is a red ale. And I loved it. I thought it was the best alcoholic drink that I’d ever drank. And I tried to buy it from other people and I was like, this doesn’t exist anywhere.
0:07:21.4 JM: Like, why is this not around? This is great. And I’ve really into history. I had wanted to study history at university, but ended up picking management and marketing for the career prospects, [chuckle] ironically. And yeah, I just thought this out, this drink should exist, Braggot should exist. And so I looked into it and decided no one’s doing it, so I’m gonna do it. So I started a brewery that firstly started by making Braggot which was an ancient alcoholic drink. And then we made mead and we did other things. And we made the recipes historically accurate. So we were looking at mass spectrometry of pot pottery and things like that in order to work backwards from the molecules that were left, and historical records. And then recreate the recipe, what it would’ve been like. So that’s how that started. The university funded it and helped fund it. And I had some money from my previous businesses as well. And yeah, started a brewery. It was great.
0:08:19.9 WB: So you transitioned from the brewery into education. What was that shift? Like how did that come about?
0:08:27.5 JM: Yeah, that came about similarly with the brewery. I started the brewery because something that I thought should exist didn’t exist. I started the education business for a similar reason. I was frustrated with my own university experience. I did a marketing degree and we were talking about newspaper marketing and television advertising, but we very rarely spoke about social media. And social media was such a big, an up and coming thing at the time, 15 years ago. And it was frustrating that we were learning things that felt out of date and that we weren’t learning the practical application of them. It’s useful to have the theory, I understand that, but when companies that I’d spoken to, because I was in the business space at the time, they were frustrated that the new graduates were coming in and they’d have to train them for a year or two years before they could actually do any marketing because they’d never seen the tools before.
0:09:23.1 JM: And so I was frustrated by that. I thought, well, the companies want to go into universities and meet the students and find the top talent. And they also want people that have got practical skills, they can actually implement what they’ve learned. The universities want more links with the companies and the students want to have better education and to meet the companies that are gonna hire them. So I decided to bring the three together and we started an event called Global Digital Week. We ran across seven countries and we did practical, future focused, but practical skills training that the companies themselves facilitated. So the companies brought in their own trainers and trained them on the technology they were using. And the university provided the venue space, et cetera. And the students, realistically, I did the advertising in order to get the students to get there. But yeah, we did lots of different things. We did digital marketing training, so how to actually run a Facebook ads campaign and we gave the students a real budget and things like that. But we also did haptic surgery, for example. So like robot assisted surgery for medical students so that they could get used to the technology that was being used today. But it was a big range of things. So yeah, it was about showing students the modern technology and helping them get hands on with it.
0:10:46.9 WB: What I’m curious about, John, is where did you get the approach to go out and approach these organizations, these companies? I guess the marketing university training you did was beneficial in that regard, but where did you get the wherewithal and the understanding about going out and approaching universities?
0:11:10.1 JM: I think partially from running businesses before, especially in like band management, you know, you have to get the gig, you have to deal and approach people. But I think more importantly, just having a good offer. And that’s part of what I do now where I’ve been coaching for six years. And a big part of that is helping people create a great offer and making sure my role is great as well. I find that when you’ve got a good offer, it’s quite easy to sell it. You just need to make people aware that this thing exists. And so with Global Digital Week, that’s what I focused on, making it a slam dunk offer, easy win for everybody involved. And then just making them aware that it exists. So I did things like, I found the phone number and email address of the vice president of Google, for the chairman of the Bank of England, the European head of Facebook at the time, et cetera. I put in the legwork and I contacted them and they were impressed that I managed to find that stuff. At the time I used an extension called hunter.io, which still exists. It’s not quite as good as it used to be, but it still exists. And I put in the legwork and they were impressed that I found them. And then when they heard the offer, they were like, yeah, of course this is an easy win. So that’s kind of where that came from.
0:12:29.1 WB: You mentioned there was a point where you felt burnt out. Was there a tipping point, like a specific moment that you said, gosh, I just can’t keep going?
0:12:40.5 JM: It wasn’t so much that I can’t keep going. I think I was blinded myself. Like I felt, and I think a lot of people feel like this, of, I just need to push through. I just need to get through this moment. And even at that time, I was throwing up blood from the stress, at that time I still felt like, oh, this will pass and I’ll keep going. And I just, I do this. The turning point, I wouldn’t say there was a tipping point, ’cause I think I would’ve continued, but the turning point for me was seeing a two minute long video about jelly beans where this guy has a mountain of jelly beans basically, and each jellybean represents one day. And he separates them and says, okay, this is the time that you’re gonna spend at work. This is the time you spend asleep, et cetera. And all these jelly beans move across and he gets rid of them. And he is like, this tiny little bit that you’ve got left, that’s the time that you’ve got to spend doing what you want. Okay?
0:13:37.2 JM: And it’s like hardly anything compared to the rest of the jelly beans. And he’s like, here’s the time you’re gonna spend with your parents before they die. At the end of the videos what are you gonna do with your time? And I saw that, and I just thought to myself, I have even less than that tiny little mountain because the way that I’m working at the minute. I calculated how many times I was gonna see my mom again before she had passed away, based on how many times I’d seen her on average over the last five years, and how many years she’s likely to live based on her life expectancy, the average life expectancy. And I was gonna see her less than 20 times before she died.
0:14:14.4 WB: Wow.
0:14:15.1 JM: And I hadn’t been appreciating that before, and less than 20 times that I was gonna see her. For me, that really struck a chord whereas I just thought, that’s not acceptable to me. It’s not something that I can continue with. I said to myself, well, I’m gonna change it then. Here’s a problem and I’m gonna solve it. So I changed the way that I did things.
0:14:42.9 WB: Sure.
0:14:43.2 JM: And reduced my own work week so that then I could spend the time how I wanted to rather than working, and the byproduct is the stress and everything went down. But I think for me, the primary driver of that change was not necessarily that I wanted to work less or that I wanted to be healthier, it’s that I wanted to actually spend time with the people that I loved.
0:15:06.4 WB: The video, by the way, for everyone listening, fantastic video if you haven’t seen it, it’s on YouTube. We’ll put a link in the show notes for everyone to go to. But really, you did a great job describing it, John. It really is eye opening. It’s, you know, it’s that epiphany that you are here for a limited period of time and a portion is consumed by sleep. A portion is consumed by all the different factors of living. And when you boil it all down, you don’t have much time left. You say that you sort of pulled back. I can imagine though, based on you, at this stage, you’re a go-go guy, right? You are very busy, you’re very active, you are involved. There must have been some challenges in pulling back from this.
0:16:01.3 JM: Yeah. I still feel like I am a go-go guy with things, but I just, I don’t go, go, go only in work things that don’t make sense. So I think the biggest challenge for me was understanding where my time was spent, because I realized I was working 70 hours a week, at least it felt like I was working 70 hours a week, but what I estimated I was spending that time on was completely different to what I was actually spending that time on when I started to measure it. And I think that measuring it is the most important first step is if you don’t have time, well, you can’t solve a problem until you know that you have a problem and you know what’s causing it. So for me, the first thing was figuring out, okay, well, where’s my time going? I can’t reduce the amount of time until I know where it’s going in the first place. So that’s what I did. And one of the biggest challenges was measuring that reasonably accurately. Doesn’t have to be perfect, but you need to have a good picture. And then understanding, okay, which things here are actually worth my time, which things here create leverage, which things that I’m doing justify the time to impact. And that took a while to figure out with things.
0:17:25.3 WB: Absolutely. Yeah.
0:17:28.3 JM: Yeah. But when you know that it becomes quite easy to cut the amount of time that you work. An example, I had a new client about 10 days ago, just over a week ago. And she was in a similar position to what I was six years ago when I first started coaching. And she runs a SaaS business, a software as a service business. And she’s doing well. She’s doing 40K, 50K a month a revenue. But she had no time and she felt burned out and overwhelmed by all the decisions and all the work. And we were talking, it was a one hour call and I said, okay, well what are you spending your time on here and here? And we delved into her situation. And it turned out that of that 50,000, about 40,000 of it was from her SaaS business. It was from the May SaaS business. About 10,000 of it was from her consulting work that she was doing alongside the SaaS business.
0:18:27.0 JM: And the consulting work was taking about 60% of her week. And for me, that was an obvious, why are you doing this consulting work? Like you’ve got too many clients for the SaaS business already, and it’s taking so much of your time that you can’t actually work on the thing that’s more profitable. And I think for her, she just, she hadn’t seen it that way. So she saw, hey, I’m getting 10,000, this is great. And when you’re making money, it’s very hard to turn it down. But from an external point of view, I could see that this thing doesn’t make sense in context of the other things. So even though we’re gonna be turning money away, because you’ve got an extra, it was almost 30 hours a week, because you’ve got an extra 30 hours a week here, we can spend that time building that SaaS business. And even if you get one extra client that more than accounts for all that time, and it takes you hardly any extra time to deliver for that client.
0:19:27.3 JM: And so for her, she was too close to the problem and it was difficult to see. But from an external perspective, it’s, hey, it’s this thing. Let’s do this. It’s easy. There were other things as well that we worked with, but that consultant, changing that consultant, she got rid of it the next day. Immediate change, saved her 25 hours that following week. You know, it’s complete overhaul. And if I had said to her, I’m going to save you 25 hours after a one-hour phone call, she wouldn’t have believed me. Sometimes I have to nerf, have to reduce the expectations for people in order to get them on the call in the first place to make it believable, because they just don’t think they can save 30 hours after a one-hour call.
0:20:11.2 WB: I’m sitting here thinking to myself, how would I save 30 hours? We might have to talk, John.
[laughter]
0:20:22.7 JM: It’s different for every business. So everyone’s in a unique situation. With her, it was an easy thing with the consultant. With other people, I had an e-commerce guy, Benoit, and it was a case of we introduced a third-party logistics company because he was doing his own packing. It’s different every business. Some people it’s let’s stop marketing here. Other people, it’s let’s start doing this instead.
0:20:47.4 WB: I guess a lot of it is automation and getting smarter with the systems you use as well, as you say, there’ll be a whole myriad of different things. It’s really being able to explore it. But I’m starting to see the 80-20 principle factor in quite heavily here as well with some of the things you’re saying. Is that something you’re conscious of and you work through as well with people?
0:21:12.3 JM: It is, yeah. The 80-20 principle in my experience does hold true. I don’t do it as aggressively as we only focus on the 20% because there are some things that don’t scale or some things that don’t look like they add value, but that actually do add a huge amount of value. But often factors and variables are linked in ways that aren’t immediately clear. It’s hard to see if you’ve not seen that before. So that’s something that I usually bring as experience with my clients. I can see that these things that don’t look linked are. So Pareto principle wise, we do look at the things that deliver the biggest return on investment for the time that you spend and we do more of those. But importantly, we look at the things that you’re spending a lot of time on that don’t deliver an outsized return. We say, okay, why are we doing this? Does this make sense or not? Not necessarily just immediately cut it because every business is different. But we question and we seek to understand, does this make sense for you and your skills? Every entrepreneur is different and for your situation, yes or no? And then we make an adjustment based on that.
0:22:25.1 WB: How did you stumble onto this in the first place? Did you have any early influences or role models that provided you inspiration or gave you guidance?
0:22:35.4 JM: I spent a lot of time, I was running my own business, but I spent a lot of time reading about it, taking courses. I spent a lot of money on courses, all that kind of stuff. And The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss was a big influence for me early on. And it was one of these things of, I’d seen all these different influencers and authors and people talking about productivity, and it always seemed like they were just trying to stuff more into a package, and at some point the seams will burst and that’s the person burning out, becoming overwhelmed. And it seemed that everybody was talking about it from a perspective of doing more in less time. And Tim Ferriss was probably the first person I’d read who looked at it from a perspective of doing less within that time, but getting a bigger result from it. And I think that was a big influence in the way that I approached things where I said, okay, all these productivity principles, they all look great. Let’s figure out which ones work and in what context they work, because not everything works for everybody, it’s in different situations, but then, okay, how can we use that to not do more in the time that we have, but to do less in the time that we have, but achieve more in the little time? So that was a big change of perspective. So yeah, Tim Ferriss’s 4-Hour Workweek was probably the first major influence there.
0:24:09.1 WB: Okay. So you’re at that point, you’ve done your evaluation of your time, you’ve identified that there’s a lot of stuff you’re doing that doesn’t really bring much value, how do you then go about reprioritizing your time and then saying, well, gosh, now I have all this available time, what am I going to do with it? So, I mean, you hear a lot of stories about people who retire and they die within two years because they don’t have anything to do anymore. Like, what do you do? Where do you go once you have made this starting discovery that you’re doing unnecessary things and now you’ve got all this time?
0:24:47.7 JM: Yeah, I get this question surprisingly often. Yeah, it always shocks me. I think there are two major things here. Firstly, when we reduce the time, if you just cut time, you’re going to find that you end up with a big void, a black hole in the time that you spend in your schedule, and usually what people do when there’s a big black hole in your schedule, they fill it with junk. And so they put things in there like scrolling on social media. A lot of the time we scroll because we have some time free and we don’t know what to do with it instead. And the easiest thing is to scroll or to watch TV or to do something like that. That happens when we’re not being intentional with our time. We’re just doing whatever happens because we’re scared of having that time. And so we fill it with something.
0:25:37.6 JM: And usually we fill it with junk. That’s the first thing. The second thing is when you start working more efficiently, and you start realizing you’ve got more time, you’ve got two options, you can fill that time with more work, and doing the work that matters, and for some of my clients, that’s what they do and it works fantastically. They grow twice as quick because they’re working the 60 hours a week that they used to work, but they’re more relaxed and happier because they’re doing tasks that they find fulfilling, and they see the results quicker because they’re doing the stuff that makes sense. The other thing you can do is what I prefer to do, which is actually enjoy your life.
0:26:18.4 JM: So I work less, but I do things that I enjoy, but I’m intentional about it. That’s the big important thing here where I have analyzed what I enjoy. I’ve analyzed what works. I’ve made a distinction between what helps me feel relaxed, what helps me feel rejuvenated, so re-energized. And I have hobbies. I play guitar, I play modern board games, I learn to sing, I do loads of different things. I travel a lot and I’m intentional about my time. So that amount of time that I’ve saved, I’ve not left it to be a void, a big black hole to be filled with junk. I look ahead and I plan things and I put things in the calendar, in the schedule of I’m doing this at this time, or I’m seeing this person then. I like having virtual assistants that do that kind of thing for me. You can teach them the things that you like and you say, look, sort out, I don’t want a gap here or a gap there or whatever, like figure out a date for me to have with my partner on Friday or something, and they do that, it’s great. But I’m intentional about how I fill it instead.
0:27:32.5 WB: You mentioned VAs and I’m sure a lot of people listening who are solo entrepreneurs are at that precipice where they want the VA, but they’re not sure about taking the leap. They’re hesitant about the cost. Any advice in that particular area?
0:27:58.0 JM: Yeah, so with VAs, I always recommend that people do that bit last. In terms of, I use an acronym, ESAD, so Eliminate, Simplify, Automate, Delegate. Delegate comes last, that’s what a VA does. You do it last because if you do it too soon, you end up making life much more complicated. If you don’t clean a system before you add people into it, you just multiply the complexity and it makes life worse. When you do get to a point of hiring a VA, I like starting small and fractional with things and then building up from there. One of my clients, you mentioned cost, the cost can vary wildly. If you want a top-notch VA that’s doing things very professionally, they’ve got a great background and they’re going to be full-time, Support Shepherd is great, it’s a website and they hire basically the top VAs in the world for you, there’s a small finders fee, but it’s worth it, okay?
0:28:57.9 JM: I think they changed their name recently, but I’m sure if you Google Support Shepherd, you’ll find it. If you’re willing or you want to start smaller, so for example, scheduling your personal time now that you’ve got more time or getting your groceries delivered automatically for you or whatever it is, or doing repetitive business tasks that can’t be automated, then we usually start with onlinejobs.ph, which is a job website in the Philippines, but you can get very wide ranges and skill of VAs, but the majority of them are very good. One of my clients hired a VA last month, she’s paying $200 a month for it.
0:29:41.2 JM: It’s only fractional, so that person’s only doing a few hours a week, but it’s a good way for her to dip her toe in and learn how to work with a VA. And learn those methods and get that right, but also to start developing that up with that person. So you can do it as cheaply as $200 to dip your toe in, in my opinion, the earlier you can get to a point where you can learn how to manage and work with somebody, the better. You said right at the start of this podcast that saving time is a skill, and I think that it is, it’s a skill that most people aren’t very good at in the early stages, but it is something you learn, you learn how to be more efficient, you learn how to manage a team, you learn how to hire and do all these things, and you can get better. So I think the earlier you start, the better you’ll get quicker.
0:30:32.3 WB: I think that’s great advice though, what you’re talking about the VA side, I’ve heard a lot of negative stories about jumping in too quick and getting a VA, and they spend as much time, if not more, trying to, you know, sort things and support the VA and get them up and running, et cetera, and they burn through a lot of money, not because the VA is expensive, but because they’re so unorganized and they’re not ready for that step, so I think your acronym is very nice, I might use it in the future if that’s okay.
0:31:05.9 JM: That’s fine with me.
0:31:06.0 WB: Yeah.
[chuckle]
0:31:11.7 WB: You also talked earlier about a business that you and your partner have with Zero Smart. Could you just introduce that a little bit more, please? And we’ll talk on a couple of topics about that in a moment.
0:31:29.7 JM: Okay, yeah. Zero Smart doesn’t have anything to do with the productivity side. It’s an environmental social enterprise, so it helps individuals and companies reduce their carbon footprint. There’s an element of tree planting, but also funding scientific projects, wind farms, solar farms, et cetera, that are all accredited, so we check all the scientific papers. They’re all stamped and sealed and independently checked that they’re actually doing what they say they do by the UN or other accredited bodies similar to the UN as well. So the way that it kind of works is we’ve got customers that pay subscriptions or one-off fees to us. It depends what they do, if it’s a wedding or if it’s a lifetime subscription or whatever it is. We bring this together and then we use this big pot of money to buy outsized return projects. So if you… Okay, let’s take a step back. If you have $100, £100, whatever it is, you can’t buy much impact because you don’t have the economy of scale. You’ve only got £100, nobody cares.
0:32:42.8 JM: Yeah, you can buy two or three trees. Whereas if you’ve got $100,000 or £100,000, you’ve got an economy of scale here. Now serious suppliers can talk to you and you can buy something that has a very outsized return. So with $100, you might only be able to remove 10 tons, but with $100,000, you might be able to remove 10 million tons. And so the scale is different. So what Zero Smart does is it collates the money, brings it all together and then buys those outsized return projects with the economy of scale that it has.
0:33:23.7 WB: What first got you involved or interested to go down this path? I mean, it’s maybe a connection somewhere between the education, but it’s still a divergence from the other things you’ve done previously. So what was the trigger for you to start working in this area?
0:33:43.0 JM: The same as the other two. It was, I had a problem and nobody else was solving it to a point where I was happy. So I decided I was going to solve it. I wanted to be able to reduce my own carbon footprint and it was a difficult, very obscure thing. It was very difficult to find scientific papers you could trust or projects that you could trust. And it felt that an average person wouldn’t be able to do this. And so I wanted to be able to do it myself. The easiest way to do that was to set up a company and have that scale to do it for myself. But I realized that other people would be in my situation as well. So I wanted to make it easier for companies, easier for people.
0:34:24.7 JM: So one of the big things with Zero Smart is carbon calculators, they are not very accurate. Okay? If you take three different carbon calculators, they’ll give you three different results for what your footprint is. With Zero Smart, we wanted to make it simple for people and more accurate. So rather than relying on an unreliable carbon calculator result, we take the average for the person in your country. We go above that average, and then we reduce by that amount in order to take the carbon amount into account. With companies as well, we’ve got set amounts that we do in order to make it easy for you. You don’t have to spend $25,000 figuring out scope three emissions or hire somebody that specializes in that. Our entire thing is we know that stuff. We make it simple for you. You just do this. It’s a simple process.
0:35:27.6 WB: Why would somebody like me be interested in coming and talking with you about it? What would my typical aim be in chatting with you and getting involved?
0:35:32.3 JM: Yeah, one of two things. You either want to reduce your carbon footprint because you believe in the environmental cause and you feel that you should do your bit for the environment. You want to do something better in that regard. That’s probably about maybe 70% or 80% of our customers feel that way. They just want to do more and we make it easy for them to do more and to have an outsized return. The other 20% of people are usually companies and they need to hit their net zero targets either for funding or legal reasons or because they recognize that it is a USP. So people are more likely to buy from a company that’s environmentally friendly. There’s loads of studies that back that up. I can send those across. People like companies that do things for the environment, and so about 20% of our customers are companies that say, hey, we should do more for the environment. Not because they care about the environment, but because they realize it’s good for business and it’s becoming a legal requirement in many countries as well. And so they work with us because we keep it simple in order for them to get that competitive advantage. And that’s okay. There’s no shame in that. You’re still doing something good, but it should benefit you. It should be good for you as well.
0:36:53.9 WB: For sure. I have an activity we call rapid fire questions. I’m sure you’ve heard about that type of thing before. But I got 10 questions and I wonder if you’d be game enough to see how quickly you can answer them. They’re all business related. You can add the why to the answer if you choose, you don’t have to. First one, what’s your favorite type of business to work with, startup or established companies?
0:37:21.5 JM: I prefer… Oof. I prefer in the middle. My favorite kind of business is somebody that’s going from being a solopreneur, so like a fresh start into being an established business. What I call being self-employed to being a business owner. That’s my favorite stage.
0:37:46.3 WB: Okay. Perfect. If you could choose anywhere in the world, where would you… Or where would your favorite place be to build a business?
0:37:50.9 JM: Oh. To build a business is different to where I’d live. To where I’d live, it’s Valencia in Spain. I lived there for two and a half years and I think I’m gonna be moving back at the end of the year as well. To live there forever, it’s amazing. I love it. To build a business, that’s a more difficult question. I haven’t built businesses in lots of different countries before, so I’m biased here. But from my experience, having worked with companies from everywhere, from Singapore to Lebanon to the US and Canada, I genuinely think the UK is one of the best places in the world to build a business. It costs about $15, £15, £12, give or take, to start the company legally. You start in one day. The bureaucracy is easy. It’s great. And there’s loads of support. I’d probably pick the UK, best place to start a business in my experience.
0:38:40.0 WB: If we broaden the scope a little bit, we talk about industry. Do you have a favorite industry that you like being involved in?
0:38:45.8 JM: I like service businesses primarily. That’s more of a sector than an industry, but industry-wise, I do like coaching and consulting businesses and agencies as well, they’re all kind of similar. An agency is more like a done-for-you consulting company, really.
0:39:01.7 WB: Yes.
0:39:04.2 JM: I like that. They’re fun. But I also really like working with businesses that I’ve not necessarily seen before. The fundamentals of every business work the same, in my experience, more or less, but there’s little quirks for each industry. So Benoit, who I mentioned earlier, the e-commerce guy, he sells paragliding equipment. Now, I have never been paragliding, I didn’t know anything about paragliding before, but I’ve really enjoyed working with him because I’m learning about that kind of business, but we’ve also… We’ve dramatically reduced his work week and he’s making more money than ever before with it as well. So that was implementing the business fundamental principles and then adapting them to his situation. So yeah, I like working with coaching, consulting and agencies, but I like it when it’s something that I’ve not seen before.
0:39:54.1 WB: If money wasn’t a consideration, what type of business would you be in?
0:39:58.4 JM: This one, coaching. I’m in a fortunate position where money isn’t a consideration. I’m doing this because I enjoy it. I love meeting the different entrepreneurs. I love learning about the different kinds of business. I love solving that puzzle. It’s really fun for me. So yeah, I love what I do. I’d choose this business every day.
0:40:20.3 WB: You mentioned earlier, The 4-hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss. Who has been the most influential person in shaping your business thinking?
0:40:31.5 JM: I would probably stick with Tim Ferriss there. Not necessarily because he’s been the person I’ve learned most from or anything like that with things, but because he came in at an earlier stage, he changed the trajectory and changed the way that I thought about things. And I think that’s, as with most people, one of the earliest people you read normally have one of the biggest influences. And I think for me, I read him at the right time. And if I think about my life as a path, he’s a whole different branch and the branch that I went down. So huge influence there.
0:41:00.5 WB: Yeah. Very good. Apart from the books and apart from Tim, I’m sure Tim will be listening to this episode, he’ll be very happy. What’s your favorite way to learn new things about business?
0:41:15.7 JM: By doing.
0:41:15.8 WB: By doing?
0:41:17.7 JM: In my experience. So it’s good to listen to more experienced people, to ask questions. I think the best way you learn is by experimenting with things, ideally with controlled variables. Because as listeners hear, and you will understand, somebody might say, hey, this thing that I did is great. It’s fantastic. It’s the best thing. You should definitely do it. And it did genuinely work for them. It was great for them. But when you do it, even if the exact same way you follow what they say absolutely perfectly, might not work for you. And it might just be that that person’s got a different type of customer or different set of strengths. Some people are great at writing, some at talking, some at whatever. That person’s different to you. That person’s business is different to yours. And I think that you need to experiment a certain degree. Listen to experienced people that can help you cut the corner, which is kind of what I do mostly is just saying, hey, I’ve worked with your business before, or I know that this works or this doesn’t, or I can see your strengths is what you’d be good at. So listen to experienced people, but then experiment and try it and adapt. So by doing.
0:42:29.6 WB: I know you’re into board games, but do you have a favorite business related board game?
0:42:36.7 JM: I would controversially say that every board game teaches you something about business, just because I love board games. CATAN is good for learning negotiation with other players. Terraforming Mars, one of my favorite games, teaches you about building an engine. So starting like slow and building things that create leverage later on. That’s great for that kind of method. And 7 Wonders Duel, one of my favorite games as well. It’s a two-player game, not 7 Wonders, 7 Wonders Duel, it’s different. It teaches you about forward planning, but also playing the percentages in order to win. But I think every game has a lesson to teach you.
0:43:19.4 WB: Very good. What’s one business idea that you’ve always been fascinated by, regardless of feasibility, but you’ve never gone into?
0:43:28.0 JM: I’ve got a list of loads of business ideas on my phone. I wish I could just bring that up and just scroll through and be like, oh yeah, this is good, this is good. [chuckle] Business idea that… Okay. Regardless of feasibility, if I just wanted to make boatloads of money, I do think space mining is gonna make really, really good money. It’s not particularly feasible at the minute, especially to do it profitably. And I don’t really know that much about it, but that seems like the kind of thing that will make a big difference, economically at least.
0:44:00.9 WB: What would you offer the listeners if they want to try and improve their time management?
0:44:06.5 JM: Two things, an easy and a hard option. The hard option first, I think this is one that makes the biggest difference, but people struggle with it. They struggle to commit to it, they struggle to do it, is track your time. I use a free tool called Toggl. There’s an app, there’s a web extension. It’s good, it’s really easy. But just every time you start to do a task, you press play and it records the amount of time that you’re doing that task for, when you finish, you press stop, easy. At the end of the week, you can then say, “Hey, I spent this much time on this, and then you say, well, is that worth it? Or, this was less than I thought, this was more than I thought, why? Was it less time than I thought because I hated doing it, so the time dragged? Was it more time than I thought because I enjoyed doing this, so I got into a flow state? Et cetera. Track your time. That’s the hard one, but most impactful. The easy one, there’s kind of two here. The easier one is to carve out one hour every morning to work on the business. Do not reply to customers, do not reply to anything, no reactive things. Your customers won’t care that you emailed them one hour later. It doesn’t matter to them. Okay? You still reply. You just reply one hour later. But carving that one hour out to work on the business really makes a huge difference. It helps you firstly be, feel proactive for the rest of the day.
0:45:36.4 JM: Feel like you’ve got something to achieve and accomplish, but more importantly, it means that you actually do something that moves the business a step forward. A lot of the time entrepreneurs feel like they’re working really hard, but not really moving anywhere. Often that’s because they’re just reacting all day, every day to what’s happening rather than being proactive and moving the business forward. So the easier option, just carve out one hour, one hour every day. Kill something that you think is not the most useful time. So stop posting on LinkedIn, for example, but instead carve out one hour in the morning. It makes a big difference.
0:46:15.4 WB: Both are somehow related to establishing that discipline. Let’s say then somebody takes that advice and they identify that this busyness is not really leading there to their desired outcomes. What would the next step be?
0:46:30.8 JM: Firstly on the discipline side that you mentioned, it can take discipline, but there are ways to make it easier. Okay? There are ways to make it so it’s a default rather than a discipline situation. Now, if you take your time and you realize, hey, this isn’t working, I think firstly, we need to be really clear what those objectives are. But then we need to say, okay, why isn’t it working? Is it not working because the process isn’t quite right? And so we need to do the same thing, but in a slightly different way. Or is it because this thing that we’re doing is fundamentally wrong, fundamentally not going to lead us to the outcome. And then, okay, what should we do about that? Can we remove that? What are the consequences of removing that? And if we do remove it, what do we replace it with? And I think that’s one of the things that I help clients with a lot is understanding, is this task worthwhile? If no, why is it not worthwhile? What could we do instead? Do we need to tweak it or do we need to get rid of it? And then what should we be doing instead in that time? That’s one of the main things I help people with.
0:47:40.8 WB: Very nice. If you look back and you were to look back, I don’t know, 10 years to your earlier self, knowing what you know now about this whole process, what advice would you have offered to yourself at that time?
0:47:58.8 JM: Yeah. Think more about the things that work would probably be the answer. When I started the brewery, I spent maybe two weeks full on doing the branding, the logo, the labels, all this kind of stuff. And those things are important, but there is a, how important is it question to be had, I think that. I think if I look back at myself before, the only advice that I think would make a really big difference is say, just ask yourself, was this worth it, was this worthwhile, like, is this the best use of your time? I think that one question unlocks such a big difference for every entrepreneur I’ve worked with of just saying this task that you did, you’re working on the business, why? Like, why did you do this task and not that task? Was this task worth it?
0:48:53.2 WB: There’s some great advice here, John. Thank you for that. Where can people come and find you and connect with you?
0:48:57.8 JM: You can find me at johnjdmunn.com. I’m sure that’ll be in the show notes as well. You’ll find me on LinkedIn, johnjdmunn. You can email me john at johnjdmunn.com. I’m always happy to talk. I’m always happy to help and provide people with what I think the next step should be for them. I’m big on listening to people’s situations to understand, and then recommending what I think is right. Even if that’s not working with me, even if that’s, hey, you don’t need to work with me, you just need to do this. Or, hey, this other guy is a better fit for you or whatever it is. Yeah, I’m always happy to point people in the right direction. So if you want to find me, johnjdmunn.com.
0:49:41.4 WB: Thank you for the great tips and suggestions. Thank you for being a guest, of course, on the ET Project. It’s been wonderful.
0:49:45.5 JM: Thanks for having me. It’s been a pleasure.
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0:49:49.8 S2: Thank you for joining us on the ET Project, a show for executive talent development. Until next time, check out our site for free videos, eBooks, webinars, and blogs at coaching4companies.com.
