A few weeks back I was invited onto the newly launched “The Money Gains Podcast” hosted by Sammie Ellard-King. Sammie was one of the very first people to welcome me into the personal finance community and since then has been a huge influence and supporter of the foundered site and content. When he asked me to join him for a chat on his podcast it was my pleasure to do so.
What did we chat about on the podcast?
Sammie is a great host and the chat was very fluid. We covered starting a business, investing for retirement, and different types of investments you could consider and I shared a little bit about my own personal story. This was my first personal finance podcast, so I hope you enjoy it as much as I did making it.
If you’re more a reader than a listener, I have the full podcast transcribed below
Hello, and welcome to the Money Gains Podcast. This is your host, Sammy Ellard-King, and this podcast is powered by Up the Gains. We’re a personal finance website dedicated to helping people like you and me learn about money safely. Now today we are joined by Connor from foundered. Now Connor retired at the age of 40, having sold and exited a business that he started in his mid-twenties with just a thousand pounds to his name.
He’s since gone on to start his own personal finance brand and founded teaching people how to start businesses of their own, invest safely and work towards financial freedom. If you’re listening on YouTube, please hit the subscribe button or drop a comment below. And if listening by Apple Podcast or Spotify, please do leave us a nice review.
It helps us more than you know. Right. Let’s get started on the Money Gains Podcast. The Money Games podcast, the Financial Guy,
the Money Podcast. Let’s make for the four. So, Connor, welcome to the show. How you doing, man? Good to have you on. Doing really well, man. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. Yeah, it’s a real pleasure. And, where, whereabouts are you in the world at the moment? So, I am in Belfast at the moment. I, live here, have lived here my whole life, which is in North Ireland.
And, yeah, it’s a great part of the world. I, I love it. I don’t think I’ll ever leave here for good, but I, I love to travel, so yeah, I screwed up out the place throughout the year a little bit. Ah, nice. I, mm-hmm. , I haven’t ever been to Northern Ireland. I’ve been over to Dublin a few times, but, yeah.
Yet to, yet to get into the northern part of the country. But I hear it’s beautiful. You’re more than welcome. Oh, thanks. Yeah, no, I’ll take you up on that offer when we, when we come over again. Perfect. look, I’m really excited about this conversation today. I think it’s gonna be a really good one. Like your story’s a little bit different to some of the guests that we have that perhaps have been doing it for longer.
And, but it’s, you know, your story before that I think is super interesting. so I’m gonna, I’m gonna roll back the years of touche its kind of tradition here on this podcast. And then we get to know our guests and their relationship with money growing up. And, so yeah, that’s really my first question.
Like, what was your relationship with money as a kid and, and early days? ? Well, we, we weren’t a rich family. my dad and my mom were both working class and they, what I would always say is they had a, a huge work ethic, and that’s what was instilled into us from, from the very, very early days. Actually.
I said to my dad a few months back, I was like, when did we ever go out for dinner? We didn’t. Was the answer. Because we just didn’t have the money to go out for dinner. But we never felt poor because we were, we had holidays and everything like that, but we just didn’t have that roughness that people would have that would attribute to like a middle class lifestyle.
so. , my dad, he and mom, actually, both of them, they, they were always very focused on money in the sense that, well, you al you never borrowed for money in our household, right? If you didn’t have it in cash, you didn’t buy it or you didn’t buy whatever you wanted. So from that perspective, we’ve always been told to save and to learn how to save, from them.
And as I said, then the work ethic came from both of them. They both had, great jobs. They both worked really hard and, and built their own business and, and built their own career, and we just followed in that footsteps, myself and my two brother. All right. Wicked. So you, you’ve got brothers. Any, any other siblings?
No, just two brothers. One of them, Martin was in, the business with me and then the other brother works with my dad as well. Ah, interesting. Okay. And what did your parents do? Were they, yeah, so my dad’s in the drink trade, so he works for, Heineken own company. Nine. and he’s always been in that business for the last 38 years.
and my mom made curtains. She had her own upholstery, or not upholstery, but, soft furnishings business. ah, so she made curtains for, you know, homes and residential homes and, and, and, and commercial settings as well. So the creative side as well in the family? A little bit, yeah. Actually she has, she’s a painter, so yeah, she would be the creative one.
Ah, brilliant. Oh cool. So obviously you kind of have that installed from you in a young age. Yeah. Your brothers as well. And imagine it was quite competitive with two Brothers . Absolutely. Yeah. Okay. We we’re headed, in fact. Do you have, do you have family yourself? I do, yeah. I have three sisters. So slightly different to you.
And I’m the oldest, so I get all of the, all of the shit basically. . . Yeah. I’m sure. No, with two brothers. You absolutely, as you said, it’s so competitive. even when we’re, we’re playing cards or we’re playing around a golf or whatever, it’s incredibly competitive. And even in business, we’re, we’re all competitive as.
Yeah. No, but that’s kind of installed that in from a young age, which you’ve then taken into business, I would imagine. Exactly that. what, where do you think that kind of, it clicked for you when you started thinking about money a little bit differently? Like as a teenager, obviously, you know, we’re just kind of exploring the world and finding out things and, you know, you want the latest this, you want the latest that as a kid, naturally, that’s just the way that you, you know, your mind works.
Then when it, when it starts to click for. Well, I was always going to go into business, so there’s always somebody in your class who sells suites. That was me, right? And I went to, I went to the wholesaler. I bought suites and I sold them, and I made a profit. So I knew about making money in that sense. On the other side, I knew about saving money too because as I said, we didn’t have a huge amount of money growing up.
We weren’t per, but we didn’t have a huge amount of money. So if we were shopping, my mom would’ve asked her. She would’ve asked whoever was behind the hill for discount back, you know, 25, 30 years ago. And while that embarrassed the hell out of us, it told us that, you know, you can get discounts for things.
You, you can save money on everyday purchases if you just ask. so both from that earning money and a saving money perspective, we. We were brought up in that, you know, we understood that from an investing and growing your wealth, that was something that our family didn’t know an awful lot about, to be honest, from my perspective, that came in my, my twenties and thirties.
only when I had money that I could then put for my f put away from my future. . Okay, cool. So, mm-hmm. , you, you lead well into the next question, so, alright, , I was gonna ask about investing, but Yeah, yeah. I’m gonna actually go a little bit into your story cuz it is quite different. Okay. you know, you, you, you, you retired at what would.
Be regarded as a young age. Yes. So talk to me about this business that you created and you ran. How, how’s that kind of worked out? Well, that’s, I exited the business in December, just, seven weeks ago today, . And that business was actually started in this room, this bedroom. It didn’t look just like this back then, but in 2009 I started a print company.
and that print company then morphed into a digital agency and. Did branding and development, of websites. And from that we were acquired in 2020, mid pandemic, which was fantastic. And I’ve just exited there in the last few weeks. And I do apologize. There’s a lot that I can’t say in that, fair enough contract for contractual reasons.
But the business itself, you know, from a, from an early part of that, I took my, I can say this anyway, whenever I started the business, my max salary, and this is something that I, I love, I never earned a big wage prior to starting my own business, I earned a maximum of 20 grand a year, 20,000 pounds per year, the year prior to starting the business.
And when I started the business, I multiplied that significantly over, over the last 13 years, and that was the biggest catalyst to. Growth in wealth and then learning about investing and getting all that, side of things, which I know will come into, really then catapulted it. So in where in that journey did you start thinking about investing?
Yeah, correct. whenever I. First started the business the first year of starting that business, I replaced my wage. Literally that was about three or 400 points difference. In year two. That increased somewhat more and I didn’t know what to do with that money and just being me and a little bit old school in my thinking, my first, and thoughts was, or my first thoughts were to pay off my mortgage.
So at that point, right, in year two, which is about 2010, 2011, I started to think about well reducing, Risk in the world, always have a roof over your head. and started to pay down my mortgage. So by age 30 I paid off my mortgage. And then after that, wow. I started looking at, well, what else can I do?
And I, I do remember the initial search. It was how to. Put money in your retirement account. And that was the first search that I’d made about this. I also then searched early retirement and find, it was actually the Mr Money mustache, blog at that stage. And this was really in the early, early days.
So he’s an American blogger and I do credit a lot of the learning and the instruction and the understanding that I have about money with that blog. And if you go down that rabbit hole, I dunno if you have done that before yourself. Do you know Mr. Bu mustache? Okay. ? Yeah. Yeah, I think he all do. Yeah. He’s, I mean, it’s still going strong.
It’s yeah. Insane blog. yep. And, and he has a, a, I dunno if I can curse, but it’s a no bullshit approach to money to it. and I agree with a lot of that in Princip. No, it’s very American and his thought process is very American. He’s Canadian, but it’s very American style blog and, but the principles work here as well.
If you earn more, see if as much as you can and invest the difference, well then you’re going to at some point become a financially independent or financially free, whatever your goal is. That’s amazing. Like you are you what out of that? Would you, would you look back now? Would you have done anything differently?
Yeah. Oh, absolutely. I, I think we all would. what would’ve I would’ve done differently is I’d probably taken my journey a little bit slower. I remember saving 80% of my income for the year now that didn’t Wow. Necessarily make a, a cha change to my life. as I mentioned, my income grew quite considerably over a couple of years, and so I just maintained the lifestyle that I had during that period of time.
But it did mean that I was able to put a lot of money into my investments early on and earlier you do. So the better. The longer you have compound interest and growth and all that good stuff, yeah. Works in your benefit. but I would’ve taken a. Because I do remember one day where a few friends had messaged me and they were like, do you wanna go ski or do you wanna go on holiday?
I can’t remember. It was a trip anyway. And the in initial response back to them was no account. I’m skint and I just put a s sizeable sum into my investments that very same day. So it’s taking. The money side of things away. Taking that emotion out of the money, it was right for me. Money and investing and saving was an expense of savings rather than something that I didn’t want to do.
So do you think that you would kind of perhaps siphoned off a little bit more of a personal life? Yeah. Yeah, just a little bit. Now, it doesn’t have to be an awful lot, but you know, if you wanted to go on a weekend away or do something like that, I probably could have done a few more things like that over the time and made it a bit more of a.
Pleasant journey, let’s say. although I do appreciate that that doesn’t work for everybody because if you’re saving 30% and that’s the max you can save, there’s really not an awful lot of room for those additional expenses. So for me, I could have, but your mileage may vary. Yeah, a hundred percent. It’s unique to everyone, right?
Yeah. But absolutely. If you’ve got skin in the game, it doesn’t matter if that’s a pound or Yeah. A million quid. Exactly. It’s being the game that counts. Right. And you know that, as you say, completely unique to you. So how, how. Then if we, if we, if we look at this, what type of investments were you getting into?
Cause I imagine, do you mind me asking how long ago that was and what was available to you Right then? Yeah. That, that would’ve been 2010, 2011 onwards. Right. and in the early days there was still accesss the early days. back then there was still access to, all of the, the Vanguard. so you would’ve still had your life strategy fund back then as well.
which I, I, I’m a big fan of the life strategy series of funds. whether you go in for 20%, equities or all the way up to a hundred percent, again, suits to yourselves. but for me, they just give you an awful lot of scope to buy into a lot of the market. For, well, for quite easily, to be honest. For a fraction of the price of a full share.
Exactly. . Yeah. Which helps, right. You know, indeed Exposure. Mm-hmm. . Yeah. So you, Vanguard heavy a hundred percent. Yeah, absolutely. I, I’m a big fan and advocate of the Vanguard Life Strategy Funds. I love them. I think that they, for somebody who’s. An investor. I, I wouldn’t call myself an investor because I don’t understand stocks and shares to a level where I could be confident in picking them.
so for someone who just wants the ability to buy into the market and to look for growth along with the market, the Vanguard Life Strategy funds work really well for me. Oh, that’s wonderful. Like you’ve come in all this way and you, you still are an advocate of funds, you know? Yeah. It, it’s one of those things that people think that they have to be the next Warren Buffet or, oh, you know, sit behind a computer day training 24 7, and that couldn’t be further from the truth.
It’s, it’s about, often just small and often, and into the right funds, which gives you access to the market and diversification across it, and, and that can make you wealthy. And it’s just really that simple. Just keep it simple. there’s no point of trying to, to make things, you know, very difficult for you to manage or to understand, or that you’re having to rebalance things regularly.
I don’t look at my stocks and shares often because I don’t have to. I know what they’re doing and I, I can look at the price point of whatever fund that I’m in and see if it’s gone up or down. That’s limit all I need to do at this point in time. I’m. The accumulation spheres of my wealth building.
And that’s very different now because when I have to be mindful of when I take those payments and when, what that does from a tax purpose for my general investments. so it’s a little bit different, but whenever you’re just buying in, you just do it small and frequently. and you see great results over time, and it, it does take time to start seeing those results.
I remember hitting, a specific number and it took forever, and then doubling that number, you know, was a lot less. And then doubling that number was, was very, very short period of time in between. So, it, the start feels slow. It is slow, yeah. But you get there in the end. Your first million is your hardest as say, I wouldn’t know unfortunately, but apparently
so you, you did touch on it slightly about individual stop picking. Have you since had a play around and do you get involved in that a little bit now? No, no. to be honest. I follow stocks and I follow shares like everyone. , but no, I, I, I don’t put any money, I don’t even have like a little fund of, you know, play money that I put in, a small amount and, and pick shares like that because, well, I don’t know enough about it.
I wouldn’t get enjoyment from it. And I know what my money’s doing in the one fund or the, the couple of funds that I’m in, and it just works really well. And if I want, to gamble, which is what I would describe, I could go to Vegas for a weekend or a week instead, and, and at least I know what I’m losing.
Yeah. Look, there, there are other ways of looking at that too, you know? Yeah. Some people, you know, off, I, I read a lot about this sort of stuff and I love individuals. Stop picking myself off. Okay, good, good. I’m, I’m self-taught and Yeah. You know, the. I’ve made a lot of mistakes along the way. Yeah. Which I probably should have just put that money into the funds, but mm-hmm.
you know, that’s, that’s the way it is. But I, I, you know, a lot of people do, where they start out, they look around their house and they make a list of Yeah. Items within it and stuff that they buy regularly. Yeah. And they’re contributing to that company, and so why not own it? A little piece of it. Yeah.
and that’s another way. Yeah. without having to, you know, without having to. Checking the charts. Yeah, checking the earnings reports 24 7, which is very, very difficult and, you know, and very difficult to dissect as well. So it, it’s a, it’s a completely different approach for myself, I personally, I like it to be very, very simple.
Mm-hmm. , in the way, and for me, the least amount of work that I can do. for my stocks and shares, the better for my investments. but I completely get that. You know, you do have a lot of people who look for dividends and that’s what they’re going for with their investments. Yeah. And you have other people, and I do love your approach where, you know, if you’re buying Johnson and Johnson products, well why wouldn’t you want to own a little bit of that company?
If you buy Apple Products, why wouldn’t you want to buy a bit of that company and. Again, go back to the point, there’s no right or wrong way for everyone. It’s what suits yourself. A hundred percent. Couldn’t agree more with you and yeah, yeah. There, there’s, there’s no right or way you’ve gotta find out for yourself.
Yeah. You know, there’s hands off or hands on. And there’s also somewhere in the middle too, you know. Yeah. I’m probably somewhere in the middle. I’ve got a range of funds. I’m probably more heavier on the funds now than I, than I used to be. And, and actually Mari also a lot better, if I’m Frank . Who knew? No, but do you, do you enjoy that?
Do you call it active? Would you say you’re an active trader or do you just buy and hold? I’m not active, no. Okay. I’m, I’m a buy-in. I’m a buy and hold. I good. Basically, I love researching new technologies. So I’m big on my FinTech, I’m big on, yeah. I’m big on my software brands, which I think, you know, yeah, perhaps have.
Ability to be the next Amazon. Mm-hmm. or, you know, could, could, yeah. You know, 10 x in 10 years kind of thing. And yeah. If, if three, four, or five of those pay off, you know, then I’ll, I’ll be a happy, very happy man. . Understood. Understood. Yeah. It’s one of those ones, that’s why I enjoy, I enjoy the actual brands and what they’re up to rather than, than.
Getting deep into their earnings and financials. You know, if I think they’re gonna explode, then I think it might be a good investment. And I might take a punt on that, but Very good. Other than that, I, I will not like sit there and, and trade in, trade out, like, it’s a loses game. It really is. Of course it is.
Yeah. Very good. The house wins. Always, always. . . So. Since you’ve exited, obviously yes. You’ve, you’ve, I’m gonna move on to, to talk about founder because Yes. you know, there’s a lot of similarities, without the gains as well, what, what we are doing. And, and then, and it’s, I think it’s excellent what you’re doing.
You’re taking thank you, a, a really good approach to it going video heavy, which, you know, some of your videos are very educational, they’re brilliant. so. Is that what you know? When did that idea formulate what, talk to me about that kind of journey of creating founded and, and, and how it’s going. Well, I, I come from an agency, so my agency was a branding and design agency, with a little bit of video focus.
but from my perspective, I’ve always loved video. and I’ve always loved educating. even whenever I owned the agency, I was talking about personal finance. We used to have a day in the office every week. It was we wellness days or wellbeing wedding. Oh, cool. And on some days we would’ve had chest, heart, and stroking so that they would talk about cholesterols, but other times we would’ve had a gym in.
And then when it came to the personal finance chat, I gave the personal finance chat to discuss money saving tips. So I’ve always had a passion for it. It’s something that I’ve been learning about for the last 13 or 14 years, ninth at the stage. When I exited, I was never just gonna sit at, a beach and drink pina coladas.
That’s not who I am. . to be honest. . I would say that one of my strengths is that I’m a hard worker. would be very hard to find somebody in an industry who works harder than me, I think, and that’s probably a little bit, naive to be honest. But I, I work hard. We graph, we put the effort in, so I wanted to start a blog.
I wanted to start a personal finance blog. It, do we call them blogs? Still these days? They are blogs. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. so I wanted to start that and I started writing content, maybe about June last year. And with the, the effort or the plan to create three to four posts per week. Now, as somebody who’s in this scheme yourself, you know how hard that is to Yes.
It’s a big call. Yeah. To consistently write, a lot of articles, a lot of words, and put that down onto, well, onto a digital media Now, I did that and I did that for the longest time, and I enjoy it still, and I will still continue to write articles, every single week. Whenever you’re building a website like this, when it’s an information based website, you need that, it needs to, well, you do this more than anyone, it needs to, mature somewhat.
Yeah. And you could write an article for that takes you six or seven hours, 10 hours, including research and editing. yeah. You do your, your profits, you put everything in their life with it. And in the first six months it gets 15 views because, Exactly. Wow. . It takes an awful long time to establish a websites authority, and especially in a very competitive market that, that we, we work in, work with that we, we publish in and so, Whenever I, I was very mindful that I didn’t want this work to inter interrupt what I was doing, and I was exiting the other business and I wanted to make sure that they, they didn’t intersect even until I had actually left the business itself.
just because I didn’t want there to be any conflict. And whenever I exited, I then went public with the site. And stills getting 30 visits to the website at that point, because again, you’ve got a nice network there. They’re being polited, they’re going to your website, and they’re, they’re having a look.
But unless they’re specifically in the, in the moment wanting to learn about personal finance. They’re not gonna stick around a hundred percent. First few months. You, it’s mom, dad, and a few mates on the site. Oh, and you, you’re looking at it thinking, oh, wow. Because yeah. Who are, who are these people? Yeah.
Family and friends, . Exactly. If you, if you filtered all the ips of the people who you know, you, it would be a, a, sorry, state of affairs. Yeah. So, . then around Christmas I had created quite a bit body of, it was actually, it was at the start of November. I created a body of text around a financial detox that I was launching in January, and I kicked out to my old network and spoke to a couple of the editors in the local press and asked them if they wouldn’t mind featuring it.
They saw it, they liked it, and they were like, yeah, we’ll publish this early January. So at that point I was committed. To going public with the site and Right. With that in mind, I then decided that, well, if I’m going public, I may as well all in and started recording the video. And I’m not a natural person in front of the camera.
This, as I I say in my videos, this pains me because I’ve always been the guy behind the camera calling the shots or telling people what to do and how to move and, and how to, to interact. Yeah. And that’s been fine. So this is unnatural for me, and I can. Yeah, of course , nobody likes that. Even even hearing your own voice sounds really, it’s, it’s off-putting and yeah, it’s also hard to put yourself out there because everybody for the last 20 years knows me for old color and they don’t know anything about this side of me that knows my personal finance.
They don’t know all the time that I’ve spent learning. They have an idea that I’m doing okay, and that’s okay. , but neither I’ve put myself out there. I went public and the only way to do that, in my opinion, is to get in front of the camera, because the, the content over here will mature and that will do its thing over time.
And the marketing over here will do fantastic work, and people will start to find the blog and they’ll f start to understand a bit more about what I do. But the quickest way to make a big impact is to speak directly to those people who want to learn a bit more. And that’s why the video. Become a primary focus.
And so every, I have quite a, a large, come back to the agency days, have a quite a large plan for every bit of content, right? I write an article first and then I record it in the video and then it becomes multiple versions of that for each of the different channels, right? And that works really well.
And over the last few weeks going live with these things, it started to tick off quite a bit. . That’s amazing, man. What a journey. Yeah. Sorry, . No, no, no. You’ve seem like it’s just really refreshing to hear that from myself cuz you know, I, I talked to myself about these things. Yeah. 2, 4, 7, 3 6, 5. Right. Yeah.
In my head. And to hear somebody else say these things, it ma makes you go, oh, I’m, I’m not crazy. You know, that this stuff does work. You know what you said about blogging as a lot of people get into it as a, as a, as a passion project. Yeah. And or with the view to make money quickly and that they couldn’t, that couldn’t be further from the truth, you know?
Website. Mm-hmm. and, you know, has been blood, sweat, and tears for the past year. Mm-hmm. and only now, you know, the articles that I was writing in June are actually now starting to show up on the first page of Google and actually making some traffic and finally some, a little bit of money. And that’s just the way things are.
but if you keep it up, It’s a compound. Interesting. It goes right back to investing and more content, better written. You get better and you, you help more people, you make more money, and it is that simple. And, you know, if you can keep it up, then, then that’s great. Well, looking at the, the, the videos then, what, what, for the listeners here that, that don’t know you, what kind of context are you taking into these videos?
Yeah, so you, you mentioned there about. about making money with your site, and I’ve decided for this first 12 to 18 months that. Mon money side of things isn’t really the, the primary driver for it. For me, it’s about getting content to a wider audience and letting them decide whether or not it’s right for them.
Mm-hmm. , and whether or not that will help them. So I talk about personal finance, I help people earn more, see it more, invest intelligently and then, Hopefully achieve their financial goals, whatever they may be. I did originally start the site to talk about financial independence, but I do appreciate that at this minute in time that where people are finding it very, very difficult with money, that that side of things will come later on.
But if I help people to earn more and see if more now and to put that money to work for them, well, then I’ll reach more people that will benefit from. . Yeah. That’s You’ve pivoted Yeah. At the right time. yeah, I think so. Perfect sense. Definitely. it’s a very similar thing to me. I started out thinking that I was gonna be the encyclopedia about investing, and actually, yeah.
It couldn’t be further from the truth. Mm-hmm. , when, when actually you start writing me and, and thinking about things, it has to be to help. Others in the situations that they’re in. And once you realize that, you know, in any niche that you get into, by the way, this doesn’t just revolve around personal finance.
It will take you time to figure out who your target audience is. Yeah. But if you just get started with whatever you’re doing, mm-hmm. , whether that be starting an investment, starting a website, starting a side hustle, crafting business, whatever that might well be. Yeah. Just get started and you will figure it out along the way.
You have to make mistake. I, I talk about personal finance an awful lot, but I talk about business. So you mentioned there about getting started and I can tell you now that you know, Sammy, you’re gonna be the exact same as me here. I hope that we all feel like imposters, you know, I, in, in my old career, I was pretty successful.
I’d done quite well when I stepped onto this new founder platform and I put myself out there. I’m a complete beginner. Mm-hmm. , I hadn’t got the experience, you know, I definitely don’t have experience speaking to camera. I don’t have experience in communicating that way. I always had a marketing team to do my marketing, so I’m learning marketing again in a different world.
I started my printing business whenever flyers were the core focus of marketing. Yeah. Yeah. It’s, it’s different now. There wasn’t even a Facebook back then. so I, I’m learning all these skills. , as you said, just start, you know, you will make mistakes. You will fail a lot. I fail every day. I make mistakes every day.
But if you learn from those, then it’s an education. It’s never a failure. You fail forward as a term that I use or not because, well, you grow from it better, you’ll grow from it quicker too. Oh, yeah. A hundred percent. I, I couldn’t agree more that you said. If someone, you know is thinking about starting a business Yeah.
Other than getting started, what advice would you give them? Just starting out now? Yeah. Oh, that’s a class question. That’s the one question that I’m asked from everybody is, well, what will it do? And I always say, look at what people are paying you for at the minute. And I, I’m always caveat that was, don’t go out and try and steal your customers from your day job, or don’t trans, you know, sideline in the, the evenings or weekends to those customers, cuz you’ll lose your.
but if you work in, in design, for example, or if you’re a graphic designer, there are so many opportunities for you to sell Design services principles on Etsy, can or Amazon, desktop publishing, or Amazon merch. you could even sell your illustrations on different sites as well. There’s lots of ways for you to sell products or your service outside of your nine to five without being in compe, in, in competition with them.
So it’s looking at what skills you have. I’m a marketer. I like personal finance. I have some skills in, well, very rudimentary skills in editing. But what I do then is I take that and I put that together in a video format. if I was starting a business today, I would do something like this, something where you’re selling service, sorry, you’re selling a product, not a service.
cause then you can open that up to the wide world and you’re not just limited to the time that you have available in the evenings. And. That’s a, this is a great thing. You know, you might start out making t-shirts. Yeah. But then you might build a website to function that off. Then you might sell across multiple platforms.
Social media might come into it, but actually exactly the fundamental basis of it was what you were good at and what you enjoyed. And, exactly. That’s, that’s a really good bit of advice. I love that one, man. Thank you. Thank you. So, in terms of, What, where, where are you seeing founded? Going from here?
Yeah. What, what’s the big goal for you? Being the Poundland Martin Lewis, for myself.
I love it. A friend of me, he’s got a ring to it. , look here, I would be happy as that. no, to be honest, if I can reach more people and educate in a manner that they don’t feel like they’re being preached to, that would be wonder. I’m just very happy to make people aware of financial literacy and to increase that across the board.
As I said, I’m making my site without expectation of charge for anyone. I will get work and I will get money off the back of that from whatever reason, but the primary focus of that site is to educate free around financial. Okay. Well that you completely blew my next question out. The water . I was gonna say, if you know, would there be a service or a course or something that you thought about or.
Yeah, so like every bit of content on my site is free and will always be free. And the reason for that is because, well, the people who will come to a site like mine where they’re looking to earn money or to save money, they may have challenges with their own current financial setup, and that’s absolutely fine.
It’s not a great situation, but there shouldn’t be a charge or they shouldn’t have to go into debt to find out more good information about personal finance. . Mm. But if they want private tuition or they want coaching in business, and I work a lot with businesses. I, I’ve helped launch thousands of businesses over the years.
then that’s a service that goes beyond the free content in the site. And I may open that up as consultation in the future. to be honest, I’m not, because I don’t, not that I don’t need to, I, I don’t need to. sorry if you can cut this, but I. I’m not open a minute, because I just wanna make sure that I’m putting good content that’s free of charging.
It’s a, it is a great way of looking at, there’s there’s a YouTuber called Myles Beckler who has done exactly that. Yeah. And he’s put himself out there for free. And what has come off it, he’s. Touring the world, giving talks about marketing and, and investing in, in, in business and websites. And he mm-hmm.
he’s a, he’s a website builder himself by, by trade. and the opportunity created by giving something to his audience for free. Yeah. As is vastly outweighed what he could have done if he’d had monetized it from day one. Yeah. And to be honest, I’m. So, , , I, I, every single day that I come up with, I, I’m an entrepreneur at heart, you know, I will always be the person who wants to do something.
You’re a starter. I’ll make things happen and do that. And the challenge for me is to stop myself and to say no, because. I’m meant to have stopped work so that I don’t do things like this. and to take things a bit more easy and to reprioritize things, and I am doing that. So I had a schedule, and my schedule’s not rigid because it’ll just happen when it happens.
So every bit of content, I, as I said, what was three or four a week, maybe three or four a month or a quarter now at this point. But when I put content out there, it will be the best version of it that I can. . That’s amazing. You got, you gotta work towards something. Yeah. And what are you getting up to at the moment in retirement?
What in your spare time other than founders? What, what, yes. A lot of travel. A lot of travel. So I finished, in December, sorry, the start of December. I’ve had three weeks travel, sun and skiing. back at the, oh, wow. Today, and I’m going nice a few weeks time. A couple, this first year I have booked 13 weeks of holidays, ,
So yeah, it’s, it’s mostly travel and just relaxing. You know, I, as I will tell anyone who starts their business, make sure that you keep your priorities in check. I neglect with everything myself, my health for, for business. And yes, I achieved the goals that I wanted to. But neither, I’m going back, I’m just very fortunate that I can go back and fix those things and get myself healthier as nothing major.
Just go to the gym. You know? I would’ve been the person in the office at 7:00 AM because that’s what I thought you had to do. whereas now I am getting up at seven and taking my daughter to school, and then going for a coffee and playing golf for four hours. It’s, it’s a lot different. Yeah. But look, you worked your, your backside off the get there.
So yeah, I do prop props to you. You know, they’re the thank you. You can only look back and have, everyone’s got regrets at, at the end of the day. You work, you worked your twenties off and it’s paid off for you. Right? So, yeah. Yeah, perhaps. I’m, I’m 30. I’m 40. . I’m 30. Thank you. . You don’t look it . Well, look, it’s been a really great chatting to you, Ko.
I’ve really enjoyed this. Thank you. And thank, is there any last tips or anything that you would, didn’t cover that you really want to sort of let the listeners know? Yeah, look, if you are thinking of starting a business or you are thinking about investing, or anything like that, that my advice is just start.
there’s no right time. There will never be a perfect time to start, and you will learn from your mistakes as you go. As long as you don’t make mistakes that stop you in your tracks, then you can just keep moving forward and, and that’s just call it an education. But, from, from my side of things, if anyone wants to find out any more information, they can go to Finder dot Dakota uk and that’s foundered.co.uk, or my channel on YouTube is Finder money.
Excellent. Brilliant. Well, look, it’s been a real pleasure. Thank you so much. And, yeah, I can’t wait to, to get you back on in a couple of years time when we can chat about how founded and, has taken off and, you know, you’ve, you’ve, you’ve exited in another business. . No . Sammy, it’s been brilliant chatting here.
Thank you so much. Pleasure. Thanks Con, have a great night. Bye-bye. Take care.
