0:00:00 Dale Beaumont: I’ve been trying and, you know, I’ve been tested.
0:00:06 B: Welcome to the Friends in Business podcast with your hosts, Ben Wright and Jemima Ashley. Ben, known as the sales strategist, and Jemima, our resident visibility expert, are here to share their wealth of knowledge and experience with a little fun along the way. Whether you’re a leader, entrepreneur, or aspiring business owner, this is the podcast where we share everything we know about business and to help you succeed.
0:00:31 B: Let’s get started. Welcome to the Friends in Business podcast.
0:00:44 Ben Wright: Hey, Jemimah. How are you today?
0:00:46 Jemimah Ashleigh: Ben, Good, how are you?
0:00:47 Ben Wright: Excellent. Now, I’m going to get in really early with this because this is our third remote recording. Our third remote recording, I should say, and only have we been recording in person up until this point in time. But on our first recording, you had a rogue AI powered vacuum. Super cleaner, whatever you want to call it, was going crazy in the background.
0:01:08 Jemimah Ashleigh: I think vacuum’s the appropriate word. And crazy might be overkill. I think it started here. Radio. I’m listening.
0:01:14 Ben Wright: We’ll run with the rumor rather than buying the truth. Then the second episode. We had a birthday card get knocked off the perch by your cat.
0:01:21 Jemimah Ashleigh: Didn’t see that coming. Honestly, I will say it is my niece’s birthday. I bought her a card and I just left it on the table and I thought, well, I just will write on that later for my birthday party tonight. And. And the cat found it pushed on the ground and I just started hearing a song called Hocker Full of Sunshine by Natalie Bathingthway. Just starts screaming in the corner. Awkward. Especially during rogue recordings. This is why we do it in person event. This is why I come to Noosa again. Why aren’t I in Noosa? All right, we’ve got a lot of people dialing in from all over Australia this week.
0:01:50 Ben Wright: Yeah. Well, my first question is, what beautiful harmonics are going to interrupt us today?
0:01:56 Jemimah Ashleigh: I can’t wait to find out. I’ve scoured the house prior to this. I make no promises because I think we know how that goes. I think we know what’s going to happen.
0:02:03 Ben Wright: Excellent. I will take your word for it, but I will believe it when I say it. My second question, though, is, who is the wonderful guest that we have on with us today?
0:02:10 Jemimah Ashleigh: We are so fortunate to say, Ben, I would like to introduce you to one of my friends in business, the amazing Dale Beaumont. Dale, thanks for coming on the podcast.
0:02:17 Dale Beaumont: Thanks so much. Great to see you guys.
0:02:20 Jemimah Ashleigh: Oh, it’s great to have you here. So excited. So, Dale, so many questions. I’ve had the pleasure of knowing you for probably longer than either of us want to probably admit. Probably crossed paths for like the last 10 years. Probably been liking each other’s phones last 5, gotten to know each other really well. But a lot of people on the podcast won’t know you. So love to hear about a little bit about you, about your business, Business Blueprint. You’re like a best selling author 19 times. Tell us about you.
0:02:43 Dale Beaumont: Yeah, so essentially I’m, I’m a business guy and entrepreneur. I’ve been in business for 25 years this year. So I left school, lasted six months in working for someone else and then said that’s it, I’ve had enough, I going to start my own business. And that’s been my life ever since. Built about a dozen companies over that period of time, exited from three. And yeah, I just love business and helping people and I’m also, I’ve been married for 23 years this year and also have two kids. One is 17 and the other is 14. And we love to travel. In addition to all my business and financial success, the thing I’m most proud of is that for the last 17 years we have set up our life to do two months work, one month travel, two months work, one month travel, two months work, one month travel somewhere in the world. So we spend about four, sometimes five months traveling the world each year. We’ve been to 86 countries together as a family and we just want to create as many amazing experiences with our kids while they’re still under our care. And so that’s been, yeah, something that I can share more about. How do you have a super successful business. But most important, more importantly is how do you have time freedom, which is I think more important than the money. So we can talk a bit about that and yeah, anything else you’re curious about, I’m happy to share as much as I can and help anyone who’s on the journey to building a successful business.
0:04:10 Jemimah Ashleigh: We have so many points in that that I just want to ask you a thousand questions about because there are so many interesting parts to that story. The thing that most people know you for is probably Business Blueprint. Do you want to tell us a little bit about that?
0:04:21 Dale Beaumont: Yeah. So Business Blueprint is a company that I’ve run for the last 16 years and it’s a business education and training company. But it’s really become like more of a community. People join for the content, but they stay for the people and the connections and the associations that they make. So we have about 500 people going through our program at any point in time. It’s a 12 month business transformation program where entrepreneurs kind of come in and over the course of the next 12 months we sit down systematically improve every area of their business. And some just work with us for a year. But we’ve had many clients that have been with us for three years, five years, some of them even 10 years plus. And more so than just a program. It really is a community where people develop lifelong connections and friends with other business owners and like minded people.
So we primarily operate in Australia and New Zealand and I think we’re pretty good at what we do. But we’re also now developing a product that we’re going to be taking into the US market as well later this year. So yeah, we just like helping people to create time and money freedom and we do that through helping them to grow their business. And then once they grow their business, they’ve then got the time and money to then improve other areas of their life. And so even though we’re a business program, we’ve had people sort of say I have got involved in health and fitness or I have spending more time with my kids or I’ve been able to travel and they’re all of the other benefits that you kind of get when you have a good business. So what I love is that when we help someone, we don’t just help their business, we help them with all the other aspects of their life indirectly.
0:05:54 Jemimah Ashleigh: So Ben, we did an episode, Friends in Business the other week and we talked about what is the measure of success, right. What is the thing? And one of the things that Dale’s hit on a couple of times I love is really around this idea of that building a life that you don’t need the holiday from. Like you’ve built the. I’m going to work two months, travel for one month and go to, we’re going to go to 85 countries and we’re going to. You can focus on your health and fitness, Ben. So that’s something that you and I obviously really quite passionate about.
0:06:19 Ben Wright: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. For me, there is no point building an amazing business if it dictates how you live your life. We talk about people going to business so they can have some freedom from working for others in a corporate role. And often what ends up being the result is that you end up chained to a desk. So your 40 hours for a corporate job turns into 50, 60, 70, 80. I’ve been there to 80, I’ve been there to 90, I’ve been there to 100. Right. Hours a week where you literally just live around your business. So yeah. Great topic to talk about today. Thanks, Dale.
0:06:49 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah, I love that. So Dale, you obviously. So you work six months with someone else before going, I just can’t live like this anymore. Have you had the time where you’ve been changed to the desk for 100 hours? Have you done that time? I think we’ve all had to do it at one point or another. It’s probably been a few years of you now, but like have you had that time in your business?
0:07:05 Dale Beaumont: Yeah, certainly the first couple of years in business are very, very tough, especially if you’re kind of raising kids at the same time as well. I do, you know, remember what it was like to be going to bed at like I was looking at my watch and it was like 11:30 and then 12 and then 12:30 and then 1 and then 2:00 clock and then I knew that at 5:30 I’d have a baby calling on me going, wake up, wake up, wake up. And you know, living on sort of four maximum five hours sleep is really, really hard. However, you know, it does kind of get better and part of the what, you know, and it’s easier now that I sort of. That was 25, 26 years ago that I was working those kind of crazy hours at the beginning. But now, thanks to technology, thanks to tools like ChatGPT, thanks to like having staff like in the Philippines at a much lower cost than employing staff locally, I think it’s never been easier to run a business. And I don’t certainly, I don’t wear hard work as a badge of honor or kind of. It’s not something that I like kind of bragging about. I’m almost ashamed of how, you know, much I tortured myself in those first few years. And yes, there’s a certain amount of hard work is important, but it’s not just working hard, it’s also working smarter as well. And it’s about using tools and technology and talented people that are based in other places to help you to grow. So I want to make sure that people know, yes, there’s element of hard work for sure, but I do not want that going over the top where it becomes like, yeah, like a, you know, the hustle and grind sort of like culture and you know, let’s see how hard we can work and how much of, you know, our health and our relationships we can destroy along the way. I’m not kind of about working hard for working hard’s sake.
0:08:41 Jemimah Ashleigh: Oh, I Love that. Because there’s often people that are like. And I know the same. I see these people all the time who are like I’ve got to do. Who have done the hard yard. There’s no surprise to anyone who’s listening to this, but there are going to be times where you have to eat the metaphorical frog sandwich. You’re going to have to eat a frog. It means you’re going to have to work till midnight. You are going to have to work, start work at 6am the next day. There are going to be times in our business but that cannot be the norm. And I think when you’re in that growth and development phase and there will be times where you are outside of that. Dale, I’m sure. And I know Ben and I certainly have had those. We haven’t do more work than historically you do. And there will be peaks and troughs of that. What’s interesting to me is the people that get four or five years in and think this is just the norm and I know this is a running joke that I’ve certainly had a lot of conversations around is that we don’t have our own businesses because we think because it’s easy. We do it because we thought it would be easy. And it’s certainly not necessarily ever that for you. Most of your clients, I imagine probably in the same thing where they get to you and they go, it might be a little bit of a last ditch. You felt like I need to get this under control. And I know that’s something that business blueprint and you talk a lot about. But what do you find sort of what’s that timing for people? What do you think the kind of the red flags are for people when they’re getting to you of we now need to get some work life balance. What does it generally look like for those people coming to you at that point?
0:09:57 Dale Beaumont: Yeah, people come to us because they realize the fact that it’s just now that was hard work for like a season is now becoming basically their permanent way of operating. And it’s basically now they kind of have created. They go into business because they want time, more time, they want more money, they want more freedom. And then two, three, four, five years down the track, they’ve actually got the exact opposite. They got less time than what they had when they were working for someone else. They have less freedom because now they have to show up because if they don’t, they don’t get paid. And after they’ve paid all their bills and all their expenses, they’re probably earning less than they were when they were working in a job. And so all of those things get to the point where someone says, like, enough is enough, and they’re humble enough to sort of say, you know, if I could do it on my own, I would have already done so by now. So I need some outside help. I need some outside thinking. It’s like a little bit like the instructions of how to get out of the jar or written on the outside, and you’re stuck on the inside. So you need someone else that’s kind of been there, done that before you. And I always say there’s two ways to live your life. One’s through trial and error. That’s through following the recipes of other people that have been there and being super successful. So, yes, you will have to struggle for a period of time. We all do. However, the smart thing to do is not to stay in that position and think you have to do it all yourself and spend the next 10 or 20 years working really, really hard. Now, we have amazing podcasts and books and mentors and teachers and programs and people that have got out of that position and they have a formula or recipe. For me, it’s a blueprint to follow in order to help someone else to go from working crazy hours and a business that’s all consuming and that’s most likely unprofitable to a business that’s highly successful, highly profitable, and a business that can run with or without you having to be there. I know for a lot of people it’s. It’s like. Sounds like a fantasy, but it’s real and it’s true. And you got to start listening to the people that have been there and done it before you.
One of my mentors, a guy that I learned from, he used to work crazy hours, as we all did, but he got his business down to working in it just two hours a week. That was it. So he basically had one hour call with his team. Like he’s called like a weekly meeting, and then the other hour was just kind of like reviewing the financials of the business. And he has like a dashboard with all of his KPIs and stats and stuff like that. And that was basically all that he would do each week, is two hours reviewing the numbers and then spending time with the team. And then he’d say, see you next week. And so they’re the type of people that you’re going to kind of like, learn from. How do you go from working 100 hours a week to two hours a week? There is a process, there’s a method and once you kind of learn it and apply it, then you can improve your life and your. And get back your time as well, which is what it’s all about.
0:12:39 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah, yeah, I love that. So we’ve talked about business blueprint a little bit because I actually really want to take us back a couple of years ago, like five years ago. I imagine you probably started that. You probably look about that young. But I do want to ask about the moment where you sort of have that light bulb moment where business blueprint becomes a bit of an idea because you were really one of the first, if not the first in Australia who went, I think we can systemize a step by step approach here. I think we can create a roadmap from A to B to C to D to get you into that potentially that two hour business if that’s where you wanted to get to. And it could be manageable. 20 to 30 hours. We’re not saying everyone was obviously reaching for the two hours, but what’s that moment like? You’re like, I can blueprint this out. I think I can do a step by step project. I’ve had the opportunity to sit in your rooms before. I’m got the opportunity where I’m going to be speaking at one of your conferences. Answers shortly. And I know the people in the vibe and everything you’re doing there. Take us back to young Dale sitting at that computer or sitting at the, with the butcher’s paper at the table and going, I’m going to bleed print this out. Can you tell me about that time? Tell me about how we got there. How do you, how’s that start? Because it’s so interesting to me.
0:13:43 Dale Beaumont: Yeah. So like most people, I was doing everything myself and I realized I can’t keep doing this anymore. I need to kind of get some help. And so when what typically you do is I’ll just hire someone. And so I hired someone and what the mistake a lot of people make. Thankfully the person that I hired worked out and was with me for 10 years, which is good. But normally what happens is that you’re working really, really hard, doing it all yourself. You find someone, you spend the next like three months, six months training them, getting them up to speed. And then the person may say, oh, I’m going to go, you know, backpacking for the next six months. Thank you for all the stuff, but I’m leaving, you know, here’s my notice. And then you basically have to go through the whole process again and hire another person. Once you’ve done that three or four times, train someone, they leave. Train someone, they leave. Many people go, that’s it. I’m not going to hire people anymore because I hire them and then they leave. And so the way to do it is, yes, you want to hire people, but before you hire someone, you need to document your systems and processes and putting it into some type of a knowledge management system, which is basically one central place which stores all of your intellectual property, your policies, your processes, your standard operating procedures, all of your systems go into one place. Because once you’ve documented, and you don’t need hundreds, you might need 10 or 20 or 30 to start with, but then you can hire someone and then rather than you having to physically train them, your knowledge management system basically does the training for you.
So their first one week, their first maybe two weeks is kind of basic training. And the benefit of that is you don’t have to stop, put everything on hold in order to train that particular person. And the good thing about that is if they work out, great, but if they don’t, then you can then hire another person and go through that training and you don’t have that disappointment of wasting, you know, months of time getting someone up to speed. And if you’re growing fast and then next month you need to hire another person, just put them into the training. Another person, you put them through their basic training. So when I started to do that myself, I got so many benefits, I was able to reduce my time, like you said before, from doing two months on, one month off. I hired someone that was then running my business. I could go away for four weeks and come back and my business would still be running. In fact, sometimes I’d go and come back and have more money than when I left. And I was like, wow, that’s really kind of like, cool. And so when I started to show, like, people started asking me, like, they messaged me and going, how are you? Like, why are you kind of going away so much? All I see is you, like, on holidays and traveling, and it seems like your business is just continuing to grow. How are you doing this? So I got a few people around and I showed them. Oh, you just set it up like this. And this is the knowledge management system. This is my training manual. This is my system for. This is my system for that. And they were like, wow, that’s incredible. That’s like a blueprint for running a business. Can you teach us? Can you show us what to do? We want to have that training in that blueprint. So that’s when I started my company Business Blueprint, which was to basically teach other people the process of the system that I developed to setting up a business that can make money and that can run and serve clients with or without you being there. And that’s exactly what business Blueprint kind of how it started. And every year we just got it made it better and better and better. And 16 years later, yeah, it’s been amazing journey to help. Like, I think we now have 4,000 businesses that we’ve worked with over the last 16 years to help them to build a business that can run without them. Many of them have actually sold. One of our clients two years ago, sold his business for one, sold him for three million, another one for seven and a half million. One of our clients sold his business for $12 million because his business was highly systemized as well. So that’s the indirect benefit of doing all this.
First of all, you just want to get your time back and get your life back. But then after that, the byproduct of you systemizing your business is it becomes extremely valuable to someone else that wants to come along and basically buy that business. In fact, the secret is if you can prove to a buyer that business can run without the owner having to be there, then they’ll pay a premium for that particular business. Because most businesses trade on a multiple of their ebitda, which is normally two and a half, maybe three times ebitda. But if you have a highly systematic business that can run without the owner, then investors will pay five, six, even seven times ebitda. So basically doubling the sale price of your business. So, yeah, that’s a bit about the blueprint journey. It’s been a lot of fun.
0:18:05 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah. So it’s been a pleasure to watch that over kind of last 10 years since I started first engaging with you. One of the things that I really liked about the last time that I went to Blueprint was that you were like, here’s the manual, here’s the manual, here’s the thing. Do this, do that, do that. And it was almost like you passed it to everyone and were like, here’s everything I know. Here’s. I’m going to crack open my brain, give you all the processes and steps as he do it. Also here is our VA call center. Here is this. Here is that. I was like, that’s just giving the keys to the castle. And that’s one of the things I really admired about when he was setting this up is this idea of just give the keys to the castle. The next thing I really loved was they’re like, do you know, thing I’m really interested at the moment. Real estate, let’s talk about that. And it became this half an hour of like how to find houses to flip for me it looks really much like a passion project for you. It also looks like I’m going to give you the keys to everything that I’m interested in and if you want to go and use it here that you can tell me about that. Tell me about the moment. You’re like, I think we’re going to show you how to use Google Earth is one thing I remember it was the Google Earth to find properties that were better valued and how you could subdivide. And I was like, I never thought about this but now I want to do it.
0:19:05 Dale Beaumont: Yeah. So one of the other things that we started to do like recently was is basically help our clients to actually be smart with the money that they make from their business and invest it into other income producing assets. Because having worked with so many business owners, they’re really good at making money. But I’ve found that most business owners are not very good at managing money or investing their money. It’s a completely different kind of like skill set. And so what I have been doing for the last 16 years is investing. And we’ve built up sizable property portfolio and share portfolio as well and also a portfolio of other companies that we own but don’t run. And my clients sort of became curious about how did you kind of build this very large property portfolio? How did you invest in shares and all these things? And so I started teaching my clients how to. It was still a business program and we’re still going to help you to grow your business. But kind of as a bonus, we now basically teach finance and we teach property shares and investing in other private companies that can run under management without you having to be there. And it’s been amazing. And many of my clients now, not only have they achieved time freedom, which is a business that can run without you, but now they have complete financial freedom as well, where they have more than enough passive income coming in that it exceeds all of the expenses that they have. And they even make more money now from their investments than what they do from running their company day to day. So business Blueprint has expanded a lot from just helping them with their business. Now it’s basically helping them to grow their business and achieve financial freedom within the next five to 10 years. And we’ve not only done that ourselves, but we’ve helped a lot of our clients do that now as well. And it’s fun. It’s fun to be able to help people to create time and money freedom. Because once you’ve got time and money, then all of your other goals and dreams can come true. And if you’ve got more money than you need, you can always give it away to others.
0:20:55 Jemimah Ashleigh: One of the things I really like and what I’m hearing from what you’re saying is that you took this idea of like I want to help people do this and then established immediately like this was this really fundamental baseline course we’re going to get you out of your business. Oh wait. The problem they’re now having in the more advanced area is they have more money than they know what to do with. Their business owners are used to living on that $200,000 and not really paying themselves a salary and probably not having the company set up correctly. Therefore, not knowing that things should go through trust or through company names or oh my gosh, there’s now more money. What do we do with this? How do we. We’ve got to pay more tax. And it’s like you’ve actually taken the thing that I love about blueprint, really what you’ve really talked about today is that step by step process that started here. I’ve now identified the next level of where our people need to go to. I’ve now identified. Well, actually now they’ve got more money so we can start looking at property investments because that’s what’s worked for us. Oh wait, you actually want to do shares and stocks. Let’s do that. And it’s this step by step process of you recognizing that firstly the issue, people don’t know how to systemize a process. Secondly, that people are going to grow over time. With you on that. As you said, like we’ve had people here for 10 years that are buying to programs. Pretty significant. I think the other question just before I know we’re sort of about time. The one question I did want to ask because one of the things I’ve really also looked at what you’ve done is that you often bring in other experts and we don’t see a lot of other business leaders who run programs go, oh, I’m going to give my stage away that I’ve built to other people straight away. You are readily ready to do that. Love to hear about why you get other experts in. I think it’s pretty obvious. But let’s talk about why you get other experts in.
0:22:29 Dale Beaumont: Yeah, for a few reasons you know, one is because that I do a lot of like teaching every single week on different things and I make myself pretty accessible to my clients. And I teach and I teach and I teach and I teach and I teach. So when they come along to my big conferences, I still do some teaching, but listening to me for like two days straight after they’ve just had me for every single week, you know, it starts to even I can lose my impact after a period of kind of like time. And so, and also I’m not an expert in every area. There’s a lot of things that I’m really, really good at. But LinkedIn, for example, is not something that I do like I focused on and other things like when it comes to the pointy aspect of finance, yes, I can read a profit and loss and a balance sheet and things like that, but there’s people that are far better at that. Or some of my clients have been asking me questions about licensing and franchising or employment contracts, for example. And they’re not things that I am world class at. So I bring in like the best of the best people. Normally each conference that I run, which is four times a year, I’ve had anywhere from 14, sometimes even up to 18 speakers that are all specialists in their different field. There’s some sessions that we all together and then we also at our venue have four other rooms like breakout rooms. And so I now have clients that are doing E commerce, so if they’re in E commerce they can go into this room. I have clients that are doing B2B so they’re that room. I’ve got other clients as well that might be needing help with their website.
So with 500 clients, you can imagine, and this is probably not good advice for anyone else that is trying to become a business coach. But basically I do everything for everyone at every size. So which is not a good formula. You definitely should have kind of like a niche. But what I’ve kind of got now is one program that teaches the core essentials to everyone. But then I’ve got these breakout rooms or specialized areas that have their own kind of messenger group and their own breakout sessions if they’re in E commerce. So I’ve got like lots of people that are doing in finance or real estate or medical. It’s almost like a community within the community. And because of that reason I want to have speakers that are specialized in that particular area. So yeah, I’m very kind of like generous with my stage and I love giving speakers as long as you’re good at what you do or you’ve built a really successful business and you’ve got to be at least half decent at speaking on stage, because I don’t put just anyone on my stage. But if you’re good at what you do, you’re an expert in your field, then I love giving speakers an opportunity to share their message and some of them pick up clients as well, which is a win, win for everybody. And yeah, we’ve had like about 600 plus people, experts speak on our stage in the last 16 years, so it’s been great. And I’ve met so many awesome people as a result of that as well. So it’s a win, win for everyone.
0:25:14 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah, amazing. Dale, I just want to say thank you so much. This is the quietest Ben’s ever been on a podcast episode. Like, personally, I’m really enjoying that. It’s been really nice. Ben, tell me takeaways, plenty.
0:25:26 Ben Wright: We can go through Jemimah. And by the way, sometimes it is nice just to be able to sit back and listen to what others have to say. Yeah, I do enjoy that. So I look, for me, there’s the really obvious piece there around systemising what you do, systemise before you scale, right? Obviously to do that, you’ve got to get really good at what you do first, right? So for me, trying to run before you walk, we didn’t speak explicitly about it can be problematic. But if you wait too long to systemise your business, right, then your glass ceiling comes along really, really quickly, right? Your growth ambitions, they will become very difficult to achieve if you haven’t systemised.
I think the second piece for me is, as you’re going about growing a business, that choice, that fork in the road that says, I’m going to learn, do make my mistakes, relearn, redo, hopefully make new mistakes. Not the same again, right? That cycle of learn by doing versus bringing in others to help you. And often it’s, for me, it’s a blend of both of that. Some things you’ll decide, you know what, I actually want to learn this myself and others. You’re going to bring in experts to help you and you can often find a really nice balance there. But I think the piece that you’re talking about there, Dale, around making that decision, making that conscious decision, is really impactful for businesses as they’re going on that heavy growth curve. So thank you, Dale. I’ve enjoyed listening to you today.
0:26:37 Dale Beaumont: Thanks, Ben.
0:26:38 Jemimah Ashleigh: Well, that’s another episode of Friends In Business podcast. Ben, I feel like I’m stealing your rough oven. I’m totally fine with it. Today we’re going to go to bring my friend Dale Beaumont into the studio. I’m very happy for that. Thank you so much. Please find us on Facebook and we’ll see you next week.
0:26:51 Dale Beaumont: Thanks, Jemimah. See you guys. Thank you. Bye!
0:26:53 Ben Wright: Byefor now.
