Hey friends, welcome back to the channel. This is going to be a little bit of a life update. So, we do these about once or twice a year. This is the 2026 life update video. We're going to talk about life and work and a couple of reflections. So, yeah, let's go. All right. So, being a dad is much more interesting now than it was a year ago. Baby girl is now walking around. She's toddling all over the place. Um, I found a nice little routine where
she and I go for a walk every morning. Um, we often go to a coffee shop. I will be having a coffee. She'll be having a baby chino, which is basically like froth milk. And she has started to say a few words. Like she says mommy. She says daddy. She knows how to say more. When she asks for more stuff, we say more please. And she'll say peace. Which is cute. And I am starting to feel much more of what parents describe as like joy when
they when they have babies. To be honest, when the baby was 4 months old, honestly, it was a bit of a potato. There wasn't much going on. I was like, "Okay, I mean, there's not much to do here." But as she has gotten more interactive, I found that around the 8-month mark was when I was like, "Oh, this is this is actually getting quite fun." Uh, and like almost like like each month she's now like learning new skills and she can now like climb up and
down the stairs roughly unaded. Still needs a little bit of help and she's going to various different like play groups like Montasuri play groups to like learn stuff and overall it's been a very enjoyable experience having a kid. more recently. We live in Hong Kong and so um getting child care is super super cheap here. And so a big part of what has been absolutely life-changing is like the child care situation cuz for example we have a full-time 24/7 nanny which is amazing which means that
like we're able to do stuff that parents without like the nanny and without the help just can't do. For example, we can go out for date nights once a week without worrying too much about it. And if for example we're in the office, we can ask the nanny to take baby girl to the play groups and stuff. So that's definitely uh made the experience of having a kid very different to our friends uh in the west or who don't have uh professional child care being to
be able to look after the baby. The key test of this was that we spent about a month in London over the summer and we didn't hire any professional household help or professional like baby care during that month cuz we were like you know what we're going to be present parents and it's going to be like a nice zen experience and we're not going to do any work and we're just going to be fully present with the baby. But then baby got ill, Izzy got ill,
I was ill for various times. all sorts of work stuff ended up happening and like there were fires happening in the business and so both Izzy and I had to do a bunch of work stuff and so we kind of realized that it's very hard uh looking after the baby and also trying to do work stuff both at the same time. Uh and now I have a added appreciation for the difficulties of parenting. If looking after the baby was the only thing I was doing, I'd
be like, "All right, cool. I can I can do this. This is it's not that hard in the grand scheme of things." But if you're trying to do literally anything else, work or cleaning the house or doing the laundry or like just keeping up to date with life, the only real time you have to do those things is when the baby is asleep. And so then you get this like window of time to where you just want to chill out, but where all of the stuff
has to get done, the laundry, the cleaning, the cooking, whatever. And now living here in Hong Kong where we we we now have a lot a lot of like parent friends who have kids at various different ages and literally all of them are stacked to the brim with like the nanny and childcare support and stuff. and they all talk about how like how if you go on holiday without the nanny it really doesn't feel like a holiday because you're on like childcare duty most of the
time and at a certain point obviously it depends on the kid's age and things. So that's been the primary kind of life change basically choosing to build a business that gives us the income where we can in fact have 24/7 professional childare uh to look after the baby as needed cuz that's certainly made life way easier than it would have been otherwise and also just having the freedom to be able to move to a country like Hong Kong. I didn't know anything about the childcare situation
when we moved to Hong Kong. It was kind of like a pleasant surprise. But now that we're here, um, and we've been here for two years now, went back to London for a month, realized actually, man, Hong Kong is sick. And so, we've now just signed another lease on our flat for another 2 years. And excitingly, and I'll talk about this in the work section, we've just signed a three-year lease on a brand new office. And so, we're in the middle of like fitting out a
whole office. And the flexibility as well of having this kind of work where I basically make videos for a living is also super nice because I can basically define my routine however I want. So at the moment like what I do is Izzy and I wake up at 7:00 and then from 7:00 till 8 will be like an exercise block. So I went for a swim this morning and then went to the sauna from 8:00 till 8:30 and then from 8:30 to 9:30 I sort of
went out with the baby girl. Uh, we had a coffee, she had her baby Chino, and then I walked with her to the office because it's walking distance from my house. And then around 9:30 was when the nanny picked her up from the office to take her to her play group. And so then I can sort of like spend an hour with baby girl in the morning on my own. Uh, come into the office and then just sort of start the workday uh, while the baby
gets taken care of by someone else, which is super nice. One thing I do feel a little bit guilty about on this front is what is a good amount of time to spend with your kid? Cuz it's not like 24 hours a day. But we can all agree that spending 24 hours a day with your kid is probably a bit excessive. And we can all agree that spending zero hours a day with your kid is probably a little bit less. And so there clearly is some
kind of sweet spot of like how much you want to hang out with a kid. And this is the question that I now pose to every parent that I meet that like how do you think about how much time to spend with the kid? Because especially when you have the freedom that you can do it as much or as little as you want. For example, in my case, thanks to the way this business is set up, I actually don't have to work. I could just choose
to be a stay-at-home dad and I could just not work and just live off investment earnings and spend literally 18 hours a day with a kid other than when she's actually she's sleep for like 11 12 hours. So literally spending spending 12 hours a day with a kid, but I don't really want to. It's not that fun spending 12 hours a day with like a 16-month-old. It's fun spending maybe one or two hours a day with a 16-month old, but when it starts to get more
than that, it starts to feel like not not very fun. And so there's part of me that's that has this sort of like should I be spending more time with a kid? from the various parents I've spoken to. Uh, and I would be curious to hear in the comments if if if a parent has figured out the answer to that question. It's like you don't overthink it. Uh, the fact that you're asking that question probably means that you'll you'll just like adjust over time. And especially
as kids get older, you start to want to spend more time with them and so don't worry about it too much has been the general vibe that I've gotten from parents who are older and have therefore more experience in in the whole kids thing. But it does cross my mind like this morning for example walked to her to the office and at 9:30 the nanny picked her up and actually for the first time she was like daddy daddy and she was like crying cuz she was
like daddy d and I was like this a this has never happened before where she's just like crying daddy she she she normally cries mommy mommy but for the first time this morning like as I left her with the nanny she was like daddy daddy and so that part of me is like feeling guilty about this to be like should I have kept her around in the office should I have just gone with her or I mean it's natural for a baby. I think that's attached
to be like crying when they've taken away from the parent. Um, so I don't know, it's a a bit of a a navigational struggle around cuz for example, if if I didn't have the freedom to do whatever I wanted and if I had to go to work, then I can tell myself that like, oh, I have to go to work. I have to go. I have to be in the office. Like, of course, I'm doing it to support the family. But like, if I'm honest with
myself, I'm not doing it to support the family. I'm doing it because work is really fun. So like what's a what's a good amount of time to spend with a baby? I have no idea. So if anyone has thoughts on this or a framework for thinking about this, let me know because I would I would love to know the answer to that question. So in a way is like do you maximize quality time where you're like fully present just doing the thing for like a small
amount of time. But then there is also something to be said for quantity time as well. Like you know obviously bonding and attachment and stuff does form through just being around each other even if you're not like quality time spending time together. So, this is one of the key questions in my life these days that I didn't didn't really have to face in the past, but it's now it now comes up whenever I make the decision to choose work or hanging out with the boys or
playing pickle ball or anything other than hanging out with the kid. I guess this is a thing that all parents have to deal with. But yeah, that's like part one of the life update. Oh, by the way, quick plaque. We currently have a promotion on this very, very nice, very cool pen designed in collaboration by me and Baron Fig. It is the liinal squire hex pen. Liinal meaning the space between the space between ideas, the space between distraction and deep work. The story behind this is
that a few years ago, I was at a writer's retreat uh where James Clear happened to be there, the bestselling author of Atomic Habits, and he gifted me a pen and I started using the pen and it was like the best pen I've ever used in my life. The only thing I didn't like about it was that it was black. And then James Clear very kindly introed me to Joey who's the founder and chief designer at Baron Fig. And I was saying to Joey, "Man, I
love the pen that you made with James Clear. can we make one for me but just make it white and more like you know light mode my kind of color scheme rather than black and so that's what we ended up doing. We ended up collaborating on this design for this white six-sided aluminium pen and engraved on it are the words diverge, converge and emerge which is the general process of creativity. Like you start off by diverging and generating lots of different ideas and then you converge
into a handful of things that you want to explore and then ultimately the product that you want to create emerges from that. This is the best pen I've ever used. It looks super nice. Everyone that I've gifted it to has said that, "Oh my god, this is incredible." And so, if you are in the market for some stationary or you would like to buy a very nice, fancy, very cute pen for a loved one, then there'll be a link down below. And there's a special promotion
on it right now. One thing we have found, which I which I I never thought I would end up doing, is uh when Izzy and I are on date nights, uh often we are just like looking at photos of the baby and like talking about her and stuff, which just feels a little um it's cute. It's it's a it's a vibe. Would recommend having kids, especially if you can get if you can get the child help, the child care. I'm hoping that like when we do
this update a year from now, she'll start to speak because she doesn't really speak right now. So, but I've seen now like two, three year olds, four year olds and stuff and I'm like, "Wo, these kids speak. That's so much more interesting when you can like talk to them and stuff and they ask questions and I'm like, okay, I'm looking forward to that next chapter of life." And also trying to, you know, you know they talk about enjoy every moment about like savoring savoring these moments
and not trying to like rush her along cuz you know this moments these moments only happen once and all of that. We're now looking into like play groups and schools and we like I went to like the Montasauri school open days uh at a couple of different different schools and those seemed great. And it was cool going to these open days, right? Because I don't know if you can tell but I used to be an absolute goodie two shoes when I was in school. when I
was in primary school, secondary school, I was like the model student that they would trot out on open days to like be impressive to the parents and now I see what they were doing because when I went to these open days and speaking to the kids, the 5-year-olds, the 7-year-olds, the 10-year-olds, and I was so impressed. I was like, "Holy, these kids are incredible." Um, and so that made me feel I was like, "Okay, schooling I I I can see the value of school." who before
I was like very like pro homeschooling cuz like but like you know especially the Montasauri stuff and the Waldorf stuff and like these alternative schooling methods I can see why they're good and man seeing like the really impressive 5 to 10 year olds I was like damn are babies going to be like that one day wo that's kind of cool so that's what we're doing probably on the schooling front for now I would like to have another kid sooner rather than later I would say my
my wife is the limiting factor here and so we'll see um we'll see what the timeline on that front is right now I reckon we should I want to aim for five kids I think five is a good number to aim for um but obviously it's easy for me to say. So we'll uh when I talk to Izzy about this just like you know we'll we'll take it one at a time and we'll see. All right, let's move on to some more stuff other than the
baby. So uh we have now been living in Hong Kong for about 2 years and we're going to be here for another three cuz we have the three-ear lease for the office and I can definitely see Hong Kong as like a long-term place to be. It's got a lot going for it. The weather's great. There's a lot to do. The vibes are awesome. It's sort of like parts of it look like you're in Karachi and parts of it look like you're in Dubai and parts of
it look like you're in Singapore and parts of it look like you're in Sydney and parts of it look like you're in London. It's just got quite a lot of variety all like densely packed into like one place. And so if you want the nature, if you want the beaches, then it's all there. Right now we live sort of in the heart of things. I'd like to move out to the sort of like more suburbia over time if we stay here long term. I like the
idea of living by the beach. That would be cool. One thing I started doing recently is I set up a a boys group. So, we have a WhatsApp group with like the boys and there's currently 12 people in the boys group and they're all like uh entrepreneur slash business owner types who I've gotten to know over the last couple of years being here in Hong Kong. And each week we play pickle ball and then we go out for dinner. So, like tomorrow is like pickle ball
night with dinner and that's been that's been nice. Uh we also have a lot of like couple couple friends cuz once you get married and have kids and you end up being a lot of friends with other people who are married and have kids. Yeah, it's just kind of cool. We do a lot of double dates, a lot of going around people's houses, inviting people to our house. Um, it's definitely much more social now than it was a year ago where we didn't really have any
friends cuz we were new to the place. But, uh, both Izzy and I have made more of a concerted effort to like hang out with people and to prioritize friends and hanging out over like work stuff. Um, and sometimes we'll get to the weekend and there'll be a plan or something. We're like, "Oh, can we really be bothered?" And then we'll be like, "No, we should make an effort because you know, we're new and still new here. We still want to make friends." And then we're
always glad to have made the effort. So yeah, friends stuff is kind of sorted. On the health front, I have a personal trainer a couple of times a week. Um, could probably do a better job with that. I've started doing the sort of daily exercise in the morning thing, either running or swimming, which is awesome. And so, like, broadly, things are pretty good on the personal life side of things. There's a challenge of like how much time is an optimal minimal amount of time to to
spend with a baby. Another challenge is a little bit the health stuff. Uh cuz work is super fun and busy and the baby stuff is like in the morning and then like hanging out with Izzy and like seeing friends and amongst all of that stuff. Actually making the time to consistently exercise and like go to the gym regularly. It all historically has fallen by the wayside. But literally as of like a couple of days ago, I decided like this morning exercise block was going to be
a non-negotiable. We've done a little bit of traveling. Often most of the traveling that we do is for work rather than for pleasure. Um cuz to be honest, even with the nanny, it kind of is a faf traveling with a 16-month-old. Uh and so the friction associated with like leaving our setup where everything with the routine and the setup and stuff just for the sake of traveling, you know, often it feels like the trade-off is not worth it. So when we travel these days, it's either
to attend an entrepreneur event. Uh we often pair those with like team offsites and with events for our lifestyle business academy students or it's for like family weddings and family events and seeing the family and stuff. Uh we've not really done much just like leaving the country just for the sake of traveling. One thing that is cool is that mainland China is very easy to get to. And so we spent like a couple of days in Shenzhen. We spent like a couple like a two days
in Guangjo, which is the city that my wife's mom is originally from. The coolest thing about mainland China is they have 24/7 spas. These spas are absolutely sick, right? You pay like the equivalent of like I $30 US or something and you get like a day like a 24-hour pass. And they've got like hot tubs, they got like the cold plunges, they got like the jacuzzi, they got like the sauna on one floor which is all like segregated. So you're there with I'm there with a
bunch of naked dudes. And then one floor up, you've got like this insane all you can eat buffet stuff where they've got all sorts of fruits imaginable, all sort of drinks imaginable. You can pay a little bit more to get access to like the actual food buffet where they've got incredible food. One floor above that, they've got these like private bedrooms that you can book out. So you can just like, you know, pay, I don't know, like $50 US for the night to get like an
absolutely sick private room and so you can sleep there. You can book a masseuse whenever you want. A masseuse will come to you and just like give you whatever massage you want. You can book private rooms for the massage. It's just so sick and it's so affordable, mate. China, I get it now. We want to explore China a little bit more. So far, the only reason we've gone to mainland China is to go to the 24/7 spas. And I want to make that like a monthly
trip. Like you go on like a Saturday evening, you come back on a Sunday evening or, you know, something like that. It could even be on a weekday because those are a lot less busy. And obviously with the flexibility of the business, we could kind of do that. Um, but yeah, I want to I want to explore mainland China a lot. And then especially once baby girl becomes a bit older uh and is able to obey instructions while flying. I hear from two onwards it's actually
not too bad. Then you know we'd like to travel more Southeast Asia. We got some friends in Japan that we can visit. I'd like to see Thailand a bit more. You know, travel to Indonesia, travel to Malaysia. The boys group thing I think is interesting. So, I read a very good post on Twitter a few months ago was basically saying that look, if you're a dude, especially if you're in your 30s, especially if you're married, you are at major risk of like male loneliness. I was
like, wait a minute, what's up with that? And it argument was basically that once you're in your 30s and married, especially with a kid, then generally the wife is the one that controls like the social scene because they tend to be more social and like arrange stuff. Um, and I found myself falling into this into this sort of like inertia of Izzy being the one to organize things and us and everything that we organize being like a couple's a couple's hangout or like a hangout with
the kids and stuff. And basically what this tweet was saying is that as a dude your male friendships will fall by the wayside unless you step up and actively be the organizing force cuz it was basically saying that like all of the other dudes that you know they all want to hang out. It's just no one can be bothered to be the organizer. And so I was like all right that's interesting. I sent that article to my Homies AI agent and got it to make me
a plan and research things that we could do for like male bonding and stuff and landed on like you know there's some pickle ball courts very accessible sport you don't have to be very good at it to have a good time and I would like to do a little bit more stuff once once the boys group becomes more more established of like a weekend boys trip to the spa so we can all get naked together or like you know a co-working trip to I don't know
Bali where we can all like work on our businesses together. So I think that would be super fun. Um, and I'm glad I have gone over my fear of admin to be the organizing force because otherwise something like this wouldn't have happened and I think it's added a lot of value to my life so far. The one downside though of being in Hong Kong is that it's miles away from pretty much all of my friends and family. If there's anything that would take me back to
the UK, it would be the family and friends situation cuz like my brother's in the UK and his wife Lucia is in the UK and like they've got two kids now and so we um stayed with them while we were while we were in London and that was awesome. And it would be so nice for like the cousins to grow up like knowing each other and hanging out more than like over the summers. But with a lot of my UK friends, like half of them are
like entrepreneur types who are also sort of moving away from the UK or always traveling. And so I've seen my like entrepreneur type friends a remarkably large amount of times even though I've not been in the UK because our paths have crossed and or they've coming been coming through Hong Kong on the way to I don't know Thailand or on the way to Australia or whatever. I've been surprised by how much Hong Kong becomes like a stopover point uh for people who are like flying around
different places, which has been which has been quite nice as well. But I do miss the UK friends and family that I now have very little like quantity time with by virtue of being across the other side of the world. Now, for the most part, like life is actually pretty good. Um everything is working, everyone's healthy, the wife is hot, the baby's cute. What's there to complain about? Work is flexible. We've got enough money to be able to kind of do what we want. It's just
too easy. It's like laying on easy mode. I say 5 years from now. What's my 5 year plan? So, I'm currently 32. I'll be 37. It' be nice to have a few more kids by then. Be nice to have a bigger place. We've we've just downsized. We moved to a three-bedroom apartment in Hong Kong. There's a sick place in Hong Kong called Repulse Bay, which is very expensive and it's super nice. And I would love to live in a penthouse in Repuls Bay. That's like my
it's on my vision board. The problem is a penthouse in Repulse Bay costs around about $50,000 a month in rent. Like what the hell? Um, now currently we cannot afford $50,000 US a month in rent, but it feels like a nice little target to shoot for. I would like to be in way better shape five years from now than I currently am because I've I don't know found a daily exercise habit that I've stay stayed consistent with and not like let my diet go to and
stuff. That would be a good place to be. You know, hopefully the marriage will continue to thrive 5 years from now. There's not much to say really on the life front. It feels like a pretty pedestrian life. Every day is kind of similar, but I love it. Like there's enough variety in the day. There's enough variety in the routine. enough freedom and enough of flexibility to be able to like go anywhere if we want to and enough like friends around Hong Kong that we now feel
very settled here which is which is nice. So, we're going to finish up with lunch over here and then we're going to head over to the new office cuz I would love to give you a little bit of a sneak preview of what's going on there and then we can talk about all of the work stuff. Okay, so lots to update on the work front. I feel much more excited now about work than I have for a while, especially for the first 6 months of 2025.
sort of like baby was on the way and then like baby was born and I felt a little stagnant on the work front. The only real product that we had to sell was our YouTuber academy course. And I'll be honest with you guys, uh I've been running this course now for like since like 2020. And the reason people want to start a YouTube channel is because they want to make money. And I actually don't think that starting a YouTube channel is the best way of making
money. I stopped caring about giving beginners advice about YouTube. And so I was in a bit of a crisis of purpose on the work side. So, for a big chunk of last year, I felt like I was just sort of going through the motions because, well, I was making money and because sponsors had to, you know, videos had to come out. And then I was speaking to one one of my mentors, Ollie Richards. He was helping me work through this question of like, what do I
actually want to do? I said to him, I want to build my own business school. And he was like, okay, so why don't you just do that? And initially, lots of things held me back from doing that. One was that I didn't want to be seen as like a scammer or something cuz it's like if you teach people how to build a business, that's sort of like teaching people how to make money. And then that's sort of like are you one of those like make money
online scammy type people? And I realized that that was a major limiting belief that I had that I could let go of. Uh but it took a while to let go of that particular limiting belief. Um and so last year in the summer of last year, we ran a thing called the 1K challenge where we helped people make their first thousands online. And this was our first fora into the world of a paid product that teaches people how to make money. And it went remarkably well.
We had like 1,300 people sign up. And our students got a lot of value from the course. And almost everyone made their first dollar. A load of people made the first $10. Some people made their first $100. And a few people even made their first $1,000 online. And a bunch of those people talked about how life-changing the experience was because it made them realize for the first time that they could generate independent income on their own without their employer. And that was like super super motivating.
I was like that was this was sick. Like I couldn't wait to do the live sessions when we would we were running live sessions for it. And I would like go on for hours and like way beyond the a lot of time cuz it was just so fun. And so since then we have launched a thing called the lifestyle business academy where my vision for this is to literally build the world's best online business school something that is better than the Harvard MBA or the Oxford
MBA or the Cambridge MBA. And since deciding to do that about this time last year, I have woken up every morning feeling excited to work on the business because this feels like a worthy mission. And I haven't had that for like years. Like in the last 12 months, we've taken several hundred students through the lifestyes and being able to quit their jobs. It's super cool. We now have an additional, I think, 15 team members that are just on the lifestyle business academy. So, we have seven
coaches and we're hiring a few more. By the way, there's a jobs page down below if you're interested. We have three admissions advisers and we're hiring a bunch more. We have a sales director, we have a client success director, we have a product lead, we have an ops lead, we have a marketing lead. Um, some of these guys are in Hong Kong. Most of them are remote. And it's just so fun. It's just so sick. Uh, I do live sessions like three times a week. Those
are really fun. I love talking to the students. We did an inerson event in London a few months ago. We've got one coming up in Austin a couple of months from now. It's absolutely exhilarating and that's like one big part of the business which has now really become the main thing that we do in the business. Uh in the business we sort of have three arms. We have content, we have the academy and we have software. Uh within content it's sort of like you know make
videos on YouTube, post stuff on Instagram. We're looking we're about to hire a writer to really help us focus on like LinkedIn and Twitter and emails. We might hire like a content operations type person to help like basically repost stuff across like Tik Tok and YouTube shorts and things. I just like teaching. Content is teaching at scale. The way I think about the content is that like as if I've been offered a tenure ship at a university and each week I just need to rock up
and teach one or two lectures that are roughly themed around helping you build a life you love. So these days, one of those videos roughly is about like personal development and the other one of those videos roughly is about building a business. And so those are our sort of two strands of content like productivity, personal development, and building a business. And both of those ladder up to helping you build a life you love. Um, which also feels like a worthwhile mission to aim for. And so
that's kind of the content side. Then we've got the academy side where the mission is to build the world's best online business school as we talked about. And then we have the software side where we have three apps right now. We have Voice Pal, Super Focus, and Creator Grid. Uh, Voice Pal is just like a nice small little app that's just doing really well and it's basically like a a ghost writer in your pocket. You hit record, you speak to it, it transcribes everything you say,
and then it's able to ask you follow-up question to help you like get out your thoughts. Um, so far I've transcribed I think over 500,000 words on Voice Pal and saved like 7 days of time compared to like typing this out. Uh, then we have uh Creator Grid, which is a platform to help creators learn, grow, and monetize. Right now, really, it's a aentic brand deal marketplace that connects creators and brands. Uh, and Super Focus is the one that I'm most excited about, which is where
we're trying to build a um kind of like the ultimate all-in-one productivity app that helps you actually manage your time and achieve your goals. Because in a way, the content is like teaching people to fish and then the software is giving them a fishing rod. I'm particularly excited about Super Focus cuz we now have like a thousand founding members and so we have every day we have um real people using the app and giving us feedback on it and saying what they love about it and
what they want improved about it. And every week uh the team, our designer, our developer, our product manager are making changes to the app and making it sick. And yeah, about 6 months ago, I was kind of embarrassed uh with the app cuz it wasn't very good. But now I'm genuinely proud of it. And so about one day a week I spend focused on Super Focus and actually about 3 days a week on Lifestyle Business Academy and then one day a week roughly on content. And
so that feels like a really good like portfolio of activities to be doing in the business content academy um software. The academy is sort of like the cash flow engine shall we say where it's sort of like you know it's high margin well-ish cuz we have a massive team around it. Uh high margin informational courses with with coaching and community and uh curriculum and that's really fun. And then the software is sort of where we're doing the monthly recurring revenue/ potentially enterprise value play. I don't
think we we'd want to sell the product. I don't think we'd want to sell the software, but we want to build it with that kind of operational discipline in mind such that we if we if we wanted to we could have the option of selling it because you know the way you build a company to sell is just a very disciplined way of building a business where you're keeping an eye on your margins, you're making sure everything is like documented appropriately that everything is sort of
yeah is just is working nicely. That was about a year ago. Yeah. When I was sort of just starting this online business school idea, I had a chat with one of my mentors and he asked me a simple question. He asked me to sort of rate how I felt about my work on a scale of 0 to 10. And at the time I said it was a six. Then he asked me, "All right, cool. What would it take for it to be a seven, an eight,
a nine or a 10?" And what I said at the time was, man, right now I'm working from home most of the time, but if we had like a really nice vibe office where we had studios filming for me and Izzy and we had the team there every day in person and it was like a super great place to work and I could go there every day and work on the stuff that would take it to a 10 out of 10. And cuz we had like
filming studios in the house and cuz like our lease was still a year to expire, we were like, "All right, let's get a small office inside a co-working space cuz then that gives you like the flexibility and you don't have to deal with office renovations and you can have like a very flexible month-to-month lease. Uh, which is what we've done for the last year or so. But then as the lifestyle business academy started to explode, we realized we needed to hire more people. The team expanded
and then our original office became way too small to actually facilitate the team that we have which prompted us to think hm should we commit to being in Hong Kong and should we try and find like a really sick office where we can film from and where we can work from um where our students can come and hang out where we can host events where we can do podcasts from and so that is what we are literally in the process of doing. So let me start
by showing you what the old office looks like. All right, so this is what the current office looks like. This is an insanely wide lens, so it actually looks way bigger than it actually is. This is where Izzy sits. This is where I sit. This is where Owen usually sits. Usually Nicole's over there, Ann's over there, and Corus is over there. And already we're like colliding into each other and barely have space to walk around it. Um, and let's now go over to the new one.
All right, so this is what the new office looks like right now. Hello. Here we go. Oh my goodness. It is. Look at all of this. It's a construction site. This is very, very exciting. Things are happening. The walls are being built. Man, last time we were here, there was nothing built and we were just sort of laying out where we want the walls to go. the time before that it was completely empty and we were in the process of like signing the lease over and
all of this has started to happen literally in the last like seven daysish and now it's all it's literally all happening. So right now there's no air conditioning in here because there's all this building stuff happening and so they're uh the building management has turned off the air conditioning uh so that it doesn't like clog up all the dust and everything and so it's absolutely boiling in here. They've got these like fans set up on the floor. They've like closed all the windows because the windows
are obviously going to let the sun in. And so you can't really get a feel for like the natural light because with with all the windows closed, but once everything is ready, we'll definitely be doing lots and lots of content like showing the entire renovation process from start to finish, which has been uh very interesting. Lots of things to think about that I've never had to think about before in my life. So yeah, this is where the main area of the office is going to be.
We've got Izzy's studio over here. We've got my studio being built over here. We've got walls and stuff separating them. We've got a little meeting room over there. We got a balcony over there. Probably the pantry is going to be over there. So, this guy's like installing the pantry stuff. Um, we're not sure what's going to be over here yet. We'll probably have a 75 in TV over there on the wall. Um, and maybe some desk space underneath here and then a couple of phone booths
over there. And in my dream world, we would have a tree in the middle of this. Yeah, this feels absolutely mental that it's shaping up like this. Uh, this business, I guess, started like in in many ways, this business that we're in kind of started back in 2012 when I first started teaching classroom courses helping kids get into medical school. And I started out in my in our in our family's living room teaching like two people and then four. And then I booked a room at
the local mosque where we had seven students. Uh this was when I was a first year med student at Cambridge. And then that expanded into classrooms of 30 students and then lecture theaters of 150 students, multiple countries like mostly in the UK but also ended up teaching in Singapore and in the Netherlands. And it's because of that business that I started my YouTube channel back in 2017. Initially making videos helping people get into med school. This was organic content marketing for the business. Then in 2019
after the YouTube channel started to take off and I stopped being interested in like the medical school admission space, I sold that company 6MED uh to a guy who then became a friend, a friend and mentor. And since then, the business has basically been the YouTube channel uh doing content about productivity, personal development, and increasingly starting a business. Uh mostly filming from my like bedroom initially and then the living room in the flat where I was living with uh my friend Molly and then later my
friend Sheen. Uh and then we moved to London in like 2021 where we got an office for the first time like in a co-working space and that was a great era. We moved to another office then which was like a residential flat where I shared a house with my brother and his wife and we had the team team coming in every day and that was super fun. And then after getting married and moving to Hong Kong, initially we were working from home, but we have never
before ever like done this sort of thing where we've signed like a three-year lease for this. We're like paying I think around $200,000 uh US for the renovation. This is a big like commitment of time and expense, but it now feels like it's the right time and it feels very exciting to finally be having our own space that we can make it however we want. And Izzy and I like get excited every night thinking about how the office is going to shape up. And yeah, if
you told me this back in 2017 when I started making YouTube videos in my dorm room, eventually that would morph into its own office with a team of like 25 people, of which like 10 are now in person. Man, I would have had a heart attack, a hernia, and a stroke all at the same time. Um, but it's cool that we're here. The challenge with this is that as a business expands, the overheads expand inevitably. And as the overheads expand, then in a way, the amount
of pressure on the business to continue to function also increases. And we've had periods of time in the past where overheads have expanded and the business hasn't uh been able to grow and we've had to say goodbye to various team members and cut down costs a lot because the business hasn't been able to grow. But this time is different. Famous last words. This time is different. Uh we now have two products that I'm very excited about. Lifestyle Business Academy and Super Focus. Um I as an
entrepreneur have learned so much over the last many years of trying to do this and making loads of mistakes along the way. We have world-class mentors who have done this sort of stuff before and are helping out helping us out every step of the way. Um, we've got a great team. Uh, Angus, our general manager, has loads of experience. We've got Izzy involved in the business now, which she's sort of like CEO of the business. Angus is sort of COO to use that terminology. I'm sort
of like the vibes guy where I don't really have to do much other than like provide the vibes and the filming and the content, which is sort of my zone of genius. And an amazing team now where for the first time over the over the last few months, we've also hired various senior leaders for various different departments. So we have um a senior leader in client success. We have a senior leader in sales. We have a really good chap in marketing who is not very senior
in terms of like age but like really gets it. Uh we have a senior leader in product. Uh whereas in the past the hiring philosophy was basically hire young vibe people in their 20s and like we all figure it out together. Now that the business is sort of professionalizing a little bit and we're going for like world's best business school, um the hiring philosophy has changed to we need the leaders of the various departments to ideally have done the thing before so that they bring external
expertise rather than all of us just working it out as we go along. We're still working out various degrees of it as we go along, but already realizing the power of having an expert in client success in product and in sales and in marketing has been insanely helpful and taken a lot of pressure off of mine and Angus' shoulders and and I now as well. So yeah, overheads are increasing, team is increasing, and I feel confident that we'll make it work. Yeah, we'll see what happens
in the life updates six to six to 12 months from now as to whether that continues to be the case, but I feel very confident about it. I think it's going to be absolutely lit. And so if you're at this point in the video, man, you are part of the reason why we are here because if you've been watching the content for any length of time, then you are the reason. Maybe you've been watching the content. Maybe you've been subscribed to the email list. Maybe you've
clicked on one of our sponsor links. Maybe you've even bought one of our courses. Or maybe you're even a student of our lifestyle business academy. The revenue that that we generate from all of this stuff, which really just started off as me making free videos on the internet, teaching people how to get into med school, is now able to sustain a team of like 25 people and an in-person office in Hong Kong, global audience of millions of people, and tens of thousands of students who've taken
our courses all around the world. And it all happened because back in 2012, I was like, I need to make some money. What do what am I good at? Okay. Can I make money teaching what I'm good at? All right. Cool. Could I make money teaching medical applicants how to pass the BMAT medical school entrance exam? It started with that thought back in 2012. So yeah, final thing to say is Lifestyle Business Academy trying to become the world's best online business school. Super focused, trying to
become one of the, if not the world's uh greatest productivity app for helping you manage your time, energy, and focus. Um, a world-class team that's super vibe and fun to be around. uh team is growing. So if you would like a job, we've got remote roles and inerson roles. I don't know why I'm pointing this way, but like down below, we've got remote and inerson roles available. So head over to aliabell.com/job. And yeah, if you're interested in more realtime updates, make sure you follow me on
Instagram or check out our email list. Those will be linked down below as well. Um and yeah, a big thank you if you've gotten to the end of this video cuz most people would not have gotten to the end end of this video. I don't know how long it's going to be as I film this, but it's probably pretty long. Um but this has been a fun one. We've got the hammering and drilling and sawing and nailing and everything happening all at once. And so hopefully
in a few weeks we should be able to move in should be able to move into the office. Anyway, if you enjoy this video and you're interested in a little playlist of the life update videos that I've done over the years, we've put that together in a playlist over here uh just for the sake of posterity and interest. So, I've been documenting this journey since 2017 when I was a medical student and then becoming a doctor and then going full-time with this YouTube channel somewhat accidentally
and then becoming final boss course seller and now becoming a guy who sells courses online and sell software online and then has a book. Uh, so it's all there in life update videos over the years. So, thank you so much for being part of the journey. Thank you so much for watching and we will see you next time. Bye.