What's up you guys, sasha here, no, i did not become a tech billionaire. No, i did not have some kind of magic secret formula and i'm not gon na teach you in a webinar or in some kind, of course, that cost several thousand dollars exactly how to do it. What i did is, i started a relatively regular business when i was age 29. I started that business from scratch.

I didn't have any help with it. I didn't have any money to start it. I didn't. Have anybody help me get it off the ground and i made it into a huge success in a relatively short space of time.

Let me tell you how now, let's start right at the beginning, after studying math physics and some other stuff at school, i went to university and at university i studied maths, mainly because i really liked math. I thought it was really interesting. I'm that kind of way-minded anyway, so i studied math and i graduated with a degree in math and an mma in maths as well. I then landed in the finance industry.

I got my first job with capital, one, a company that in the uk specializes in credit cards and i worked across various different functions. I worked in marketing. I worked in credit risk. I worked in commercial strategy.

I worked in finance. I worked in almost everything that you can work in as some form of an analyst. That's how i started on my journey in financial services in personal finance and consumer finance products. I worked in various other companies over the years.

I worked predominantly in the current accounts. Credit cards, loans and other forms of personal finance sectors. Although i've had some deviations, i've worked in energy for a bit and trading. I would travel for another bit.

That was various detours, but i continued along the same line eventually making way through to more senior roles and managing teams and then managing teams of various other teams. Now, after doing that, for quite some time eventually, i joined a company called friends for you, they're, a very well-known company in the uk. They sell mobile phones or sold. Should i say, because i actually joined about three months before the company went bust, not the best career move i've ever made, but it actually allowed me to think about what i wanted to do because up to that point, i really just didn't really think too hard.

I landed in a particular type of role in a particular type of industry and i continued working my way through it and suddenly i had to go and decide what i wanted to do, and that was the point where i explored a bunch of ideas. I spoke to a load of people. I was offered a couple of jobs and i had to make a decision as to which direction to go in now. Here are the circumstances that i was at.

I had no money at that point because i literally just bought a house and every single pound that i had went towards buying that house. I bought the house literally a number of days before all of this happened, so i didn't really have any money at all to go on. I didn't have any partners, because i wasn't planning to be in this position. I wasn't planning to start a business in advance.

Other people that maybe i could have spoken to had other jobs, other situations in life, other things they were doing so i didn't have any of that. So let's go and get started. So in december 2014 i went and registered a company called strategy desk now that company provides consulting services to the financial services industry. Why consulting you ask? Because that was the fastest way that i could make money out of the various different business options that i considered.

I needed money fast, because i need to go and pay for the mortgage. I need to pay for the bills. I need to be able to have an income and with most other business ideas that i had. I wouldn't be able to do so for quite some time, because it would take me time to go and set up a business and get substantial traffic or to design a product or launch the thing whatever it is, with consulting the beauty of that particular business model Is that you can actually get going quite fast with a relatively low cost i started, and for the first six months of the company i worked in my kitchen downstairs so every morning i go and sit there and i'll sit there for the entire day.

Until i was gon na go to sleep and i worked on my business, i didn't spend any money on an office. I didn't spend money on anything else and i actually knew absolutely nothing about consulting, which was a really really difficult thing, because there were some things that i just didn't know. One big misconception that i had was that all the contacts i've built up all the great relationships that i have in the industry. All the people that i know in the industry is where i get my first clients.

Certainly, i watch enough youtube videos and enough. Other people told me that that is where your first clients are gon na come from people. You know people who value you, people who think that you're particularly good and i never burnt any bridges. I had excellent relationships with all these different companies.

I worked at the truth. Is it was the exact opposite people that i used to work with just weren't used to the fact that they had to pay for my services. They were too used for me sitting right next to them. For me to be the guy that could go and do the work without them having to go and get the wallet out.

They'll go and hire other consultants and they wouldn't bat an eyelid about somebody who maybe wasn't as experienced or somebody that didn't know at all, coming in doing the work. But for with me, the personal relationship actually hurt things. I also thought that the primary companies they would be doing business with would be the small startups. So at that point in time there was a massive wave of fintechs starting in the uk and abroad.

That was a very, very hot industry. Those people raising capital very very quickly to start up the next loans business, the next bank, the next challenger bank, the next whatever - and i thought these are the guys who i would be able to work with. I was quite experienced in designing new products and bringing those products to market in improving the products people already had, and i thought that's where i'd be able to help, because these people had the want and desire to go and build these types of financial services businesses. They had the money behind them, but in some cases they didn't really know what they were doing.

A lot of these businesses were started by people who have never worked in the industry. They've never actually built a credit risk model, they've, never gone and built a new credit card product without anything being in place beforehand. They've never seen how these systems work and they've never seen some of the downsides. Some of the things you wouldn't expect they've never been through an economic cycle.

With these types of things, i thought that's, where i'd get all of my work. In truth, i found out the hard way that actually was the exact opposite, so my biggest clients over time have been companies like mastercard companies like barclays companies like tesco companies like rbs companies like hsbc, all the big banks have probably worked within one capacity or another, But let's get to that bit a little bit later now i started the business in a fully bootstrap way. As i mentioned, i didn't spend money on absolutely anything and it took me several months before i got my first client. I think it was about three and a half months of just hustling, trying to win any kind of project.

Before i got my very first one and the very first one happened in quite an amusing way. I was speaking to as many people as i could, and somebody actually noticed that i was doing that and they were at that point having a tender for some piece of work for which they had several consultants coming up, and they said when you come up and Go and do a presentation just to practice your pitch just to see if you can go and go and pitch us alongside all these other experienced guys, and i went ahead and prepared a presentation. I went and did that i went up to the company's offices and i pitched i think there were several different companies before me and one two afterwards who were doing the same pitch and i somehow managed to win that particular project. Now, that's quite amusing because the project was actually too big for me to be able to do on my own and i needed one other person.

I actually put another person in the pitch, but there was nobody at that point in the company. Luckily enough, somebody that i previously worked with that, i knew really quite well - that was extremely smart, actually had just come back from traveling for a few months and they didn't have a job, and so that's how i hired my first employee. I used the advance that i got from the clients to be able to buy the laptop for that person. I use my own personal laptop at the time because it was cheaper.

I wonder, bought a few other things like business cards. I actually paid for the travel that i did. I had to travel quite far to go and do the pitch and for future travel, so we had to go and engage with the clients stay over in hotels, pay for flights, all that kind of stuff, and that's basically how it all started, probably worked much harder Than i ever had before on that very first project, because it meant everything to me, i would work nights. I would stay up late.

I would spend every single hour that i had making that piece of work as good as it could possibly be, and what that meant was that, after we completed this piece of work, the same bank then went and asked for a second piece of work to be Done and the second piece of work was bigger, and it would cost more because they required a lot more work to be done than what we did in the first one and it basically began progressing from there. The third project came about as a result of some of these people that i was working with speaking to some other people in a different part of the bank and that's how i secured the third project for the company ever and from then on. I began winning more projects with other banks being able to attend pictures that i previously would never have been invited to, and things just began organically growing. The very first employee that i hired actually came on the train from london to where i live and worked.

In. My kitchen, that was the working arrangement i didn't - want to spend any money on the office. I was fully bootstrapped, as i said, so. I actually live outside london, so they came on the train.

I picked them up from the train station, drove them to my house and both sit on my kitchen table and work and then, at the end of the day i would drive them back to the train station and that's how they would get home after 67 months. I managed to upgrade the office situation and got the very first actual company office that was based in a wework in london. It was a tiny, tiny space and it was quite claustrophobic because you had glass walls and you had all the other offices right next to you all the other people working right next to you, but it felt amazing as the work grew and the demand for our Services grew, i managed to hire a few more people and very very quickly. Within a few months, we outgrew the very first office and we moved out of rework because it was actually quite expensive compared to some of the other options moved into a different office.

Just down the road also in the city of london, we moved to a regis office and that was fit for up to, i think eight people, and within a few months we actually outgrew that as well, and we had some other issues that we really didn't like About that office, so that's when we went and moved into our current office that we still have today, which is a really really amazing space in a converted wharf near tower bridge. It came with absolutely all the necessary requirements for a startup office. It had views of the river, it had exposed, brick walls, it had wooden beams on the ceiling, and it had iron supports absolutely perfect. It is just an amazing space to be.

It was very, very calm and relaxing compared to the hustle and bustle of being based in moorgate right in the middle of the city and all the tall buildings in london, and that's still where the company is based today. Here is a few really important things that i learned about the consulting business that i wish. I knew when i first started. The three most important ones are this first 80 of how good your business is going to work of what you need to be focused on.

As the owner and the founder of the business is selling, it is not doing, and that i found a massive problem with before that i never had to do much selling. I never had to go and sell my services because i worked in a b2c business and suddenly in the b2b business selling is everything i'm not, naturally, a very sales type of oriented guy? I'm not the hubbly bubbly kind of personality, i'm not the kind of guy who goes and takes people out for dinners and is really good at doing so and flies all over and sends nice christmas cards to people, i'm just not that guy. So, for me it was really really difficult. I had to battle through the naturally enclosed kind of person that i am i had to battle through not wanting to go and always be away from home and traveling.

I had to battle through just not wanting to always be trying to sell people. I really really enjoyed doing, and i thought that just doing the work is good enough. I thought that if you're really good at what you do and people really see the value, but that would speak for itself, but the truth is that is not what happens. The truth is no matter how good the project that you deliver.

You have to work extremely hard for a repeat project. You have to work that much harder to get the second one and the third one, and if you're a large company, this probably doesn't apply in the same way to these large accounts that you have. But, generally speaking, all of these clients that you work with will have a natural life span. You'll do one project you'll, do two projects, you'll do three, but eventually they don't really need your services any longer or they just move on and decide that you are too expensive or whatever else, and you have to go and find a new client and you have To go and work that relationship from scratch again, you have to go and convince them.

They want to do business with you that thing that i found very early on, which is the people that you knew from previous work. The people that you directly worked with that didn't hire me that continued for pretty much my entire time of running this business over the last six years. In fact, i think i only ever had one company where i managed to win a project, because i actually knew the person beforehand and almost all of the work i'm talking like 95 plus of all the work that the company has ever done came about from cold Leads from people who didn't know me before where i had to go and work at the thing the hard way. The last thing that i learned that i really didn't anticipate, but probably should have, is that people are prepared to pay for shiny things and people don't like paying for effective things.

So what i mean by that is, if something is popular, if something is talked about, if something is very fashionable, people are prepared to spend a lot of money on it. If there's a, i involved in something people are saying: hey i like this. It is a term that is apparently very modern. I want to spend money on it if there's any other apparent technological breakthroughs, if there's things that the ceo of the business thinks will make the company more modern or take it to the future, people are more prepared to invest in those types of thing by hiring Consultants than they are in things that might improve their business more quickly, that might actually have a tangible benefit that is easier to quantify.

That might address things somewhere in the back end of their business, things that nobody ever looks at that actually will give them a 10 20 performance improvement, but they're not sexy. Nobody really cares about the fact that there's this stuff in the background over there that needs fixing, because it's just not the kind of thing you go and hire consultants. For so, what i found relatively quickly is that you have to be at the forefront of whatever it is that you're doing at the place where people are prepared to spend money, you have to be providing the newest tech, you have to be providing the newest solutions And you have to be the guy who is always talking about the future and never solving existing problems, because no matter how good you are solving these existing things using existing approaches and techniques, people just don't like paying for it. So where did all this get to? The company grew and grew beyond my wildest imaginations? The company grew in people as well as in revenue and in projects.

The company at one point had offices in london and new york, and we worked in the middle east, in asia, in north america and in europe. I actually personally lived in new york for almost a year. That's how that particular side of the business grew and was formed the company's become one of the leaders, certainly in the uk, in actually designing, building and bringing to market financial services products. There's some other companies that do something similar, we're generally known for the execution for the fact that we actually take many businesses from zero from not existing all the way through to launch and do everything in between that's.

How we've built up a reputational brand. We've got in-house developers, we've got in-house, marketers in-house content, writers, in-house specialists in various parts of the building life cycle, a lot of very, very smart consultants. All of that happened from absolute zero from me sitting in the kitchen. There is a much less glamorous side to this business as well.

Alongside every trip to dubai and every single trip to hong kong and wherever else you might be wanted, there's a different trip to cardiff to blackpool to bournemouth to wherever else you're required, because there's a financial services company, that's based there. You are sitting there in a hotel room for several nights in a row trying to figure out. Why exactly are you there? Why has your life been structured in a way where you live out of a suitcase half your life? Why are you having to do all this and spending your time trying to win the next project being on this treadmill? That is something that you need to be really aware of. When you're trying to decide what kind of business you want to set up, what kind of business do you want to run? What kind of work do you want to be doing today today? Do you want to be building something that works on itself, or do you want to get into a place where you are perpetually on a treadmill trying to win the next project, trying to make the next sale hello teaser for you that business so exists that business Still operates, but i am now doing things in a very, very different way.

You might have noticed that i've started a youtube channel talking about personal finance products, there's a bunch of other changes. I think that is a whole separate topic that i'll cover in another video. In a little while so make sure you watch out for that, if you want to watch that video, if you're interested in exactly what i'm doing now and how i'm changing the way, i'm running that business and some of the other things that i'm doing as well Make sure you subscribe to this channel and hit the bell to get notifications so that when that video comes out, you don't miss it. If you enjoy content that talks about business, that talks about personal finance, talks about money and how you can make more money and do more with the money that you have make sure you smash that like button, so that this video can be showing to more people.

So that i can reach a bigger audience more quickly and distribute this message, i really really appreciate it. Thank you so much for watching and i'll see you guys later. You.