How A British Airways Pilot Makes $100,000/Week Selling Sewing Accessories | The Growth Booth #30

Welcome to Episode 30 of The Growth Booth, where today I'm joined by someone who I have worked a lot with over the years. His name is Hjalmar, and Hjalmar is based out of Belgium. He's come from being a complete newbie in online business to building a business that earns hundreds of thousands of dollars per week, and he's built that business with his brother. I thought I would get Hjalmar on the call with us here today to talk a little bit about his journey and to hopefully leave you with some inspiration about what's possible with building an online business. 

AIDAN

Hjalmar, welcome to the call. Where in the world are you today? 

HJALMAR

I am in Belgium, as a matter of fact, today. Pleased to be here, by the way. It's always good to talk. 

AIDAN

The reason I ask that question is because Hjalmar is an international pilot, and normally when I'm talking to him, he's popping up all over the world. In fact, there have been times when he's been down here in Buenos Aires, which is where I am at the moment. You're back at home with family in Belgium. Tell us a little bit about how this amazing business that you've built sort of started and what was the motivator in doing it. Obviously, you've built a very successful career as an international pilot. What was the motivation for building your online business? 

HJALMAR 

Well, as an international pilot, by the way, I fly for British Airways at this stage, but I used to fly for the national airline of Belgium, which was Sabena. But as a pilot, I realized with a computer anywhere in the world, I could do whatever I wanted. But the major thing was that I also felt very vulnerable at being employed in a business that typically goes from highs to lows in months very dramatically. Nearly no airlines may ever make money. 

Anyways, I never felt really at ease, and I always had this drive during my life to be sort of self-sufficient, which I wasn't at any stage, really, even though I was a successful airline pilot getting a decent salary every month, but that itch was always there, so I started trying to find stuff online. How do I start? I ran into you and Steve, found Blueprint Academy, and then there I took the leap to join the business group because I had already learned that you need to find the expertise where you can find it, I mean, where you realize it is at its finest. I thought I'll take the leap; I'll just join your group and see how it goes from there. That's really where it all started because you guys encouraged me to start into Amazon, I think it was the first bit, and everything rolled from there. 

AIDAN

And I think this is going back, correct me if I'm wrong, but somewhere around 2015, 2016? Does that sound about right? 

HJALMAR 

Yeah, that's correct. Absolutely.

AIDAN

How does it work, being an international pilot? I mean, do you sort of do a long-haul flight, and then you've got a couple of days when you don't fly? How does your schedule work and how does your business fit into that? 

HJALMAR 

It's a bit like you just said. Indeed, I fly 75% of the time. I have a 75% contract now to be able to work on the business more, which is one week during the month. Seven days, I don't work. I'm sure that I'm off, so I can plan any meetings that I really have to do, I will plan for that week. But otherwise, I fly two or three times somewhere far away, like, for example, Buenos Aires, indeed. Depending on how far it is, there's a legal requirement for rest. It's one or two days, 24, 48, sometimes 72 hours there, and then I fly back. But it means, obviously, when I'm there, the family – I got a wife and two kids – are not there by default because I'm just working. It means that I'm totally free to work all the time if I want to, on my Mac, on the business. The uninterrupted possibility to work and be creative is probably a bonus. 

AIDAN

You've really just summed up the geographic freedom that an online business gives, and you're a perfect example of it because you are literally globetrotting all over the world any given day, never not quite knowing where you are. That's amazing. And I love what you've done. If we get into a little bit more of the details now, you mentioned why you wanted to start a business. What was the first business that you started? Were those the Amazon physical products on Amazon that you mentioned? 

HJALMAR 

Correct. Steve, your Blueprint Academy partner, was my first mentor, and he recommended at that stage to indeed go for something that is not easy to enter but has clear sort of rules. If you're smart about it, and you guys have the framework, it is possible to enter there with a reasonable chance of success.  I did that, followed the knowledge and the playbook, and indeed got to one product, a pizza stone it was at that time, I landed on. I changed it, redesigned it, and then basically it was a one-product business at that time. But still, we brought it up to over… 

AIDAN

How was that product going? Was the product making money or how did that…

HJALMAR 

It was. From the first year, by Christmas, we were really up and running. I still remember how unreal it felt when things started selling. All of a sudden, you sell one and you think, “Oh, great,” but that's not a business. But then by November and December, people were just buying them all over. And I was thinking, “Oh my God, do I have enough inventory?” 

AIDAN

Yes. You know, the funny thing about pizza stone, I think, “God, that's got to be something that's quite heavy.” It’s not the textbook product, if you like, but it just goes to show that the rules of e-commerce are designed to be broken. I sometimes show people that one of the first types of products that I was selling online was barber chairs. These things can literally weigh half a ton, literally very heavy, and they also break the rules. That was the dropship model as well, which is what eventually you sort of pivoted to. You started with Amazon, and then what happened from there?

HJALMAR 

That proved to me that it could work, that starting a business online was something very viable. This made money, but I was needing to grow it. But then you guys had come up with a Facebook-driven connect-your-audience-with-product system that I had a good look at and then I thought, “Right, I actually believe that this might be the next big thing.” I then asked my brother, who has always been a teacher, he'd been a teacher for 15-16 years by then and had never ever done anything in the business world. My parents are not entrepreneurs at all and he would just never have done anything like that. By the way, I had never done anything before, but still, I had this urge, but he never had that. He first declared me totally mad when I wanted to start a pizza stone business. But the fact that I had made it run and that it made money and that you guys were behind it, and now the next thing, this Facebook connecting-to-product business style, he said, “Right. I now believe that this might work. I'm so frustrated at how education in Belgium at this stage is declining to worst and it's just not working anymore. Right, I'll come with you with this venture.” I pulled him in and we started a business together, and a few months later we were through the testing phase. We followed the religiously the system of testing that was set up. You know how with Shopify, you can switch that on and it goes cling, cling, like a tiller?

AIDAN

That’s one of the best widgets for motivating. It's a thing where you get a sale on your website and if you've got a phone smartphone connected up or something and that's like an alert that you've just made some money.

HJALMAR 

But then that happened in February, March of 2017, or whatever. But by the end of that year, we've gone through about a million and a half in sales. It worked so well that we were totally drowning than in customer service. We all of a sudden had a big business that we needed to now get everything logistically set up for. But indeed, I still remember how the first sales were like, and then it just kept racing onwards until by the end of the year, we all of a sudden were a real performing business.

AIDAN

That was a completely new business model because it was unrelated to what you'd already done on Amazon and went from zero in that business model to $1 million in that first year. Over $1 million in sales. 

HJALMAR 

Correct.  

AIDAN

I remember actually meeting your brother for the first time in Las Vegas. I think I met you previously, but we were holding one of our Blueprint Academy mastermind meetings in Las Vegas, and I think you introduced him as the skeptic, but he had come around because you were making thousands selling pizza stone. And I see that so often. I see that same pattern repeat itself so often and it's easy to understand. I mean, I was skeptical when I first came into online business. I didn't know what was a scam. Is this actually real? Can you really make money doing this stuff? But you guys are a real class act and how you've taken that and built an amazing business with it. Your brother comes in and he's part of the building of this bigger business. How did you guys divvy up the workload there? 

HJALMAR 

Well, by the way, I’d like to really stress that I couldn't have done it without him, that we really had to have each other. We're both very analytical minds, but he's very scientific and he's very deep into analytics. 

AIDAN

He's a science teacher, right?

HJALMAR 

Yeah, and he was halfway in his PhD before he actually started teaching because that's what he really wanted to do in biochemistry, I think, and something else. He's really bright. But that was the great thing, that I am sort of the business, like I'll do more of the legal thing and organization, etc., but he was definitely done into Facebook testing system where he would build these very long testing sequences, but also look and analyze the data, like what is real here and dive into it. He had that going and he really focused on Facebook, actually making Facebook work, finding the audiences, etc. I worked with him, but the way he went in and took it to the 7th level, where I would have always been at level two, made that side work. And then together with what I did on the other side, we were able to just race.

AIDAN

I think also, having been a fly on the wall of your journey, you were clearly a visionary in believing that this was all possible and pointing the ship in the direction. And then your brother Esbjorn was very good at, like you say, really doubling down on figuring out how it all works and cracking the code, if you like, of Facebook advertising, which is where the vast majority of your traffic initially came from. 

I think that's another lesson that we keep seeing over and over again. If you find a good business partner, and I don't believe that they have to have a different skill set to you or even the same skill set, they just have to have a common shared vision of where you want to get to, then I think there's almost never a downside to having a business partner. Dropshipping business, you build this business, you've set up a website, you are driving traffic from Facebook, and you get over a million dollars in your first year. There must have been a few growing pains along the way, typical ones we've seen in the past, accounts getting shut down, inventory running out. Going back in time a little bit here, what are some of the things that happened to you guys? There must have been a few challenges along the way. 

HJALMAR 

In the beginning, it seemed like every time when we raced forward, like five steps forward, it looked like we always hit a brick wall, a high mountain, something that would just make it all stop. That just was like the end. We can't progress. This is it. It's PayPal that says we're stopping everything and then some sort of procedure where there's no human to talk to, but you need to get through it. And then there's another portal where again, because you grow so fast or because you're doing business, there are also legal things that kick in, that need checking, that happens. Then there's also Shopify and other payment systems. It's the same thing. Then we added Amazon, and Amazon does that as well. They check, they have algorithms, they've got automatic shutdown actions that they take with small new sellers, which we were at that point. It's one thing after another in the beginning. And I forget, like, 100. It was just like one thing after another. You just need to keep believing that you can always surmount any problem. Because every month, every week, we had something where we thought, “How on earth, how are we going to get through this?” but ultimately you can. 

AIDAN

Also, having a business partner is helpful because it's hard to stay positive all the time when it seems like you're getting slammed one day from PayPal, the next day from Shopify, the next day from Amazon, or whatever else. They really do make people jump through a lot of hoops. But I think it's almost like a rite of passage. If you want to get to that point where you've got a million dollars/month business like what you guys have got, there are going to be lots of these ups and downs adversity to go through to get there. 

HJALMAR 

By the way, I rather quickly took this as a positive. Like all the difficulties in the beginning. I mean, it was just very hard and unpleasant. But fairly shortly afterward, my brother and I started realizing, even whilst we were still hitting one wall after another, we thought, this makes it very hard for everybody else to get through. A lot of them, like 90% of the rest is probably going to give up anyways, or this is going to kill competitors. It also meant the barrier of entry, actually, it's very good if it's high, because you don't need to prove yourself, which is good for your self-worth in the end, maybe not whilst you're doing it, but afterward it's very pleasant, but the competition needs to go through it as well. 

AIDAN

It also falls into the category of these are ‘good problems’ to have that Steve and I often talk about. You're only going to get asked to provide some identification, and verification if you're doing a certain number of sales. If you're sitting there doing no sales, then no one's ever going to ask for that. For most of the challenges, I think the more challenges and problems in my mind are good to have, the ones that you’re having. What I was going to ask you there is, where is your market nowadays? I know you've done a lot in the United States. Is it still the United States? Is it international? Where do you sell your products? 

HJALMAR 

It's still mostly in the United States. It is the United States plus New Zealand. It's basically the English-speaking countries. We've kept it simple so that we don't need to translate anything. A bit of Canada…

AIDAN

Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand. The United States probably missed a couple there, but… 

HJALMAR 

Those are the main ones because we are from Belgium. It felt like, “Why don't we also and then launch into Europe?” But we very quickly learned there's only so much effort that, between my brother and I, we can produce. In America, the United States, there's such a mature market, there’s still so much growth for us to be had. But it wasn't easy to say no to all the rest of it. We had to say no to a lot to double down on the biggest core market and first build that as big as we could, and that's where we're at now. 

AIDAN

That's also a little bit of the entrepreneur's curse, where you see opportunities around you all the time and you're saying, “We could be selling in Germany. Why not? People in Germany would love our product. We could be selling in France, we could be selling in South America, they would love our product.” But each one of these markets that you go into is going to present new challenges and ultimately, sometimes I've seen that they can be a real distraction to what people are trying to do. And so often doubling down on one thing instead of diluting your efforts, is actually a much faster way to get to where we want to get the business to. Mainly in the US market and without going into specific details of your products, did you start off testing lots of different products and lots of different niches and then you ultimately just got to this one niche that you built a business around? How did that work? 

HJALMAR 

Well, taking it back all the way to the beginning, we had a testing system where we tried in all sorts of directions, “Where do we find a match between the audience and products?” because we weren't too fussed about what the product was going to be. If we could find a product that matched the audience and made a difference for them, then there would be a business. There we hit onto the business we're in right now. 

We've taken it from there and then we totally fell in love with it because actually, I don't mind if everybody knows what business we're in if that's fine with you as well.  We’re in the sewing niche. My grandmother has always been sewing. We forever had our clothes mended by her, etc. When we did hit on sewing as the niche we were going to be and build a very nice store and go for it, we had the connection immediately with the products. We then had a steep learning curve onto how do they actually work and what can we invent and improve. Because my grandma was always a bit lonely perhaps on her own sewing by ourselves in our little house, we thought, “How can we make a difference for people by giving them better products so it's more fun and easier, but also how can we connect them?” And that's why we built also this very big thriving Facebook community around our products. We're not monetizing that at all. It's just to connect people and do good basically for the people that otherwise would be by themselves. Now they're chatting to everyone and say, “Oh, look at this, look at that.” It's just lovely to see the energy when they're doing their hobby that they already liked, that they're now even more upbeat than they could have been before already. 

AIDAN

I think it just goes to show as well in an obscure niche, some people when they're thinking about, “I'm going to build a business online,” they'll think about “I'm going to get into health and wellness or I'm going to get into something related to business,” or maybe they'll say “I'm going to get into something related to sports,” but I don't think I've ever heard of someone having built a million dollars a month or hundreds of thousands of dollars a month, I should say at least around sewing. It's just absolutely amazing. And like you say, you've taken products, I guess you started with products that were sort of standard and then you customized and modified them in some way. Is that how you proceeded? 

HJALMAR 

It's a mixture of both but what our strength is, I think, is that we often use products that already exist, but might not necessarily ever have been used for sewing. It could be something that's actually a tool for a car, which is very handy to a mechanic that works under a car, perhaps in the dark, and then now we've used that telescopic thing that they have that has a magnet and a light in it, and we improve it just slightly so it becomes something that is just the thing when you drop your needles on your carpet. That is just an example of where we try to make a difference by adding stuff to somebody’s sewing arsenal that they might never have thought of, never connected to their hobby. 

AIDAN

There's sometimes a great way to come up with products, a story that comes to mind, or another product like this. I don't think I could build a huge business around this, but when I'm taking the bones out of fish, I use longnose pliers, which are obviously a tool more for handyman types. I'm sure there are specialized little pliers for getting all those sharp little bones out of fish, but I found the best ones to use because I used to find a lot of pliers, the bones would slip off them. But now I found the best tradesmen pliers for getting bones out of fish. There's another example of taking one product and finding a good use for another. 

HJALMAR 

How are you selling them? 

AIDAN

Don't sell them. No, I haven't got that far. I'm not sure. I might need to look into trademarks and so forth. But anyway, how about your team? You've built this business. Let's talk a little bit about the team that goes with it and makes everything tick when you are disconnected from the Internet for 12 hours on a long-haul flight. 

HJALMAR 

Well, in the very beginning, it was really only my brother and myself. But as soon as you have customers, even if you only have a 1% or less complaint rate or whatever, if you sell a 1.5 million in sales, then there's going to be questions, there's going to be customer service to be done. That was the first thing where we were just drowning. All of a sudden, we had all these sales…

AIDAN

Was that your first hire? Customer support?

HJALMAR

Customer support was the first thing. We had somebody who could help us because like six months after we started, we started going on Amazon as well with a product.  We had somebody who could solve problems on Amazon for us together and get our customer service organized in that we didn't do it all by ourselves. We got somebody, it was in the Philippines, ultimately, where they've got extremely professional, totally English-speaking people that love to help other people every day in and day out. It takes a special kind of person to do that and they were there. We found a lovely lady that was very professional at what she did and she found other colleagues to do it together with her. This sort of built their agency for us, with us. And now there's seven customer service staff that are full-time working for us. But that was the first big thing that needed to happen, and that did happen. Then afterwards we continued onwards, but that went slower because in the beginning, we could do a lot still, but between the two of us.

AIDAN

And what about a strategic level other than customer support, basically? Do you have other people on the team that is helping you nowadays? 

HJALMAR 

Oh, yeah. Well, our team is now divided into we have a Facebook Marketing Manager, we have a Social Media Marketing manager. Obviously, these all sound like titles as if there's another team underneath, but they are the team every time. We are a team of ten to twelve in total. It’s what our entire company is. There's somebody that has customer service, Facebook, but also for Amazon, there's one person that is now responsible for everything on Amazon. There's a general manager now as well, which is a big leap that we took this year.  Again, a big step. We had to develop the team because otherwise, we couldn't have done it.  

AIDAN

What's your thinking behind hiring a general manager? Is that so you and your brother can step back into doing different things?  What's the story there? 

HJALMAR 

Yeah, that's a big part behind it because my brother, who's always been a teacher, as I mentioned in the beginning, three, four years ago, also by doing business, you realize anything is possible if you put your mind to it. There's the world, you can shape it as however you like, as long as you really want to, that he realized that if in Belgium the education system wasn't going to improve itself or by the state, then he was going to have a go at it. Three, four years ago, he started planning that he would finally, ultimately get a school going and get the connections going. And ultimately now, on September 1, that school will open. But that takes up nearly all of his time now. That didn't happen just overnight, so we saw that coming.

Ultimately, this year we hired the general manager, a brilliant guy, he's probably brighter than my brother and me. He's just really going for it as well.  It's great to see him do it, but just by having him there, my brother has not the flexibility to nearly completely do something else.

AIDAN

He’s in Belgium as well? Okay. It must be nice being able to meet in person. I know that sometimes makes a difference with our business. We try to make sure that we get together with the key leaders in the business quite regularly because it's hard to beat that in-person meeting dynamic versus virtual, even though we're all running virtual businesses now. Was it hard letting go of the controls and sort of stepping back and letting other people take up the reins? 

HJALMAR 

It was not as hard as I thought it was going to be, but still, it requires a different mindset and it requires for me, definitely, you to bite your tongue a lot. Not because you might know the answer, but just because you know that whatever you say is going to have an impact and everybody will listen to it because they're used to it because you used to rule everything. It's better not to say anything and just to deliberately be in the background. And that is different. I used to be very present and now I intentionally am

AIDAN

Do you do much of the day-to-day operations with your business now, or are you more like a director's role? What's your day-to-day role right now with your online business? 

HJALMAR 

I still pay the bills, so all invoices still run through me. But other than that, it's now mostly working with the general manager so that he gets all the support and all the answers to any questions you might have about the business. I basically support him as well as I can all the time, think with him about where are we going this year, the finances also because you have to fund inventory, etc., before the end of year peak, etc. It's more financial now. 

AIDAN

Right. One of the best players I think that we made in our business over the past 15 or 20 years was a CFO, Chief Financial Officer, and she handles all of the finances, all of the billing, paying all of the team, all the salaries, all the money that comes in and goes out. She keeps her eye on it. And for me, that's been a huge weight off my shoulders because I've got someone that I can trust.  At some stage in the future that might be another good hire for you, and then you could really sit back and essentially just almost be like an investor or a director who chimes in once in a while if that was something that you ultimately wanted to do. I'm not sure if it is or not, but it sounds like you've got a good team with all the important hires there. 

HJALMAR 

Yeah. Well, the machine appears to work, but with the general manager now entering the fray, it is being restructured even because that's what his strength is. It's getting even better. Everybody is now really put into where they realize their strengths are, which might not have been exactly what we hired them for, but we are getting better. There's a sort of a worldly crisis going on now and we're using it to reorganize and get better. But, yeah, the team with the general manager is now definitely stronger and a good position for me to ultimately really step back even more, because the finances, as you've mentioned, will be done ultimately by our general manager as well. Absolutely.

AIDAN

Right. That's great. And have you found that you need to regularly sort of reset your goals and rethink your mindset? Because you started off building a business on Amazon, and I can't remember the exact numbers, but let's say you got that $200,000 a year or so selling the pizza stones, then you pivoted the business still into e-commerce, and you built to over a million dollars in sales in the first year. Now, most people come into online business and they think, “Okay, my first objective, I'm going to get to $100,000 a year or $5,000 a month,” or whatever it might be. You've sort of taken a monumental leap forward and added a new zero to the bottom line at the end of each month, but you've done that regularly. Have you had to work on the psychology behind it and constantly thinking bigger about what you're doing and not just getting into that comfort zone of, “We’ve hit $100,000 a month, that's great, this is really good,” but pushing yourself and saying, “Okay, well, what could we do? What would it look like to be at $1 million a month? What would it look like to be $10 million a month?” Is this something that you think about or just sort of naturally happened?  

HJALMAR 

No, it was very conscious. It was a learning curve as well, doing the inner work. Reading many self-improvement books, etc., is definitely important. I got a business coach as well, call it a mental coach, but also where you say, when you're trying to see, “Where am I going to go with the business?” I chatted with you a fair few times when you say, “Where do we want to be in a year? What is realistic to be in six weeks, twelve weeks, whatever, where do we want to end up in two years?” That sort of discussion I had with you every now and then, as you probably remember. But the mental capability, so the mental opening, to sort of also believe you can do this in your mind is where nearly all the work ultimately comes from. But the business will roll if in your mind you can make it work. And yet, reading all those books and having the coach every day, think about, “How can I improve myself?” is a big difference to the business as well. That is really career business forward. Esbjorn is really deep into it as well. We're totally different people since we started the business. 

AIDAN

Yeah. I think it's that old saying of what you think about comes about. If you keep thinking about something, if you keep working towards something, then ultimately that can come about, and your thoughts drive your behaviors, and your behaviors drive your results.  I'm also a big believer in that. 

You mentioned something else. I just lost my train of thought, but it will come back to me. In the meantime, though, once someone is listening to this and they're not at the stage where they've seen business success, but they do want to build an online business, maybe they're building an affiliate marketing business, maybe they're building an e-commerce business, maybe they're starting to think it all sounds too difficult and complicated, and we've been talking about the challenges, what kind of advice would you give to that person? Or what kind of advice would you give to yourself if you could speak to yourself back in 2014? Knowing what you know now, what would be the advice you would give to them? 

HJALMAR 

I would definitely advise them about what I just said about books and inner work, to work upon themselves. That is a big thing. As you just said, begin with the end in mind, etc. That is important. Read The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, for example, by Covey, and other books, The Slight Edge. Read these books repeatedly. Write down stuff about them. That is a big part of it because then you will start believing that anything that looks extremely big is really only a small step you need to take today. And that, the book The Slight Edge is basically what we give every team member still when they join our company. 

AIDAN

I love that book, by the way. 

HJALMAR 

That is one of the biggest pieces of advice that I could probably give to somebody who starts. If you read a book like that, any massive hurdle that you see in front of you is probably only a small step today. 

AIDAN

It's also what Steve Jobs famously said about you can connect the dots when you're looking backward, so when you look back at where you've come, you can see how everything connected up. But at some point, you have to have faith in the system. You came into the Blueprint Academy and other different coaching programs and other courses that I'm sure you took as well, and you had some faith there. You had faith that something from this is going to work. That's also a mindset. That's also having belief, even if it's not belief in yourself, because you haven't got runs on the board yet, just believing that somehow things are going to fall into place. 

But those types of things only ever happen if you sort of initiate them and take action, to begin with. I think a lot of it is in being brave or having that confidence to just dive into the unknown, because that's when something interesting can happen, like starting to sell a pizza stone and then ultimately testing out random products and ending up building a multi-million-dollar business in the sewing niche.  I think a lot of it is having faith that something will happen and then just diving in headfirst and taking massive action. In your case, I think another one of the big takeaways from this is it's been huge to have a business partner that you've been able to rely on little by little. You've been able to grow your team to pick up the slack so you can focus on doing less of the things that you don't want to do or more of the things you do want to do. 

HJALMAR 

Absolutely. I suppose mentorship, look around, keep your eyes open, be ready for the opportunities and actively seek out your business partner. Definitely, if you can. But also mentors, not in a like, “Please come do everything for me,” but “I've seen you do amazing things. Can I learn from you?” If that sort of reach out you do, you will find someone or multiple people and that is also a massive catalyst.

AIDAN

We've covered a lot of really interesting ground here today. One thing I want to ask you a little bit more about, just because I'm fascinated from an entrepreneurial point of view, and I think it's another amazing chapter, and everything that you've done in your life is about the school that your brother has been masterminding. Can you share a little bit more information about what that is, maybe what the vision is for that school? You mentioned that your brother was a teacher and looking at ways to improve education in Belgium. Obviously, you've got children of your own. How do all these different bits and pieces tie together to push this vision forward? And what's it all about? 

HJALMAR

Well, the Belgian school system has forever been a very good high level, with good scores in European comparison studies, etc. But in the last 20, 30 years, it's really gone downhill. We lose places every time up to the fact that now, in the last five years, kids that leave the schools in Belgium at 18, after secondary school, almost in the world, they're least likely to want to learn more. They're so fed up with it. 

My brother being a teacher, and then seeing that happening, tried to flip the classroom, which is a way of getting the students involved to actively learn, instead of just sitting there and waiting for the teacher to learn. Many other countries already get some of that going, have that in their systems, but we in Belgium having a very hard time getting that going. I pulled him into the business, and that worked. Now he learned to be the CEO, and that anything you try, basically, if you have a vision and then a very clear will to actually get that vision into reality, then that is what you're going to do. He said, “Right, I'm going to get that school going,” and he got in touch with other people. Now we're there where the school is actually going to open on September 1. But the big thing, doing that against everything else is that you now need lots of funding to get the school going. Because if you want to open a school and you ask the Belgian government, “Can we start a school?” They might say, “All right, jump through all these hoops, and in about 15 years, we might provide the funding.” But in 15 years, we can't wait. We need to change the education system in Belgium. 

AIDAN

15 years, it's a lost generation. That’s a whole lifetime of schooling for kids, basically.

HJALMAR

Absolutely, yeah. Everybody can do deep learning. Everybody can become an 18-year-old after they've done secondary school that wants to make a difference in the world, that wants to be together with others, get the world going forward in a reliable way, and then want to learn continually because that's the only way to be these days. If you don't want to learn, if you don't have a thirst or a hunger to learn, in any company you enter, in any organization you enter, you will need to be that way if you want to be personally happy and if you want to make a difference in that company and for the world. 

That's why my brother really wanted to start it. He has started it against all odds. The school is actually opening on September 1, but we still face a funding crunch where some of it we still need to collect. We're trying to do that in Belgium, which is working fairly well. But also, if there's anybody in your audience that might know how to, and I'm just going to drop one name, but I know Mackenzie Scott is every year handing out education funding, money, etc. But it's not only her, there are many others. But how could we connect? 

AIDAN

There are a lot of people with money and are looking to help, especially in education, because I think lack of education is a root cause of many other problems. Maybe if someone is interested in helping with a project like this or in providing funding, perhaps they could reach out to us at The Growth Booth, and we've got a dedicated team that will be able to pass any contacts on to you and your brother. Maybe that's a good way that we could do it. I'm not sure if you can share the name of the school or the organization. That might be another way that people could find you. It's Lab Education, but it's in Dutch, so it's https://www.labonderwijs.be/.

HJALMAR

It's Lab Education, but it's in Dutch, so it's https://www.labonderwijs.be/.

It'll be in the show notes with the correct link to the website of the school system. So, yeah, they could go through that way, but direct through you. You'll connect them to me. Anybody who can even be like, the connector between us and a big foundation or a small one or a private one, anything, could be awesome for us and for 18-year-olds year after year after year that comes out of the Belgian school system.

AIDAN

Yeah, I think it's awesome. And you're talking about the Belgium school system, but there's no reason why once it's up and running, it couldn't be shifted beyond that and help a lot of kids all over the place. It's the same system…

HJALMAR

Yeah, we've already had the question from Germany, from entrepreneurs in Germany, that said “Right. As soon as that school is rolling, it really is so necessary in Germany as well. Please, can we…” and we say, “Right, hold on, we're just going to get it going in Belgium. It's the second school of its kind in Belgium. Let's first do that.” But still, indeed, the money towards this is so much bigger than this one school. It's showing everybody else that it can be done because that is one of the biggest hurdles many people think, also in business, the biggest hurdle we have to overcome is believing that it can be done.

AIDAN

Yeah, absolutely. I think the business skills that you and your brother have built up is going to be absolutely useful in this next adventure that especially your brother is embarking on.  I will add the name and the link and everything to the show notes, and that would be a good way for people to reach out. 

This is episode Number 30 of TheGrowthBooth. If people go to TheGrowthBooth.com and navigate to episode number 30, you'll be able to find, obviously, the show notes, along with links to the books and everything else that we've mentioned, like the school annotation. Get in touch if you've got anything that you want to share with Hjalmar and Esbjorn, or if you've got any desire to be participating in funding an exciting new venture like this as well. 

Look, I think we've come in some really good ground here, Hjalmar. Thank you once again for coming on here and sharing your story. It's real inspiration. I feel grateful to have been a part of it since basically the beginning and see how you guys have gone from strength to strength and have personally met you many times at the Blueprint Academy meetings as well. Thanks once again and look forward to doing this all over again one day soon. Hopefully, in the next episode, we'll be able to talk about the school and how that's been developing.

HJALMAR

I'm totally looking forward to that next session. Yeah, it was very good to be here. 

AIDAN

Thank you. Thank you very much, guys, this is a wrap for episode number 30. Make sure you tune in next week for the next episode of The Growth Booth. If you'd like to learn more about how you can get coaching from Steve and me through the Blueprint Academy, then head over to TheGrowthBooth.com/ACADEMY. We'll also include that link in the show notes. That's it for us in this episode. I'll see you at the next one.