The Growth Booth

From A Near-Death Experience In Argentina To Selling 100,000+ Books | The Growth Booth #45

November 15, 2022 Aidan Booth Season 1 Episode 45
The Growth Booth
From A Near-Death Experience In Argentina To Selling 100,000+ Books | The Growth Booth #45
Show Notes Transcript

We all love a good zero-to-hero story… 

Welcome to the 45th episode of The Growth Booth Podcast, a show focused on supporting budding entrepreneurs and established business owners alike, towards achieving lifestyle freedom through building successful online businesses.

This week, Aidan is joined by Olly Richards of StoryLearning.com as he shares how a near-death experience led him to building a business with 100,000+ books sold, hundreds of thousands of YouTube subscribers, and a dozen courses on different languages. Find out how StoryLearning came to be, and how it is currently growing using Olly’s unique business model.

Whether you're looking for step-by-step strategies to start building an online business, simple game plans to grow your business, or proven lifestyle freedom frameworks, you’re in the right place.

Stay tuned and be sure to join the thousands of listeners already in growth mode!

Timestamps:

00:00 Intro

02:14 Behind StoryLearning

06:55 How StoryLearning Works

10:50 How To Market A Blog

12:43 How Long It Takes To Build Traction

17:42 Episode Sponsor

18:11 Managing Content Writing and Marketing

22:39 Where Does the Money Come From?

29:08 The Entrepreneur’s Trap

33:27 Where To From Here?

37:31 Outro


Links and Resources Mentioned:


About Our Host:

Aidan Booth is passionate about lifestyle freedom and has focused on building online businesses to achieve this since 2005. From affiliate marketing to eCommerce, small business marketing to SAAS (software as a service), online education to speaking at seminars, the journey has been a rollercoaster ride with plenty of thrills along the way. Aidan is proud to have helped thousands of entrepreneurs earn their first dollar online, and coached many people to build million-dollar businesses. Aidan and his business partner (Steven Clayton) are the #1 ranked vendors on Clickbank.com, and sell their products in over 100 countries globally, as well as in 20,000+ stores across the USA, to generate 8-figures annually.

Away from the online world, Aidan is a proud Dad of two young kids, an avid investor, a swimming enthusiast, and a nomadic traveler.


Let's Connect!

●  Visit the website: https://thegrowthbooth.com/ 

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●  Subscribe to our YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheGrowthBooth 


Connect with Olly through StoryLearning.com or via OllyRichards.co!


Thanks for tuning in! Please don’t forget to like, share, and subscribe!




Hey everyone. Welcome to episode number 45 of The Growth Booth, where today I'm joined by Olly Richards, who is the founder of Storylearning.com, which is an absolutely fascinating business, and one that I'm particularly, particularly enthusiastic about - actually using myself. And you'll find out about what all of that is. He's also done an amazing job with his marketing. It's a real inspirational story of going from zero to hero in an online business, essentially where he started things out on his own and has built an amazing business where he’s sold hundreds of thousands of books, he's got hundreds of thousands of subscribers that follow him from all around the world. And what he's doing is teaching languages.

 

Aidan

Olly, thank you so much for taking some time out of your schedule there to join us today.

 

Olly Richards

It's a pleasure man. Very happy to be here.

 

Aidan

I should give a bit more of a backstory. I actually met Olly in person, I guess a month or so ago. He was in Buenos Aires and we were introduced by a mutual friend, and it turned out that we had a lot more in common than I would have maybe realized. For starters, we were both in Argentina in the early 2000s. I came here for the first time in 2005. I know you almost died in Argentina in 2004. Maybe you could share a little bit about that wild adventure.

 

Olly Richards

Yeah, well, this is really actually the whole backstory to the origin story of Story Learning, my main business, and it involves a kind of epiphany around languages. So, I at the time spoke kind of very mediocre Spanish. I've been trying to learn for a while and hadn't really gotten very far. And then I was traveling around Argentina with some friends and we ended up in this beautiful place up in the mountains in the north of the country called Iruya, which is thousands of feet high, a beautiful mountain village. I kind of enjoyed it.

 

Aidan

It's pretty hard to get to.

 

Olly Richards

Yeah.

 

Aidan

I drove there, it must have been about 2006. And I tell you what, I had a pretty sweaty brow as I was cruising those very narrow gravel roads with a 100 meters cliff right next to me and crazy locals driving up the other way. I don't know if I could say I had a near-death experience, but driving those roads could definitely result in one anyway!

 

Olly Richards

Yeah, just getting there is kind of a near-death experience. But yeah, I went out that evening in the village with my friends, had a great steak and wine dinner, like you do there.

 

And then I woke up at about 03:00 in the morning and I couldn't breathe. I think it was because of the altitude, I actually could just not feel my lungs. So, I kind of jumped out of bed, kind of ran out onto the balcony. There I was heaving, trying to get some air back into my lungs. Couldn't do it. I was there for 2 or 3 minutes thinking that was going to be my very last vision on earth. And obviously, the breathing did come back eventually, luckily, but I was a bit too freaked out to go back to sleep so I ended up sort of sitting out under the moonlight. This was 2004 or 2005 so there were no mobile phones.

 

All I had was this book in Spanish that I had kind of picked up a while before. I just started reading this book at 03:00 in the morning and stayed up for 3 or 4 hours reading this book. It was too hard for me but I could just about follow along with the plot of the story and then I kind of put the book back, eventually got tired, went back to bed, didn't think anything of it.

 

But the next day I realized I had all these words popping out, popping into my mind, words that I hadn't known the day before, words like ‘el obispo’, which is the word for bishop, which I never knew. But then somehow, I knew the word but I also knew what it meant, and I realized it was all because of this story that I'd been reading. So, long story short, I kept on reading, and within a few weeks, my Spanish totally transformed because I just could understand so much more. I could also speak a lot better. And that then became the foundation of how I went on to learn the eight languages that I know and also [became] the foundation of how I teach languages in StoryLearning.

 

Aidan

I know you've got a whole methodology. I'd love to dive into that a little bit more shortly here because I think it's something that's going to be quite interesting to everyone. Before we do that though, just another couple of parallels that we had early in the early 2000s: when I first came to Argentina, I was here as a tourist on a tourist visa and I couldn't speak a word of Spanish. I enrolled in an intensive private Spanish school where I was studying 20 hours a week. There were about four of us in a class and one teacher, so it was 4 hours a day, 20 hours a week, and I did that for ten weeks and that allowed me to really hit the ground running.

 

But a couple of other things I did was during this process, I was doing a little like what you're doing with the book. I was reading the newspaper and had a dictionary with me and I’d just be highlighting words, highlighting words, and it was amazing how in a period of weeks that focus sort of compounded, and all of a sudden, I had this vocabulary. Maybe that was a similar sort of thing you were doing.

 

But the other thing that I found really interesting when we met and we're talking about our stories a little bit was when I was in Argentina, I had to make ends meet. It was around the time when I was starting my online business, and in parallel to starting my online business, I actually started a Spanish school for foreigners where I was the receptionist, who spoke a very limited amount of Spanish, but that was enough to be the receptionist. I hired teachers and we had foreigners coming through.

 

I eventually went on to sell that business, but it was my first foray into an offline business, and it just happened to be that it was teaching Spanish. So, another little overlap there. But anyway, tell us more about this interesting sort of methodology that you’ve got. I know you've got 14 different - at least 12 or 13 different languages that you teach. I guess, it all rolls around this methodology?

 

Olly Richards

Yeah. So, the best way to describe it is learning a language through stories. And most people remember what it's like to learn a language at school. It uses a method which is generally referred to as grammar translation, which means that you kind of discover or learn about the language through the study of grammar. Sentences up on the blackboard, like we all remember from school, and translate this, fill in the gaps, all that stuff, learning lists of words, trying to memorize stuff for tests. That's how things are generally done.

 

And yet take a look around you. How many people do you know from school who actually speak another language? Virtually nobody. It doesn't work on a kind of mass scale. And so, what we do is take the opposite approach and say, “Look, you don't learn a language by memorizing stuff or learning rules. You learn a language by surrounding yourself with the language, immersing yourself in the language, and then you let your brain, for want of a better word, soak it up.” I mean, it's kind of not quite that simple, but in a way it also is.

 

You've just got to give your brain the right information and it will start to learn by itself. And so, what we do at StoryLearning is basically provide the structured environment for that to take place. In order to learn through stories, you have to have simple stories to read. That's what we give you. We also give you the methodology that kind of goes along with that, so that we kind of help you along the way a bit by helping explain what you're reading, to help the process along.

 

And so what people tend to find is that it is more challenging at first than your kind of Duolingo, because we don't dumb things down. We kind of give you the method that we get. You are doing this method from the start, so it's more challenging at first. But what people find is that after the weeks pass and the months pass, they realize that they've learnt so much that the language is starting to kind of take shape in their mind in a way that it could never do if all you were doing was memorizing lists of words. That's the fundamental approach that we take. We've been building it out across many, many languages. I think we have courses now in 12 languages, we have books in over 20 languages. It's something that's really resonated with people. And from the business perspective, it's just really once I realized that it was resonating with people, it's like, “Right, double down, do more of what's working, keep building it out.” And that's what we've been doing now for years.

 

Aidan

Something that's really interesting there that I'm not sure if you've come across or not is this whole idea of stories. It's the same method that people who teach memorization often use when they need to memorize a whole bunch of things, or a sequence or something like this. They don't try to memorize one word after the next, they actually make a story out of it. So I think that's pretty interesting and I think everyone could probably relate to little stories that they've heard or learnt when they were little and just how vividly they stick in the mind.

 

It definitely doesn't surprise me that this has turned into such a ‘home run’ of a business and of a learning methodology. In fact, I could have really done with brushing up on my Italian and my French. I was recently in Italy, in France, and I've done a beginner course in each of those languages. But if I'd taken a little bit of time and actually gone through some of your training prior to going on my trip, I probably would have found it a lot easier because it felt like it took me a whole week to get to the point where I remembered everything and just then I was leaving anyway.

 

I want to dive into some of the marketing. You started off with a blog. Is that how the whole thing kicked off for you?

 

Olly Richards

Yeah. This was summer 2013. I was living in the Middle East, I was managing a teaching center. I was kind of midway through my career as an English teacher and I was really kind of missing that creative outlet because I was a manager at this point, so I wasn't even teaching. I was really looking for something to do creativity-wise. And I read this great book called the $100 Startup by Chris Guillebeau where he basically talked about a bunch of people who were making money, earning a living with their passions and in. There was a story about a guy called Benny Lewis, who's a well-known language blogger, and he was earning a full time living by blogging about languages. And I took one look at that, I went to his website and I thought, “I can do that. If he can do that, why can't I?”

 

So that very day, I just sat down, I opened a free WordPress blog at wordpress.org, and I wrote my first blog post. I just jumped on it and started blogging. And then from there, I just kept it up. I just did nothing but blogged. Then from that point on, for a couple of years…

 

Aidan

Did you blog weekly, or daily, or how was that?

 

Olly Richards

Yeah. I set myself a very strict output quota, which was one blog post a week. Every Sunday, at 05:00 p.m., I would publish a blog post. And right from the beginning, I was reading a lot, and listening to a lot of podcasts on doing this stuff, on building online businesses. And it was quite clear to me that consistency was the number one thing, so I thought I could do it daily, but then the quality is going to be crap. I've always taken the approach of, “Let's make the best blog posts in the world on this topic, whatever it is, and then do that once a week.” That was essentially my approach.

 

Aidan

How long were you doing that before you started to see some kind of traction, maybe getting ranked in Google, or some traffic coming to your blog?

 

Olly Richards

Yeah, so for the first three or four months, like very little. I still remember one evening kind of logging on to WordPress and seeing that I had 98 hits that day. I kept kind of refreshing it, trying to get it up to 100, not realizing that WordPress knew my IP address and wouldn't register it as a separate hit. That was a big moment there when it got to 100 hits a day. My traffic growth, if you looked at it, it's one long slow line. There's no hockey stick, there's no breakout moment like you see with YouTubers with this kind of crazy algorithm. It's been one very long, slow curve of growth.

 

I think the first sign of traction that I really remember was when I started guest posting. I would do a guest post on some of the larger language blogs out there, and then I remember seeing how those guys would send an email about my post, and it would just send hundreds of people, even thousands of people, over to my website. Wow.

 

Then that was my first kind of understanding of dynamics and how you could leverage relationships and other people's audiences to grow. At that point, I was like, I'm guest blogging. So now I'm writing one post a week on my blog, and then one guest post a week on someone else's blog and just did the rounds. I went through every single blog I could, essentially getting in front of other people's audiences. And then, of course, without realizing it, I was also building a good backlink profile then at that point too, which now is something people spend silly money to do, but I was kind of doing it just through guest blogging. So, inadvertently.

 

Aidan

You're doing it the way that Google always wanted people to do it, by creatingunique content.

 

Olly Richards

Yes, it's exactly that. I think so much of business is this. It's about just doing the next right thing. As they say in Alcoholics Anonymous, just do the right thing, get the basics right, do it day after day, month after month, and just keep going. And what you find is,I remember someone said to me, “Just keep doing this for five years and you have a successful business.” And that's exactly what happened.

 

Aidan

Yeah. I mean, in the first couple of years, if you were doing one blog post a week, two years, you would have 100+ blog posts, and that doesn't include any of the guest posting as well. It's not that long into a business in the scheme of things. A couple of years and you're probably starting to build up traction. And how long does it take? Do you remember when you launched your first course in languages?

 

Olly Richards

Yeah, so I remember about a year into the blog. I was getting around 25,000 hits a month to the blog, which is I mean, I don't know what that is, really. It's hard to judge. I mean, it's not nothing, but it's also not a lot in quite a broad niche like this. But it was something. And then about a year in, I thought, “Okay, maybe it's time to start trying to sell something.” Because again, I was listening to my podcasts and they were all saying, when you make your first dollar, everything changes. “Okay, got to start a course.” And then it was around that time that there was a Jeff Walker product popped up in my inbox. It wasn't his product launch formula. It was like what he calls a seed launch, which is how to launch a new product without any pre-selling and make it on the fly and all of that stuff.

 

And I thought that sounds good. It was $1,000, which was scary as hell, but I just took an educated guess that it was probably not BS, and it wasn't a scam, and it was probably going to help me, and it did. I spent $1000 on that. I made a course, sold it for like $2500, so I could have doubled my money and then thought, “This stuff works.” And so then a few months later, I took another course from somebody on how to create automated revenue, and that was very useful learning, really, because what I realized by that point, a year and a half or so in, was that if you're consistent with content, you'll build an audience. If you learn from people who are teaching this stuff, you will make steps forward.

 

And then so those principles I've kind of stuck to really as the years have gone by because I'm a huge proponent of learning and paying for training and getting mentorship and all of that. So I was just following the breadcrumbs investing back into what I was doing and it always worked.

 

Aidan

And, you know, it's really interesting. I've obviously really dived quite deep into a lot of what you're doing at StoryLearning. And by the way, if you're wondering what the website is, you can go to storylearning.com, and Olly's other website, which is another project he's working on, is over at OllyRichards.co. You can also check those out.

 

Now, I'm talking about content marketing. I see you popping up absolutely everywhere. You've got a YouTube channel with hundreds of thousands of subscribers and your videos get a ton of views, social media. How do you manage all of this with what must be a pretty busy business there?

 

Olly Richards

Well, yeah, the secret is that I don't manage it. That's the only reason it works. We have a pretty big team of people. I was just actually explaining this on an earlier call today, my approach to this. Since I started expanding beyond the blog, I've had a very straightforward approach to (a very practical approach I guess) to building new media properties, and that is essentially I made the decision that we're going to move into a different type of media.

 

I go out by myself and I learn it. I take courses, I study it, I spend real time understanding how it works, I build the resources that I need to do it to the best of my ability and I get traction with it. As soon as I get traction with it, then I bring on the people necessary to hand it off so that the platform itself can kind of grow independently, and so really that's how we do things. We have, for example, a Spanish YouTube channel. My main channel is kind of all about languages and just in general and I still do that myself because I really enjoy it, but we have another channel which is just Spanish videos and that's managed completely independently of me. I don't even see what goes up there and all of that we're able to do because we've learnt the lessons from the main channel.

 

What I do is I kind of hire a team who can implement all of that stuff with input from me from time to time, but the principle is it’s always managed. Every new project always needs a manager as an owner, someone who's on the line to drive that forward. And then if you have to follow those principles and you make sure that everything has an owner, then there's really not much of a limit to how fast or how big you can grow these things.

 

Aidan

Yes, I love the fact that you get the method dialed in and then as soon as you can, you sort of hand it off to someone else. It's the exact same kind of approach to systematization that I've taken in my business and I think it's a really easy way to do it. I often talk to people. If I'm trying to outsource something to someone, I master it myself, then I do it with the other person and then I eventually hand the whole thing off to the other person: I do it. We do it. You do it.

 

Olly Richards

I think you have to do it this way because creating content is an art form and it's a blend of art and science. If you're going to do YouTube, for example, you really need to become an aficionado of the platform. You need to understand how YouTube works, what it means to create content for humans, really what it means to design a thumbnail that people will click on, a title that draws people in the first 30 seconds of the video that catches people's attention and gives them a reason to keep watching.

 

You're never going to be able to outsource this kind of creative artistry just to anybody else. You can guide them through doing it and train them up, but you can't outsource the learning element of it. And so I think that as entrepreneurs, we have to take responsibility for really understanding what we're doing because it's like sales. No one's ever going to be able to sell as well as you can. I'm a big fan of leveraging my - I mean, I obviously have a natural affinity for this particular business that I'm in -  the biggest leverage I can bring to the business is to leverage my kind of energy and passion for learning something and then systematizing it. And then that's the approach.

 

Aidan

Is it possible to apply the 80/20 rule to what you're doing with your marketing? And do you know where you sort of get the most ‘bang for your buck’? I mean, obviously you've got a podcast, you've got your blog which is now a decade old, practically a YouTube channel, obviously. Is there an 80/20 rule or something that you can apply? Do you know where you get the most bang for your buck?

 

Olly Richards

I mean. Yes, we do. It kind of depends where you're applying the 80/20, really because in broad terms, like, if you were to just dissect the business and say, where does the money come from? And in broad terms, you're growing your audience through different types of media, you're capturing email addresses deepening in the relationship through email and then making money through a kind of cycle of offers over a period of one to three years. I mean, that's essentially what it is and then you can kind of skin that cat in a few different ways and you can reach people. There's lots of different tactics for reaching people through different media, but the principle is the same.

 

I think, like one of the things that I've really come to believe, and this is what I'm writing a lot about on Olly Richards.co where I'm just going to talk about my various ideas about business, I've developed a way of doing things which is very much kind of anti-direct response and direct response marketing (for those who don't know) it's very much a system of ‘how can we approach a cold audience and then make as much money as possible with a single transaction’, and then you then follow that with the second and third transaction to two customers. But it's very much based on the idea that you can use copy, targeting, persuasion techniques, scarcity, etc., etc., to make sales.

 

I spent years learning this stuff and applying it in different ways. But what I've learned is that by far the more powerful way to grow a business with real longevity and a real fan base is to think much more in terms of an ecosystem and world-building than a kind of linear, direct response model where it's like step one and step two, then step three and then step four. And so, I really take this concept of world-building to heart, and this is a Dan Kennedy concept.

 

It's the idea that essentially, rather than having your kind of classic value ladder where you sell the kind of the tripwire and the $100 course and the $1000 course and then the $25,000 mastermind and in theory, people will go from one step to the next, instead, you have a very well-articulated, strong brand. In our case, this is ‘learn a language with stories’. It's not for everybody, but for the kind of people who are attracted to that, it's like crack cocaine. You know, they've tried everything to learn a language, but it hasn't worked. They find this, it's like, “Man, this is what I've been waiting for my whole life.”

 

What we want to do then is not to keep pounding on them, trying to sell them more stuff, but rather to create an entire ecosystem of offers that are all based around this brand. And then through your email marketing, through your content marketing, you keep coming back, you stay top of mind and then you kind of give them the offer, the invitation to keep spending through offers that are cycled through at different times. This creates a scenario where people never really feel sold to. They don't really feel like we're putting pressure on them, but because they like the brand so much in what we do, they just keep coming back and spending a lot of money. Not necessarily in the first month or even the first year, but over a period of one to five years you can spend quite a lot of money. This is kind of how, over time, we found the business really, really compounds and snowballs as our audience size grows.

 

Aidan

You know, I think a lot of what you're talking about here is the synergies that you've been able to build into your business. By building these synergies, by having a whole portfolio of different products you can offer to people, you're offering them solutions to their problems. And I think that's perhaps one of the reasons why it doesn't feel like selling. I know that in my own business and my own experience in the online business space, we've got Cartzy which is an ecommerce platform. If people want to sell physical products online, they can use that. But then we've also got a hosting company, and these are not things that we have to push out on people. They're more sort of like, “Hey, if you're doing this, here's an option. It might be a good option for you rather than buy, buy, buy. This is the best, this is the best. It's more magnetic.”

 

Olly Richards

Yeah, that's exactly it. And if I had a sort of software portfolio like you do, I'd be thinking about it in exactly the same way. You don't really need to sell anything because you can just create the content you're creating and then just kind of drop. Who was it? I think Russell Brunson used to refer to this as ‘Marinating’. You were just going to marinade the different things you offer within the things that you say you talk about. You might be teaching something around ecommerce, and then you just drop in the fact that, “Oh, yeah, and I do this on cartzy.com,” or whatever it may be, or you just kind of drop in the name of your hosting company, and then it just becomes the next logical step for people to actually go ahead and do that.

 

And then every now and again, maybe two or three times a year, you might come in with a specific offer or something. So people who are procrastinating give them a reason to get off the fence, but it is only very occasionally and so you kind of maintain goodwill whilst also allowing people to really kind of go deep on your whole world.

 

Aidan

I think this is a strategy that works particularly well when you're able to look at the business through a longer lens. And to your point earlier, you spoke about consistency, sticking with it, keeping it simple, keeping the basics, keeping going. When you do that and you're doing it over a period of time, you can drop your products in there and little by little things start to grow. And I know that I experienced this with our hosting company when one day I woke up and I was like, “Holy crap, this has grown pretty big.” Now we've got a real company on our hands, whereas when we started we were literally just offering it out there without thinking too much about if we were going to make money from it or anything. It was just a solution that we had that we used ourselves and woke up in the morning after a few years and oh wow, you've got a massive business.

 

I want to ask you something else. I think it's a trap that a lot of entrepreneurs fall into.  It seems like you're able to stay pretty focused when you're building StoryLearning.com. Was it difficult to stay focused? Because it also sounds like you were aware of lots of different courses and training programs out there, but you were able to keep focused, putting your blog posts out, building the audience, building that foundation.

 

Olly Richards

I mean, I'm a pretty stubborn person, so once I set my mind to it, I tend to carry on. But also I was at a stage of life where I really wanted this to work. I was living in the Middle East in a job that I was just not enjoying with very few prospects. My wife was pregnant, I did not want to have a baby in Egypt. All of these things swirling around in my mind and what this kind of represented was kind of hope in a way. And so, I think that was what kind of made me get home from work and then sit up for two or 3 hours writing a blog post. I mean, I wouldn't do that now.

 

I think it's one of those scenarios where if you've got youth on your side, it is an asset because you could just do more than you can when you have a family and you're maybe not as young as you used to be. There was a lot of energy involved in creating this. But also, I definitely did find that it became challenging to hold things together once it got to a certain scale.

 

I mentioned earlier how for the first two years I was blogging very consistently. That definitely started to slip after two years when I started to spend my time building courses instead. I found that I would go for a few weeks without posting blog posts. And it did really start to slip. It was then actually a year or two, I think, until we sat down and said, “Right, we've got to not let the content slip here.” And so, we actually brought someone in to focus on writing up and posting the various blog posts. And we sort of shifted to getting blog posts commissioned rather than me writing them. There was a kind of shifting period for a couple of years.

 

Aidan

That must have been a complete game changer when all of a sudden you were not the guy that had to do the writing. You could still do it if you enjoyed it, but it wasn't all dependent on you.

 

Olly Richards

I mean, it didn't feel like it at the time because it was expensive. And the thing about the SEO game is the traffic takes time to come through. But looking back on it, in retrospect, it was a really key moment because, you know, now we get north of a million hits a month on the blog and that is all because we've managed to systematize content. So, these things, you have to try them and then you have to learn how to do them properly, make mistakes and all of that. And only then and later does it start to really compound.

 

Aidan

You mentioned something there about this story of adversity. You were in Egypt, your partner was pregnant and you needed to get this going. Actually, when you said that, it reminded me a lot of when I was in Buenos Aires in 2005. I was here because my wife was here. She wasn't my wife at the time, but I was out here visiting her and it was either “Get this online business making money, or you are going back to New Zealand and you're going back into the rat race and you're not going to be able to travel and do all these other cool things that you want to do.” I also had this burning desire. It was almost like, “Succeed with this and you survive and your dreams will survive. Or if you don't make this work, then you're not going to have any of those things that you want.” I think that's an amazingly powerful motivator. It's the most powerful one that I've ever had. Certainly, my children as well now, more recently, back then when I was starting out, I felt like a rat in a corner that was fighting its way out. And one way or another I was going to do anything to make it work, and that helped with my focus and ability to get results early on there.

 

Where are you going to go with StoryLearning from here? And also OllyRichards.co, what's the plan of attack? You've built this amazing business. Where to from here?

 

Olly Richards

Yeah, well, we actually have a fairly big vision for what we're doing with StoryLearning. It was interesting because I found that going to 2019, 2020, I really didn't have much of it. I didn't know where the company was heading and I actually found myself getting quite dispirited with the whole thing. I spent quite a lot of time working with mentors to try and figure this out and it was one of the best things I ever did because it helped me sort of understand what is possible for the business.

 

In one sense, we're just kind of continuing to grow it the way that we have been, but we're also trying to build more of an ecosystem of companies within that. We recently invested in a tutoring company so you can get one-on-one lessons with a tutor. We're building out a certification program. We were actually starting to train people as teachers. And so, what we're doing is kind of using our core audience that we've built at StoryLearning to build equity in other places. With the tutoring company, that's kind of software recurring, revenue-based play, certification is much more kind of high ticket. We have a self-publishing company as well that we're trying to take more mainstream.

 

It's essentially focusing on growing the main company while then reinvesting income from that into part of parallel ventures, which can kind of grow the overall pie, because there's one rationale for doing this is that it actually adds a lot of value to the sale price of the company. But I don't really care about that. It's more because I just think it's a cool thing to do. Once I get an idea in my mind, it's kind of impossible to drop really. That is really the three-to-five year vision, and then over on OllyRichards.Co essentially, I'm just documenting this. I'm writing about it because one of the things that I found so difficult in my journey is actually just having a clear vision from an understanding of what's possible and what I should be thinking about as I'm growing a company.

 

I really want to write about that and get stuff down on paper. I've just written a whole case study about StoryLearning and how it works. I'm basically a teacher at heart. I've always taught. That's what I've always done. And so, when it comes to business, I just had this kind of inner desire to just teach it and write about it. I kind of created that to just be a home for me to write about the things that I've been learning.

 

 

Aidan

That sounds amazing. And I'm really interested in watching this space because what you built up already with StoryLearning is absolutely amazing. I'm a user of it. I think it's brilliant and I'm going to be using more and more of it because I just realized, after my recent trip to Europe, that I needed to have brushed up and I should have done that in advance. But anyway, I know where to go now, so I would absolutely recommend that everyone check these websites out.

 

A couple of thoughts to sort of wrap up. Here are a few things that you've mentioned which really hammered home with me:  I think your story and your success is not the result of a magic bullet. It's rather toiling away with a single focus. You didn't have that hockey stick growth. You said that you experienced a long, consistent growth curve, and I think consistency was one of the real keys there, that ability to stay focused, keep toiling away, get the basics right, keep things simple and just keep going. And I think you also mentioned that a couple of the principles that you've really lived by with your business is learning from other people who have been doing what you want to do and then applying what you learned with consistency to your business. I think that's something that everyone listening to this can take away with them.

 

So, Olly, thank you so much for taking some time out of your day. I'm really excited about getting this episode out to our subscribers and look forward to being able to catch up with you in person. Once again - I should have mentioned this from the start - but we really hit it off. Olly ended up coming over and having dinner with me and my family, and we spoke for hours on end about marketing and businesses, and I learned a ton from Olly, and I think you will as well by going to his website. Olly, thanks for taking the time here, man.

 

Olly Richards

It's been a real pleasure. Always great to chat and yeah, I look forward to catching up again, whether that's in Buenos Aires or down here in the UK. Yeah, we'll have to do it again soon.

 

Aidan

Awesome. That's a wrap for this episode, guys. You know where to find us. It's at thegrowthbooth.com. This is episode number 45. You can also find us on YouTube, on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, or wherever it is that you like to consume your content. Just find or look for episode number 45 and I will see you in the next episode of The Growth Booth.