In the summer of 2025 I decided to get serious about making a few million in my business, The Ideas Lab. My 60th birthday was approaching and I calculated that I ever wanted to (or had to) retire, I was going to need something like a couple of million extra in order to have a comfortable life in my own home.
That’s a pretty alarming thought given that I’ve been running my business for 20 years and never broken the £200k turnover barrier. I already had a reasonable idea of the kind of things I would need to do to scale up, but I thought I would have a better chance of making it if I had someone who was already at the stage I wanted to get to guiding me along the way.
That’s when I decided to invest a 5-figure sum in working one-to-one with British business strategist Lisa Johnson, who has now made over £20 million in her business.
Whenever I meet someone who is doing similar work to me but making a lot more out of it, I have mixed emotions. And by ‘mixed’, I mean mostly shitty ones: Envy (‘damn it, I want that’), bitterness (‘how come she did it and I didn’t?’), and self-reproach (how bad must I be as an entrepreneur that I’ve been going 20 years and am still bumping along the bottom of the 6-figure turnover range when others started more recently and have made millions?).
Oof, that’s a lot of feelings.
Fortunately, there is also excitement (‘If they can do it, then I’m sure I must be able to as well’).
So all of this was swirling around as I drove my car to Bedfordshire that day to have a my one-to-one strategy session with Lisa followed by doing this interview.
The strategy session had me furiously writing notes to capture all the actions I wanted to take afterwards. The interview turned out to be just as interesting though. We covered a wide range of topics from tactics to mindset and Lisa shared some surprising insights including:
what really matters in an online business if you want to make a few million
why having almost no spare time might actually be an advantage in starting a business
how neurodiversity might have held me (like many others) back from making those millions I’m seeking - and what to do about it
why people with challenging childhoods tend to do better than normal in entrepreneurship
what happened when Lisa was subject to severe online trolling right at the start of her journey and how you can handle online criticism & attacks
Watch the full video above and let me know what you think.
At the time of writing, Lisa is about to run her free Race To Recurring Revenue challenge. If you want to start a business that’s sustainable, or you want to add a recurring revenue stream into your current business, register your free place here
