With Olly Richards, a former jazz musician turned entrepreneur, what started as a simple blog on language learning grew into StoryLearning, a $10 million business and a leading name in the online education space. Driven by his passion for languages, Olly taught himself eight of them while traveling and teaching English abroad in Japan, Qatar, and Egypt. His journey from language enthusiast to founder of a multi-million dollar company became the foundation for StoryLearning’s success, which now publishes dozens of books and offers courses to language learners worldwide.

Today, Olly uses his experience to help other online entrepreneurs scale their businesses to 7+ figures. Through his newsletter, he shares the strategies and mindset shifts that helped him grow StoryLearning, using his journey as a living case study. Beyond his own ventures, Olly is also an active mentor, advisor, and investor in the education industry, committed to guiding others on their path to success.

Join us in our conversation with Olly as he shares his journey from jazz musician to successful entrepreneur, exploring the key lessons of resilience, determination, and the value of hard work. Olly discusses his “why” behind learning languages and scaling StoryLearning, emphasizing the importance of focusing on the method, not just the personal brand. Tune in to discover how to create a business that brings both impact and fulfillment.

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Takeaways & quotes you don’t want to miss from this episode:

• The role of resilience and hard work in mastering languages and how progress builds confidence.
• What is the distinction between music and language?
• Why going through struggles helps you truly understand yourself?
• The importance of aligning your goals with what genuinely brings you fulfillment, rather than striving for external milestones.
• Embracing challenges in entrepreneurship leads to true growth and control over one’s destiny.

“Progress begets progress. Confidence begets confidence. Whether or not you have a knack for it, it’s all hard work at the end of the day.”

-Olly Richards

Check out these highlights:

• 05:57 Olly shares his experience at age 19, that started his love for languages.
• 10:36 The importance of having a strong reason for learning languages and why it takes years of study…
• 47:24 How entrepreneurs often don’t know what they want until they go through challenging experiences…
• 54:42 What brings long-term fulfillment, even if it requires hard work in the present?
• 59:39 Olly advises listeners that making mistakes is an essential part of learning and growth.

How to get in touch with Olly on Social Media:

Special gift to the listeners: Get a FREE access to the Case Study: Anatomy of a $10M Online Education Business here.

Imperfect Show Notes

We are happy to offer these imperfect show notes to make this podcast more accessible to those who are hearing impaired or those who prefer reading over listening. While we would love to offer more polished show notes, we are currently offering an automated transcription (which likely includes errors, but hopefully will still deliver great value), below:

GGGB Intro  00:00

Here’s what you get on today’s episode of Guts, Grit and Great Business®…

Olly Richards  00:04

The resilience and determination that you’re looking to cultivate is not for any particular aim other than itself, because if you are resilient and if you are hardworking and disciplined, that is the character of someone who is in control of their life.

GGGB Intro  00:21

The adventure of entrepreneurship and building a life and business you love, preferably at the same time is not for the faint of heart. That’s why Heather Pearce Campbell is bringing you a dose of guts, grit and great business stories that will inspire and motivate you to create what you want in your business and life. Welcome to the Guts, Grit and Great Business® podcast where endurance is required. Now, here’s your host, The Legal Website Warrior®, Heather Pearce Campbell.

Heather Pearce Campbell  00:49

Alrighty, welcome. I am Heather Pearce Campbell, The Legal Website Warrior®. I’m an attorney and legal coach based here in Seattle, Washington, serving online information entrepreneurs throughout the US and around the world, welcome to another episode of Guts, Grit and Great Business®. I am super excited to introduce my new friend, Olly Richards. Welcome Olly!

Olly Richards  01:15

Thank you so much for having me on.

Heather Pearce Campbell  01:17

Oh, excellent. We’re gonna have a great time today. And I love before we went live, we were just chatting about where Olly lives, and I just spent some time over in the UK. He’s on the south coast of England, and it was one of my favorite spots I could have stayed. We took a particular walk down to a certain point on the Jurassic Coast, and I, literally, I was carting like, 20 pounds of photography equipment, and I still did not want to leave, right? And I had to hoof it down, and I had to hoof it back up with all this equipment. And it was quite a walk, and totally worth it. So I love it.

Olly Richards  01:51

Did you get good weather?

Heather Pearce Campbell  01:52

We did. It was that end it, you know, it’s like the shoulder seasons, where there’s less people and the weather is still moderately good. You’re starting to get, like, a little bit of rain each day, but not a lot. It was so lovely. It was just really enjoyable. 

Olly Richards  02:08

You know it’s the most British question of it of all, like, you know, how is the weather? But the thing is, here, it’s capable of being like, pouring it down with rain one minute, and then you’ve got rainbows everywhere you look at five minutes later. So, you know people that come here either it usually goes one or two ways. 

Heather Pearce Campbell  02:23

Oh, this is it. I can relate because I’m in Seattle and, like, I talked to my one of my sisters almost daily, and it’s always like, weather first, right? It just, I don’t know, I love it. I’m not one of those persons. I’m not one of those people that’s ever going to get tired of talking about weather because it’s so integrated into other experiences in our life, right? And even the best writers like you read a book where they incorporate like landscape or weather, even if it’s not super relevant to the story, it becomes part of the setting, part of the whole experience. So anyways, I love it, but for those of you that don’t know Olly. Let’s get Olly introduced. Olly Richards, and I just love this, by the way, Olly Richards had a series of random careers, from jazz musician to English teacher, before eventually starting a blog on his passion – language learning – and growing it into a $10 million business. Today, he writes a newsletter teaching other online entrepreneurs how to scale their businesses to 7+ figures, using StoryLearning as a “living case study”. As he was scaling StoryLearning, Olly constantly struggled to find other successful entrepreneurs who taught freely how they were growing their businesses. In the end, he had to figure it all out for himself, and committed to, one day, providing mentorship to others looking to navigate the perils of scaling. When StoryLearning turned 10, Olly launched his newsletter, teaching strategy and mindset to scale education companies to 7+ figures. Olly, from the UK, started his career as a jazz musician in the UK, playing professionally for seven years. He decided that career wasn’t for him, and instead trained as an English teacher. At 28, he took a teaching job in Japan and started a new career, later moving to Qatar and Egypt. Throughout all this time, Olly’s passion was learning foreign languages, and he taught himself eight languages. While living in the Middle East, he decided to channel this passion into creative output, and started a WordPress blog teaching others techniques for learning foreign languages. Over the next 10 years, Olly grew his business from fledgling blog to multi-million dollar business, publishing dozens of books and becoming one of the most renowned language companies on the internet. Today, Olly is involved in multiple successful education companies as an investor, mentor and advisor, but his passion is still teaching and working with others. His newsletter focuses specifically on helping 6-figure business owners make the leap to 7+ figures and beyond. Olly, that’s quite an introduction. There’s so much that I love about that, and in part, we actually have some similar threads. First of all, I love the series of random careers. I think a lot of people experience some real conversations around self worth when they’re when they you know, struggle to find something that feels like a right fit for them. And I’ve talked to lots of people who have made switches, or, you know, done something dramatically different, and how much flack they can take from people around them in their lives doing that right? And in the end, when you look backwards, all of those things tend to make sense, right? They tend to like create this really beautiful story. So for you, I’m really curious if you could share where your love of languages started. It seems like that is a really significant passion for you. Where did you recognize that? What age were you? How did that get started?

Olly Richards  05:57

I can pinpoint it for you. I was 19 years old. I’d just quit University. After one year, I had taken a job as a barista in a cafe called Cafe Niro in central London in the early days of that bit like Starbucks, basically, and I was there serving coffees, wondering what the hell I was doing with my life. But in the cafe, everyone else that was working there was from different countries. So we had people from Sweden, Japan, Italy, Poland, they all spoke perfect English, good English. Anyway, often they could speak each other’s languages as well. So the Italian could speak with the Spaniard and the German knew a bunch of French, etc, and I was just sitting there feeling completely inadequate, and so I just had this really strong feeling at that moment that I do not want to be this typical British guy, monolingual, can’t communicate with anyone else, and I committed to learning languages, and that was the genesis of everything that happened afterwards.

Heather Pearce Campbell  07:04

Really, I love that. In high school, you got to choose a certain number of electives. And I lived in a small community, rural, agricultural based, where there were a lot of folks of, you know, Hispanic origin, right? So a lot of people speaking Spanish, and most of them actually did not speak English very well, right? A lot of them were part of essentially migratory families, and were transplants, and had, you know, come at ages where they they didn’t learn English young. And I remember just feeling so drawn to be able to communicate with them. And so I think it was at the start of high school that I started taking Spanish, and that ended up, I ended up taking both French and Spanish all the way through high school and college. And I love Yes, and so I love languages so much. And the irony is, I was able to travel to both France and Spain on a senior trip that I took, and the one other place that I talked my way into was a school trip to Japan. So I love the Japan connection, too, where, when, and I want to hear more about that. Where did you end up in Japan when you went there for teaching?

Olly Richards  08:24

So like most people, I ended up in Tokyo. You’ve kind of got two main choices if you want to go and teach English in Japan, either you join what’s called the JET Program, which is that the national program where they place teachers in high schools and junior high schools. So you co-teach with Japanese teachers, and then they randomly send you anywhere across the country, the smallest backwater village you can end up, which in many ways, is a great experience. But by the time I just shifted careers, I was already 28, I kind of knew what I wanted. I wanted to go to the action. So I decided I wanted to go to Tokyo. I would have gone to Tokyo. Would have happily gone to Osaka as well, or Kyoto, maybe, but kind of it’s harder to get jobs in those in those places. So I went the easy route. Took a job where I knew I was going to be in Tokyo and spend the whole time there.

Heather Pearce Campbell  09:12

Oh, wow. And how long did you end up staying there?

Olly Richards  09:15

I was there for four years in the end.

Heather Pearce Campbell  09:16

Oh wow, that’s amazing. Well, I went twice, and the first time I was in a little place called Kamakura. And then the second time I was in Yokohama.

Olly Richards  09:24

Okay, so on the outskirts of Tokyo. Then both times…

Heather Pearce Campbell  09:28

Totally. And this would have been in the 90s. I think I’m probably a bit older than you are. And so this would have been the time that I was actually in Yokohama. Was when all those underground bombings were happening on their trains. And, right, yeah, yes. And it made the news. And anyways, it was a pretty terrible thing, but I loved my time in Japan. It was like, it’s absolutely on the list of places to go back. And now I have a son, who’s 11, who’s obsessed with Japan, and I don’t know where that came from, and he just talks constantly. And I said, Okay, you. Plan the trip and we’ll go. So he’s totally jazzed about. 

Olly Richards  10:03

Be careful, because you’re going to end up spending your whole time in, like, anime stores and mangas.

Heather Pearce Campbell  10:08

It’s so true. I’m sure he wants to collect, like, every ninja device, you know, he could find. Yeah, totally. So I love the story about how, you know, the love of language started for you, and once you got started, did you find that you had a real knack for it? Because it’s one thing to decide, like, oh, you know, I should learn like, another language or two, but like, you really pursued it to the nth degree.

Olly Richards  10:36

So, you know, I did languages at school as well, French and German, but, and when I look back on that, at the time, I had no reason to learn them. I did them because I was, as a good student, good academic kid. And, you know, I did whatever was put in front of me. So I did okay. I could do. I knew some grammar, I could pass my tests, but I had no I couldn’t speak the language at all. I had no reason to. And this is often the experience of people who try and struggle to learn languages, whether they’re at school or whether they’re as an adult, and they thought I really should learn Spanish. Why? Because if you don’t have a strong enough why, then you won’t do anywhere near the amount of work that’s required to actually learn a language properly. And learning a language takes a long time. I know on the internet there’s people saying you can learn in seven days. Not true. Even a language that’s relatively straightforward for English speakers, like Spanish, which is one of the easier languages that you can learn faster than others. Italian would be another example. Takes 2-3 years plus minimum of study.

Olly Richards  11:52

Yeah, to get to a good level…

Olly Richards  11:53

Spoken fluency, and then it’s a lifetime of work after that. So it’s really not much of a surprise that people don’t succeed at learning languages. So when people say, Do I have a knack for it, you’ve got to compare like with like. So if you don’t, or anyone in question, you seem quite good at languages. But if anyone, someone who kind of who don’t, doesn’t believe they have the language gene, and they don’t have a knack for it, and their memory is awful, and all the other, you know, plethora of excuses that people give if they’d done what I did, which was to live in a in the middle of a multicultural city surrounded by foreign people to learn whose languages I would take inspiration from have enough time to go home in the evening and study for hours because I was 19 years Old, and then get a one way ticket to Paris and live in Paris for six months and just speak French the whole time and force, even though I was miserable, to force myself to learn and practice, I dare say that a lot of people would be able to get more done. You can’t compare that with 15 minutes on the train on the way home once a week. It’s not the same, it’s like trying to run a marathon by by crawling. You know, it’s not going to happen. So you know, I may well have a facility for languages, but it’s difficult to say, because, you know, French was the first language that I learned, and I was pretty good by the end of my six months in Paris, and what that gave me was the confidence to say, Hey, I’ve now learned a language. I know it can be done. So then, when I went on to learn Spanish after that, I wasn’t starting from a place of saying, I can’t learn languages. I don’t have the language gene. This is not for me. I knew it could be done and so I learned Spanish, Portuguese, a number of languages from the European language, from the Latin romance language family, quite quickly, in quite a quick succession. And then, progress begets progress. Confidence begets confidence. And where I come down on this now is whether or not I have the language, so called language gene. I think the amount of hard work that I put into it makes it irrelevant, because whether you have the gene or not, it’s all hard work at the end of the day.

Heather Pearce Campbell  14:11

Oh, well, what was coming to mind when you were describing that like, right? How to assess like is that I had a knack for something, or just a very strong interest and a willingness to pursue it is this idea around luck, right? Luck is really what happens when hard work meets opportunity.

Olly Richards  14:28

My favorite definition and in business is the same. So much of business is accounted for by luck and random events that can’t be accounted for. There’s a crazy statistic about about stock market investing, and I’m going to butcher the statistic, but it’ll give you the general point, which is that, if you look at market returns over the last 100 years or so, something like 50% of let’s say you were invested in the markets for 100 years, something like 50% of the gains, or could be even. Or 80% I don’t know, came from something like six or seven individual days in history where there was a big upswing in the market. And if you were not invested during those five or six days, you would have missed out on 50% of overall gains. So the world of business in particular, is always full of these huge leverage points that that if you can uncover them, you know, really just do wonders for you. Some of that is going to be accounted for by luck. Did you happen to buy crypto in 2012 for example? Other, the other part of it is accounted for by time in the game. So this is why…

Heather Pearce Campbell  15:43

Being there, just being there, and…

Olly Richards  15:46

Having a seat at the table, yes, which is why so often when I spend a lot of time talking to entrepreneurs and they could, people kind of had this mindset of wanting quick fixes. So much of the time, I kind of think about their what they presented me, and turn around and say the best thing you can do right now is just stick to your plan. Keep going and see what time, see what lessons time serves you up. And so whether it’s language learning or or business, you know, so much of it, so much of this just kind of revolves around being having a seat at the table, being in the game, continuing to learn and and that’s pretty much been my how I’ve approached life, really, whether it’s music in the early stages, learning languages, becoming a music teacher, I’ve never, you know, I started off by saying that learning one language gives you the confidence to learn another. I found exactly the same thing to be true with the various careers that I’ve had, you know, at the age of 16, I was convinced that I wanted to be a jazz musician. I fell out of love with it for various reasons, and I always knew that in the back of my mind, you know, quite fancy teaching English. So I went to teach English, and I worked really hard, and within four or five years, I’d done a certificate of, diploma, a master’s degree. I became a teacher trainer. I was extremely highly qualified English teacher. And it kind of showed me that within within five years, I think within five years, you can become, you can be top 5% in the world at anything that you choose, just through hard work and grit, which is given the title of your podcast, sounds like we’re in the right sort of an agreement. You can very quickly become, I don’t want to say world class, because world class all implies that you’re better than everyone else, but you can be top 5% at pretty much anything within four or five years. And so I just kind of developed this confidence around in just like I did with languages, with life, career, business, money, that whatever happened, I know that I could rebuild and and that confidence, I think, counts for a lot when you think about people you know you mentioned earlier. I don’t remember if it was before we before we started the recording, but people who you know, often people struggle to make the shift of changing careers and doing something very different midlife. It’s unsurprising if that’s the first time you’ve ever done something that wasn’t prescribed to you at the age of 16, you know, so this whole, for me, life is just one big puzzle that’s there to be on. There’s to be solved. And the older I get, the more I think that we are just so conditioned to think that things are one way, and it’s just not true. Absolutely. Quite a bit deep there. 

Heather Pearce Campbell  18:33

No, I love it there. I mean, I think there’s some really important themes that come out of what you just said, and one of them actually ties even to the reason that I launched this podcast, was this, this factor of stick to itness, like the willingness to just keep going. I mean, like you said, like, commit to something and do it and see what life serves you up. People do want quick fixes. And I think in the age of the internet, people believe more and more that these quick fixes are possible, whether it’s in the Department of Health or business or whatever it may be and and yet, the people who really see success are the ones that have been doing it, that have been showing up day in and day out, and like have walked the path. And I actually love your observation, even about this, like five year commitment, I remember the early days of learning piano. I was actually having this discussion with my husband last night because my son, who’s about 11, we’re about the time of year where we would be enrolling him in baseball, and this year he said, I don’t want to do it. And so we’re at this crossroads of like, do we let him quit? Even though he has an aptitude, there’s some hurdles that we all have to get over on this learning curve of like, whatever we commit to, and I know as a young person. And even though I started off young trying to teach myself piano once, once my parents could afford proper lessons and I started taking lessons, I kind of hit that hump of like, oh, I don’t know if I want to do this. Like, it’s hard, you know, if I had not worked through that hump, I wouldn’t have ever gone on to become, like a highly trained classical pianist, like I traveled numerous places and won competitions and ended up at national levels of performance. And like, I think those wins like whatever, wherever and whenever they come in life demonstrate what you’ve just said about commitment, about putting in the time, and also what it takes to reach top levels, like I was a kid you know?

Olly Richards  20:49

It reminds me of the question that the often asked business question of, how do you know when it’s time to quit or pivot, versus, versus, double down and continue to push through the hard times, because, you know, the hard times are coming, but then you don’t you, you also don’t want to to to flog a dead horse for longer than that. It needs to be flogged, right?

Heather Pearce Campbell  21:10

And so many people don’t want to give up if they think like, maybe they’re in that 11th and a half hour where they’re almost to the reward, right? They’re almost to like, making things click or work.

Olly Richards  21:21

You know, I find it much easier to talk about that from applying to business than applied to kids. I mean, so I have a similar experience with my daughter when she’s eight, and she she likes she’s a real kind of she’s an arts kid. So she does. She goes to a local theater group. She loves singing. She’s very much that, as opposed to to the more scientific kind. But there are times, as you say, when she turns around says, I don’t want to do this like she loves singing. She needs a singing for the local theater group, but can’t be down to I can get into practice in any in the afternoon, after school. And so we kind of, you know, I find that I believe it’s true what you said, that you do need to stick to things in order to have the chance or the opportunity to become great at them. But then that raises the question of, Why do you want to become great at something? And something that I’ve always struggled with as an entrepreneur is knowing when to stop and when to slow down. And I I’ve come to believe that actually wanting and desiring things from a place of ego or status or anything that’s not authentic to yourself is ultimately not helpful. And I don’t know, you know, it’s too difficult for me to say whether the the years that I had when I didn’t want to practice piano, for example, were possibly a sign that I shouldn’t have carried on. Because I did carry on, and I got good and I went to music college, but eventually I quit. So what does that? Does that actually mean that I shouldn’t have Should I just listen to my should my parents have said, No, it’s right. You don’t have to play the piano anymore. Oh, you’ve, you’ve, you’ve been learning for eight years, but it’s okay. You can stop. And if you start to invest and really interrogate this question, this parental pressure thing, you know, why do you want your child to continue to do this thing? Because I want them to be excellent at something. Why? Because then they’ll be successful. Why does that matter? Because then there’ll be a success at life, right? What’s success? And then you kind of, you take this to its logical conclusion, and then you’ll kind of end up in places like, well, then you’ll be a movie star in Hollywood, or a concert pianist, and what, what is it about that that makes you think they’ll be living a happy life? Because a lot of the evidence is to the contrary. And so I so I’m really torn on that question, because in business, I’ve seen that it’s all about dedication and consistency in hard work, but I’ve also seen that goals are goals and ego and and all these things are, are, are unreliable, narrated, and you’re it’s a dangerous game to be pursuing them all the time. And I think a lot of people get to the end of life and and think, you know, I wish I’d just been a bit more authentic to myself not listen to other people so much. I’ve heard that that’s quite common, and so I don’t have the answers to that, really, other than the observation that I think a lot of the time, we are working towards things that we haven’t really thought through on a deep level.

Heather Pearce Campbell  24:28

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Heather Pearce Campbell  26:11

That’s such a an important and relevant conversation, even for the entrepreneur, because I think there is a really important balance to be achieved between the work ethic and the doing of whatever it is that you’re building, creating, but also knowing whether it’s in line with your true, authentic self and mission, versus because you just chose this path and you feel like you have to stick with it to the end. And I think, oh, go ahead.

Olly Richards  26:43

Yeah, well I was gonna say, and that assumes that you know what your authentic path and mission is. Because I think most people have absolutely no clue. Because when they had to choose what university they’re gonna go to, they’ve just been on a path that has absolutely, you know, you’re kidding yourself if you think that you you know you chose. You know, whatever you chose at 16 was what you ended up wanting from life you know.

Heather Pearce Campbell  27:08

No, it’s true and and I think especially the conversation around like, how do we teach our children core lessons that will serve them? Well, I actually think it’s less about what gets chosen. Obviously, you want to support your children in leaning into what seems like a natural area for them, whether it’s a natural area of interest or talent or strength. Those often overlap, by the way, but it’s also, and I’ve done a lot of reading on this, it’s also so important that our children do learn about a commitment level where they begin to feel like they are a person who can follow through, they are a person who can commit. And so the the challenge, because there’s also a lot of parents that are like, Well, I was a kid of the 90s, and my parents made me do a, b, c, x, y and z, and I really regret that in my childhood. I wish I could have been more of a kid, right? And so they go the other way, of like, Oh, if my kid says no and he doesn’t want to do this, then no, we’re not doing it, you know? And that is, I think, in my experience and opinion, a tremendous disservice from the standpoint that kids never build up the stamina and the resilience, yeah, and it really is about and even in if you read about grit and resilience and success from the standpoint of people getting to where they want to go, not from the standpoint of Like, oh, all these outside accolades is the single most important factor is resilience, is whether or not they can stick to a pass. That’s it. It’s not intelligence, it’s not natural talent, it’s not any of the other things that we think are part of the equation. It is just, do they have the resilience to get there.

Olly Richards  29:01

And the slippery part of that’s really hard to grasp is that the resilience and determination that you’re looking to cultivate is not for any particular aim other than itself, because it’s if you are resilient and if you are hardworking and disciplined, that is the character of someone who is in control of their life, who can do good things, as soon as you start to pin that to the outcome, I want, I want to teach my kids to be resilient and determined so that they can become a multimillionaire.

Heather Pearce Campbell  29:32

That’s right. You have to detach from the outcome. You have to detach, yes.

Olly Richards  29:36

The point is, this is where something I find myself talking about quite a lot in the entrepreneurship space, is that, you know, you’ve got, everyone has goals. I want to have a seven figure business. Why? Because then I’ll be successful. What does that mean? And people don’t realize they can be successful way beyond, way before having a seven figure business, if they only take them. Moment to define what success means for them. This is very well articulated in the book called the Gap and the Game by Dan Sullivan and Ben Hardy, which I highly recommend. But everyone who, every entrepreneur who sets a goal, finds that when they reach it, the goal posts immediately move and there’s no there’s never any arrival. Even people that I know, people who have exited their businesses for nine figures next day, they’re straight back at it, because what are they going to do sit around drinking cocktails by the pool? So whichever way you look at it, you end up at a point where the point is the hard work, because that is what makes for a a person who is capable, is self reliant and is in control for no other purpose than to be the master of your own destiny and and that’s I think, what I want with, certainly with my daughters, what I want her to develop is the ability. I think the main thing that I’m that I want to the mindset that I want to instill in her is a healthy skepticism of predefined paths and directions that put you on a pathway where you’re competing with with everyone else you know. So if you go down there you know, banking or law or medicine or whatever it is you are, you’re put on a pathway where the only, the only, realistically, the only differentiating factor you’ve got is the amount of time you’ve been doing it, which is why people get promoted based on seniority rather than ability. And I want her to understand that she can do and create anything that she wants. And if she ultimately wants to just become a gardener and work in gardens, spend all her life in nature, I can’t imagine a better outcome for her, provided that she chooses that independently. And so one of the things I’m doing with her right now is we actually started a podcast together. Oh, how fun. And and so because I’m trying to, I want her to, I’m not trying to teach her to be an entrepreneur, but I want her to understand that she can create and that creating things can lead to other other opportunities which make you self sufficient and self reliant. So we started a podcast called EJ’s book review, where she’s a big reader. So what we do is we do a podcast together. It’s just me and her, and we talk about the latest book that she’s been reading. She reviews it. She talks about the characters, anyone with kids who around that age, around around eight, go and look it up. It’s on Spotify.

Heather Pearce Campbell  32:29

Yes, I’ll have to share that in the show notes.

Olly Richards  32:32

Yeah. But the pride that she has when we listen back to her, she goes around tells all her friends, I want Spotify. I want Spotify. And her friends listen to it. So, wow, you did that. And then she listens to it, and she can see something that she’s made. And then I show her the analytics, and three people in Hong Kong listen to your podcast yesterday. For me, is you’re not going to get taught that in school, and I wouldn’t want her to grow up not knowing about that, because that is certainly the direction that things are headed in, and it allows her to be the master of our own destiny ultimately.

Heather Pearce Campbell  33:05

Well, it’s the lesson that you’ve just talked about is such a powerful one at all ages, and it is really about this ability to create value for other humans, right? Whether and I wish as a young kid, rather than being taught, save, save, save, save every penny that comes your way, which is the lesson you know that we were taught around the money. You know, like so many people, right, it’s hard to come by. You have to work really hard for it. Save, save, save. No, I want my kids to live in an abundance mindset where it’s not a zero sum game. It is about creation. It is about understanding that you can have an impact that has value, and leaning into that and learning that lesson really early, right? I think you’re because none of us can extra can control exterior life circumstances. We can’t control what happens to the real estate market. We can’t control what happens to the investment market. We may have to pick up and create new value at any point in our life, right? And if we can learn that lesson young anyways, I just think it’s tremendously powerful. So I love that. I feel like there’s a whole separate conversation we could do around that I’d love to dig in in the time left. And by the way, thank you for sharing so many gems already, but into your own entrepreneurial path. I know you did some time in music, and my my one question about that. And then, even though I’d love to stay there longer, we’ll move into some of the other stuff. Do you see music as a language like you know, I can see that you’re language oriented. Did music feel like a language to you? Looking back, how talk to me about your experience with music?

Olly Richards  34:57

I remember being in a class once, and. someone asked the question, what is music? And the reply was, music is truth. And that is, I think, is the experience of the of the musician. Because you are, whether you’re a jazz musician who’s improvising or you’re a classical pianist who’s interpreting Mozart, what you’re trying to do is to get to the case of the case of the jazz musician, you’re trying to translate the ideas in your thoughts and ideas in your brain into music in as authentic a way as possible. And the greatest improvisers, people like Keith Jarrett, for example, who sadly, can’t really play anymore. But the greatest improvisers, when you listen to them improvise you, you’re very aware that what they are playing is an invention that’s coming directly from their from their from their minds and their souls. And they’re able to translate that directly from inside themselves to the music with with no friction and No, no, you don’t see ethical barriers. You don’t see like…

Heather Pearce Campbell  36:08

This mechanical processing. 

Olly Richards  36:10

Yeah, it’s like they are like the painter who’s just mastered the depiction of certain certain things. But that’s what you get with with music, with, you know, I recently did a very I’ve been binge listening Mozart’s piano sonata number 16, the C major. And I’ve been listening to a very famous, you know, well known Sonata. I’ve been listening to the way that different pianists interpret the piece, everyone from Lang Lang to Glen Gould, and what it’s striking how each pianist and these recordings do tend to be from masters, you know, so they have a kind of imperative to stamp their own, their own personality on it, but they are getting what they’re trying to do is to get to the truth. What did Mozart intend when he wrote those notes on on the manuscript paper 400 years ago? And so they are kind of in the pursuit of truth. I am not sure I see languages in the same way, honestly, because I see, I think of languages as a way to connect with people. And the thing that people what people think language is all about, which is correct grammar and a wide vocabulary actually doesn’t matter all that much. And if you need any convincing of this, you know you can, you can think of everyone knows someone who’s just, who can just communicate with everybody, even if they only know a few words in a language, they just have that human connection and and you just don’t care about grammar at that point because you’re achieving your goal. I’m not sure you can say the same about music, because you do need with music, you just need such a strong underlying technique that takes decades to develop that you can’t really perform music unless you unless you have you can’t perform music to an authentic level unless you have that technical ability. Whereas with languages, I don’t think that’s true. So I understand the question, but I don’t, I struggles and form that link.

Heather Pearce Campbell  38:24

I love that. No, I love that interpretation. And I do agree that, you know, I mean, there’s different levels of performing music, and so like, I think of the little kids at piano recitals or whatever, learning those first basic steps. And to the extent that music is universal, I think the connection piece is there, meaning that music is a way to connect with the, you know, the emotions or the the humanness of somebody else. And I think that’s what makes music so touching. But from the standpoint of Yes, of, for example, being able to play Mozart, you have to have mastered and achieved an understanding of music at a certain level to do that well.

Olly Richards  39:11

And mistakes aren’t allowed. You can’t go and play Mozart and play the wrong notes. I mean, you just can’t do it. 

Heather Pearce Campbell  39:16

No, you can’t. No, you can’t. It just doesn’t. It doesn’t sit the same. But I do love that, and I love the distinction as well. Let’s fast forward. I know we’ve spent and I love these topics. I could honestly stay there all day, and I’d love for you to share with us some of the some of the gems along the way that you have really pulled out of your entrepreneurial career, right? Because there’s some super important lessons that many of us listening are in the middle of, or are still learning, or we haven’t got to yet, right? So share with us, like kind of a quick survey of some of the most important lessons that you have gone through on the entrepreneurial side. 

Olly Richards  40:00

Yeah, wow. I mean, there are so many, it’s hard to know where to where to start, but there are certain things that I find coming up over and over again. I mean, yeah, so for context, I mean story learning, where what we do is we teach foreign languages to English speakers. So our typical customer would be someone much like yourself, actually, who’s interested in languages. You might want to learn Korean, and they come and learn from us. And we are, we’re multimillion dollar business. We do seven figures of revenue, seven figures of profit, but we’ve grown slowly over 10 years. And the thing that makes story learning. What it is I fundamentally believe is the fact that the thing that we do, which is to teach languages through stories, which is our USP, is a deeply effective way to learn. There’s nothing about it that is a marketing hack, which is to say that what we offer is genuinely valuable in the marketplace. There are so many things to learn around business and marketing and sales and all of that, but when you strip that all away, a great product counts for so much and does most of the work for you. It’s certainly true that you can’t build anything at scale with a product that is not excellent, because reputation will stop that from from happening. So you know when I’m when doing what I do. So my business newsletter at ollyrichards.co. My avatar there is a six figure online education business owner, so someone a lot like me, who is teaching, whether it’s whether it’s music or languages or or legal requirements, copywriting.

Heather Pearce Campbell  41:52

Right? Could be any topic, anything, anywhere.

Olly Richards  41:54

Education is involved. That’s who I’m speaking to. And the message that I always give is trust in your own ability to teach. Whenever anyone, anyone comes to me with with questions or problems, I rarely even ask about their products in terms of, like, how does it work? Because for teachers, people who teach the product and the teaching is never the problem. That’s what we’re good at. We can do that with our eyes closed. It’s the marketing piece and the business building piece that we struggle with because of, you know, lingering starving artist syndrome that we will suffer from a little bit. And so the thing that I’ve really had to learn about over the last 10 years has been how to bring business rigor to the subject matter expertise, right? Yes, yeah, which is to say, how do you take that thing that you’re an expert at and build a business infrastructure around it that allows you to actually scale? Because many entrepreneurs end up being a king with 1000 helpers. So you’ve got the big personality at the center of it, bunch of people helping them, which is great at the beginning. It’s very easy to get traction as a personal brand, very difficult to scale a personal brand. Why? Because you become the bottom leg, and you’re at the center of everything. And so when it comes to that subject matter expertise, one of the main things that has allowed me to scale from five to six to seven figures has been to make the hero the method itself. So at the beginning, it was Olly. Was the Olly show. What do I know? I’m going to teach you everything I know about languages. As soon as I define story learning as a method, we started to reorient the whole business to make it all about story learning. And I was more the kind of celebrity endorser operating at the sidelines. We could then have a team who come in and actually deliver and fulfill on the method itself. So for educators generally, this is one of the big lessons that you have to learn so that you can continue to grow, and you don’t hit that that bottleneck.

Heather Pearce Campbell  44:03

This is such an important point, like, I just love that this is one of the points that we’ve reached in this conversation. Because even at the beginning, when somebody has an idea and says, Okay, I’m gonna create a business around this, around my particular expertise, or I’m going to launch a digital version of what I’ve been doing over here in real life, right? And there, it’s really about creating that impact, reaching more people. The choosing of the business name and the brand becomes critical, right? And one of the things that I ask everybody at that point is like, do you know your long term plans, and it’s around what you have just said. So, you know, I think descriptively, is that building a personal brand around yourself, it’s great if your intention is to, you know, have it always look a certain way and and not? Scale beyond certain limits. But if the goal is to scale beyond some limits that are there initially, you have to look at the branding. You have to look at what is at the center. Because you’re right. Nobody can build a personal brand and have it grow forever. 

Olly Richards  45:18

Yeah, I mean, what’s even more important within that, though, is to understand exactly what your goals are, right? Because it’s also not necessary to continue to scale your business ad infinitum. I’m someone who wants to continue to keep learning. I’m just what we were talking about earlier, right? That the point, the progress, and the learning is the point. It’s not the end goal, but it’s the continuing to develop. So I’m very much like that, but I mentor entrepreneurs from time to time, and one particular woman I’m working with went through this exact journey we’re talking about, of wanting to scale, wanting to grow, and then realizing from having done it, you know what, I don’t want a team. I having a team is my worst nightmare. I’m a terrible manager. I can’t have, I can’t even pin down an ops manager who I can allow to do the work. What I actually want is a high performing personal brand that turns over one 2 million a year, and I live a very nice life. I don’t need more. Thank you very much. Getting to that realization is huge, but it’s not obvious, because if you build for scale, you build a lot of expenses, you build it, you have lower margins within your business, which is what you inevitable you’re going to scale. But if you set out and say, You know what, I actually don’t need a ten million business. 123, million would be perfectly fine for me. Thank you very much. Therefore, I’m going to build a lean model, keeping my expenses low, designing my products in such a way that they don’t need a big, a big team to fulfill, and Facebook ads running left, right and center, and all this expensive software you build deliberately, then you can build, you can have an extremely profitable business that runs as a personal brand, but you’ve got to be deliberate. Because if you’re not deliberate about it, you can have let all of these other elements creep in that can sabotage the plan.

Heather Pearce Campbell  47:10

Do you think that people have to go the route of having kind of the painful experience of doing the building and then realize, like, oh, this maybe isn’t exactly what I want. Does that just seem a consistent path?

Olly Richards  47:24

There’s no way around it, because the alternative is to take something on faith. It’s to listen to someone like me on a podcast saying, Oh yeah, you can build a $2 million personal brand, and someone, lots of people, will say, That’s fine for me. I wouldn’t mind. I’d be perfectly happy with a $2 million personal brand. Thank you. But then when they get there, they realize, damn, I’m actually ambitious, but I didn’t know this about myself until now. I wish I’d done things differently back then, but they didn’t, because they didn’t know themselves better. But in order to get to know yourself, you’ve got to go through it to see, you know, Charlie Mung used to talk about a way of of of setting goals, which was, I forget exactly what he called it, but it was something like negative selection, or something whereby you don’t necessarily know what you do want, but you know, be sure as hell know what you don’t want. And so you can choose your paths in life by simply avoiding things you don’t like, and it’s a very effective way of doing things but you but you do have to know what you don’t like in order to do it. I don’t like traveling solo, for example, I’ve realized that I’m about myself, so I don’t do it. And I don’t see a world in which you can build something intentionally on faith from someone else, because being an entrepreneur, one way or another, you discover the truth about yourself and you can’t. There’s no world in which you don’t do that. And so I think you know, really you do. You have to go through all kinds of pain in order to really end up in the right place. I mean, case in point, you know, I few years back, I’d reached a point where, you know, on paper, you really couldn’t imagine a really better situation. I mean, story earning was, you know, we were doing, we already had seven figures in profit. I had just moved down to the countryside. I had a full management team in place. I was working two, three days a month, maybe whilst, you know, being pretty comfortable for the previous seven or eight years, that was my dream. And I thought if I could do that, I’d be so happy. Couldn’t have been further from the truth. I felt lost as soon as I got to that at that stage, didn’t know what to do with myself, and as a result, now I’m kind of i over the last few years, I’ve been re engineering what I do. I even started my business newsletter because I realized I want to be in contact with people like you, with other entrepreneurs. I that’s, that’s the that’s the ship I want to sail in. And, yeah, it’s more work. I spend five to 10 hours each week writing one newsletter. I love it, and I know I love it and I but I only know it because I’ve been through this path of being so free that it was scandalous, really, but it was enough to realize that it wasn’t for me. But I think how many people you say, Yeah, you could have a multimillion dollar business and work two days a month, they will be banging like Dan, Sign me up. Yes, no, no doubt, but I’ll tell you, it’s a dangerous game, because you don’t know what happens inside here. I’m tapping my head right now, but people are listening once you get there.

Heather Pearce Campbell  50:50

Well in this, you know, there’s two things that are really important about what you just said, and I think one is this acceptance around the challenges and the struggles on the path. I think people, it’s human nature. We want it to be easy. We want stuff to feel natural. We want we want also to be good at it, right? And I think we have this idea that, like, if we’re good at building a business, or if we’re doing it the right way, it should be easier than it is, you know, and and what you say, like, these lessons don’t come if it’s easy. These growth points and turning points, and these challenging opportunities don’t come on the easy path. And it’s also a conversation that I regularly have with my clients, because so often, even though we’re in the legal world dealing with legal stuff. What we’re really talking about is business boundaries and business structure and some of the things that help our businesses run and and we don’t know what business policies we may need until somebody really violates our boundaries or makes business really uncomfortable, and then suddenly we’re very clear on the policy that we need to help run that particular aspect of our business. So it’s just natural that we have these things along the way. And this final piece that you say about, you know, I call it like using joy, like, first of all, recognizing what brings you joy in your business, and using those as the oars to row your boat. Like, never let go of that joy, because business without it, it just becomes like, what am I doing? What have I done all of this for? Right? And so even though it may not make sense to other people, I’m also a big believer in that. Like, if we’re building businesses, we get to build them and be in them the way that feels good to us. Ultimately, that should be the goal, right? And this is all going to depend on our personal values. What brings us joy? How we like to show up?

Olly Richards  52:54

Exactly, and that’s what I was going to mention, that you have to know what brings you joy so just to dilute back to my point, I just made you can assume that certain things will bring you joy, when, in reality, they don’t. So my whole presupposition was having tons of free time and loads of money would make me happy. Turns out, not the case. What I know now makes me happy is a feeling of progress and learning within my business, even if that means spending my time doing things I frankly rather not do or don’t. Don’t fill me with with with excitement. But it’s the distinction between happiness and joy, and I never remember which is one is short. One is in the moment, fleeting. One is the kind of longer term satisfaction, like kids and stuff like that. I think the longer I do this, the more I understand what that longer what longer term fulfillment looks like. And as a result, I’m much more willing to make compromises in the present moment, because I don’t want to look back and think, like, I think one of my biggest, one of my biggest fears, is looking back and saying I didn’t do what I was capable of. I didn’t meet my potential. And then you kind of got these questions, these follow up questions of, why do you need to meet your potential? I mean, that takes you to an earlier conversation, but I want I know that about myself, and I’m just kind of accepting it because the work is the point, and as we were saying earlier. So I think whichever way you skin the cat, and you get back to this question of knowing yourself and knowing what brings you joy or happiness, and which you which you want to, you know, prioritize, and it’s nothing easy about it.

Heather Pearce Campbell  54:42

No, no, it is not easy. And I think that’s actually the whole point of this podcast. I launched it when covid was just coming over the the ocean to the US, right? No, no, I know. Thanks. No. And we were in Seattle. Ground Zero was here, but I thought nobody’s talking about this, and nobody’s talking about what it’s going to do to small businesses, from the standpoint of isolation, from the standpoint of everybody having to move online, even though they’ve known that for years, they haven’t done it, you know, anyways. And so part of my goal with the podcast was this idea around longevity, around sticking with it, around like being able to do the work to figure it out right? Because to the extent we have people doing and building things that they love, the world is just a better place. Just is. And so anyways, I love that you got there. I love that we’re here. And I’ve totally taken you over time. For folks that are listening, that are thinking, like, oh my gosh, this Olly guy is so interesting. I need to go look at his work. I need to sign up for his newsletter. Clearly, you’re a teacher at heart, like I heard you say, so much of your joy comes from like the learning and the progress and leaning into the potential and also teaching that I can see that, like your commitment to your newsletter is also about helping others do that, and teachers you can’t people who are designed to teach you cannot take it out of them. 

Olly Richards  56:13

I’m so glad you recognize that, because I feel like people don’t understand that often, but I’ve always done that when I was a musician, I would teach music. When I learned languages, and I taught, taught languages with business. I having spent 10 years learning, I can’t suppress the desire to pass it on. I think it’s just a personality thing.

Heather Pearce Campbell  56:37

Totally, and I think it’s also true that certain people are designed to teach. We all know people who are like, almost like idiot savant category, meaning that they are so good at what they do, and they just make it look easy, but you ask them to teach it, and it’s like speaking a different language, right? And then there are people who also can master it, but they can teach as well. We need those people in the world listening to that calling to teach. So one, I appreciate you. I’m so glad you have a newsletter. I’m so excited to share it with my audience. If you’re listening, do hop over to the show notes. You can find them at legalwebsitewarrior.com/podcast, find Olly Richards’ episode, but Olly, tell us where you are. Where do you show up online? Where for people that are wanting to connect with you, where would you like them to go? 

Olly Richards  57:30

So best thing to do with to sign up to my email newsletter, which is at ollyrichards.co double L, y richards.co not.com because some guy from Google called Hollywood just has got the.com and he doesn’t answer his email. So I can’t buy the domains if you’re listening along your domain, and yeah. So I send very, very long in depth emails about, specifically about scaling online education businesses. So you can find me there. When you do sign up, you will also get a case study that I’ve written, which is 117 pages, and it breaks down the entirety of my business story, learning the language business and how it works, how we do sales, product marketing, and some other thoughts on lifestyle and things like that as well. People tend to really like that case study. So you’ll get that when you when you sign up. You can also find me on YouTube. You can search for Olly Richards, but your thing is, you’ll get a lot of my I have a big YouTube channel on languages, so you’ll probably find it’s been pointed out to me that you’ll probably struggle to find my business YouTube channel. So what you should probably do is go to my website, ollyrichards.co, and just look for the link. So then you’ll find the YouTube. I’m also on Twitter. I’m on LinkedIn. You can search me there, and would love to connect.

Heather Pearce Campbell  58:42

Awesome. Well, we will share all those links. I am personally excited to go also check out your, your 117 page paper people. If that scares you, don’t let it right? You can consume that in bite sized pieces. 

Olly Richards  58:55

People email me and say, like, oh yeah. I’ve just read the whole thing in anything they stay up until like, 4am reading.

Heather Pearce Campbell  58:59

That’s how I am, like, I will start a book, and it’s like, you know, sometimes I’m reading five books at once, and sometimes I am just like, plowing through so I get it. That’s the lawyer in you. I think I know, right? Anyways, I’m so grateful to have you here today. I’m so excited for people to get to know more about your story and be able to learn from you through your newsletter through this 117 page document. Olly, what final thoughts do you have to leave people with, whether it’s an action step, you know, something that they should go do, whether it’s just a lesson or a quote? What would you like to leave people with today?

Olly Richards  59:39

You know what? I’m going to share the quote that is at the beginning of my case study, because I think it kind of sums up everything we’ve spoken about today. And it’s from a book called The Journey by James Norbury. And he said the quote is the following. It’s about two characters called a tiny dragon and big panda and tiny dragon. Says, But you always seem to know all the answers. Big panda grinned, well, I’ve made a lot more mistakes than you. Yeah.

Heather Pearce Campbell  1:00:09

Boom. There it is. You know this is true. Whoo. Bring on the mistakes, right? Fail forward.

Olly Richards  1:00:16

Bring the mistakes. Don’t beat yourself up about them.

Heather Pearce Campbell  1:00:19

Totally, on the lesson and move on. That’s right. I love it. Olly, thank you so much. I am so grateful for you and your time today.

Olly Richards  1:00:27

Thank you. It’s been a lot of fun.

Heather Pearce Campbell  1:00:28

I’m so glad. Well, I look forward to being in touch and maybe at some point there’s a round two to this.

Olly Richards  1:00:33

My pleasure. Thank you.

GGGB Outro  1:00:35

Thank you for joining us today on the Guts, Grit and Great Business® podcast. We hope that we’ve added a little fuel to your tank, some coffee to your cup and pep in your step to keep you moving forward in your own great adventures. For key takeaways, links to any resources mentioned in today’s show and more, see the show notes which can be found at www.legalwebsitewarrior.com/podcast. Be sure to subscribe to the podcast and if you enjoyed today’s conversation, please give us some stars and a review on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcast so others will find us too. Keep up the great work you are doing in the world and we’ll see you next week.