Hello everyone, and welcome back to another episode of Teach
Sleep Repeat. My name is Dylan and my name's
Hayden. And in today's episode, we're
going to be exploring exactly how we managed to quit teaching
and still pay the bills, how it took a long time, and the
different income streams that we've managed to build up.
Hopefully along the way you get some tips that might be helpful
for you. It's something you're thinking
of doing in the future as well. But without further ado, let's
crack on. Probably by far the most asked
question I get on social media is how have you quit teaching
and still managed to pay the bills?
How have you still? Are you still making money?
It's something I've thought about doing for a long time, but
I can't find the job. I don't know what's out there,
have to take a huge pay cut. And I always think to myself,
our stories, I think quite unique, like in terms of what we
did, I don't think many other people did that.
So I thought it'd be a good podcast episode to just
literally explain to people exactly what we did, be as
transparent as possible, and explain how we did manage to
lose a big chunk of our income but still stay afloat and pay
our bills. Yeah, definitely.
And I think a little bit of context is really important to
our journey as well. A lot of people, I think assume
because they've seen us on social media that it was very
impromptu, like we were happy teaching, teaching, teaching for
years and years and years. And then sort of within the
space of a few months, we're like, oh, do you know what?
Let's quit and try something else.
And actually that is not the case.
I think it's really important to say that we, we got the wheels
in motion to get us to the position where we could make
that decision over a number of years.
And we were, and there were a number of years within that
where we were considering the idea.
We were thinking about it. We're like, what if this, what
if that could we quit if this happens?
Should we quit if this happens? So it really wasn't a last
minute sort of off the cuff, like let's just do this crazy
thing. And I think that's just, I just
want to make sure that's clear. Yeah, you, you got to lay the
ground works and I hope people will get that impression because
I think the best thing we can do is I like being as transparent
as possible. I talk about this thing to the
cows come home. Some people not always
comfortable talking about it, but I don't mind at all.
So let's let's dive in then. And we're going to lay the
context down very quickly from our job part time teaching.
So we already dropped down to part time teaching from a full
time teacher's wage as part time three days a week.
We were taking home 2000 lbs. I was taking home every month
from teaching. When we quit, we lost that.
We lost 2000 lbs. Huge chunk of money when
mortgages are rising, cost of living is going through the
roof, etcetera. So I can justifiably see why
people say how enough did you do this?
So hey, then we start off, we're going to go through every single
way that we have a kind of income stream which allowed us
to make that. Decision, absolutely.
So the first one and possibly the most important because it
does provide us the majority of income now is our tutoring
company. So we have a tutoring company
called Top Dog Tutoring, which we started in 2018.
So this is what I meant about getting Wheels in Motion a
little bit earlier on because that was a long time ago.
Now seven years we've been running this company and that is
the first income stream and the biggest one that keeps us able
to pay our bills. So, you know, we'll give you a
whistle stop tour of of that journey.
But basically in 2018, we were still full time teachers.
We saw the allure of the private industry and we thought this
this could be something we could do ourselves because we get to
teach kids all the time exactly how we want without people
telling us what to do. And we started that company.
Fast forward a few years, It allowed us to go part time like
you said. Fast forward a few more years
and it allowed us to make that decision of OK, let's quit
because we've got enough income to pay our bills and we can buy
our time back. And that was a huge thing we
learned. I think this is something people
would be interested to hear about genuinely because this is
the thing where when people are asking what can you do, people
always think tutoring, we can go to a new career, finding the
business. I think there are loads of
transferable skills we're teaching.
If you're listening to this thinking, what can I do?
I think there's loads. You can go into Facebook groups
that give you lots of information.
There's so many skills you have that you can just take into a
brand new career. But this really worked for us
because we were still so passionate, weren't we?
We were. And you know, I finished my
career passionate as well, but I love teaching.
I loved helping children, but this let us do it ourselves.
So we started in 2018. We didn't make much money.
Not at all. This wasn't a thing where it's
like, oh, yeah, immediately we've got that.
Our first ever message to our Facebook group when we set up
top dog tutoring. Yeah, you're the top dog.
You're the best in the world. Oh, we got a message after day
one. How exciting is this?
Maybe it's a customer. What breeds of dog do you teach?
That was possibly one of the favourite moments of my life
because it was so funny and like my heart sank because I was so
excited. We'd spent £15 on Companies
House setting up this limited company and by the way, we put
in barely any money. We put in about two 200 lbs of
money and the 15 LB of that was for a company's house and that
to be our first message was absolutely gutting so.
It worked though. It's stuck, isn't it?
It has stuck. But yeah, this is the thing.
And tutoring, it was. It started off you and me,
literally. We tutored children, we talked,
we left the school. Those children went up into year
five. They wanted to tutor because in
Kent we have the 11 plus test. They wanted to boost in English,
to boost in their maths. They asked us and we said, do
you know what we've thought about it?
What's the worst that can happen?
So we did it. And that's what I want to say to
people right now. I hate it when motivational,
inspirational people who are millionaires say you just gotta
work hard, you just gotta do, you gotta make it happen.
You gotta go and get it. It frustrates me because lots of
people work extremely hard. Lots of people try stuff and it
doesn't work for everyone. The the amount you work and how
hard you work does not equal what money you manage to take
home all the time. That's not how the system works.
However. I always say this to people
though, just do it though. Just give it a go because you
know what there is a 0 percent chance of it happening if you
don't give it a go. So if people out there, lots of
people out there thinking I need to quit teaching, I need to do
something about it. 34567 years down the line and they still
haven't actually done anything about it.
I'm sorry, but you won't change your situation.
Yeah, it sounds, it sounds harsh the way you said it, but it's
not harsh at all because ultimately it's just that is
just black and white truth, isn't it is waiting for
something to happen to you is what someone said to me once.
You don't just wait for it to land on your lap and actually go
out and just try it, do something.
The worst that can happen is it didn't work.
Yeah. And then you go and you go back
to your stable job. Yeah, you're not too.
Yeah, you don't, you don't enjoy it that much.
But it is ultimately a lot of pros to teaching in terms of
income and then the stability of that job and the job security of
a teacher. Like we're always going to need
teachers. With the declining birth rate, I
think that is actually something that's that's declining.
You're not going to lie. But we're still going to need
teachers, full stop. Maybe not as many, but I don't
know. Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, no, definitely. I think, I think that's, I think
that's a huge point. Now that's all I wanted to say
was just give it a go though. Just give it a go because, you
know, it grew. It grew.
We we in my first year, I didn't realise this having always done
PAYE, but I had to file a tax return.
OK. In our first year of tutoring,
we didn't make any money. So my tax return said I owe you
0 lbs, Mr Taxman. But I thought because it was
zero and I didn't have to pay anything, then don't have to
worry about it. No, no, it turns out you do.
I got £100 fine. So I've got £100 fine on a £0
tax payer down. I was like doing it.
Yeah, I appealed that they let me off in.
The end, to be really clear as well, people probably wondering
what they probably want to know, like what kind of shooting we
actually did and why we didn't make money in the first year.
I think it's really important. The reason they make money is
because we didn't take that super risky approach where you
get a massive business loan out and do it that way.
We just reinvested money we made.
So as we were starting to make income from the pupils we were
gaining over time, We started with something like 6 pupils
because we were doing group tuition.
All of that money just went back into the business, getting
resources, getting our website, doing all these things.
So yeah, we ended the year with £0 up because we just spent it
and Dylan ends up paying £100. It was so funny.
But that is that's huge. And that grew and that grew and
that grew. And you're absolutely right to
mention it as the biggest part of our income, because it is the
biggest part of our income right now.
What tutoring allows us to do is pay our bills and sustain the
household at a very, very base level.
That's the point we got to. And with our tutoring, we had
small groups, small group tuition.
COVID came along, we moved online at this point.
Now we have a group of, I think 14 or 15 primary school teachers
who tutor with us and do tutoring groups with us and we
pay those people to run those groups.
And that was our bread and butter.
And it still is the bulk of the money we make right now through
tutoring. But I want you hating to quickly
talk about as well, other options through tutoring.
Might be some people think I don't have the time to do the
recurring tutoring. I want to go down a different
route. Well, we've kind of done
everything, haven't we? So we've got that.
What else do? We have, yeah, we diversified a
bit. You know, one easy thing we did.
We did things like mock tests and actual physical events.
People can come to and pay for like a summer course, those kind
of things, as well as the regular group tuition.
But also we thought was really interesting this idea during the
cost of living crisis, actually that kind of sparked this idea.
We were like, I wonder if there's a more affordable option
because not everyone can will be affording the regular tutoring,
paying for an actual tutor. I wonder if we can make a sort
of E course version of this. And we at that point and we'll
talk about YouTube in a minute. We'd already had a bit of
experience with making videos. We were like, I reckon we could
package up a really high quality tutoring course that lasts
across the whole year or maybe multiple years in the end is
what it ended up being and sell that course to people and allow
people to just buy access to the entire library.
So we had our live tutoring and now we had running alongside it.
Well, here's this cheaper alternative option where
actually not get a live tutor, but we've prerecorded all of our
lessons and you can download tasks and things to go with it.
And you can watch these other videos of walkthroughs of
answers and this and that. And this was a separate package.
And suddenly we found ourselves in this position where we had
customers coming in and buying this package.
And we were like, wow, someone just bought this whole library
of videos and someone else just come in and booked a space in
one of our tutoring groups. Oh, someone else has just come
in and a book to mock test for next month because we're doing
that. Someone else come in and they
bought our, our summer course because we're doing like a
little, you know, a week revision over there.
And we found ourselves kind of accidentally diversifying within
the business itself, which I guess ultimately made us realise
that diversifying is good. Like having having different
income streams, not having all your eggs in one basket is one
of the huge laws that made us come out of teaching in the 1st
place because we knew that ultimately in teaching, all of
your eggs are in that one basket.
We can see our future trajectory of what money we were going to
make and and what our job role was going to be in the hours we
put in versus the hours we don't.
It was all there. Whereas this was exciting to us
because it was new and we could do different things.
So yeah. That's a really good way of
thinking about it is that tutoring isn't 1 pot for us
tutoring, it's our tutoring business itself is 3 or 4 parts.
And I don't like this idea of I don't like it necessarily say
what passive income is a weird definition of what passive
income means. But we've kind of got as close
as we can in terms of people buying those, access to those
online lessons. And we've done homework sheets
for everything. You know, it's comprehensive.
But there's a lot of, there's many, many, many hours that's
got into that. And it is almost now like an
item off the shelf. Yeah, it's made now, but it
won't run out. You know, it's not like Asda,
when the shelf runs out, you gotta restock it and buy it
again. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
We have made this course. It's there.
It's to help children. It's really popular.
And it can just be purchased whenever we can wake up in the
morning. I checked my emails.
We've got two people purchased it.
It's a really nice way to still, you know, top up your income as
you go through. Definitely.
I'd like you now to talk about YouTube because I mentioned it a
minute ago and I think sometimes people don't even realise that,
yeah, that that could be an income source for.
Us this this is this is the thing and I think this is
hopefully the theme running through is that there is no
quick answer. OK, so a lot of people think,
well, what can I do within a month?
Not much. Like if you want to build up a
tutoring business, if you want to be influential like this and
get people through the door, it's hard to scale quickly,
especially if you've not got the time or money to put it in.
It took us years and years to do it because it was natural
growth. The same is true for YouTube.
So when we look at what we said about the tutoring, that is
essentially almost replaced the part time wage of a teacher.
OK, we're not quite there at the full time wage, but it's enough
to kind of keep things sticking over.
Get the bills paid. Exactly that.
Another income stream for us is YouTube.
We have I think over 30,000 subscribers on YouTube now.
It's educational content. It's, it's targeted so that
parents can use it to help their children learn things.
And with that, what we've built up is the point where we got
past. I think you need 1000
subscribers on YouTube. That's right.
And you need 4000 hours of watch time in a year to go into their
creators programme, which is basically they run ads on your
videos anyway. If you get past that threshold,
they start giving you 50%, I think it is of the ad revenue.
So again, we've got to the point where we spent years and years
and years making YouTube videos. We go back and watch them.
It's hilarious. They're not bad, I don't think
sometimes when you go back to the first video.
It's very serious, like the podcast.
It's like very serious at first. We're overthinking everything.
Yeah. Exactly.
But then we kind of found our niche with a few skits, a few
funny things, and it was about, you know, teaching something
really clearly. Yeah.
And it, we, we had years, didn't we?
Years and years, Yeah. We weren't even monetized.
We were just putting YouTube out there just to, you know, we.
We smashed it with a top dog brand and exactly some people
maybe found it and then we got messages saying, oh, I'll come
to your tutoring. So it's all interwing.
It's all exactly, we're advertising our own things.
But it's funny when you look at the graph, because you can look
at analytics on YouTube, you look at the graph of if you do
it by sort of money earned or views or whatever.
But the flat lines here it was, it was literally for like 3 or 4
years. The line is basically nothing.
We weren't, we were churning out the content and videos.
Even after we monetized, it was still at 0.
So I mean, it was like an actual flat line 0.
Then we monetized. That's why it was like 50 P
exactly. We making money, but we kept
doing it. And that's, I think, I think
it's a really important point, 'cause you made that.
And I don't want anyone to gloss over that.
We knew we weren't going to be making money from YouTube even
within one year of doing YouTube videos.
Yeah. But we knew in the long term if
we kept it up and we were consistent, we would probably,
and it was always a probably, we'd probably get to a point
where that starts paying off. Whether it's because we've
plugged our own resources and tutoring in the videos and it
funnels a few people to that and we make that money and you know,
sort of passively that way. Or whether it's because actually
the YouTube videos themselves are getting those views and
we're starting to make add money from that.
So we are now at the point and it's not, it's not significant.
You know, we're not, we're not, we're not like we can say we can
quit everything and just do YouTube like a lot of Youtubers
do. But it is bringing in a couple
of £100 a month like we are getting.
It's more ad revenue. It's more than that.
If you look at YouTube in a in a year, in a calendar year, we
make about 7 to 8000 LB on ad revenue, just on ad revenue.
So that's just on YouTube videos existing and people playing
them. What you need to add to that as
well is the amount of, you know, emails we get through saying,
oh, my son loved this. I, I really, it really helped
with the preparation. I want to buy those that course
you made and talked about earlier or my child wants to try
tutoring, etcetera. That's more hard to quantify,
but we've definitely had a stream with that as well.
So everything so far is all within the the world of our
tutoring companies. And if you really think about
it, all this YouTube stuff, it's all kind of come from our top
tutoring and you can say, yeah, we've diversified within it.
So it'd be really interesting to hear from you if that that kind
of experience for us when we actually took a step out of that
company where we've kind of done everything and we truly
diversified in terms of can we do this in another way?
Can we do something else? Yeah, yeah.
So, so we, we have multiple things, this is the thing.
And because we're risk averse, the the tutoring, I felt even
though we had a big, big part of my advice to people is to have
multiple pots to take from. I wanted the tutoring pot to be
big enough to sustain. Yeah, that's so that that is
like being risk averse. We could have done this earlier,
but we started the podcast in 2023.
OK. And again, I think there's a
little bit of people sometimes see our social media apps.
We started social media at the same time.
It's I'm gonna I'm gonna treat these as almost one in the same.
We'll come on to social media in a bit more, in a bit more
detail, but they're kind of one in the same in terms of we made
that choice in 2023 when the strike's happening to, you know,
have a presence online basically, which we didn't have
before and we were still teaching at that point.
So we were always treading water with what we could find
acceptable or not. But we did that.
Again, it's the same story. The 1st 304050 podcast episodes,
we were talking to 40 people and their dog.
You know, it was, it was nice. We had some, it was really nice
to have those fans and but it compounds, it massively
compounds. And in terms of it making money
for us, again, we've been doing this podcast now for 2 1/2
years. Yeah, just over now.
Only within the last six months have we really made any money
off it. So in terms of the podcast
itself, we don't get paid to do this, No.
There's some cameras set up in the room in in top of my house
and we just put it out there. Social media.
I don't get paid to do social media necessarily.
Like I was putting out reels and making memes and building up a
following for nothing for ages for.
So long. And it, but here's the thing,
you could look at that and go, what's the point?
I'm not, I'm not. And I'm not being rude to people
here right now because I understand it.
But how many people do you see who say I'm starting a podcast?
They get 8 episodes in and clearly become disillusioned
with it and I think what's the point?
It didn't grow quick enough it. Didn't grow quick.
No podcast grows quick enough unless you're a celebrity and
can already have that legs up for thousands of people.
You have to just be true, authentic.
Put videos out there you think people will laugh at.
Put videos out there that you agree with and you think people
resonate with. Do the podcast because you want
to do it. Put these things out there
because it's part of what you're passionate about.
And I think that's what we've always done.
You build it up, you build it, you build it up.
My thought was social media and the podcast was always about
helping people genuinely. And I'm not this is not like
some corner or I just want to help everyone.
I promise you, you cannot possibly do a podcast for two
years making no money without really genuinely wanting to help
people. And when people would message us
and say, oh, thanks for doing that video, it gave me the
confidence to speak up or Oh my goodness, I didn't know this
about shared parental leave. Now my family and my child is
going to get thousands of pounds a year more.
That's what feels good. That's what feels good.
That's why I did it. And that grew and that grew.
And you get to the point with social media.
I don't know how much people know about this, but even going
back to YouTube, we've only got 30 K subscribers.
You think about how many amazingly huge Youtubers are out
there and we make 6-7 grand, 8 grand a year on YouTube.
Think about what people there's huge money out there if you keep
going right? And you don't need to have a
massive, massive, massive, massive following to make decent
money from these things. The same is true from social
media. We've had months now you have to
get to a certain point to turn on money.
So there's, there's a certain requirement of thousands of
followers, like 10,000 I think for TikTok and it might be more
Facebook. And there's certain requirements
you've got to do and you don't get a huge amount of money per
view. No, but you know, when you've
got some social media videos like ours, which get millions of
views on each one and they boom and they go viral and you're
constantly uploading again, it's not consistent.
But we had a month recently where we earned 1000 lbs from
social media, which was crazy. It's insane because we had a few
videos that went viral, a few videos that really hit the nerve
of people and lots of comments and engagement and people, you
know, sharing it was really important.
But yeah, it's not normal. Please don't get me wrong.
No, no, I'd say normal is probably 200 pounds, £300.
Trickling in from the. But but it only takes a few
videos to go viral and we had a month where we had £1000 in
total. When you add up Facebook revenue
and you add up TikTok revenue, insane.
There's no way we can replicate that.
We can't rely on that. No, this is what I wanted to
say. This is why it's different.
Having different pots, tutoring, bread and butter, pays the
mortgage. Yeah.
Everything else fluctuating up and down.
More risky. Not like having a nice state
funded job with your pension that's good that way more risky,
riskable. Yeah, and it might not have paid
off. That's the thing.
I, I just want to keep saying this.
I think it's so important because I want to constantly
come back to this idea of getting the wheels in motion,
right? Because actually before we had
this cool month of we earned 1000 lbs from social media, we
had 30 months in a row where we earned between 0 and 10 lbs.
You know, because it was £0 for a long.
Time because two years was nothing.
Two years because we couldn't even monetise at that point.
We weren't big enough to to monetise at all.
Yeah. And I just think, yeah, at any
point in that two years, I could have given up at any point in
that 2. Years I could have given up.
You could have given up on the social media you were doing
that. I could have given up editing
the podcast. Shut up.
You know, But people, people I think will hear sometimes that,
oh, they made 1000 lbs cool. I'm going to start social media
tomorrow and I can and I can quit my job next month.
It just doesn't work like that for some people.
And this is like Instagram reality, you know, versus
reality. You do get the odd crazy like
lottery win scenario for people where they're like, oh, this
crazy thing happened to me and now I've gone from zero to
£5,000,000 a week. And you're like, let's not
normalise it though, because most people have to put in some
graft and some grind and get those wheels in motion way
earlier than they actually start reaping the rewards from it.
And I think that goes back to your point earlier, which is
when people say I'm just not into teaching.
I really want to do something else.
And then six years have gone by and they're still saying I
really want to do teaching. I always want to shake them and
be like, you know, when you said this six years ago and you've
been saying it every year since, if you just got something moving
six years ago, you never know, like, it might have taken five
years to make you any money, but you might be in a position now
where you can go, oh, sweet, I can do something about this now
and I can actually change my life.
You can, you might not. You might not you.
Might always say to people all the time, it's not just a I'm
not just saying, yeah, just do it and work hard and get there.
You it might not have worked. It was we are lucky.
I always say, people always say you make your own luck.
I disagree with that statement, but I'm very passionate about it
in a different kind of way. I always say you make your own
opportunity to be lucky. That's why I always say because
you can't make your own luck. It's luck.
That's the point of it. Yeah, Yeah, right.
I didn't make luck. I didn't, I didn't like, I
didn't do something. And therefore I got lucky
because of what I did. Luck is luck.
It's it's uncontrollable, right? But I gave myself the
opportunity to be lucky. I gave myself the opportunity
1000 times to be lucky because they did 1000 posts on
Instagram. So I gave myself the and you
know what? 950 of them.
Of them got a couple of 1000 views, yeah, nothing.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, right. It's the algorithm. 50 of them
maybe boomed. 2 of them maybe got 5 million views and off that
I made a few 100 lbs yeah, right.
So it's about I made that opportunity.
That's what I'm saying to people right now is you make your own
opportunity to be lucky, and if you're constantly feeling like
you're waiting with something to happen to you, it won't happen.
If you at least make the opportunity, it might happen.
That's what I'm saying. And I think as well, like just
think about the ecosystem of our podcast as well, you know, talk
about the ecosystem of our choosing company and how we
diversify within that. You, you can be quite clever as
well in terms of those passive benefits.
Like with the YouTube, we were like, not only can we make ad
revenue, we can also plug our products to go to our website.
And then when the website, they've got three options to
choose from. We would we were doing the same
sort of thing with with the podcast as well.
Like not only would you maybe get really lucky at that 5
million view thing that made us £100 ad revenue, we also gained
100 people watching the podcast. Yeah, which ultimately we want
to grow as well. So it's like lots of things can
work in tandem, which is really nice and build up together Yeah.
And they might not have it like distinct monetary value.
Yes, us getting 100 new listeners to the podcast, it
doesn't equal X amount of money. That's just not how it works.
Yeah. But it's 100 more listeners
podcast and we want to grow that and we and because ultimately it
comes back down to the passion as well.
Yeah, I want to speak to 100 more people.
I want, I want to have, I wanna hear your voice.
I want you to hear what we're saying.
And we can have that discussion and we can hopefully be a voice
for you as well. It's real.
We're not doing this podcast and social media because we want
more people to follow us, because we want more money.
Yeah, it would fall apart immediately.
Absolutely. You've got to be really
authentic. You've got to put things out
there that you believe, and you got to want to help people.
And then as a result of that, look what's come out of it.
Think about the podcast ecosystem as well, because I
feel like we've kind of got three big parts.
We've gone through the tutoring, we're going through the podcast
now. We'll talk about what else we're
doing in a second, but staying on a podcast for a second.
So you've got social media, which I just, we can't rely on.
We just can't rely on that. That is almost like and being
very clear to people, we're not taking that money like we've
invested in this, but look at this mic, look at the camera
you're watching this on. Like This is Money that we put
down, that we made, that we're now reinvesting, we're.
Not taking a penny, actually. If you think about it, we're not
taking a single thing. Like let's be really clear to
people right now. We've personally not taking any
money from this podcast because again, it's about reinvesting
it. And and you know, we could do if
we really were desperate. And that's the luxury we're
we're living in. But we don't want to because
we're thinking, cool, we've got this money now, cool, we're
going to reinvest it in whatever it might be.
Exactly. Like even the, they've been
talking to each other. We've got amazing tutors who've
come through from applying from us posting on our Instagram.
Yeah, that's like the biggest, it's all coming in together
right now. But another big thing, we've
done some sponsorship deals with people and now I really hope
this comes through to people. But we, Hayden and I are so
passionate about just not just flogging off absolutely anything
that we that we possibly can to you guys because we've got an
audience now. We want everything we do to be
because actually it's going to be useful to you.
We're not here shilling AVPN, you know what I mean?
Like VPN literally is. And we're not doing, you know,
we've worked with a few brands where we thought, you know what,
this, this, this actively works. We've worked with, you know,
book companies, we've worked with different Ed tech companies
that we think are helpful for children.
There's a whole plethora of of people who we've actually gone
to who have some charities as well.
Great stuff, but we get a message every day.
There's a lot of stuff we ignore.
Who say, Oh, hey, guys, can can you we'll get people to say, can
you just post this, please for free?
And I'm just like, we get this every you don't understand if I
did that, I'm not trying to be a Scrooge or anything, but if I
did this every day for like my, my feed would just be people
promoting stuff. Then we get some people who say
I'll give you some Commission based, some some Commission
makes money for this, like I don't want to turn into a
salesperson. Yeah, that's interesting.
Wanted to be a salesperson. I did my own thing.
When we got offered like an £800 each £800 bike for like a it was
like an exercise bike. Yeah.
I mean, like this is cool and everything yeah And it's like,
yeah, do I would do I want a free exercise bike in my house
just to say to do a real on Instagram.
It's like yeah, kind of, but it's just not relevant to you
guys. I don't I don't want you guys to
be listening to this thinking yeah, why are they able to
sponsored by a gambling company and AVPN now do you know what I
mean? Like it's just yeah, I don't
know, it doesn't sit right. I don't know.
A lot of people say that. It sounds like, well, we're
pretty virtuous, but ultimately. It's not about being virtuous.
Ultimately it's like it's not and and it doesn't benefit us in
the long run. We're always thinking long run.
Yeah, everything we do is like we said it, 500 * a set again,
the wheels in motion of stuff. We're not thinking what we can
get right now of it. We're thinking in two years and
three years. And the negative compounding
effects happen as well. If we if we start going on the
route of anyone that offers us money, we say, yeah, here's a
bike, here's this guys. We're going to lose our audience
interest in three years time. Our audience is going to be half
the size as it would have been where we might be able to, you
know, do something then it just doesn't make sense.
Completely, I completely agree. Absolutely.
Although I would like an exercise bike.
So if anyone wants to donate an exercise bike and also what's
the advert? Yeah, if you do want to pay us 5
grand a month, I will. I will advertise anything on
this podcast. Absolutely.
We're not doing VPNs or gambling company next week.
Brought to you by Sashark. They heard it and they thought,
let's push these guys. What's Where can we make them
break? Everything they just said.
Wonder what the amount of money would be for me to do AVPN
advert? Yeah, I don't know.
It has to be quite high. Yeah, just saying it's not VPN
anyway. So that that's kind of going on
as well. That's all to do with the
podcast. You know, social media grows
because of the podcast. The podcast goes because of
social media. It's all part of the same thing.
And then the other part, and to be honest with you, we talked
about how quitting teaching and still paying the bills is really
important. We built up the tutoring
company, which kind of did that itself.
But even at that point when we could replace my part time wage,
I still thought to myself, the time is amazing.
I've got a young family, There's so many pros to this, but I need
something else. We've got the podcast growing.
When we decided to quit teaching, we'd only just start
to monetize the podcast Tiny. And we weren't even taking that.
It wasn't making us money. When we made that call, it was
like it had a lot of potential. We had a lot of people banging
on the door saying let's do this, let's do that.
But we very much hadn't gone there yet.
So we knew that was potential. And I was thinking, do you know
what? There is something that we could
do here with the podcast. We got tutoring.
It was having that third part, I don't know about you Hayden, but
talking to the to the team and, and in particular Ben, who, who
we met and and spoke to about this, who was really passionate
about education, that tipped me over the edge.
It was the new set of wheels. We needed another set of wheels
going like we had the wheels from the past and tutoring made
us great money. Where the wheels, they were sort
of emotional for the podcast and we could see we're starting to
maybe get something out of this, but not right now.
We were like, if we're going to quit, we know we can quit and
take a huge pay cut, but we need another set of wheels in motion
so that we've got another thing that in 234567 years we can look
back and be like, I'm glad I did that then and I didn't wait
seven years to suddenly realise I needed more money to live.
Talk about this, then what? Because we talked about it
before. Mathsu.
You can search Mathsu, there's some bits out there already.
Big push after Christmas. All about arithmetic, all about
smashing the basics. It's our passion.
What? What drew you to it?
What is it? How can people maybe take
something from this in terms of working in their tech company?
Because we've got transferable skills already from what we're
doing. Why?
Why was it that pot that we needed that helped us quit
teaching and hopefully eventually still pay the bills?
I'll start with one of those things and you can jump around.
That's 19 things at once. What drew us to it?
So what drew me to it was it wasn't it was something we
wanted to do anyway. We'd had this idea of what Mausu
has become. Me and you had sat down and I
thought we'd love to do this. I want to.
I want to make some education software where everyone can use
it. We're helping all the kids
because they can all use this thing.
And when we spoke to Ben, what drew me towards him was was his
attitude and his passion to and, and his hit such a yes man.
He was like, yes, he's a sick idea, let's do it.
And the security of him and his entrepreneurial skills and and
everything that he can bring to the table is what drew me
towards that as our next set of wheels.
And the team, right? And of course, the team that
comes with him, that's what I mean.
Like everything he brought to us, which includes the team,
made me think this is worth investing my time in.
Will I get anything out of it right now in terms of will I be
able to pay the mortgage from it right now?
No, that's not how it works when you start a company.
I've got invested interest. I've got equity in this company
as have you. So long term those wheels are
there. You know, if this company is
successful, we own part of the company, not just employees.
Exactly and that his passion drew me in I was like, I want to
build this company and can we build this exact thing we think
that we know is good Yes amazing cool.
Let's do that then. That's the partnership that we
need so that's like our next. This is our next chapter of
life, isn't it Yeah and, and we are extremely passionate about
it you've probably heard us on this podcast holding back
sometimes like of course we'll just rant for two hours about
like everything we want to build, all of the products we
want to make and the ways we're going to transform mass
education in this country because that's what we think
we're going to do yeah, we know we're going to do it Yeah,
completely. It just takes time.
We've learnt that from the past. We've, we've had success now
where we've gone, oh, it took us five years to get to that point
where we could do the thing that we know we knew we could do.
This won't take five years, though.
Yeah, exactly. And you know the podcast it two
years and hopefully this one will take one month.
No, but you're right, you learn things and I think if we were
earlier on in our career, I think we'd be wearing what itchy
feet? How come we gotta get something
out of it right now? Whereas now I'm just like, no,
get it absolutely right. This maths platform is going to
be unbelievable. Like I can't I I love teaching
maths. We've talked about it a million
times. We've been speaking to loads of
maths specialists out there, loads of ex teachers, loads of
people in the industry. Every single person who's seen
this has gone wow, this. This is a good idea about
nailing the foundations, becoming really fluent, being
able to do arithmetic. Think about what you do for
arithmetic in your class. Think about those little
sections of your day where you just put aside 1520 minutes,
just go over processes, ideas, understanding things, getting
the kids to be able to do the maths.
If we can absolutely nail that, which maths will do for so many
kids, I'm so excited to see children using it.
That unlocks everything else. It's not replacing the teacher,
it's not replacing your curriculum.
It's short, sharp bursts every single day, unlimited questions,
children having a go, teachers being in ultimate control.
Can you do the maths? Because then the teacher is
going to take you on the journey through constantly reasoning,
constantly explaining yourself, looking at those problems.
It, it, I'm just so excited by it.
And if you won a solution for maths in your school, for
arithmetic, for basic, doing the math, if you think, oh, they're
just moving things too. I know, too excited if you think
you're just moving through things too quickly and the kids
just don't have a chance to nail something down.
Can they add these two numbers together?
Can they find a fraction of an amount?
Do they know their number bonds? Whatever it is, this platform is
going to find that out. See where the children's gaps
are. Give it to you immediately.
Give you infinite questions to practise on.
It's gonna be amazing. Powered by AVPN near you.
So that sounded like your ad pitch.
No, Tell you what we are going to start doing now is we don't
need it. We don't need an ad.
We're going to talk about masters.
Yeah, absolutely. We're going to sponsor
ourselves. We're going to keep everything
within our own ecosystem because.
We know it's good. It just makes sense.
It is going to be fantastic. So I feel I want to throw this
back to you now. I don't know if I missed one of
your seven questions, but I want to throw this back to you
because I think people listening right now might be thinking it's
really cool and maybe they just wanted to be nosy and hear our
story and just learn a bit more about us.
Maybe they wanted to hear it because they're thinking, I want
to do something I want to I want to break out of this system as
well. What would you say is like the
ultimate running theme throughout this here?
Because it's not OK. Everyone needs to go and start a
choosing company and take five years and then you need to start
a podcast and then you need to get involved in Ed tech.
Obviously, that's our journey. So is there a a bigger, wider
thing that you could say now to people?
So this is what helped us on that.
This is what made that brought us success from that.
Like is there something we can take that's transferable to
everybody else, do you think from this?
It it's quite apartment that you're wearing a Nike jumper.
Just just do it. But yeah, I think you've you've
you've kind of pointed this out to me without me thinking it is
I have this attitude of what I did it though, like like it's Oh
yeah, you know, I was on Who wants to be millionaire.
It's a huge part of this story that we're not even mentioning
because even when I won, who wants to be money in there?
I won £125,000 on a quiz show. How insane is that?
Incredibly lucky I'm. Glad you did because we got the
studio. Out there.
No, no, no. But.
But this is my point. Jokes aside, you you'll know,
you probably may be frustrated by this when I was there, but I
very much treated that as separate.
Yeah, I didn't let that. Honestly, I didn't.
That was pretty stupid. I should have probably put 50
grand into the business and boomed it.
Somehow. I kept that as separate.
I was like, that's separate. It's not going to affect the
business at all. We're not going to suddenly I
don't want to take more equity from you.
I don't want to be investing it in and all I need to get on
money, but I didn't want to keep it clean.
We're at a point where we had a plan that was still working for
us and what I could do with that money was.
Just move house, yeah. Exactly.
It was like your person moving house separate.
Let's see that so and everything we built here is still part of
the the businesses money. So my point is it's not about
getting lucky. What I would say the overarching
theme here is just give it a go. Get over the cringe was I
cringed out when I did my first talking head video on Instagram.
Yeah, yes, incredibly cringed out, but I knew I was going to
be and I didn't care. I still post it.
I never thought to myself that's cringy.
I thought, I feel that I'm gonna box it off.
I'm gonna just. Do it where you cringed out when
you applied for Who Wants to Be a Millionaire for the second
time and then go through. It's not like, you know what I
mean? Like several times.
No one ever talked. I've that's what this the whole
theme of this is we're talking about how much groundwork goes
into things. You know, it wasn't just you
applied to it. Who Wants to Millionaire got on
and got on the show and won. Yeah.
You applied loads of times. You didn't give up.
You applied over years until you eventually got on work went in,
you got the wheels in motion for you, which was just.
I'm going to keep applying to the show and hopefully I'll get
there and I'm giving myself the opportunity to be lucky again
and again and again. That's and again.
Oh yeah. Got it on that one.
That's it. And that's the perfect example
because I had people, I'm going to just very quickly explain a
couple of examples of the why that is the truth because I went
a millionaire and people are commenting and that's an easy
set of questions. I've got that right.
You didn't apply, mate. You literally didn't apply.
You didn't go through the process, you didn't go through
it. You're like like what you're
saying can be true, but also like, was it lucky that I got a
football question to get to my safety net of 32 grand?
So lucky I knew it. I loved football.
It could have been a rugby question.
I wouldn't have known. It could have been a golf
question. I might have known it.
Was it lucky? Yes, I was in the chair because
I went through the process. I got kicked back repeatedly,
repeatedly. I went through the process to
the Zoom interview, got kicked back, go through the process to
a phone interview, got kicked back, tried again, tried again,
got on, got lucky opportunity to be lucky.
Same thing. When we announced we were
leaving teaching, I said we're leaving teaching.
And I was, I was alluding to that third part.
When you look back now and you see all the thing that's going
alongside it, people didn't know this, but it's because we knew
we were undertaking a new project.
And I just said we've got lots of things in the pipeline.
We're still working at it. We're going to be working with
some egg tech. We're going to have a go at that
try and make life, children's life better.
And someone very angry man on Instagram just just commented
saying like, Oh yeah, another one got their lucky golden egg
for having a bit of a social media following and just doing
this now for a laugh. And I was like, what on what on
earth do you even mean got your lucky golden egg?
What I posted 900 times. You don't get a following.
You don't get an audience or a following randomly, you get it
because they see your content and they like it and what you're
saying and they press follow. So I've only got, we've only got
this following because people like what we're doing.
It's not like just some random luck that oh, you've got all
these people who are like you, isn't that lucky?
No, it's not luck. We did it and I'm always
conflicted. I'll round this up.
Maybe you can summarise for me because I'm always conflicted
where I don't like just saying to people, I'll just do it.
It's your own fault. You're in control.
Hopefully it's really clear. What I'm saying here is you've
got to give yourself the opportunity at least to get
lucky and and if you don't do anything, it won't happen.
If you do something, it might happen.
Luckily for us, it feels like it's happening, but my goodness
me, it's a slog. And it could have been quicker.
Yeah, yeah. There's, there's a, there's a
scope. I I couldn't agree more and I
will add one more thing to this for the people that listen now
think, OK, what's my thing has to be passion LED.
I was to say we didn't really mention that as passively
mentioned it, but I want to actively mention it now.
Everything we ever did was through passion.
Yeah. We started the choosing company
because we were so passionate about teaching and we were like,
what's the ultimate thing we can do?
Oh, let's make our own place where we can teach kids and no
one tells us what to do because we can just teach kids exactly
how we think we want to do it. Passion we we started the
podcast because we were passionate about being a voice
in education because we felt like teachers were getting
trodden on and we started with the strikes.
Passion. We got into Ed tech because we
were like, Oh my God, I just like we love maths so much and
we're so passionate about maths and we thought if we're coming
out and teaching, I need to be doing the thing I love most in
teaching, which is maths. That's my very subject.
How can I help as many kids as possible?
Oh, let's build a cool maths bit of software platform.
It's all passion. So think to yourself, what is
your passion and just start somewhere.
Like Dylan said, just do it and it and it, it doesn't need to be
transformational and massive and crazy.
We started because a couple of kids in our class when we were
leaving that school that parents said, Oh, are you doing
tutoring? And we were like, yes, actually,
yes, we are. And we had a couple of kids and
we didn't make it, didn't make enough money to cover our
overheads of hiring our classroom.
And we just did it because we love teaching.
And it built and it built and it built.
The wheels were in motion. And then we got somewhere where
we could actually make a decision about our lives that
wasn't just, oh, I'm attracting this one thing.
That's it. You just got to get the wheels
in motion, find a passion and tally up how many times I said
wheels in motion in this. I've been going for a bit of a
record. I'm hoping I'm in the double
digits. Hayden also has a stake in Hot
Wheels. I don't have anyone who's got
there. You got that from his passion.
Hot Wheels VPN. My my passion is Manchester
United. So my next one is going to we're
going to play for Manchester. You're going to play for them.
Not even managed. Small steps.
I'm just going to go to a game. Small steps, sit on the side.
That's fair enough. Run onto the pitch.
Yeah, small steps. Yeah, we'll get there.
OK. So my last point is keep it
realistic. That's my point.
That's my wider point there. Where, you know, look, you're
not going to get the answer that fits everyone.
It really is down to you. And we had people before who
very quickly on this, people messaged us.
They wanted to do some tutoring with us.
They wanted to become a tutor. They were interested.
A couple of days later, the same person replied back to me
saying, I'm just not in a position to do it right now.
I've got a young family, I've got another one on the way.
And I and I just said to that person, you know that for you
right now, the, the situation you're in, the best thing you
can do is do your job to your degree, have your boundaries,
talk about all the time, go home, spend time with your
family. Yeah, exactly.
That is rich as well. All all this.
It's cringed me out a bit when you're like, yeah, money, money,
money. It's all about money.
Yeah, Rich. How can I pay my.
But we're talking about surviving.
That's what we're talking about here.
And there are, there are definitely points where the best
option would be. OK, cool.
Do what you can in your job. Stick at it.
You're good at it. You've got a young family at
home. The best option right now is to
just do that for a few more years.
I don't know about you, Hayden, but I look at our our young
families right now and I think in 10 years I'll have more
leeway and want to do more maybe.
Yeah, definitely. Things that maybe right now I
choose not to do. Yeah.
I even think back to when we start the shooting company.
Yeah. Could I do exactly what we did
then now? Honestly, no.
But I will add the middle ground.
I think the middle ground's porting of, but I still could
have got the wheels in motion even if it was at a reduced
pace, genuinely, like I still could have at least started
thinking about it. Maybe maybe even the evening
half an hour before I go to just plan out or something.
Just think, well, what would I do?
Fantasise about this situation? It's still better than just
going. I can't do anything.
And here's the only thing I'll add to this.
Sorry to add one more thing, one more thing, one more thing, one
more thing, one more thing. Get the bills of motion.
Use your school holidays. That's my advice to someone you
you get your school holidays, erect your boundaries.
I know you like that term, erect your boundaries, erect your
boundaries, really firm. Get that right.
And the reason I'm passionate about that is because then it
lets you have your free time more in that free time.
Explore these options. Yeah, we do get 13 weeks of non
contact time in school. I'm not going to say 13 weeks
off because that's a lie. We do work all the time in the
holidays, but you but you can actually manufacture that a bit
to get yourself a run and being used to it all the time.
We didn't have half time. No, we didn't have half time.
We got through the time. We did less work than maybe we
wanted to. Maybe that's why I was a bit
slower, got to half time and we basically did a week of work.
Yeah, but like, just for ourselves.
Building up our company, exactly our companies.
So use it. Yeah, exactly.
Definitely. Well, I think I really enjoyed
that. Yeah, I hope I always feel a
little bit like with these episodes because I there's just
something about talking about yourself, isn't there?
Your own journey that you just think is someone going to be
rolling their eyes and that someone's going to be saying
something? Oh, whatever.
These guys this and these guys that.
Well, we've missed maybe something, but.
Imagine clicking on a podcast episode about how we quit
teaching and what we did today and then getting quenched out to
talk about why we quit teaching. I'll change the ties for the
last minute completely. Difference in the wheels in
motion Hot Wheels baby. Brought to you by non VPN
sponsored by Nike. That.
That's it. That's the nice one.
That's it. You clicked on this episode.
That's what you came for. Yeah, leave us a review and see
you next time.