Near Death Experiences and Neurodivergent Entrepreneurship (with Stuart Morris)

Frugalpreneur podcast features serial entrepreneur M. Stuart Morris

>> Sarah St. John: Welcome to the Frugalpreneur podcast. I am your host, Sarah St. John, and my guest today is a neurodivergent serial entrepreneur, tech inventor, TEDx, speaker, and CEO of the number one celebrancy training business in the world. Welcome to the show. Stuart Morris.

>> Stuart Morris: Well, hello, and thank you for having me.

>> Sarah St. John: M. It's so good to have you on.

We train people how to take weddings and funerals properly

Well, first, I have a question. celebrancy, can you explain what that word means?

>> Stuart Morris: Sure. So, in the US, it's more likely to be used the word officiant, but not necessarily in a religious sense. So we train people how to take weddings and funerals. Some of them may be religious, some. Many of them are not. And what we find is that, in fact, many religious, many ministers of religion, they may do a three year, seminary, but they do less than half a day of training in order to teach them how to take weddings and funerals. And so we teach people how to really take, a wedding and make it something really special for the couple, how to take a funeral and make it a proper celebration of life, not just a, recitation of a religious ceremony. I think the example I like to use is, I don't know if any of you watched the queen's funeral last year. We had an hour of marching, which nobody does it better. We had an hour of ceremony in Westminster Abbey, and then we had another hour of marching. And in all of that, there was 58 seconds of discussion of a woman called Elizabeth, who was a mother, a daughter, all about the church and the state. It wasn't a celebration of who she was as a human being. And too many funerals are like that. So, yeah, we train people how to make really epic funerals and weddings that are about the people rather than something else.

>> Sarah St. John: Yeah. So I guess that funeral, you would say, failed or missed the mark.

>> Stuart Morris: I guess it did what it needed to do from a state perspective. But that's why there was a secondary funeral at St. George's Chapel in the castle of Windsor for just the family, because, yeah, state funeral does not meet the family's needs. But a lot of religious funerals miss that mark as well. They're all about God and the hereafter. Well, actually, what about our loved one? What about the people that we are? so, after a career in tech, who knew that would be a thing?

>> Sarah St. John: Yeah. So I'm curious how you got into that or maybe go through your journey of entrepreneurship.

>> Stuart Morris: I'm ADHD, I'm dyslexic, and I'm autistic. So at age eight, I was written off at school because I couldn't read and write. Basically. Was the disruptive kid at the back never going to amount to anything? I got to university, I did a degree in a very geek and technology subject, started working in technology for one of the big blue chip electronics companies and was always going to get fired. I don't fit in well. I'm not a good employee. I'm bouncing off the walls. I've got ideas. I don't respond to authority well, especially when I think they're being idiots and, you know, being autistic. If some, if I think somebody's being an idiot, I'll tell them. And if they're the chief executive and who's this upstart of an engineer telling them, I think you're talking rubbish. That doesn't generally go down well. So I ended up working for a couple of smaller businesses, and then the company I was working for got taken over by its biggest competitor, wheel, got laid off, and I'd got two small children, another one on the way. And I was thinking, how am I going to pay the mortgage? How am I going to pay the bills? So that was the genesis of my first business. Just worked with what we got to, phoned up all my old customers and said, hey, you know, we've been taken over by the company whose product you didn't buy. How would you like the guys, you know, to be doing your tech support? And I've never looked back. I compare this in my friends that, I was at university with career average in earnings. I'm ahead of their curve generally, but that doesn't mean it's all been easy. You know, they may have had stability of income, but actually working for a big corporate these days, you have no stability of, you know, you could be laid off tomorrow with no real notice. The only person that can fire me is me. There have been times when we've been desperately poor and really struggled. We nearly lost the house on more than one occasion. Here we are today. I run two successful businesses, I've got three startups on the go, life isn't boring. I fly my own airplane, and none of the guys I was at university with have achieved that kind of thing. So I figure career average, I'm ahead of the game, and I've certainly had an awful lot more fun. and then I've taught entrepreneurship at, one of the top business schools in the world. That was a fun four years, but again, it reminded me that I'm not supposed to be employed by other people, let alone an academic institution. It was terrific fun, did an awful lot of interesting things. But filling in expenses claims don't give the ADHD kid an expenses claim every month. It just doesn't work.

>> Sarah St. John: Do you find. Cause I imagine you've talked with several neurodivergent business owners. Do you find that that's kind of a, consistent struggle of working for someone else?

>> Stuart Morris: Yeah. And it's a struggle working for yourself, because you still have to do the accountancy, you still have to do tax returns, you still have to make sure that the regulatory side of running a business is done. You still have to. The business grows. And I always say that there's no judgment whether you're running what I call self employment. If it's just you, and if you take a day off, you don't earn anything, or if you take, a vacation, the business is all still there for you to do when you get back. That's what I call being self employed. Running your own business is where you can take a week off. And when you come back, it all happened without you. There may be a bit for you to catch up, but it doesn't matter whether the business is a $10,000 a year turnover business or a $10 million a year, turnover business. The scale, there is no value judgment. It's what's right for you as an individual, what's serving you and your family. And I think it's really important that people are okay with that. build a business that suits them. But especially as you start to grow, you start hitting those benchmarks. The $100,000 turnover, the million dollar turnover business. Those are the pinch points where something has to change.

You start hiring people now you got to manage people. And as an autistic person, you may be used to masking

You start hiring people now you got to manage people. And as an autistic person, you may be used to masking, you may be used to being people pleaser. You don't want to fire people because you're trying to please them, but actually, you've got to fire them because they're being an idiot or they're just not pulling their weight. You get all sorts of challenges, and it gets really, really difficult. And my team, I've, tried to build a team of people who compliment me because it's very easy to hire people that are like you, and then you end up with a nightmare because nothing's getting done, because you all have been creative the whole time. So it's important to understand that you need to hire people who will do the bits of the job that you can't do. And in fact, recently, I've just hired a CEO, for my group of businesses. So essentially, I'm no longer the CEO. I've hired my boss in a way so that he runs the business on a day to day basis. He's the one making the decisions. It's really difficult to say no. You have the responsibility, the authority to take decisions. These are the principles upon which I would like the businesses run. So we have core principles. Generosity is the beginning of every decision. We're human centered business. Yes, we need to be making profit, but it's about the people, both the employees and the customers first. And within that remit, even my lowest paid member of staff has full authority to take decisions that I'm not going to yell at them. I may disagree, we may discuss it, but within their realm, I don't want to know. If you're making day to day decisions, get on with it. And that relinquishing of control is actually very, very hard as an entrepreneur as well. But it's the only way the business would truly grow.

Richard Branson says hire the best people you can afford

>> Sarah St. John: Yeah, I find that difficult myself, even hiring people, which I really haven't yet, but I don't know, I think it's like that control thing. You know, how you like to do things, and you're like, well, if I hire someone, even if I give them sops that they might still, they will.

>> Stuart Morris: Yeah, they will fail you. But the reality is, if you're honest with oneself, if you look at your own performance over time, you have failed you. Richard Branson, Virgin Atlantic and Virgin records and lots of other virgin brands, he said, hire the best people you can afford. Let them get on with it. Know that they will let you down from time to time. Very few of them will let you down on purpose. They are just human. Your scope, your scale will be multiplied because you've relinquished some control, far more than you can do it on your own. If you only ever do what you can do. There are only 24 hours in a day, and you do need to sleep for some of them, even me with my ADHD, if I don't get enough sleep, my productivity drops through the floor, and I really struggle to make progress. And I think it's. You build a team of people you trust, and some people you let go because you realize you can't trust them. At the end of May, 1 of my team had to go, and we did it as amicably as we could. But no, it was me firing him. And that's a shame. In some ways, I feel the responsibility. Did I fail him? Did I not give him the leadership that he needed? It was hard. Probably kept him on for two or three months more than I should have. I didn't want to take the difficult decision, but in the end, it was the right thing to do. We pick ourselves up, we move on. But, yeah, if what you want is to be self employed, it's just you're contracting. I was talking to somebody over the weekend. Essentially, they're a contractor. They get paid very well for the project management work they do for big corporates, but they don't get paid if they don't work. So they aren't running a business. They are just a self employed contractor. But that's what suits them. It's what gives them their income. They enjoy their life, they earn well, and they have a good time when they're not earning. For me, I know that the businesses that I want to run, I want them to be bigger than that. Flying my own airplane, which is something I've wanted to do since I was a little boy, and I've spent two years restoring a vintage 1961 aeroplane. My plan next year is to fly it across the Atlantic. That's not a trivial both in terms of cost, risk, and the skill set I have to learn in order to be able to do that. So I need a business that's supporting my personal dream, both in terms of the way I want to be in the world and the things I want to do in my downtime.

How would an entrepreneur decide whether they should go the solopreneur route

>> Sarah St. John: How would an entrepreneur decide whether they should kind of go the solopreneur route, like the contractor route, like what you were talking about, or having a business, hiring people, how does one determine which route to take?

>> Stuart Morris: I think it's one of those things where you have to be led by a heart. It isn't necessarily a head decision, it becomes a head decision, but it's what's in your soul. For me, with the celebrancy training, I had a health issue. I had to step back from the whole of life for several months. And as I came back, my brain wasn't working right, my body wasn't working right. I started doing the celebrancy role. It was just me. I was just taking about 150 funerals a year and loving it. Absolutely loving it. Didn't need staff. If I needed a duvet day, funeral director phoned me up and said, can you take a funeral next Thursday? I could say no, and I didn't have to explain why. It was just me being self employed. And it worked really, really well for me at that point in life. And I actually thought that was it. I thought I wasn't going to be building another business because of my health and where I needed to be to look after me at that time. And a few years later, people started saying to me, will you train us how to do this? So thinking, no, because I'm really enjoying life. My earning capacity is pretty limited, but it's enough. I'm paying the bills. And then I realized that if I'm doing 150 funerals a year, roughly, then about 3000 people a year are coming to one of my funerals and they're getting a good funeral. I hope so many people every year go to what I call a bad funeral. A funeral that's just the cookie cutter copy of every other funeral you've ever been to. And the grief process is really stalled unless you get a good opportunity to say goodbye. So I started, I said, okay, we'll run one course. And a friend and I, and we set up and we advertised, we ran one course, and six years later, I have a team of about 14 people. We train more people to do this than anybody else in the world. We are a, serious business. We have an advertising budget that makes me weep every month. We have all of these costs that are coming out. But in terms of my personal reach, almost a million people a year in the United Kingdom attend a funeral given by somebody we've taught. And I no longer do all the training. I come into the classroom and I do the specialist bits. So in terms of my personal impact on the world, close to a million people a year, receive a better funeral because I run a company, compared to the 3000 people a year who could receive a funeral if I was just being self employed. And so that's about legacy in many senses. And there are lots of people out there, I would argue, who can do an online course to become a celebrant or officiant. You can come here and do an in person course and it's a completely different experience. If we weren't doing it, other people would be filling the gap and they'd be filling it badly. Now, that's hubris. I think we are doing it better than anybody else. You could argue there's hubris there, but I've spent, over the years we've been doing it, close to $2 million developing this course, making it the best course there is. But we've only been able to invest that money because we've built a business that has generated that revenue to reinvest in the product. But we started with literally $500 worth of Google Ads. That was the initial expenditure. so I started with what we'd got with a very little spend, sat down with a friend, designed a five day course. So we spent a few days writing the course, we spent $500 on Google Ads and we had our first eight students. And that repaid their accommodation, it repaid the Google Ads spend and we've just grown out from there. For me, that decision to go from being self employed to running a business almost happened by accident. But now I see the influence, the legacy that I have in the industry. But at no stage did we spend more than we could afford to lose. So we were doing it on a shoestring the whole way through. Business is probably costing us $70,000 a month to run it, so. But, hey, it's just a different scale.

>> Sarah St. John: Yeah, exactly.

You have a training company and a venue for retreats and training courses

What are the other businesses that you have, you had mentioned?

>> Stuart Morris: So, yeah, I mean, where I am, we have in 2019, that training business was spending trying to do the dollar conversion, close to $200,000 a year renting training facilities, and I wasn't happy with the environment. I wanted something that was more private, that was more controlled in terms of the ambiance. Myself, I have food intolerances, which actually often go hand in hand with autism, so gluten and lactose. Pizza for me is kryptonite. If I eat a pizza, I'm ill for days. The place where we were using just couldn't cope with special diets and it had other guests, people wandering through. So we might be talking about a really delicate subject, say, the loss of a child. How do you take a funeral for a stillborn baby? That's a tough subject. And some random tourist walks through the bar in the evening and there's one of our students in tears because they lost a child and they're now trying to reconcile what they learn today with their own experience. So, through lockdown 2020, the entrepreneur in me was thinking, there must be hospitality businesses going bust because of lockdown. So I spent the whole of that, period of time searching online, looking for hotels and retreat centres, and was fortunate enough to have some savings and the ability to convince a mortgage company to give me an insanely large mortgage and bought where I am now, which is a 300 year old farm in the Yorkshire Dales National park that had already begun to be converted into a retreat centre. So we've got 20 bedrooms, so my training business is my own largest customer, so once a month, we rent the whole place, so we've got the privacy, so there won't be random tourists running through. My son is my head chef, and he understands special diets because if he kills his dad, he's out of a job. And so the food is home cooked. Farmhouse cooking. The environment is everything I want it to be. And then this weekend we have a, booking with a counselling group. So they're bringing their counselling trainees to kind of sit down with them for a few days and take them through whatever their program is. And I don't really care what their program is. We do what we do best. We do the hospitality. We make sure they're warm and they're fed, and they've got the meeting rooms they need and the av that they need to have their successful event, and they do their magic. On top of that, the week after that, senior leadership of, I was going to name them, and I probably shouldn't, one of the major car companies, major manufacturers of vehicles, will bring their senior leadership team here for a four day retreat. They have complete privacy here. They can talk about strategy, sales, marketing. They can draw stuff on whiteboards. They can come for lunch, and they don't have to worry about what's up on the whiteboard because there won't be some random tourist walking by and see company secrets. And because we're in the middle of nowhere, there isn't even cell phone coverage up here. So they're completely disconnected from the world. They can focus on the work that they've got to do. So, yeah, I have the training company and, a venue for retreats and training courses. And I've got three other businesses that I'm working on. One is my course, one in a million dollar life, which is for people who are thinking about starting their own business. You know, how do you live that one in a million life? How do you live the life that is something you've chosen? Because I come across so many people, especially in midlife. They went to college, they got a job, they've worked their way up the corporate ladder. They're now working in middle or even senior management. But they're not really loving life. They're paying the bills. They may be paying the bills quite handsomely, but every day they're going in to sit in a cubicle or an office somewhere and dying inside because they're not really enjoying life. And they're thinking, how can I run? How can I create my own business, which isn't just one of these, how to get rich quick on Amazon arbitrage or importing whatever the latest aliexpress thing is, and selling it on eBay. Oh, those things just drive me nuts with those courses. You know, that the person who's selling that course is making more money selling that course than they ever did about doing the thing they're trying to tell you. Whereas this is a course for people who want to build a business that will be stable enough, they could leave it to their kids. Talking about generational wealth creation here. Not insane wealth, but good, long stability that you can look back and say, did that. And my kids are benefiting from it, and potentially their kids, not necessarily that those people would become part of the business. For example, I have one of my sons, works for me, but he doesn't want to take on this business. He'll move on to another job at some point, that's fine, but when I'm gone, I want this business to bless my kids and their kids, to be something that they can sell to somebody else, if that's what they want to do, that they have choices. And I think that, for me, being an entrepreneur gives me choices. It gives me freedom to do things, to spot an idea and go, oh, I'll investigate that. And I might spend an hour, I might spend a day, I might spend a week investigating a new opportunity and then go, yep, definitely gonna go all in. Or I might say, no, it's not working. Let's walk away. But that creative juice has been flowing, and I've had fun.

When you were 16, you broke your neck and were declared brain dead

>> Sarah St. John: And then I also read that you survived death. Can you explain?

>> Stuart Morris: Oh, yeah. So, when I was 16, I, broke my neck. And it was quite serious. There's no easy way of putting that. I was in the hospital. My mum, who was a radiographer, looked at the x rays. She came over to my bed, and I said, how bad is it? And she said, I've got guys in my hospital who will never breathe again, who've done less damage than you have. Okay, what's the prognosis? And my mum said to me, I was 16 years old, if you survive tonight, it will be a miracle. Okay, mom. don't sugar the pill. Don't hold back. That night, the clinicians were doing various tests, and I was fully conscious, but I couldn't feel or move anything. The paralysis had progressed, and they declared me brain dead. But I was fully conscious. So I heard them tell my parents that I was dead. I heard my parents and, the clinicians discuss organ donation. And I realized I was going to die watching somebody cut my heart out of my chest. And that was a tough moment to realize. There is no control I have right now. There is nothing I can do to change the course of events. And in that moment, I vowed never to be a victim. That whatever was going to happen in my life, stuff happens, unfortunate things happen. But I was never going to sit there and blame everybody else. The accident, it was my fault or my carelessness that had resulted in that. Yes, there were external circumstances, but I wasn't going to blame the external circumstances. The one thing I had control of is my attitude. In this next moment, if you can't change anything else, the one thing you can change is your attitude. And I spent 3 hours moving my pinky. It took me 3 hours to move my pinky. And a nurse was holding my hand. I didn't know she was holding my hand because I couldn't feel it. And she said to the doctors, he moved his pinky. And they went, no, no, no, it was just a reflex. And she went, no, he deliberately moved his pinky. And I did it again. And that was the point. They realized I wasn't dead. So I ended nine months with a collar with bolts holding my head on. Another nine months doing physiotherapy because all the neck muscles have waste away. At that point, before I could stand up and walk around without a collar on, it took me four years to recover. And, yeah, so that was.

The ill health I suffered in 2013 was a nervous breakdown

So I talk about three types of fun. There's type one fun, which is like a roller coaster ride. It's fun at the time. There's type two fun, which is fun that you look back on and say, actually, that was fun. Might not have been fun at the time. Those four years were type two fun. Actually, they gave me a lot of understanding about myself, what my real limitations are when I look back at it. At the time, it was hard and painful. There is type three fun, which is the kind of fun that your friends talk about at your funeral. He had fun. It didn't end well. And there is a fourth type of fun, which is just not fun. I often say, well, that was interesting. And what I mean was, that was painful. It was hard, it was expensive. But what did I learn from it? I'm not going to be a victim about it. I'm not going to complain about it. I'm not going to blame somebody else. Other people may have blame in this situation, but I also have responsibility for what I do next. And that's the one thing that you always have control over.

>> Sarah St. John: Wow. I can't even imagine laying there and being able to hear people talking about organ donation and all this stuff. And obviously, you so badly want to communicate with them that, no, I'm still here, but you can't. Oh, that's like a worse, nightmare type scenario.

>> Stuart Morris: Yeah, it is. I'm really careful to say there are people who have suffered far worse than I have. I never look at somebody and say, oh, you don't know what it's like. I don't know what it's like to live in your shoes. I don't know what it's like to be you, to have gone through what you've gone in life. I've suffered what I've suffered. It's made me who I am sometimes. I've been very, very broken. I had. The ill health I suffered in 2013 was a nervous breakdown. I became suicidally depressed. I managed to recover. I got the help I needed. I refused to be the victim. And I know that there are people for whom that decision to end their own life, that that decision won, if you like. And I can't judge them because I don't know their story. I don't know what got them to that point. All I know is that, I'm determined to live life to the full, to live what I call the one in a million life, the life that I have intentionally chosen. Now, there are times when life throws you a curveball, and you don't get to choose. As I said, you can choose your response. You can choose what happens next. That's. I think the lesson of my life is never give in. There are times when you have to give up. You have to say, this just isn't working. You have to stop doing this. M but I didn't give in and just become a couch potato and sit there and do nothing. And I think that's the joy of being an entrepreneur. You always have choice, and you have.

>> Sarah St. John: A book coming out, the website, one.

>> Stuart Morris: In a million life slash frugal for your listeners. The book, living the one in a million Life, which, actually, until we started this interview I was writing away, will be out, I hope, in the summer, let's say. And it's a combination of the way I teach people to start their own businesses, which is very different from the way most business school lecturers and business schools talk about starting your own business. A little bit about my own life. Some of the inspirational stories, the challenges. I lost 26.3 million pounds in a day. Once. It's just money is fine.

>> Sarah St. John: And at first, I was thinking, like, pounds, like weight.

>> Stuart Morris: but, yeah, it's getting on for $30 million.

>> Sarah St. John: Yeah, yeah.

>> Stuart Morris: No, not pounds, weight, but equally, I fly a beautiful airplane. My co pilot is my dog. She comes everywhere with me. She's called Skye cause she's my co pilot. She's down here under the table right now. She's always in my office. As an entrepreneur, I get that choice. I get the choice to say it's okay for the dog to be in the office. I'm going to take a month off next year and fly the airplane across the Atlantic, up to Iceland, go touring around the volcanoes, across to Greenland, do some glacier flying down into Canada, down into the United States, spend a month touring around, visiting friends and family, and then fly home. I could not do that working for somebody else. So the book is the story of how I've got there. But also, if you want to build your own life, don't follow my story, because it's your story, not my story. Don't follow my dream because it's your dream, not my dream. I was ten years old when I first saw one of these airplanes. It took me 45 years to get to the point where I could buy my own, and then it's taken two years of restoration to get this thing into a flying state and probably cost me a marriage. But never mind. It's a whole different story.

>> Sarah St. John: That's a different podcast.

>> Stuart Morris: Oh, yeah. Anybody who's thinking of going out with me, I tell them, this is my other woman. I will always spend more on her than I do on you. You need to understand that very much.

Be intentional about your dreams, and understand that your dreams may change

Have your dream, think about your dream. Be intentional about your dreams, and understand that your dreams may change. There are very few of us who have the same dreams in our mid fifties as we did when we were 1617. Life has changed hugely. The world has changed hugely. If when I was 17, somebody will have, you'll have this phone that's got more processing power in it than the whole of NASA had, putting people on the moon, several orders of magnitude. I just said, no. You got to be kidding. I spent my life in tech. Very few of us could envisage what the world will be like in 40 years time. So dreams change, and being okay with life changing is also an important thing. Being okay. I don't know a single entrepreneur, who is running the business they started running, they've taken serendipity. Life has changed, opportunities have cropped up. They've gone this way, they've gone that way, they've gone the other way. Even Facebook, if you look at Mark Zuckerberg, ah, Facebook didn't start anything. Like what it is. Google didn't start as this advertising, globally dominant business. It started as, can we search the Internet? A PhD project. Very, very few entrepreneurs are, currently running the business they started.

>> Sarah St. John: Yeah, I know. That's true for me. So people can go to one in a million life frugal. And if you want to purchase the course, you can use coupon code frugal.

>> Stuart Morris: $300 off.

>> Sarah St. John: Yeah, that's. That's quite a discount. And then your book will be coming out sometime in the summer, so. For sure sometime this year, I'm sure. But, Yeah, well, I really enjoyed having you on. Well, I do hope that you make it through the Atlantic and get to see all the things that you want to see.

>> Stuart Morris: The worst that can happen is the engine fails and I end up in a life raft on the North Atlantic until somebody comes pick me up.

>> Sarah St. John: Yeah, I have a feeling you survived a few things, so I think you can survive that as well.

>> Stuart Morris: Well, yeah. Well, thank you very much. It's been great.

>> Sarah St. John: Well, thank you for coming on. I appreciate it.