Rise Of The ‘Youpreneur’Chris Ducker

In 2009, Chris Ducker was working an 84hour week as a highly successful entrepreneur in the Philippines, running several businesses and employing 350 people around the world.

Then he had a breakdown that landed him in the hospital for ten days and eventually led to back surgery from all those deskbound hours.

Now he works an average of six hours a day and always takes Friday off. What happened? Chris discovered the power of building a personal brand. In 2015, he decided to share his business breakthroughs with other entrepreneurs.

He founded Youpreneur.com, the fastest-growing personal brand business education company in the world and wrote the business bestseller ‘Rise of the Youpreneur: The Defnitive Guide to Becoming the Go - To Leader in Your Industry and Building a Futureproof Business’. sat down with I-MAGAZINE to tell us how he squeezes so much into his twenty four hour work week.

You coined the term ‘Youpreneur’, which is also the title of your recent book ‘Rise of the Youpreneur: The Defnitive Guide to Becoming the Go-To Leader in Your Industry and Building a Futureproof Business’. What does ‘Youpreneur’ mean?

A Youpreneur is someone who builds a proftable business based around themselves, their experience, their personality, and their unique customer base. To give you some examples, this includes consultants, speakers, experts, fnancial advisors, thought leaders, coaches, mumpreneurs building businesses around their passions, authors, content creators, bloggers, podcast hosts, YouTubers.

Basically anyone in any industry building a business and offering products based around their experience and personality. The Youpreneur concept grew naturally from my own work blogging and podcasting, which I started in 2010. It became evident to me that people were relating to me more than to the brand name of the podcast. They were saying, “Hey, listen to Chris’s podcast”. Eventually I realised that I had a personal brand myself. It wasn’t s omething I set out to do, but it came about with speaking, then the frst book deal, then the second, and so on, until I realised I had built a business around myself. The term, Youpreneur, itself was born over a cup of coffee, with a mate.

You are an extremely successful serial entrepreneur who now mentors, supports and inspires other entrepreneurs. Tell us about the transition between running your own businesses to launching Youpreneur.

The transition for me was a relatively easy one because I hadn’t been involved in the day to day of running my businesses for several years. I hit burnout big time in 2009 and had to make a change. By the end of 2010, we had hired eight people to replace me – which gives you an idea of why I was burned out.

I launched Youpreneur in 2015, and the transition from burnout in 2009 to Youprenuer in 2015 came about gradually. The blog had been growing, and the podcast had grown exponentially. We’re now at 7 million downloads, which is just incredible. People were coming to me to ask for help and coaching. So, we started with an online membership community for mentoring, and this was hugely successful, and we just kept building with the book, the live Summit, the coaching.

The issue here more than anything else and why Youpreneur has done so well is that not only do we provide quality information in a convenient library – we provide community. Being an entrepreneur can be quite lonely.

When you put yourself into a situation where you’re surrounded by people who get you, it all becomes so much easier. It’s important not just for when you stumble, but also for when you hit your goals and are looking for that high-fve.

How has entrepreneurship changed since you launched your frst successful businesses? It’s all become so much more personal. Now building a business is all about what I call

‘P2P’ or People to People. People want to do business with other people more so today than ever. People want to do business with people they know, love and trust – not just like, but love, feel passionate about.

We’re all now operating in a very fast-moving, crowded, noisy space that is constantly changing and will never stop evolving. So, the way to stand out is not to be better, but to be different – being different is better than being better!

You are a champion for future-proofng businesses. What recommendations can you give to help entrepreneurs and individuals to futureproof their careers and businesses?

I’ve started and built a number of different businesses. You come up with an idea, you launch it, you get clients, you lose clients, you pivot, you get more clients, and on it goes. But when you build a business built on your personal brand, it will be the last business pivot that you’ll ever make because you’re building your business around your uniqueness.

Because you’ve built the brand around you and your audience’s trust in you - your audience, your clients, your tribe, these people will follow you. Because they want to do business with YOU, they will pivot with you, as you yourself evolve. Because of that you become futureproof.

Tell us a little about the process of developing a personal brand.

How long have you got? There’s 300 pages in my book about it! But, I’d say it really comes down at the very core, to what do you want to be known for. So, the frst step is to defne who you are.

Understanding who you are – your strengths and weaknesses – is key. A very easy exercise I give everyone at the beginning of working with them is the self-assessment test. I ask them to write down the ‘fatter yourself’ list and then the ‘keep it real’ list. That list tends to be a slightly tougher one, especially for the Type A entrepreneurs we work with.

It’s actually the more important one because once you know what your weaknesses are, you know what to avoid. Some people say you should work on your weaknesses, but I’m a big believer in avoiding your weaknesses, delegating your weaknesses. Instead, lean into the things you excel at; that’s how you fnd success.

How do you see the personal brand trend developing in the UK and abroad?

It’s going to become more and more important. Personal branding is going to become more and more mainstream.

Seventy percent of kids today will say they want to be YouTuber when they grow up – and of course they can tell you who their favourite YouTubers are. These kids can also tell you who their favourite actors are, their favourite Instagrammers and so on – that’s the next generation and that’s personal branding. And you look around and see that even Richard Branson has his own blog and is on social media because he wants to infuence and sees the importance of being seen as the leader of his business.

So, yes, I think it’s going to be incredibly important and even more mainstream and across every industry and platform – across the board.

You’ve recently moved with your family back to the UK from the Philippines. What brought you back?

I love the Philippines and the people there. It’s an incredible country with so much going for it. But when your kids get to a certain age, it’s time to come home. There are incredible schools in the Philippines, and the kids got a superb education.

They’re very academic - but no cake sales and none of the sport I grew up with. Youpreneur is a family business and not only does my wife work with me, but our children attend all the events, with full conference badges, the whole experience.

They may decide they don’t want to be entrepreneurs themselves, but they will have the opportunity and the exposure. In addition, we decided as a family to come back to be able to better serve our primary markets, which are here in the UK and Europe.

You have an intense schedule that includes speaking and presenting around the world. How do you stay connected with your family, and what recommendations do you give to personal brand entrepreneurs to help them maintain their important relationships when building their own businesses?

There isn’t a magic pill you can pop, but I do think boundaries are key.

I work from 10am – 4pm Monday to Thursday. I don’t work Fridays and haven’t for six or seven years now. There is never anything on my schedule on a Friday. I start at 10am so I get to be there for the kids in the morning, and I stop at 4pm so I can be there when they get home.

My family always takes top priority over anything I do in business. That said, I don’t think work-life balance is a genuine thing. It’s an invented thing that makes a good sound bite, but it just isn’t real.

If you run your own business, it will always play a part in your personal life, and if you work from home as most Youpreneurs do, your personal life will always play a role in your business.

What’s the best business decision you’ve made in the past fve years?

To double down on my own personal brand. Looking back across my career, I see retrospectively that every deal I’ve landed and every success I’ve had came from my brand, from me, and from my relationships.

I hugely value relationships. So, yes, the best decision I’ve ever made, hands down, has been to focus on building the business around my personal brand. We’ve more than doubled our annual revenue and tripled our employee numbers since we made that decision, and it’s brought massive opportunities our way, too. Leaning into it, going all in on it, has been the best decision. other people do likewise.

You have a hugely successful podcast. What kind of content do you consume?

I actually don’t consume much business content. Except for books. I’m an avid reader, usually consuming 2-3 non-fction books a month.

I’m also a big Star Wars fan. I deep dive into a lot of the literature not related to the movies. As a family we’re huge Disney fans. We’re also a Pokémon family! My son and I play Pokémon Go most weekends.

I mentioned this when I was speaking recently at a conference in San Diego, and someone came up to me afterwards and said he played Pokémon Go with his son most weekends, too. The next thing we knew, we had a group having lunch and then playing Pokémon Go together, around San Diego - without any kids! That’s what it’s all about – being in the moment, connecting with people. That’s why I love what I do.

Chris Ducker is a serial entrepreneur, keynote speaker and author of the bestseller, “Virtual Freedom”. He is known as the “Virtual CEO” and regarded as the No. 1 authority on the subject of virtual staffng and personal outsourcing.

Chris owns and operates three businesses in the Philippines, amounting to almost 300 employees - including a call centre, a recruitment consultancy and a co-working space to support local startup entrepreneurs.