What's Your Dream?

Squibb's Three Questions framework for discovering your dream proceeds in order:
1. What do I genuinely like doing?
2. What is my deepest pain?
3. How can I help others?

The second question is the engine. Sophie, who needed life-saving surgery after childbirth, couldn't find comfortable jeans during recovery — so she created I Am Denim, now stocked by Debenhams and featured in Vogue. Sara Blakely was selling fax machines door-to-door when visible underwear lines drove her to invent Spanx, making her the youngest female billionaire in America.

Squibb traces his own purpose to being abandoned at eight in a town centre, dyslexia humiliations in school, and homelessness at fifteen. That pain fuels HelpBnk and everything he does today. Pain turns "want" into "need" — and need is what builds empires.

Squibb bought the Porsche he'd dreamed of since sleeping in staircases. The euphoria lasted one week. By week three, he was anxious driving it, bored talking about it, and spending days at the garage over a scratch. Selling it felt almost as good as buying it. Every possession you shed, he discovered, makes you lighter.

He extends this to housing: a mortgage traps you in your job, absorbs savings that could fund a business, and fills mental bandwidth with maintenance. Had he been locked into a UK mortgage, he'd never have moved to Hong Kong — sleeping on a friend's sofa — where his career took off. The real trap starts young: save for the gadget your friends have, then scale up with paychecks. The psychology never changes, just the price tag.

Most people sell time: they work harder for marginal raises until there's nothing left to give. Squibb calls this the "escalator" — salary must keep climbing to match expanding costs, and you're terrified to step off. Your employer captures most of the value; you get a fraction back as wages.

Entrepreneurs flip the equation. They build teams and systems that generate profit without stretching themselves thinner. At Fluid, Squibb earned more as chairman — doing far less — than at any prior point, living off risks he'd taken years earlier. His advice for employees: ask your boss for equity. If they refuse, find a role with ownership, or start a side hustle. The goal is owning a piece of what you build rather than renting out your hours indefinitely.

Gymshark founder Ben Francis started at 19 as a Pizza Hut delivery driver, sewing clothes in his parents' garage with a machine his grandmother taught him to use. Eight years later, the company was valued north of £1 billion. Meanwhile, WeWork raised $22 billion and filed for bankruptcy — excessive capital eliminated the discipline that survival demands.

Squibb learned this viscerally when his DevaShard comic book joint venture burned $1.5 million after he traded bootstrapping for a "rich mindset," leasing a fancy office with a cinema room for three people. His rules now: don't write a business plan (it's an illusion of progress). Register a company for £12, build a website with free tools, and start selling today. Justify every penny or don't spend it.

Your first customer proves the dream can exist outside your head. The second proves it wasn't a fluke. But Squibb argues the third is the threshold: three customers give you minimum viable feedback on what people actually want — which often diverges from what you assumed.

He invested in an Asian experience-gifts company pitched purely on market data and demographics. It failed. A competitor with an identical model succeeded because its founder had a personal mission rooted in childhood. The difference was never the idea but the purpose-driven execution behind it. Before three real customers, you're guessing at demand. After three, you have a compass — and the confidence that comes from people paying real money for something you made.

Squibb bought a derelict staircase in Twickenham for £25,000 and installed a doorbell where strangers pitch their dreams on camera. Hundreds came — one drove six hours from Scotland. The transformation of saying a dream aloud is immediate: a McDonald's worker named Delon, who initially claimed no dream, returned in ten minutes to declare he wanted to be a Twitch streamer. Squibb was the first person he'd ever told.

Sharing unlocks hidden support. Sam in Hong Kong launched her catering business Chez Sam within 72 hours of speaking her dream. Caitlin, a photographer, landed a lastminute.com sponsorship after her video reached 10 million viewers. When HelpBnk opened registrations, helpers outnumbered help-seekers — proving people desperately want to give when given the chance.

Squibb's Rule of Seven and Eight targets the hardest firing decisions. Below six on a ten-point scale? Obviously struggling — easy call. Nines and tens are stars you fight to retain. The danger zone is seven and eight: competent enough to justify keeping, inconsistent enough to corrode standards. Tolerate them, and top performers conclude you don't value excellence. They leave.

Retention requires ownership, not perks. Squibb insists on giving employees equity stakes — anything less means they're building value they'll never share. At HelpBnk, he exclusively hires people who've run businesses or plan to, knowing most will eventually leave to start their own companies. His math: owning 51% of a thriving company beats 100% of one hemorrhaging talent because you refused to share.

Two sculptors abandoned the marble block that became Michelangelo's David, deeming it unworkable. He spent three years in near-darkness, barely eating, sleeping in his clothes — creating what's widely regarded as the greatest sculpture ever made. At Fluid, Squibb wrote a list of fifty dream clients and contacted every one in month one. Zero replied. Nine years later, he'd worked with all fifty.

But persistence isn't stubbornness. Instagram started as a failed check-in app called Burbn. Netflix mailed DVDs. Nvidia had exactly one month of cash when it shipped the chips that saved the company. Most strikingly, Blockbuster didn't die from lack of innovation — it built a competitive streaming service, then fired the CEO running it. It failed from giving up too early, not from failing to see the future.