Our 10-Year Commitment to Families
We started 2020 by telling you about our goals for the year.
However, that was really just an intro into what we believe will be a life-changing decade.
Many of you will know that I started this blog just over 2 years ago by going public with my intentions for what The Humble Penny would become.
Taking that step has meant that we indirectly made you our accountability partner.
I made the case for commitment recently, and in that post, I told you that my life would be nowhere near where it is now without me committing to set goals.
Building up to 2020, Mary and I were reflecting on how the last decade went and more importantly, our focus for the next decade.
Today, we are taking that public step in this special post to tell you about our vision for the decade to 2030.
We are strong believers in writing a vision and making it super plain. So here we go:
The Future We See
There is a great demand for more and more flexibility in our lives today. There is no one that I come across who does not want more of this.
This is partly driven by changes in technology and the way we work. However, it is also driven by the need for more people to do family life well.
The future we see is one where family life takes more precedence over conventional need to work long hours.
More people than ever before want a life of financial self-sufficiency for their families and they are starting to believe this is a possibility.
When I started The Humble Penny, I had no idea who I was creating it for.
I looked inward and focused on the people who had faced some of the challenges that I faced as an immigrant to the UK.
Coupled with that, I wanted to create a platform for the millennial generation, as well as one that made financial education accessible to minority groups.
Although the site wasn’t ofcourse exclusively created for these groups, they were who I had in mind when I started.
It was the low hanging fruit because these groups reflected exactly who I was.
We focused on creating high quality and accessible free content on this blog and then over time added a YouTube Channel.
Parallel to this, we also started to create more premium content via online courses, driven by exactly what our readers wanted.
Some of our readers wanted direct learning, and so we listened and started creating. Whilst this has had a strong positive impact, it left room for more ways to serve our audience.
Over the last 2 years, The Humble Penny has grown quickly and we have focused on engagement and building relationships with our audience in order to understand them better.
Over that period, we have learned some important things that are guiding are future direction.
Those things are:
- Our audience (across multiple platforms) is overwhelming made up of family units.
- People love our content, and although it has been great for helping many gradually change their mindset, etc many aren’t taking action yet.
- Although many love our content, in many ways, they still want access to me and Mary.
- There is a distinct lack of creativity, motivation and inspiration to make dreams come true.
- Culturally, many people don’t take risks and as such, don’t see much upside change.
- Everyone wants to create a life of financial independence for their family. This will help to give them back more autonomy, fun and flexibility.
So although we had started out this site more generally as home to a generation of Fearless Dreamers, we now better understand who they are and what they want.
This posed us an interesting and fun challenge:
How do we better serve families more intimately using existing technologies to help them achieve their desired goals of financial independence?
After months of brainstorming, we came up with a new idea and got to work behind the scenes.
This will be a first for us and one that will require a significant commitment of time from us weekly and for years.
To develop the idea further, we started to meet people from our audience one to one in order to really understand their frustrations and how we can help.
The result of these interactions have led to what we see as our core mission for the next decade.
Before I talk about the vision for the decade, it’s important that I share more information on why we believe this is meant for us.
Why Bother With All This?
On the days when we’re very tired, I sometimes ask myself, why do we bother with all this?
Why do we care about how the financial lives of many families will turn out in the future?
Especially as we really could just be “chilling at the beach” and not waste our precious time creating all kinds of content.
Here are my answers on 2 levels:
1. Personal Level
On a very personal level, this whole platform of The Humble Penny is truly the first thing that I’ve ever done in my life that has come anywhere close to being something I believe that I was created to do.
It is hard to put into words, but when I work on this stuff, I come alive.
Whether I am up at 4am or 4pm, I feel like I am doing what I have been born to do.
I had 34 years of my life searching for something this special and this exciting and it came in the shape of a blog and now a platform and life mission.
It’s so hard to put into words the excitement and pure joy that I get when I do what I do.
I have to always remind myself that this started from nothing and the experimental nature of what we are doing makes it ever more exciting.
Then you throw in the fact that I’m doing this work with my wife and life partner, Mary.
I honestly could not have asked for a better person in my life to pursue this journey of literally changing the lives of thousands of people one day at a time.
It also helps that I love to teach and have a heart for giving.
I’ve grown sooo much on this journey over the last 2 years and a bit. I’ve become a better person through sharing our message of hope through doing money right.
So when I think about it, I see this work as my very personal calling. My personal ministry.
Something that I can put my name to and say this is something I have achieved in my time on this planet.
This ofcourse means that I have no plans for retirement in sight.
2. Community Level
After infidelity, money is the second biggest reason why families break up!
This stuff wreaks havoc on homes and can destroy the upbringing of children in our communities.
And a lot of the time, this happens because couples have not grown up learning how to manage money.
Something so simple yet so hugely powerful in potentially holding our families and communities together in the future if we fully understood it.
As a family man, I know how much safety, fun, love and joy that I derive from being a part of my family unit.
I do everything possible to protect that and I enjoy a lot of peace in my relationship because we understand this subject of money.
Not to mention the many life opportunities and options that we have been able to create because we have made the right decisions about money.
Mary and I want more families to lead happier lives because of a better understanding of money.
So together with our burning desire to help more families, we see this journey of helping more families practically achieve financial independence as our core life mission.
Our Next Decade (2020 – 2030)
Ok, so here we go, peeps! Allow me to dream big. Hopefully, this inspires you to dream too.
Here is our vision for this platform over the next 10 years (God willing):
1. Helping 10,000 Families in 10 Years
We are committing our lives over the next decade to helping 10,000 families become Financially Independent.
When Mary and I talked about this figure, she thought I wasn’t being ambitious enough.
Thinking about it, she is probably right.
However, I am publicly putting this number out as we are right at the beginning of the journey and will learn more as we work through this goal.
Although this figure somewhat scares me, it also excites me because I know it is possible.
The big question is, how? More on that later.
2. The Humble Penny: Kids
If you meet our sons Joshua and Elias, you’ll understand why we are super passionate about the family unit.
Our kids are a joy and even I say so. In particular, they are way more advanced than I ever was when it comes to understanding and thinking about money healthily.
We see a big part of our next 10 years being about extending our brand to create products that will serve the younger generation.
We’ll do so through schools but beginning local from our homes, churches, communities, etc.
I’ve always dreamt of publishing kids books on money and creating a curriculum that will serve our communities.
We see these resources being available internationally and created in different languages.
3. The Humble Penny: Foundation
When I started this platform, I also bought thehumblepenny.org as a domain with long term desires for charitable works.
We dream of creating ‘The Humble Penny Foundation’, with its own independent Board and a core mission closely tied to our commitment to the 10,000.
Ultimately, this foundation will exist to serve and build our communities.
We expect it will be funded partly by the success of the many initiatives I’ll talk to you about below.
4. Conferences, Summits, Family Retreats etc
Years ago, I had a dream and in it, I stood on a stage and in front of me were more people than my eyes could see or count.
That dream scared me initially because at that stage of my life, The Humble Penny didn't exist. I'd never done a TV interview, podcast, YouTube video, etc.
I just had a regular day job and that was it.
Today I’ve gradually come to think of this dream as something that is gradually starting to happen today.
Somehow, we are reaching thousands of people daily by doing what we do using the same amount of time.
To add to what we do, our vision is that one day, we will launch and run the Financial Joy Conferences, Summits, Retreats, etc.
A place for lifelong learning.
And we will run these in multiple countries.
These will be broadcast and beamed across other continents using the power of technology.
We see this as a way in which we can also begin to better serve our home continent of Africa.
5. Products & Services
We plan to extend our brand to other areas that will serve families.
For example, we have been eating primarily plant based for the last 2 years.
We are working towards creating a food brand in the near future. We expect this will be called The Humble Kitchen.
We’ve trademarked it, bought premium domain, etc.
So this is something we’ll be doing to help families not only manage money better but eat well too.
Among products and services, we expect to create future digital products, e.g. journals, planners, etc.
What If You're Single?
You're ofcourse not excluded as all of our content can be used by anyone, whether you're single today or tomorrow.
However, in order for us to focus on creating a mission led business, we needed a core focus.
So please, feel free to continue learning from our various platforms.
How Will We Do This?
This execution part gets me most excited because it is where the creativity comes in.
Here are some of the things we have in mind.
1. Academy Membership Program
We are re-imagining our academy and creating something game-changing to re-launch in January/February 2020!
This is our primary strategy for achieving our core goal of helping 10,000 families become financially independent.
Currently, we merely sell online courses for direct learning.
Some people buy those, learn and take action ONLY if life’s worries don’t overwhelm them.
Most lose motivation and give up! Then they contact us for coaching but can’t afford one to one coaching.
This offering that we’re creating solves ALL these issues.
With the NEW offering on the academy, we’re creating something that will achieve this:
- Offer weekly live access to Me and Mary for 1 hour. Here we will offer ongoing coaching and mentoring, “Ask Me Anything” group sessions, etc.
- Access to ALL our present and future courses. We’re creating a vault with all the tools to educate our tribe like never before. Monthly Courses will be created with a focus on Action Plans.
- Create a truly genuine and supportive private community for members. This is even more important than the content. We’ll be super deliberate about who joins this community. We’ll serve this community with 20 – 30 hours a week each.
- Expert Sessions – We’ll invite experts in various areas to further support and practically help our members.
- Networking, Inspiration and Motivation – Our custom community will be focused on growth, networking and inspiration.
- Accountability through Action Plans, Challenges, etc.
- Much more as this new environment develops.
We’ll achieve all this using existing technologies, efficient processes, bigger team, etc.
Given we’ll each be committing at least 20 – 30 hours of our lives per week to this Academy Membership offering, we’ll be intentional about everything.
This program is not created for everyone. It is very important that I make this clear.
We’re aware that not everyone is ready to do what it takes to achieve Financial Independence.
As such, we are not interested in quantity here at all.
We’re more than happy to start with a handful of people.
We’ll be super selective about who joins simply because we want good vibes and most of all, action takers.
We will share everything with our membership tribe. We want them to actually thrive.
We’re calling these action takers our Dream Makers.
I cannot stress enough – This is ONLY for people ready to do the work and take action.
Please don’t join if you’re not ready to do what it takes. I ask this with all politeness.
Although affordable, our membership is not free and will not be an environment for time and energy wasters.
Our immediate goal is to start with 100 people, ensure everything works well with these Founding Members, then accept more members.
NEW: Our Membership Programme is now LIVE as at 29 February 2020!
We launched with 100 Founding Members as expected and growing. Feel free to explore it and join 😊
Mary and I look forward to getting to know you more personally in the Academy!
2. Partnerships
We are rapidly building relationships, and our goal is to use these to add more value to the Dream Makers and support THP Foundation.
From guest experts, to guest instructors, speakers, Board members, etc.
We are also focusing on other strategic partnerships – Other brands, non-profit organisations, community groups, corporates, etc.
3. People
We are growing as a team to help to deliver on this core mission.
Beyond me and Mary, we are also joined by a tech person, a VA and a Community manager.
We expect this team to grow.
We’ll then also appoint Community Champions to help us deliver on our commitment to families.
4. Awareness
We will continue to create quality free content on The Humble Penny (Blog and YouTube).
The YouTube channel in particular is growing rapidly.
We expect about 50,000 subscribers in 12 months and 100,000+ subscribers in 2 years according to current growth rates.
I also expect to be speaking on various stages, conferences, panels, etc.
These will help to create awareness of our core mission.
How Are We Preparing For This?
We don’t pay ourselves from The Humble Penny at present.
Everything we make is reinvested into what we do in different ways.
E.g. buying equipment, hiring freelancers, paying for technology, paying for accounting, advisory fees, travel costs, etc.
Other income is reserved for projects like this Academy Membership program.
How Will This Change Our Lives?
We’ll be busier for sure, but having fun doing something that we know will most certainly change family lives.
Although busier, we’ll be very deliberate about protecting our family time too.
I expect that we’ll build many more intimate relationships because we’ll get to know our tribe better than ever and walk hand in hand with them on the journey to Financial Independence.
One of the things we look forward to the most is the community interactions both online and offline.
We strongly believe that this project will enrich our lives in ways we can’t even anticipate now.
It will also help us to create a far more sustainable financial education business.
One that will generate an income that will help to support our growth and the opportunity to do more not just for this community but through charitable partnership initiatives.
How Will This Transform The Lives of Many Families?
We expect that all of this will help families live happier lives, be freer to do more, stress less and give more.
More than anything, we believe these goals will help to build up the next generation to be more prepared financially for the challenges life will throw at them.
Children will grow up with a healthy relationship with money and in peaceful and more united homes.
Families will build wealth and not leave their children with nothing to inherit.
We are super excited about the above vision and hope you’re excited to join us on the journey too.
Thank you for supporting us so far. To our collective success! 🙂
Do you have any questions about any of our plans for the future? Please let us know below.
Do please share this post if you found it useful, and remember, in all things be thankful and Seek Joy.
ade says
I’m very excited about your plans and look forward to being a part of your academy when it is formed. As an immigrant myself I want to educate my children about money and i want to have surplus income that i can invest in their lives so they do not go through the same struggles that i went through.
thanks for creating this platform and spreading the word about financial peace of mind.
The Humble Penny says
Hi Ade,
I appreciate your kind message and understand your desire to better yourself and your children. It is something that a lot of people will relate strongly to. I look forward to getting to know you more personally in the Academy 🙂
Sade says
This is truly amazing guys, keep it up! I’ve bookmarked your academies homepage and look forward to joining soon and meet like minded people. Well done guys for filling a need in our society 👌
The Humble Penny says
Huge appreciation, Sade! 😊. We look forward to seeing you in the Academy.