Welcome to the 2X eCommerce podcast. This is the podcast dedicated to rapid growth in eCommerce. This episode is not going to be an interview. This will be a solo episode. The last time I recorded a solo episode like this was quite well-received. It’s had double the normal volume of downloads, which means that I’m doing something right. I thought, “I should be doing this once a month if you guys are enjoying this based on download figures.”

I am going to be talking about a mindset, my internal operating system for thinking bigger, taking risk, making progress, and doing what I do. I thought, “I should speak to this framework.” It’s a simple framework. It’s a framework we typically use over New Year’s and birthdays. If you put meaning into it, it makes sense.

For those of you who don’t know who I am, I’m the host of this podcast and I’m also the Co-founder of an eCommerce company called Octillion Capital Partners. We acquire and operate good-for-you consumer brands. We’ve made two acquisitions thus far and we’re looking to make twenty in the next ten years. It’s a decade-long play. We’re more short term. We’re looking to make another two acquisitions in the next twelve months. They have to be good-for-you and they must be consumer brands with high retention, profitable, and the like.

I wasn’t always like this. I didn’t start like this. I started my career in SEO, which is linguistic and technical at the same time. I’ve been through every single drip and drop in SEO. The only thing I didn’t get into in SEO was scripting. We talk about sitemaps, technical SEO, and link building. I did it all and I did it quite successfully back in the days. I then moved into specific SEO, which was eCommerce SEO, got out of there, moved into performance marketing, and learned about conversion rate optimization, landing page optimization, and the whole full user experience for the web.

I go into becoming an eCommerce CMO for smaller eCommerce businesses or interim eCommerce marketing manager. I did that for a few years and thought, “In the final stint of my career, what should I do? I want to be an operator.” The best way to be an operator from my position was to acquire. I then started to look for a business, I learned about acquisitions, and I go into doing this by joining Ayu at Octillion. That’s it pretty much. I do this podcast and I do Octillion.

Why have I always wanted to be better? It’s down to three key tenets, which have not always been there but as they become more predominant in my life, I see why they’re so important. There are very simple three tenets, one is health, the other is wealth, and the other is mindset. I learned this from Howie Panes. Howie Panes has another interpretation of these three.

For those of you who don’t know who Howie Panes is, Howie Panes was a phenomenal guest who came to this podcast in 2022. I ended up going to his place in Palm Desert, California for a mastermind. It blew my mind what this man had been able to achieve. He always talks about health, wealth, and mindset. Hopefully, if you’re reading this, it’s super important to build on health, wealth, and your mindset and that’s what I want to talk about today.

I’m not talking about tactics today. I’m not talking about any specific campaigns. I’m not talking about anything operational. I’m not talking about finance or marketing. I want to talk about this core formula. Before you even start thinking about eCommerce, for me, you need to get these three tenets defined in your life before you start to determine what to get into because if you don’t get these three tenets right, you don’t get your why, which kills everything.

I was speaking to somebody and I was telling him about Octillion. One of the first things we ask any potential business we’re interested in engaging is, “Why did you start your business?” If the why is, “I wanted to make money. I thought that I could make a quick buck.” That, to me, is a red flag. Your why should be very deep. Your why should be, “There was a health issue in my family,” or, “I didn’t like what I was seeing in my environment and I wanted to change something.” When you want to change something, you will get your health, wealth, and mindset formula right.

Let’s start out with mindset, how you think, and how you talk to yourself. It is important to get your mind right. It’s core how you talk to yourself and what you say you’re capable of doing. You will always have negative thoughts, it’s just the way the human mind has been constructed. How do you counter those negative thoughts? Mindset is important.

I’m a very big proponent of mindfulness. I’m sitting in silence. Even when you’re in a sauna alone, you’re soaking up thoughts. Being comfortable in your own company is a mindfulness hack. Getting into mindfulness has been phenomenal for me. I can personally sit in silence for over 30 minutes and I do that every now and then. Slowing down and listening to how you’re speaking to yourself is important. Silence and stillness are key.

The other thing you want to do in mindset is understand your traumas and heal those traumas. Healing those traumas are important. I’ve heard about a procedure called EMDR that I’m going to try. Trauma is going to hold you down. Traumas can hold you down. Traumas can give you unconscious perspective about money. You have two levels of mind, you have the unconscious mind or unconscious brain and you have your conscious brain but the unconscious brain is what is driving you, it drives the conscious.

Over time, you might have been conditioned to think about business and money to be evil. If that is the case, you will never grow a business significantly, you just wouldn’t. There are traumas of fear and traumas of what other people think about you. For a society to function, we should all care about what other people feel.

A lot of us are affected quite significantly about what other people feel about us that it freezes us to make moves that serve our higher self. Addressing your trauma could be the single biggest move you make in your entire life that frees your inner child to get you to your highest potential. This is an eCommerce podcast. This is deep. The information you’re getting here is going to make you a better person, which will make you a better eCommerce entrepreneur, eCommerce pro, or what have you.

Another thing is attachments. What attachments do you have? Attachments kill experimentation and change. If you have an attachment to your past, your past doesn’t define who you are today or who you can be. Attachments are important. It’s all parts of this healing, this trauma, and you having an identity. That’s a very important thing that’s helped me from a mindset standpoint.

The final thing here on mindset I want to talk about is something even your parents might have spoken to you about, which is comparison is a thief of joy. We have two businesses, one business is a full retention business, 60% retention rates, and another business of ours is less than 10% retention rates. How can we compare both businesses? It’s like understanding your path.

Let’s say I tell you that I’m doing a business and it’s doing $25 million in revenue and then you’re at $2.5 million or $3 million and then you’re sad. Think about the context where you are, what you want to do, what you’ve done, and where you’re going. Less comparison will make you less anxious and will anchor you towards performing even better. Those are the key points I want to talk about in mindset, your mindfulness, staying in silence for long periods of time, stillness, healing your trauma, which would help you address attachments. Attachments do kill experimentation and comparison is a thief of joy.

The next thing I want to talk about is your health. When I talk about your health, I talk about your physiological health, brain health, or we talk about your cardiovascular health, your muscular health, nutrition, movement, and checking your metrics regularly. I’ve had my fair share of health scares in the past. I was looking at my health app, the NHS app, which is a national health service here in the UK. I was looking at what has transpired in my past.

In 2009, I had sarcoidosis, which is an inflammatory disease. I got to find out that I had kidney-related issues, pre-diabetes, and all of that. I was trying to take care of myself but I was not taking care of myself. With health, there’s a lot of missing knowledge out there. With the internet, if you follow the right hashtags and follow the right accounts, you’d start to connect some dots. You can’t connect all dots. The reality is you can’t connect all dots in health but you can do your best and you can try.

I’m going to talk about physiological health, which would be cardiovascular and your skeletal-muscular health. With regards to your physiological health, the key thing is movement. You need to move on a regular basis and that’s why I like the Apple watch. With the Apple watch, you can set move targets. You could say, “Apple, I want to set a 1,000-move target on a daily basis.” It will tell you when you’ve not moved around.

A lot of us will sacrifice our health for our businesses and I don’t think that is right. You need to nurture your body to get the best performance. I want to tell you that I’ve met some entrepreneurs and I know some entrepreneurs that don’t take care of their health but they’re building phenomenal businesses. Don’t get me wrong, to build a business, you need to be in good health.

The thing is your health eventually comes back to get you. You cannot run away from your health. You could build and build and build and it could be to the detriment of your health. When it’s at the detriment of your health, you’re now trying to play catch up and not all of us make it at the other side when we realize, “Health is the most important metric in life.” If it’s the most important metric in life, it’s the most important metric in business.

What’s my stack from a health perspective? With my cardiovascular health, I try and get into some cardiovascular activity at least three times a week. I train with my heart rate given the fact that I’m over 40. I get my heart rate to about 80% capacity, sometimes 90% for just one workout. Generally, it’s zone 3 and zone 4 so about 60% heart rate capacity I would typically train for. My workout in the morning is a split of cardiovascular on the one hand and strength. My skeletal-muscular health is important. I do compound exercises, bench press, squats, and dumbbell curls. I do lots of lateral lifts. I go hard in the gym and it’s also therapeutic in a way so that’s very important.

The reason I’m doing this is I want to continue doing this till my old age to protect my frame. With being muscular, first of all, my propensity to fall, the risk of falling is lower quite significantly and I’m just a stronger person in general. When I build my frame, any physical challenge isn’t that much of a challenge. Particularly, I’m just moving around the house and all of that stuff. It’s important to build your muscle and also, from a cardiovascular standpoint, build the strength of your heart. It’s the way nature times you. When your heart stops beating, you die, and you pass away physically.

With brain health, I rest. Sleep is important. Sleep is the way to rest your brain. There’s no other way. I don’t take too many supplements for brain health. My brain health is meditation and sitting in silence. On average, I sit in silence for twenty minutes and I do that at least four times a week, sometimes every day of the week. Sometimes I go deep, I do 30 minutes-plus sitting in silence.

If you monitor your heart rate while you’re sitting in silence, you see a ridiculous dip in your heart rate. You realize that you’re putting your brain in what they call the beta or theta state. That in of itself is slowing down your entire machine, your entire body, your heart, and everything. It’s amazing and incredible. Movement is just important, it’s a non-negotiable in my life.

The final thing I want to say around health is check your metrics, check your blood pressure, check your heart rates, and measure your sleep on a regular basis whether it’s an Oura ring or Whoop band. I use a Whoop band personally. Check your metrics on a regular basis so you know the quality of sleep you’ve had and you know whether you need to nap.

With my Whoop band, it’s always on points when I’m about to fall ill. It gives me the metrics, “It looks like you’re not really feeling well. You’re baseline temperature is down. Your heart rate variability has gone down. Your heart rate is up.” All those metrics give you an indicator of how you’re doing. We’re so blessed to be living in this time where we have access to so much bio data, it’s phenomenal. I put up a post on my LinkedIn about some of the test I’ll be doing this year like DNA tests and a few other tests. You might want to read that.

The final piece in my health wealth mindset is wealth. The one thing I’m only going to say about wealth is truth. You’ve got to expose yourself to your numbers, whatever your numbers are. This is where we get into eCommerce. Most of you who are reading this are building wealth through eCommerce. You might be building wealth through other things. You might be building wealth through real estate. You might be building wealth through other businesses. If you don’t know your numbers, you just can’t build wealth.

It’s exposing yourself to numbers and being comfortable seeing those numbers even if they’re bad. It’s overcoming that fear and asking yourself, “What the heck am I going to do about this? Do I have the capacity to change this? Do I need help to change these numbers? How do I turn these numbers around?” It’s difficult sometimes to look at numbers and it can be scary but guess what? The more you run away from your metrics and your numbers, the longer it’s going to take to solve the problem. I’ve been there and I’ve done that. It’s going to take longer. If you’re scared to look at your bank statement, it would continue to be in a dire state.

Go and look at why certain things are happening and you’ve got to find solutions and work towards the solutions towards solving the problem. In your eCommerce business, it’s all about knowing the metrics for everything in particular aspects. Whether it’s your customer service, your operations, your marketing spend, and what you pay your staff, you’ve got to look at your numbers, your cashflow. You’ve got to look at your numbers on a regular base and expose yourself and be comfortable with it. That is the singular advice I give for wealth building.

When you combine all of this, you’d be a better person equipped to building a legacy brand that probably started in eCommerce or uses eCommerce and to be a better person to leave a legacy. That’s it, folks. I hope you enjoyed this format. I thoroughly enjoyed it because I want to talk more beyond just tactics. I want to talk about leadership and about what it takes to put a lot of responsibility on your shoulder and still walk with your head up because you’re doing your best and you know you’re carrying a lot of people behind you.

With this health wealth mindset formula, you can make it your own. This is what works for me but you can make this your own, folks. With that, I will leave you. Enjoy this episode. I will catch you guys on the next episode. I’ll be interviewing some interesting people for the rest of this month. Stay tuned, keep your alerts on, follow this podcast, and give us a review. All the best. Thank you.