Yo yo yo. Welcome back to the Further your Lifestyle podcast conversations on lifestyle passions and hustles. My name's Chris, I'm your host and I'm super excited to be back here having the conversation with you Episode 159 today and I'm actually talking about a conversation or a topic or a point which actually has come from a question that actually arose in one of my live streams that I was doing the other week. In my yeah, I do weekly live streams at 8.30 PM on a Wednesday night, we open up Pokemon cards, we answer questions and just hang out and chit chat, and sometimes we raise money for charity as well, and in that, ethan Ruchok my accountant actually he actually asked a really, really great question and that was what's one thing you know now that you didn't know when you first started the business. That would have allowed you to fast track your progress.

Now, I did answer this in the live off the cuff and I wanted to come back to it because I think there's a lot here that we can like. There is a lot here and the more I think about it, like, I feel like there's so many things but it's really hard to articulate, so I kind of wanted to revisit it. It did catch me off guard, and I kind of want to try and answer this as real and raw as possible as well, to make sure you know that I haven't prepared something for it, more so because I don't want to oversell it. I kind of want it to come from the heart and make sure that it is from the heart, and I did put a couple of points around it that I want to elaborate on, but I haven't gone into detail in my notes. I've really just put them as dot points to really help prompt me to then have the conversation with you. So we'll go through this, we'll see what my perspective is, we'll talk about any of those additional thoughts and we'll get into it. And, of course, you know, I would love to hear from you as we go through this.

Maybe there's something in a similar manner that you know, something that you know now that you wish you had known back then. And what would it? What would have it been if? If you do have something like that? So we're going to dive into it now. We're going to roll the intro and then get straight into the podcast. So what's one thing you know now that you didn't know when I first started the business. That would have allowed me to fast track my progress.

I think the main point here is you got to be willing to grow. This is a complex answer and I'm going to break it down into a number of different points, and that is giving yourself permission to grow, trusting your gut and taking some risks with leverage, willing to do the work, having a plan and understanding what it will require. Now, ultimately, we cannot expect things to change for the better if we don't do anything about it. You need to make the change happen. You need to make the change happen, to see things happen, otherwise, nothing will change.

Now, looking over the last, this is my fourth year reselling my business. For those that don't know, I have an eBay online business. I basically sell everything pre-owned, but majority of that at the moment is clothing. For the first year, I did everything. Then I moved into media and books and then, by the end of year two, I got out of that and started in clothing in year three and went pretty much cold turkey, full-time clothing, which was the best thing I ever did. And then, in doing so, I started to implement some pretty bold moves around getting a storage unit, getting a second storage unit and now got a third storage unit, hiring some people and really seeing what I can do when I just let myself tackle this like a problem rather than trying to keep myself safe and secure and make myself feel calm and relaxed because I didn't want to get outside of my comfort zone. So that's really point number one giving yourself permission to grow.

I think this isn't even necessarily about business individually. It really comes down to you and what you're capable of doing. When we give ourselves the permission to grow, it means it lets us let go of crap, it lets us let go of things that are in the way and it lets us let go of the things that are holding us back to achieve what we can possibly do. Now, this might be perceived understandings, it could be certain mindsets, it might be a limited belief, it could be anything right. I can't answer that for you. You probably have we all have our own issues, but you would have some level of understanding of, maybe, what you fail to tap into because you're too scared. But when we give ourselves the permission to grow, to take a chance on ourselves, to try something new, to be willing to fail, to be willing to learn, to be willing to make mistakes. That's when we will start to see things happen.

And it took me a while, even though, like, I left my nine to five gig, I was earning a nice, nice income and I took a chance to do the business to build this podcast, like I had to be okay with doing that. No one forced me into that, which made it kind of harder, but the reality is it took me a good two and a half three years to really get into a groove because there was a lot of things still holding me back, which kind of leads to number two, which is trusting your gut and taking risks with calculated understanding and leverage. So, with that in mind, you know look, I'm not here to say that we should just take risks for the sake of taking risks, but there are moments and I think you would know this too where we have inklings of, oh, this is the right thing to do, or I should pursue this, or I should entertain this conversation, or I should entertain this idea, but we don't. And then we think, oh, I knew I should have done it. Maybe it was investing in something, or maybe it was giving an opportunity, a go, having a conversation with someone, meeting someone. Whatever it may be. This applies to life but then also the other thing is then spending some time to do some calculations and understanding.

If I do this and I apply these parameters or I bring into the perspective of what could happen scenario-based situations, you can start to take some calculated risks, which I like to do with leverage. And what I mean by leverage is like if I spend this much money and I get this, and with the power of a working staff member or having my storage unit, it enables me to do something quicker. It's like when for me doing this podcast, when I first started, every time I did a podcast I had to set something up, I had to put things in place, I had to get ready. It took me 15, 20, 30 minutes to get ready. Now I've just got a setup that I just put the camera on and good to go. So those things I invested the money to be able to save me time, to be able to save me time, to be able to get the output quicker, which means I'm putting in the reps quicker, which means I'm able to grow quicker.

So, understanding when we do implement things that we think are better for us to see that growth, to enable that growth. It might be a risk, it might be an investment, it might be something which doesn't seem to make sense in the short term but makes absolute sense for the long term, then we should do it. The next one is willing to do the work. I mean the amount of times that, and even for me, it took me a good two years to really understand what this meant and it shows for it, because the results have been exponential in growth. But you know, we can go, do things, we can live a lifestyle and I mean I'm doing this to build a lifestyle but you can't expect to do nothing and get lots in return. We do have moments where you have really good days where you go into a shop and you find something that's $2 and you're able to sell it for $200. It happens and those days you feel like an absolute baller and an absolute boss.

But the reality is that's not doing the work, that's just being at the right place at the right time, and really what we need to be doing is putting ourselves in the position where that happens on a consistent basis, and the way to do that is by doing the work. So, for instance, when I first started I wasn't necessarily sourcing enough to give myself the ability to be able to grow the store, because I didn't have enough listings to be able to list per day to be able to see that potential revenue or sales come through, whereas now I have so much stock that it's the opposite problem. I can't get it done quick enough, right? But the reality is now I have the ability to be able to spend three, four hours just doing that if I need to like, just taking photos, just prepping for listings, just getting it done, which enables me to then bank two, three, four days worth of other work later. And that's why people say and I'm getting very specific into eBay here, so I do apologize if you're not really understanding, but the idea is, what I mean by this is I like to list 25 items per day. Now, if I can take 50 photos of items today, it means I've banked two days worth, right? If I've got someone else doing the same thing and they do 50, that banks me another two days. So now I'm four days ahead. So things like that. When I film these podcasts, I like to do two podcasts at a time, if not more, because it means every week I'm banking two weeks ahead, and then sometimes it compounds and I can get three or I can get four and then I am getting ahead. So that's really the mentality I'm talking about willing to do the work.

Now there's no point doing any of the work if you don't have number four, which is having a plan. You need to know where you're going, what are you doing, what is the intention here? Where are we going with all this? When we have a plan of understanding, then we can start to put an execution behind it. Now, I spoke about this it might've been in the last episode or the episode before talking about focus, intention and execution. When we focus with intent, we can execute well. But we also need to know that when we focus on the intention, we can execute well, because the intention is what we need to be doing. What is our intent, what do we want to do, what do we want to achieve, and then how do we focus on doing that? And then what are the actionable steps or the executable steps that we can do to make that happen? So when we have a plan now I've got a very high level plan for you know, I've had one for the like for two to three to five to ten years. The ten-year plan might be what it looks like.

It's not down to the intricate detail, intricate Into the into the finer details, but I know where I want to be going and that helps keep you honest to your North Star. It helps keep you honest to where you're going, to the path of next step. Do you take this path or do you take this path? Is this going to get me closer to where I want to be? So having that understanding changes everything, because it keeps you rooted, it keeps you guided and it keeps you honest. The next one is what do we got here? Understanding what it will require? That keeps you honest. The next one is what do we got here? Understanding what it will require. So this is where it kind of brings into the level of willing to do the work and having a plan, and this is probably one of the biggest things which a lot of us struggle with.

I think it's with anything Like I've just built out my 50K ultramarathon training plan. It's going to be 900 kilometers of training right Over 21 weeks. That's what it's going to require. It's going to require me to do not just running but eating properly, doing cross-training, doing stretching, doing strength training, doing the recovery work, sleeping better. It's a commitment. That's what it's going to take to be able to do it, and it's the same when building a business or building a podcast to be able to do it. And it's the same when building a business or building a podcast, I'm here showing up 160 weeks, 160 episodes. Well, this is 159, but you get my point. That's what it takes.

Now, on the contrary to that, sometimes, even though putting in the reps, we don't see the results we expect. Sometimes we need to make changes, we need to adjust, but understanding what is it going to take? We're here talking about business purely. It's a math problem. If you want to earn a certain amount of money, you need to understand how much you need to sell and how many times a day to get that. Per week, per day, per month, per year, whatever it is. It's that simple.

And there was an interesting conversation that I had with someone and they said, oh, I want to earn $60,000 of profit. I said, okay, all right, cool. And then we did the math, the calculation. It worked out that they're going to have to spend in order, based on their metrics and this is not calling anyone out, but they were going to have to spend $15,000 to $25,000 on stock to be able to get that $65,000 profit. I think this is what I was. Look, I don't know where it was. I might be just making the numbers up, but we'll use that as an example. You have to spend let's just say you have to spend fifteen thousand dollars in stock to be able to get sixty thousand dollars profit, which is pretty high margins, to be honest. But the reality was it's like where am I going to get the stock from? I can't afford fifteen thousand. No kidding, right. But the mentality is we need to understand how we're going to get there. How are we going to build up to that momentum? How are we going to build to what it is that we want? What is it going to take? And when we understand that it gives us the ability to be able to make the change, to make the difference, to actually get to where we want to be.

Now, for me, if I had known these things at this level back when I started, I think I would have done things differently. And you can chat to a few different people. I mean, I'm not going to call them out to go chat to them. But there was some people that I remember sitting down when we were doing analysis of different business models and I said this is going to work and they said well, why haven't you done it? I said I'm too scared. Imagine if I started a year earlier and when I started to implement those things. I've implemented those things and the growth that I have seen like what I've been able to achieve and it's not even crazy. But when you compare it to year one, year two, it is crazy is we have to be willing to take the boldness we have to be willing to put in the work and we have to be willing to try new things, adapt and be comfortable with giving ourselves that permission to grow.

I think one more point here that I didn't have was stuff the haters right, because unfortunately I mean look, it's a bit different for me because I obviously document this on YouTube. I'm putting it out here for you guys to hear and learn from as well. But with that there comes a lot of people providing their own opinions, which is okay, but also a lot of people looking in and maybe getting unsolicited advice, because they're not driving the same ship. They're just doing whatever they're doing and giving their own opinion, which is up to them. But sometimes it's not relevant and we need to make sure that when people do dislike, or if they're feeling jealous or frustrated because of your own success, we need to block that out. We need to be rid of it, and that's been a real big challenge.

I've spoken about this over the last probably six weeks across multiple mediums. At the end of the day, if we know what we want, if we know where we're going, if we're trusting our gut, if we're giving ourselves the permission to grow and we understand what it's going to take and we have a plan for it and we're willing to do the work, there's nothing. I mean, it's just going to work. That is literally how you do it, that's how you make progress, and I think having that mentality earlier than later will change the game for you. Now I do apologize if this is not down to the detail that maybe people were looking for.

This is about you. This is about you individually. I mean, for me, this is about me individually, the things that I've had to do, my mentality, how I've had to change the way I think about things, and that's really what it comes down to, because if you are a business owner, then you are driving your own ship. You are the one that is spilling over into those areas of the business. Therefore, you need to make sure that if you aren't doing the right thing, you need to get yourself into the position where you are, and what I mean by doing the right thing is like your headspace is good, you're healthy, you're physically okay, and then all these other things like are you feeling confident or are you feeling insecure? Are you having self-doubt? Are you having imposter syndrome? I have all these things all the time, but I have to work through them. I have to give myself permission to give it a go. Be willing to take that risk, be willing to try that thing.

Now, if someone's listening to this and you're thinking oh, this is my reason to go to quit my job and go start reselling full-time. No, that's not what I'm saying. Understand. What is it going to take? Have a plan of how you're doing it. Are you willing to do that work? Because it will take you a long time? I'm still four years in. I haven't replaced my income the way that I was receiving it when I was working a nine to five, but I'm living such a better life, and I still trust my gut and I'm willing to continue to take those risks because I've given myself the permission to grow into what I want to be and to create the space, the place, the environment, the business and the lifestyle that I want as well.

That's really what it comes down to. So appreciate the question. Ethan really does mean the world to me. I'd love to hear from you guys what about you? Something that you know now that you wish you would have known a little bit earlier. It's complex, it's deep. This is a bit of a personal conversation, a bit more me central, but the reality is that's what the question was about. So here we are, answering it. Appreciate you all being here. If you enjoyed this, if you want to support the channel, the podcast, share it with someone. Otherwise, let's continue the conversation. Jump down into the comments below and otherwise you have wonderful day cheers.