The Grass is Always Greener? Letting my Standards Slip & Setting New Goals - Doc the Journey Ep 49

Yo, back with episode 49 of Documenting the Journey. I'm back from Barcelona. I'm slightly tanned, which I think makes the blonde hair look a lot better, less albino. And I was looking back at my YouTube again because that seems to be what I'm doing in recent episodes, looking back where I was a year ago and reflecting on it. And I tweeted last night when I was driving home, getting a taxi home from the airport, from here throughout like midnight, about to collect my dog and I was feeling nostalgic and post flight fills and I'd had a few champagnes and I was thinking, fuck. The last video I made a year ago was talking about this in Sohaus Mykonos and I was talking about how the grass seems to always be greener for me no matter where the fuck I am. Maybe it's been historically my issue with Shiny object syndrome. Starting brands, you know, never sticking with one thing, thinking if I'd stuck to One thing for 10 years, I'd be fucking retired by now. And then realizing that I'm kind of the same with everything. Well, particularly with places. Wanting to be somewhere I'm not wanting to live somewhere new. Been talking about moving to Dubai, but then thinking, would I actually be happy there? Would I be starting again? So yeah, it's a weird one. But before that quick one, you click the link in the bio. Last chance to buy my course, my Real commerce E commerce course at the original price. I've been thinking about how to best like leverage my audience and monetize my audience and provide value that people seem to want. And people always, always, always ask me about consulting, et cetera, et cetera. Et basically I'm pivoting the real commerce course to be much higher end, much more involved. Like think of it as a course plus one to one consulting, either as part of a group or solo. I'm going to be releasing something very new on that very shortly, which I've been working on in the background as long as all these episodes and pods, of course. But if you click the link below, you can sign up at the original price, previously 899, which is going to go up soon and yeah, essentially the last time to get into the course at that price. So yeah, check that out. And yeah, grass is always greener. This is something I'm battling with, thinking about, probably pondering far too much, but it seems to always be a balance between wanting to try new things and not necessarily settle. For example, do I want to live in London long term or am I better off Trying Dubai when I'm so young, have relatively little obligations, you know, I don't have kids or anything. Or am I just constantly chasing the next thing? And it's going to be a constant process and I'm never going to be happy anyway because I think I'd be happier somewhere else. I don't know. Because I guess the grass is greener where you water it. You know, you have relationships, you build, build a network in one place, you build experience in one place, you get to know a place. Whereas say I go to Dubai, I'm effectively starting from scratch in terms of. Well, not literally from scratch, I know a lot of people there. But yeah, something I'm debating. So, yeah, that's kind of one large topic of this video I want to talk about. Because as I've said before, I think when you have options, particularly location and time freedom and you can be anywhere, you can run your business from anywhere, it's great. But it's actually also a massive fucking restriction. Because it's not a massive restriction, it's a massive fucking challenge. Because you then can be anywhere. But where do you want to be? And because you can be anywhere, you probably have this habit of dotting around the place. Bali, Mykonos, Dubai, Marbella. Like I've done for the past few years. Obviously been based in London, but would I get better results long term in every area of my life? Like health, wealth, love, happiness. What if I just stuck in one place and figured that out a bit more? So that is something I'm thinking about this week. The next thing is like I feel like I've let myself fucking slip in the past few months. Obviously last year I went through in hindsight a pretty fucking mad transformation. Like I built the business from scratch again. I lost about two and a half stone after my like post ex girlfriend ballooning ness. I just got really fat basically. And then I got absolutely shredded to the point where people were asking me if I was taking like TRT or some shit. I definitely wasn't. But yeah, I got absolutely shredded. I got in the best shape of my life and I was training like every single day, really cleaning really well, very consistently. Got into running obviously around the sub 3 marathon, which was a big deal at the time. And then ever since then I felt like I haven't had a goal like physically. And for me I've found, or at least I'm self aware enough now to know that having physical training goals for me, whether that's endurance, you know, like the marathon, whether it's trying to look good like I was when I started running again. I just wanted to get shredded or something else. I find that that really helps me in every area of my life. It's like this central foundation. And if I'm not feeling my best, not training my best, not eating too well, feel like I'm looking like shit when I look in the mirror or stand on the scales compared to what I was this time last year, then I don't know, it just makes me feel like less of a killer in many ways. And it kind of translates into business. And I feel like I take my foot off the gas a little bit and get maybe a bit lazy. Not lazy, but lower standards potentially. And yeah, I do want to be pursuing excellence, whether it's in my fitness or in my business. And I think they go hand in hand. And in the past few months, to be completely honest, I've just fallen off a little bit with my fitness and that has definitely translated into, I guess, my work ethic with the podcast, maybe elements of my focus with the business. And yeah, I don't know if anyone else can relate. If you're in your best shape, you feel like you can do your best work in every area. You feel more confident with girls, you feel more confident with making the right decisions in your business, your brand, whatever it is. And yeah, I think I've just kind of decided in the past week I really need to get back on it. Like, I'm not fat or anything, but I look back at myself this time last year I was probably 3, 4 kg lightest, about half a stone. I was absolutely shredded. Now it's like July 15th, middle of summer, and I'm just not feeling the same way about myself. So, yeah, I don't know if that's a natural, you know, a natural cycle to fall off or is it a summer thing? Because I've just been distracted by wanting to go away and drinking a bit more than I probably should, etc. Etc. But yeah, I think just being aware of it, it's probably very hard to sustain, like being shredded, doing my absolute best work, not drinking, etc, etc, etc, all the time. And maybe in a way it's good to fall off a little bit so I can give myself a new challenge. But I need to decide what the next challenge is because I was gonna do this, you know, the sub 245 marathon. It's gonna be like the next stage from the sub 3. And I was originally gonna do that the end of April 23rd. So a few months ago in London Marathon. But I pulled out of that about two, three months before because I just wasn't feeling motivated with the running. So I felt like I'd been there and done that. You know, the romance and like the magic of the sub 3 marathon was that I'd never done it. I said I'd do it and then I did it. So it was like this sick story of like self progression I guess off the back of a big L the year before and then just doing it again didn't have the same appeal. And then I did like this sub, not sub, this 24 hour group marathon, group ultra marathon a few weeks ago. I really liked that because it was something new. I'm considering doing like a 60 or 100 kilometer solo ultra trail uphill ultra in the mountain, in the mountains in the next few months. But yeah, I just feel like I need to decide what the next physical challenge is because for me having a physical challenge massively fucking helps every area of my life, including business relationships, how I feel about myself mentally. And yeah, I think just being shredded and being your best shape just tends to translate into other areas of life. I don't know if anyone else agrees but at least for me that, that has definitely been the case and I feel more confident meeting new people etc etc when you look better. Right. So whether that's girls or guys in different contexts. So yeah, I just feel like I need to become a bit more of a savage again and it's alright to slip off now and then and start to get a bit pudgy around the edges and not quite squeezing out the effort I used to be. But at the same time, you know, there's a lot of, there's a lot of benefit in pushing yourself in every area and for me at least I'm just very aware of that. If I'm working hard in every area, I tend to see better results in every area obviously and one plays into the other and vice versa. So. But yeah, I'm rambling again as always. Episode 49 probably really fucking boring watching these episodes. What's happening business wise? I was in Barcelona for the past week, summer. I feel like it's quite difficult. Our real challenge right now is we'll do a record month again this month which we have done the past few months progressively. But CAC is definitely rising. I'm finding it hard to stay as efficient as I would like as we're growing. Obviously there's economies of scale so it's kind of chicken or egg problem of like, well, if we triple revenue, our ROAS and CAT could be. Our ROAS could be lower and our CAT could be higher just because overheads become less relevant. But then in the road to tripling revenue, we need to spend way more. And that's when CAT goes up and ROAS goes down generally. So putting a lot of work into creative systems, testing new offers, new landing pages. We've got a lot of new skus. Well, not a lot of new skus. A few new skus on the way, going into retail and yeah, speaking to some other new potential partners slash investors as well. We. Which is interesting. So there's a lot going on, I feel like July and August, so the next six weeks I think personally are going to be quite challenging compared to like September, October, November, obviously going into Q4 and the end of Q3, but yeah, I'm really trying to lay the foundations now. So come Q4 we can really fucking scale. And yeah, I'd like to think we can get to like a million a month by either end of Q4 or start of Q1 next year. We're not there yet, but we're certainly on the way. And yeah, it's never easy, is it? It's fucking hard. I speak to a lot of founders. I was at some event in Barcelona the other day and at the end of the day, everyone has the same issues. You know, you spend more. Cat goes up. Scaling is fucking hard. I feel like I'm never quite where I want to be, probably never will be because I'll get there and it won't be good enough. It won't be the big enough number. But yeah, scaling's hard, but I'm certainly getting better at it and I feel like I've learned a huge amount over the past year running this brand and maybe I'll make a video about like the top few things I've learned because it's probably quite insightful for a lot of people. And yeah, like I said at the start, if you want to, I'm doing some consulting on the side. If you do want to do that, there's a link below in the bio to either join the last version of Real Commerce before I release the new one and make it way more expensive. If you want to do that, you can do that by clicking the link below this video. And I'm doing some consulting on the side here and there, which I know loads of fucking people message me about, which is why I started doing it. I do maximum like two or three hours a week of it, but it's actually quite fun and I think a good way to really solidify what you learn yourself. So what I've learned myself is to speak about other people and help them solve their problems whether they're similar stage or slightly newer to the game or they've just launched a new brand. I think it's really fucking fun to be honest speaking to people in that respect and yeah if you want to do some of that with me the link is in the bio as well and as always subscribe to the pod. This felt like a really really rambling episode. Feel like my head's slightly scattered after being away for four days I've got a fuckload of stuff to do Saturday. Today I'm doing a Saturday session then I'll go to the gym and train and figure out what the next physical goal is but as always subscribe to the pod. Appreciate you watching. Hopefully it's valuable or remotely interesting to some extent and I'll see you in the next one. Cheers for watching. Peace. Sam.