Episode #26 - How I Take A Holiday Every 90 days

Welcome to the E Commerce Freedom Podcast with your host, Oliver Denier. Learn the practical steps you need to take to build a business you can run on your own terms. Escape the 9 to 5 and work from anywhere in the world.

Hey, how's it going? It's Ollie here. Very warm welcome to another episode of the E Commerce Freedom Podcast. So in this episode, I want to talk about traveling, right? Building a business while traveling that enables you to visit more countries, take more holidays, so you can run it from somewhere else. Now, when I was younger, like when I was a kid, my family, we'd go on holiday once, maybe every two or three years, right? We very rarely went abroad. I think I only went abroad once or twice just to go visit my cousins in Ireland. So like, you know, half an hour plane trip, never really went anywhere sunny or anything like that. So I always had this dream and this craving to actually go abroad a lot more often. And like many people, when I was a bit younger, I actually had this pipe dream, this idea of traveling all the time, building a business I could run from a laptop, just never stop traveling. Always be going to new countries, new places, and living this digital nomad lifestyle where you don't even need to have like a base where you have a house and everything in one country, but you just constantly travel. So what I've actually realized, obviously since then, it's been a long time since I actually did have that dream, is that really being like a digital nomad, traveling all the time, not having a base, kind of overrated, right? It's kind of overrated for a couple reasons. One of them being because actually it's kind of stressful traveling, right? It's amazing. It and enables you to see new parts of the world. You have incredible experiences, you meet new people, you get to stay in incredible places and, and just expand your mind and just have awesome experiences, right? But at the same time, it's very intense. Like you've got to obviously make flight connections, you've got to, you know, pack things, which is stressful enough. And quite often when you land in a new place, you kind of fall apart, right? You got to spend the first like couple of weeks piecing yourself back together, getting to know the new area, right? Just getting that sense of familiarity back that you have when you're at home and just reconnecting and all of that takes up a ton of energy. So really building a business where you can just travel and go anywhere, any point, I don't think that's something I necessarily would want. However, now That I can run my business from a laptop and pretty much travel and be anywhere. It is amazing being able to travel. So I've basically come up with a compromise which is kind of halfway between traveling all the time and, you know, constantly being on the go as a digital nomad. And somewhere between that and doing what most people do, which is having like one holiday per year, right? Most people have one holiday per year and that's it. And they look forward to it all year. And for me, I want more than that. So here's my compromise, right? I travel every 90 days. And you know, I think this is the perfect balance between traveling all the time and traveling once a year. So there's a few reasons why I think traveling every 90 days is just so powerful, like beyond just because you want to have more holidays, but also you can actually structure your business in such a way that you become much more productive because you're traveling every 90 days and you can actually get a lot more done. So let's walk through the reasons why I think this system is not just good for being able to travel, but it's also good to be able to actually grow your business a lot faster and hit your goals much faster and be more productive. So first of all, there's a lot of research out there that's been conducted that proves that 90 day goals, right, quarterly goals, are the best time frame to set the next milestones in your business. Now, a lot of people focus on 12 month long goals. They'll say, you know, I want to earn X amount in the next 12 months. And I think that's quite a good thing to aim for, like to have something new to hit every year. And that makes a lot of sense. But if you only have that, then what can actually happen is because a year is really quite a long space of time. Like thinking about what things need to be done to hit a goal in a year, it can actually feel like you've got way too much time to achieve it. And I don't know if you've heard the analogy where no matter what the goal is, you will achieve it in the amount of time you set to achieve it, right? But if you set yourself a year to hit a certain target, what could tend to happen is you'll procrastinate for say, six to nine months and then it'll get to like, you know, three months before the end of the year and you'll be like, oh man, I've got to hit this goal. That's when you start putting in loads of Work and panicking and actually try to hit the goal. And a lot of the time what can happen is you end up missing the goal altogether just because a year just seems quite far out. Now, quite a lot of people set monthly goals and they say, you know, every month I want to have a new income target. And some people take this even further and say, weekly targets, I want to make it this week better than the last week and the next week better than that and just keep going on and on and on. Now this is powerful because a month or a week is coming very soon and it makes you take a ton of action and get things done today rather than waiting, you know, for procrastinating for a few months. If it's a weekly goal or a monthly goal, it's coming up soon, so you have to take action, right? So a lot of people set these goals, but what happens is you quite quickly find that there's not really much you can actually achieve in a week, and there's not really much you can achieve in a month because a lot of things that happen, especially in a business where you're importing products and stuff like that, and it takes time, you can't really do too much in a month. So it's great to have a breakdown of what you need to do in a month, right? But not just set your goals, monthly targets. So a month is too short, a year is too long, but 90 days is pretty much the perfect amount of time to hit any goal, right? And especially in an Amazon business. In fact, a lot of the time when we're talking about imports, we're talking about how long it takes to get a product into the Amazon warehouse, get it selling, ramp it up to say, a thousand pounds a month in profit or more, we're looking at chunks of about 90 days, alright? So you could feasibly, if you wanted to really break down your year into a very simple set of four goals, you could say, I want to launch one product every 90 days. And if with each of those products, if you were generating a thousand pounds profit per month, by the end of the year, you could easily have four grand a month coming in, a thousand pounds a month profit coming in from each one of those products, you'd have 90 days to launch each product and then by the end of the year he probably will replace your income, right? So just practically 90 days is very, very powerful time frame to set goals. Also, in terms of mindset, right, it's been proven that the human mind just works very well with that period of 90 day time frames, for whatever reason, I think it's probably because 90 days is not too soon, but it's not too far away. So you know, you have to take action, but you can actually get quite a lot done within that period. So because of that, because it's such a good time frame to set goals, you can coincide the times where you want to travel with each quarter. So what I aim to do, and I have to say it doesn't happen every single time, but what I aim to do is at the end of each 90 day segment of my year, I aim to travel. And there's a few things I do on these trips that actually coincide with my 90 day goals. The first of those things is I reset. Okay? So at the end of my 90 day period, my end of the end of my quarter, what I want to do is get away from my environment, right? So I always do work at home usually or in coffee shops near me or hotel hotels near me, right. I just like to do work from, you know, wherever it feels comfortable. But the point is I'm usually doing it in the same place, whether it's just in my office or in my living room or my kitchen table or in the local coffee shop. That's an environment that I'm used to. And what you can happen is you keep doing work all the time in the same environment, you can start to associate that environment with work, right? So it can be difficult to kind of relax and just get out of your head and get out of thinking about work when you're in that environment. So taking a few days away from that space alone just instantly allows you to relax. So at the end of a 90 day period, I can just completely cut off from all of my environment, not really think about work too much and just relax and just allow my mind and my body to reset. What this does is this enables you to really focus when you get back to your environment for the next 90 days, that's the first thing, right? I want to relax. So I often go somewhere nice. Last year and this year especially, I've been going to the UK quite a lot every 90 days. But also I've been going other places such as Switzerland, Spain, Barcelona, been to Marbella, other places, you know, in and around Europe and just going, picking somewhere, going there nice every 90 days. For example, this quarter I'm actually going to Canary Islands as my next quarterly trip. And it'll be really, really nice to actually relax there. The second thing I like to do on these trips is actually get inspired, right? By coming out of your environment, relaxing, getting away from, you know, the normal work that you're putting in, you actually start to get more ideas, right? You look at things from a different perspective. By pausing and not being in the midst of your business, you actually start to come up with brand new goals, ideas and things that you never would, would have got by just working, right? By just being super, super, super focused and taking loads of action. Because when you're doing that, you can often just almost be like on a hamster wheel where you keep doing the same things over and over again. By extracting yourself from that environment, going to a nice place, not really doing any specified work, you can actually come up with tons and tons of ideas. And then thirdly, one thing I like to do on these trips is reflect and also look forward, right? So reflect back on how the previous quarter was, what were the goals I was trying to hit, how did it go, right? Did I hit those goals? What went well, what didn't go well, right? And then look forward, decide what things am I going to continue to do throughout the next quarter that I did in the previous quarter, like what was really, really good, what am I going to change, what am I going to stop doing, what changes am I going to make, etc. Etc. Right, so it's a great time just to pause and really have a look at the trajectory of your strategy as it develops throughout the year, right? So you know, you might realize halfway through the year that you know, throughout that yearly period you want to earn six figures. Well, if you're only a quarter of the way there by six months time, then, well, you've got two options. Number one, you can change the goal, which is probably not something I would want to do, or number two, you might want to change your actions and say, well, I need to really step my game up for these next six months if I'm going to hit my goal, right? And then you can come up with a strategy to actually do that. If you didn't pause at the end of those 90 days, then what would happen was you probably just continue in the same vein that you'd managed to get the work done in the previous six months. And the second half of the year would be exactly the same because you didn't take the time to have a look and pause and reflect and then you'd only hit half of your goal. So there's a lot of really practical, really powerful reasons why taking a holiday every 90 days can work for you, can actually make you more money, right? Can actually get you better results. I remember whilst I was in Villa Honeg in Switzerland, sitting in. In the. They've got like an infinity pool. And it's crazy because you're sitting in the pool and you're looking out and it looks like the water just spills out into the mountains because there's no edge to the pool and it just kind of melts into the landscape. And just the amount of ideas and inspiration I got just by sitting there and just looking out at everything really helped me change the trajectory of my business for the rest of that year. And at the end of the day, if you've been working so hard for the previous quarter, you do need to take some time to reward yourself, right? And especially as an entrepreneur, like, you're dealing with so much more stress than most of the rest of the population, right? With the work that you're doing, it's really important to reward yourself at the end of each quarter. So, in summary, this year, structure, including holidays every 90 days, is the perfect balance between, you know, what a lot of people do, which is one holiday every year, one holiday every two years, and traveling all the time, right? It's, like, good somewhere in the middle of all of those and it keeps you motivated and it can actually be much more productive. But the question I'm sure you're probably asking yourself if you're listening to this podcast and you're, you know, thinking of building an Amazon business, etcetera, Is, well, how do we get there? Right? This is really awesome thinking about building an Amazon business and being able to take these vacations every 90 days and all of that stuff. That's cool. But how do we get to the point where we have the income coming in and the flexibility to be able to travel every 90 days? Well, the first thing to do is to think about the next 90 days because you can actually start to build up some sort of foundation where over the next 90 days you can start to get consistent income, learn all the skills you need, and actually move forward to building this business and getting results so you can continue to scale the business and then actually get up to the income levels you want. So in order to actually help as many people as possible get to this level of consistent income and get to that first thousand pounds per month in profit. On the 19th of November, I'm launching my breakthrough course. Now, the whole point of this course is to help people break through, right? And what a breakthrough for me, really, I think in the beginning was when I went from not earning anything on Amazon to actually Generating a thousand pounds per month in profit. This was a huge breakthrough for me because, number one, it was consistent income and it proved that the business was actually working and actually generating money. But number two is incredible for me because it replaced the income I used to earn from working in a bar, right? So I actually earned the same amount of money from selling on Amazon, which is something I loved, right, that I was earning working in a bar 40 hours a week. Didn't particularly enjoy that kind of lifestyle. This was a huge breakthrough for me, so I want to help as many people get to that stage as possible. Getting from zero to a thousand pounds per month is the hardest part of this entire journey for you. It's going to be the most difficult part of your entire business because you have to learn all the new skills, the new strategies and you have to develop a new mindset. And this stuff is all brand new. If I can get you to that £1,000 profit per month in 90 days, you can do so much more in the following 90 days. And over the next few weeks, I'm going to be showing you some strategies. Once you've got to the thousand pounds per month in profit, how you can like duplicate that Almost instantly to 2k a month, 3k a month, 4k a month just by rinse and repeating the same thing and really scaling up the business a lot faster. So if you're interested and you want to learn a little bit more about Breakthrough, I've got a little freebie for you. You can grab if you go to ecommercefreedom.com 26, that's ecommercefreedom.com and then the numbers 2, 6. You'll see the show notes for this episode and in the show notes, you'll see I'm giving away a PDF with five products that you can download that all are capable of generating a thousand pounds profit per month. Right? So what this proves is that there's tons of opportunities out there for you to build an income of at least a grand a month in profit on Amazon. You just need to pick a product, go out there it, import it, get it to sell. So I've given you five examples on this just to get you motivated, just to give you an idea of the types of products you can sell. So in the next 90 days, you can build this grand a month income. Now, on the thank you page of when, after you've downloaded this PDF, you'll also see an invite to the early bird list for Breakthrough. And there's going to be a limited number of spots for this course because I can only help so many people at once. But if you want to secure your spot, you can actually jump on that early bird list and you'll see that this is going to be offered to 20,000 people when it launches on the 19th. But you can jump on the early bird list and actually get early notification of when the car opens sent to you so you have a chance to actually secure your spot. So after you downloaded the PDF, you can sign up for the early bird list and then you have a much higher chance of actually being able to join Breakthrough when it launches. So thanks so much for listening to today's episode. I hope this has inspired you to build a business where you can structure your year in a way that's productive for you because it's fun and awesome and feels good, but also productive for your business because it allows you to set 90 day goals, reward yourself, relax, reset, reflect, and get inspired to push forward. Thanks so much for listening to this episode. Go grab the freebie the five products ecommercefreedom.com 26 and I'll catch you in the next episode. Take care, keep believing and we'll speak soon.