#36 - Scaling Your Business with Lloyd Ross

In this episode of the Morning Upgrade podcast I talk with Lloyd Ross about running ultra-marathons, scaling your business, spending time doing things you enjoy and more. 

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Ryan  

Hey guys, it's Ryan real quick. So my mission with the morning upgrade blog and podcast is to raise the awareness of morning routines and personal development. And I now have two products that are also helped me with this mission. The first product helps you start a 20 minute morning routine. And the second product is a book that outlines how to use personal development to upgrade your life and business. You can get full details on both products over at morning upgrade.com. Thanks for letting me share. And now, on to the show.

Announcer 

Welcome to the Morning upgrade podcast with Ryan cote where we feature casual conversations with entrepreneurs about personal development and growth.

Ryan  

Hey, everyone, this is Ryan Cote with the morning upgrade podcasts. And today I have with me Lloyd Ross. Hey, Lloyd. So excited to talk to you. Why don't we start off by you tell everyone who you are, what you do, and what your interests are.

Lloyd  

For sure. Firstly, thanks for having me on the morning upgrade podcast, and excited to be here. As you can tell from my accent, I am from Australia, which is quite a novelty sometimes for people to hear. But a little bit about me. In short, I did what everyone else did when I was younger, went to university but probably for too long, did some degrees came out the corporate, traditional business owner, and then got into the internet and online business, which I love. And started investing in the stock market at an early age and ended up building a million-dollar stock portfolio in my spare time as well. And now my wife and I just work from home and run our businesses from a small room from our computer. So that's really a nutshell of a bit about my background and what I'm all about. Yeah. What about your insurance? I was on the podcast the other day and someone else? What do you do for fun, I'm like, Really, I love doing business. There's a lot of fun. But so we just completed a 111 Kilometer ultra marathon, which took us 26 and a half hours to complete. Now, no, that doesn't sound like fun. But they're the types of things we get up to Sometimes for fun, we do a bit of CrossFit. We do some running, we hang out with friends, we are big family, we do a lot of stuff with family and you know, read books, I love reading. It's good, you know, horse riding boxing at all a lot of different stuff like that. And yeah, keeps me fit, lean and healthy and know, like on my toes.

Ryan

Would you learn about the ultramarathon? You and your wife? Did it together? Would you learn about yourself?

Lloyd  

We did learn about ourselves during that whole thing? Sounds like a great question. So last year was such a big year for me personally, because I had my first boxing fight in March before COVID. Then I wrote a book, money grows on trees, my first book, and then in November, we ran his ultra-marathon right? Before then I only run 10 kilometers, right? Which kind of surprises people like why the heck did you do that? And the reality is my boxing coach actually challenged me to do to write my book and also run the 100 kilometers. So we did it together. He's 47. So he's running this 100 kilometers at 47. I dragged my wife and her sister into it, and another two friends. So yeah, I think with the ultramarathon, it's such a metaphor for life because we had to discipline last year was all about discipline to me. And I think if you think about success, or upgrading yourself, you know the morning upgrade, it's about having in displaying discipline in an area where you want to excel. So I just took my success formula with other areas where I've been successful or have applied discipline, and a disc, we just deployed it to the marathon. And so what would happen is we would get up in the morning at like four and dock him go up in the hills, and run 35 kilometers up and down elevated hills in the bush in Australia. And then we'd run half a marathon is training the next day. And then we'd run about 70 or 80 kilometers a week, to get up kit to get you to train up for it right. And that's like life, you got to kind of put in the time and the effort and the practice over and over again to get better and to get fitter. And that's what we did. And then on the day of running the marathon, we all rock up there at 6 am and we knew we're in for brutal 24 hours like it was. Thankfully the weather was on our side because if it had rained, it would have sucked so bad. But I read Dead we'd read David Goggins's book can't hurt me if you haven't read that book. It's amazing. It's in my top three all-time books, was what really helped me to develop the mindset of last year like I had to go through a lot of hectic stuff. Voluntary, of course, but on this ultramarathon, we went through highs and lows I remember coming into the body is only meant to is designed to run about 35 ks it just at that point, it starts to break down and collapse. And so at 35 ks, I was like yep, I'm hurting. At this 57 K's my shin splints and my ankles and my blister. My legs were just pumped like I remember coming in 57 Ks, and we had some friends there that fed us that massages out, if they hadn't been there would have been really hard to continue. And then I'm like, I'm gonna do another 50 Ks, it's 111 kilometers. So we go out in the dark and nighttime with our lights, and off we go, man. And just coming in at 4 am to the next checkpoint was this like, Oh my God, get me out. He was like hell, it's like torture on your legs, torture on your mind up and down hills, four and a half 1000 meters elevation. And finally, the next morning at about 9 am 26 hours at 8:30 am. We're close to the finish line. And we have an hour and a half left. And we would have got disqualified how we have not crossed that line in that time. So we're running and limping because you know, you start to get sore and you limp. And I remember coming down the back end of that final straight, and feet are hurting all I could think about was taking my shoes off. And we run down and all their family and friends of this audience we didn't know that would be they got up really early and drove back out. And we just together my wife and her sister and myself ran across that finish line together. And it was just like one of the juiciest moments of living life. It was just like run on the wire. It was very few people have did the 111 COVID ultra-marathon and to do with those girls was amazing. And yeah, one of the best. It's the hardest thing I've ever done physically, possibly mentally. And it's like a life worth it. You pay the price.

Ryan  

I think you put a lot of work into it. And it paid off. Yeah. How did it feel to cross the finish line?

Lloyd  

Relief is all I can tell you. Like there's a funny photo and video and the video at us. And it's on one of their ads now and it's on my Facebook. But we come across the finish line and mark phases are like, Ah, my poles go down and there's just this relief. And then my wife and her sister held hands like jubilation as we did it. Yeah, it's funny, but it felt really good. I cried at the end, and I don't cry ever, which is funny. It's just, I'm just not an emotional person. But yeah, I, you know, had a few tears in my eyes at the end of that one because it was just such a big overcoming effort. And I haven't had sleep for like 36 hours or something, then your body's breaking down. So it's like, a few different things. You know?

Ryan  

That's pretty cool. Yeah, really cool. So it sounds like you've got a lot of habits. You mentioned discipline in that. If you look at your day-to-day routine, what are your go-to habits that you rely on?

Lloyd 

Yeah, cool. We had a little brief chat about this before we started, right, but it, what my wife and I did at the start of this year. And it's a really clever way to manage not manage a lot like you don't go in micromanaging your life. But we have a default diary. And so we put in our diary at the beginning of the year, the things that we are like non-negotiable on that we need to be doing to achieve our goals. So in the morning, it's usually like, Get up and go for a run, get the exercise done early. That's in the diary. And then just things like jumping on the call with our team jumping on a podcast, recording an IG TV, or Facebook Live and Instagram Live and doing posts and being on Twitter, told me that customers are doing a couple of sales calls a day using one or two sales calls a day. And I'll just read it all from my laptop here on my phone, we cruise around the house, and we can run most of it from our phone. So we're quiet we're flexible about where we can go. But we're quite rigid in terms of what we do for our businesses to grow them each day. That goes for five days of the week. And then weekend, we just relax.

Ryan 

Content creation sounds like a big habit for you. Sounds like you've created a habit around how you structure the content creation.

Lloyd  

Yeah, we have these habits of not doing the non-negotiables, which includes content creation, sales calls, team calls, and then obviously have some administration that you need to deal with each day, and then working out so that they're the discipline areas that we focus on.

Ryan 

You mentioned team that I like to talk about entrepreneurship, as well as the last where you are COVID is not, hasn't been as big. How have you adapted your team and your business to the changing times?

Lloyd  

Yeah, so back in March, when it all happened. I was thinking to myself, God, this could go either way. I don't this has ever happened before. So I didn't know what to expect them as we could go backward, our business could just kind of disappear. To grow. It was one of those moments of entrepreneurship, where it's like, Whoa, this is like the roller coaster of emotion you go through an unknown hit us. And I actually did think that we were going to have a drop in sales. I just felt that because I saw how many people were losing their jobs. And I just didn't think that at the money to keep buying our products. And that's where it came from. So what happened to us as an entrepreneurship journey as a pivot, thankfully, about a year before, or 18 months before COVID We had pivoted to, like 9% of our business online because we used to do that stuff face to face and do a lot of travel and that type of stuff. You had to build relationships. But we had an online system to onboard new customers in our team was used to that. So we got about 200 field consultants in the world around the world. And they had been used to and trained in the online system that we developed. And so we were already we had already pivoted, fully online. And so when COVID came it what happened was our business went through 300% growth in 12 months. Yeah, which blew me, I was like, What is crazy, because what happened was, all of our consultants finally had time to focus without the chaos nurse of life going on, because, you know, lively and lockdown in March, and all of a sudden, and we had all this focus and energy went into their business, our business, and it grew. So we luckily, we just had pivoted to online, you know, early enough, which thing a lot of people are doing now to even, like very niche b2b businesses, manufacturing, for example, or, you know, sell widgets, a lot of them are trying to, you know, at least sell their products on their website, you know, because I think everyone's realizing that you need to give them even more flexibility, more scalability. 

Ryan

Good Point. Sounds like the timing worked out, worked out. Well, there. Yeah. Have you had any challenges that you've had to get through and had and you get through it with your business?

Lloyd  

The biggest the greatest challenge had to encamp we can it was to scale. And so because when we first started out, we had, you know, we would get cut, it was a side hustle our business when we first started, I think most businesses are and I would encourage people on the entrepreneurship journey if they aren't trading their first business as a side hustle to do it, because you get to get paid in your job. And you get to fund yourself. So I think it's great. So when we started, we were getting one customer here, one customer there, one customer, one customer there. And you can imagine that that's tedious. That takes a lot of time. There was no scale to it. And so what we thought was God, you know, like, how do we scale this? How do we get like, go from one customer a week to 100 a week, right? And that was the goal, we'll have you do 100 In a week. And that's where your mind starts to expand. And once you set those big, lofty goals, you start to think of unique ways and systems to develop to actually achieve that, right. So Elon Musk says, you know, take your 10-year goal and try and achieve it in like six months. So, we set up a Facebook sales funnel, which we've never done before a social media sales funnel, which I've learned off, Dan Henry. And we started building a community around our product through Facebook groups. And we incentivize all of our customers are incentivized to refer people. And so they refer them to this one Facebook group, where there's a chatbot that automates a sales funnel through it, and actually sells to these referrals coming in our products. So we actually mobilized our entire customer base to be our best marketers. We gave him the scripts and things to use to refer people back into the group to then roll down the funnel and buy. And so we just, yeah, we went from a few customers to like, just last year, in March, April, May. I think we had for one month, we had 770, new customers roll in, without us doing much. Well, yeah, so that was the challenge, it was challenging. To figure that out, though, there's a lot of testing, like, we probably took a 300% hit, when we pivoted from nonscaling and non-online to the scalable online systems. We lost a lot of consultants that left us that didn't like change, we tested imagine things that didn't work, and we had to roll back. Then when you develop a system and you've got like consultants and people in your team that need to learn stuff, they need to build trust in the system that is working for them. And they don't people don't like change. So we had some drastic changes to do. And that's where we lost a lot of income and lost a lot of sales. Yeah, that is collateral damage when you do that. Yeah. And just having the faith that what we were doing was going to pay off. Thankfully it did. So you have no choice sometimes as you know, we have to go big and do this or not because what are we in? Are we in a business or are we just like a little hobby?

Ryan 

Yeah, integral I always I know me personally like I don't like I'm growing and being productive. It's it really messes up my mood and my mindset. So finally, I get what you're saying there. And you're not going to please everyone that you had a clear vision of where you want to go and onboard or not. You know, that was their choice.

Lloyd  

Yeah, pretty much the ones that one on board, they just find their way out. They get off the bus. Do with our tours hurts, you know, to lose good people too, but that's just the nature of business.

Ryan  

Yep, exactly. So I want to ask you about your morning routine. Maybe I'll save that for the last question. The next question. Before we started recording we were talking about how you greatly Simplify your life, just, you know, move into where you move to and just some other changes. So I'd be curious to see here about, like, what your approach to happiness is.

Lloyd  

Oh, love it, what a great question, my approach to happiness. In my own mind, it's having the objective, to spend as much time of my life doing what I want to do. You can never spend all of your time doing just what you want to do. But largely try and spend your time doing all the things that bring joy to you. Okay, now, I'm not talking about like, you know, going out partying all the time and stuff like that, like, that's not a great life, it will come back and bite you, obviously, but, but doing things that I love to do to, you know, generate an income and training the way I want to train and just living the way I want to live, is the secret to my happiness, and not being on anyone else's agenda all the time. Because whatever you say, yes to you're also saying no to something else. So trying to please everyone is a really bad way to build happiness. And I've tried to make my life not pleasing everyone all the time, just sometimes. Okay, so that would be that. But structuring your lot is like thinking about what do I want my day to look like? And getting up in the morning and exercising is brings me fitness and happiness, joy, and energy. Hanging out with my wife and having a business that we run together brings me happiness, no debt brings me happiness. So there's a simple, that's a big one for me no debt. I hate that hanging over my head. And being in business with people, I love to be around. Being in types of businesses brings me joy in terms of what I get to teach. I teach people about money through my books and my courses, and I get to coach people in business with our business, our consultants in the field, you know, and help people with their health with our products. That's what we that's, that's the end result, too. So being in a business that is aligned with your values will also bring you a lot of happiness. But I think it all boils down to what do you want your days to look like, within reason? I mean, you can't work and expect to be super successful and spend your weekends doing the things you want to do with the people you want to do with get away from negative environments, and conflict as soon as possible.

Ryan 

Honestly, I think most people would want that with everything you just described. I think the difference is based on what you told me all the steps you took action and designed the life you in your life and you actually implemented it and you need some hard choices and, and gotten to where you are. So I think that the action part is the hard part. 

Lloyd  

It is definitely the hard part. And here's what happens. I read this really good quote once and it really just thought, wow, that's just what I needed to hear. It says, Have the courage to disappoint others to get what you want. But I forget what exactly what it was was something like that had the courage to disappoint someone. Now, no one was disappoint anyone. But when it comes to your own demise or your own unhappiness, I think you've got to have the courage then to say Hang on a second. I'm okay to disappoint you. Because I'm not happy. And I think if you have that courage to do that, you will be able to build that life because taking action like what you just said it is all about having the courage to have hard conversations, have hard conversations with yourself and others around you and loved ones so that you can develop the life you want to have a hard conversation with a spouse and said Listen, I'm not happy doing it. I want to do this together. You know, we kid with your parents, like I've had a hard conversation with my dad about leaving our family business-like and to sit outside with him and say listen, this is not my thing and had to disappoint him. But it was the best thing for both of us. So I think that's where people that's what prevents them from making a drastic changes. Yeah, I don't want anyone.

Ryan 

Well, this has been great Lloyd. I do want to ask you about your morning routine and then you can wrap up by telling everyone how they can learn more about you if they want to connect with you. Can you give everyone a quick overview of your morning routine?

Lloyd 

Oh, well, you know as a podcast with the title Morning Upgrade. I mean, there's so much juice in the morning of someone's life like it's all about this thing I learned from Hal in.

Ryan 

In his book The Miracle Morning.

Lloyd  

Miracle Morning. Yeah, sure. Thinking of Robin John's book anyway. So the Miracle Morning is he gets up and he has saver you know he goes through those steps to do those specific things each day. If you haven't read that book, grab it. I don't go to the same details what he does, but in the morning, are attend to get up generally, and exercise overrun or train or something like that. And that is so important to do. And once the reason I do in the morning is that once done is done, if you don't exercise in the morning, it's fairly certain you probably won't do it in the afternoon because life gets busy gets away from me things happen you can't control. So I just do that first, while everyone's still getting up, I'm out exercising, right. And then I'll come back, and I'll look at my diary. And so my day is dictated by my diary. And so I know the day before what I've got on the next day. So as I get up, I have this structure. So I look at my diary, and the structure gives me freedom. People think that you just get out, you literally live and are so free. No, if you live your life like that, you're going to actually find it, that much freedom is everywhere. So if you can structure your life in your Google Calendar is what I use, and I'll look at it and I'll know what's coming up. So I get to decide what I do in the gaps. And that could be anything I want to do, right. So it does give me a level of freedom. But it also lets me feel like at the end of the day, I've been productive, which is what I need to feel like an entrepreneur, I need to feel progress and, and, and productive. So after our exercise, I have my smoothie, I have good nutrition to start the day off, which is so important. I don't have coffee because coffee drains your energy. And so I have that smoothie in the morning, and then I'll look at my diary and I'll kind of get in the mindset. My read passage from the Bible might read a little bit of a book that you know, I'm reading and then I pretty much get in the mindset of Okay, let's go to work. And so nine o'clock rolls around, I'm on sales calls. I'm doing this and doing that. And that's how I start my morning off to have the most productive day.

Ryan 

Love it, sounds great. Very similar to my morning routine. So love it. Oh, well this has been great. Like they dropped a lot of gems in here. Great answers. I appreciate you beyond and wanting to everyone you know the best way they connect with you.

Lloyd  

So the best way to connect with me is on Instagram. My handle is Lloyd James Ross. That's with two L's on Facebook. But also you can check out my book if you want to my website which is moneygrowsontreesbook.com. So probably the places to connect with me.

Ryan  

We'll add all that to the page. Thanks again and thanks to everyone for listening.

Ryan

Thanks for listening to the morning upgrade podcast. Please subscribe and review. And don't forget to visit us at morning upgrade.com for more content.