Documenting the journey EP1

DLL: Hey guys, back to the channel. It's been a long time since we recorded anything, but trying to get back into a habit and build this content out around the channel. My goal with the channel is to really create a behind the scenes journey as I try and achieve this goals. I hear a lot of people say, I wish I had a documented the journey earlier. And for anyone that's interested in following people's journeys or wondering how someone that they look up to got to where they are now, I know we all wish that we could see the process along the way and not just a finished product. I know with a lot of people that I look to in business or sport It'd be great to have like a YouTube channel or something that has followed their whole journey from the start and something I tried to get into a while back, around the covet times and kind of fell off. It's just that I find it personally hard to take a camera out and film everything that I'm doing. just feels like real awkward. So I would like to get a videographer or someone just literally follow me round, go into the stores and just produce that content and edit it. my sort of feelings behind it is if you've just got someone that's kind of with you all the time, calling out their cameras and stuff and just filming, then you'll just stop noticing that the camera's there and then you'll really start to get good content. So that's my plan with the channel. But something that I was thinking about today, it's Tuesday, it's only the second day of the week. I've got my routine that I've got set and I've got my standards that I journal every day in what how I wanna be operating. So I get up between four thirty, four forty five in the morning and then I usually have a coffee and work for about thirty to forty five minutes, just computer work, check everything's out, see if there's anything I need to plan for the day. And then I and do my first training session. So Probably the last 12 months or more, I've really only been training once a day, and it's been up and down. I mean, I've I've maintained pretty good fitness levels and haven't let anything fall off too much, but it's really been a second priority, and a part of the reason for that is I'm extremely competitive with myself and I I'm very good at hyper focusing on certain tasks and then once I like really fixate on something, I need to keep pushing it. I really struggle with just being okay with setting something and that just being okay. I need to see improvement in it. and it's it's one of my personality traits that makes me good at making continuous progress. But it's also one of my traits that doesn't makes it hard for me to just stop and enjoy being in the moment because I'm thinking about what I'm missing as a part of my routine. If I set my routine up perfectly, that would be making progress. And that's always been the case for me. And like I said, it it made me good at being able to train alone. every day on repeat when I was focusing on CrossFit and going to CrossFit games because I found joy in just making one percent gains every single time. I could repeat a workout every week For weeks on end and as long as I could make it ten seconds faster or two seconds faster, that was enough for me to wanna show up and do it again. So it is a good trait to have on some aspects, but in other regards it can be a little bit of a negative that I have to try and control. So when I moved away when I moved away from trying to just compete and win the CrossFit games and move more into business and family life. I knew that if I just was set in my ways with I train twice a day, I need to improve, I need to dedicate this much time to recovery and training and I'm just thinking about how to improve it and the diet and everything that comes with it, I'm going to make sacrifices in other places. And I'm gonna if I take this is my available energy for the day, if I you know a big chunk of it's gonna be used up, mental capacity, everything like that, in focusing on training and I'm no longer trying to make my training Produce something for me, except for fitness, health, happiness, and looking and feeling the way I want to look. So it really took me a long time to be okay with that. And really, the one of the things I had to do would just say, I just don't have any goals with my fitness rather than just to move each day for an hour each day. Go and do some weights, go for a run, whatever I'm feeling. Whatever I'm feeling like doing that day, that's what I'm gonna do. And as long as I do that, I'm happy with that. And then I can focus the rest of my day on whatever else I need to do and make sure I'm available to do that. and that it worked well because I took the pressure off myself and the stress off myself that if I was missing something or I wasn't progressing the way I wanted to progress, it was okay. so the last twelve months really for me was spending a lot of time working in the businesses, like doing a lot of hours in the stores. We currently have three stores, they're all in hospitality. We have a a cafe that runs as a burger and cocktail bar at night, and we have two pizza shops. We have roughly 70 staff, so There's a lot that goes on in the day-to-day of those businesses. And one coming from the fitness world and running gyms, there was a lot for me to learn in the different operation side and management of those businesses. And I just needed to learn how to be good in all the different sections of the businesses so I could actually make improvements and have valuable input. And I just wanted to again, my personality, I wanna be good at everything I do. So I spend a lot of time on the floor, working. it's really only been up until about two months ago that I've been able to take my four hours away and redesign my work schedule so I can focus on taking the brands where I want them to be and designing the team and the media around that to make it all come together. So a part of that is relaunching this personal brand YouTube and trying to document the journey and where I want to take the brands. So essentially for me what I'm trying to create is with Nalu, as you can see I'm wearing the Nalu shirt, that's our cafe and cocktail bar. We do really, really good food there. It's a really busy cafe, really good coffee. We use all really good, fresh local ingredients. It's a killer business and we're looking to try and expand the footprint of the business. and take over some adjoining tenancies that are vacating and really build out the nighttime side, the bar side, the beer garden side and the events side. So that's that's something that I'm looking forward to and we're planning at the moment. But the bigger goal for me is Dobro's, our pizza shop. With that, I'm looking at how do I bring something new to the fast food market that doesn't exist and that I'm also interested in. And I mean, this is I'm not talking about like a new pizza or new basta or food offering. I'm talking about looking at brands like Red Bull, Monster, and a lot of sports supplements companies, which I'm obviously part like have been a big part of my life, and how they interact with their customers and reach a bigger audience and tie into those audiences. So something that I'm really passionate about is pretty much all sports, but a lot of of the extreme sports and and not even just sports, I like motorsport, I like everything. So how do I bring the Dobros brand into those sports? No matter what sport or what industry you look at pizza is loved by pretty much everybody. Everyone have a pizza at some stage. Even if they're dieting or whatever they may forego it, but pizza's pretty much a staple. Everyone loves their different styles of pizzas. So I think it's a good brand to bring to other areas that I don't really feel like and from the research I've done everyone kinda stays in their lane and they market to a certain audience and they market on Whether it's like cheap prices or they market on how quickly I can get a order to you or something like that. And I just feel like while you have to focus on those things, I wanna build the brand into more. Like I wanna do events where we have like Nitro Circus events, but it's a Dobros Nitro Circus essentially. We have DJs there, we have we're building out a whole media brand, which is Sort of thing, I want to build a brand that encompasses a lifestyle of people just enjoying life and getting after the things they want to do. And the connection that I make in my mind of why it works is because pizza, pasta, palmies, all these foods are lifestyle foods that if you're out at the beach or you're fishing or you're doing whatever you you're doing. Pizza is one those foods that you'll grab. You can have like a gourmet style where you go and sit down, have wood fired, you'll make it at home. People buy frozen pizzas. You'll get pizzas just on your way home from a s like you go out to the footy, you grab pizza on your way home. You're at a party, you order pizzas, you're having friends over, you order pizzas. You're just sitting home watching a movie on a Friday night, you order pizzas. It's a very versatile food that fits into a lot of categories, and I want it to encompass Everything that we do, and we start to build the brand out around like these cool events. So that's my goal with the brand, and I want to take it everywhere. And more so, I think one of my main focuses on is this events and brand style thing of like bringing what we do into how do we bring athletes into it? How do we bring projects in events in media teams in to support people coming up to put on cool events that have music that have all this cool stuff going on. Do I need another product? A part of the brand, just figuring out that picture of how we build the brand out and making it come to life. So that's something that really excites me at the moment and is like a big picture goal to me that I really want to make work. Now, before I can bring all of that to life, because that's my background, is like big events, sponsorships, athletes. Going out and doing cool shit and having brands at like tied to that. Whether it was like brands tied to me while I was doing as an athlete, all the brands that I had with the gyms and the supplement company and apparel, helping people do that cool shit and going to events. I I love that sort of stuff. So I just want to make it the biggest and best thing that doesn't exist at the moment. But to do that I need the businesses running really well. So a big daily focus of my at the moment is optimizing all of our systems. So so we have the three brands at the moment and they work independently but they're all there is some crossover and for anyone that works in any form of business it's very hard to find a platform that Does everything you want it to do and pulls all your data into one spot, like a clear dashboard that you can just see. Communications, you've got your training logs in there, you can see where staff are progressing through like mentorship courses or training courses. You can see your finance and your PLs, like it's very hard to find something that does all of that. So I know like up until now we've had like four or five different programs. Like you have your your payment software, then you have your accounting software, then you have an invoicing software, then you have a communication software, then you have project management software, and very quickly you have like six different locations for all this data and you need to compile them all and it becomes like a mission to do that. So we were using we use our Pulser softwares, so we have two different Pulser softwares. We have Square in the Cafe, we have Deliver it in the Pizza Shops, then we use Zero, then we use Miller Note, we use Todoist what else? We use Cooking the Books. There's a bunch of we use Circle for our teamcoms which we switch to just from Messenger that I mean a lot of people still use Messenger but with in Australia the under sixteen bands coming in, we needed a way for staff to be able to communicate and we do have juniors on that were potentially gonna get banned and then we needed a way to them to be able to communicate to cover shifts or or whatever or ask questions during the day. Then we also use deputy for all our time sheets and scheduling so A lot of apps there, not even talking about social media apps and and all that sort of stuff. And I was really just trying to find a solution to pull everything into one place as neat as possible. Whether we still keep the other apps, that's fine, they do their jobs well. But how do we pull all that data into one spot? and it and it just was like there was no solution out of the box that could do it. So I've spent the last couple of months building this idea and then finally I've got it to a point where we're switching our stuff over to it and essentially it has everything in there. It connects to all of my external data, so our POS, our zero, all that sort of stuff. It pulls deputy, does all that sort of stuff. And then in the actual app we have the three stores which you just click to change. We have chats, group chats, direct messages. We have all our section closes with checklists. So the staff have to go through the checklist, they have to submit their photos, add their notes, add their prep lists. The once they've added their prep lists, it has all the par levels. If something's under par notifies. It builds their prep card for the next day and orders it in list of importance. So whatever's gonna needs to be done first and takes the most time gets put first. So they can just work through it in in numbered order. It has all of our training courses so we can onboard a new staff member and they can go through. We set pass rate through. pretty much just like multi-question, multi-answers. has a finance section where it pulls in not only all of our ordering receipts and like weekly spend that we spend on stock and etc but it also pulls in from zero and it cross checks with our front of house till closes each night so what they're actually entering in is physical data and matches that all up. It does everything that we need to do it in one spot. So I'm really excited about having that system in place and getting that in into use. But that's essentially where I'm at right now is I am back to trading twice a day. I've even launched a bit of a monthly challenge on my Instagram. and it's pretty much just to keep me motivated and keep me like pushing. And that's like every month I'm putting up a thousand dollars if you can be more consistent than me. So I've set some rules about what's required. So you have to be like at least doing as much as what I'm doing in terms of sticking to a schedule and and training and stuff like that. Each one has points. You have to post it every day. If you're more consistent than me and I fall off, you win the money or you win whatever the prizes that I'm putting out at the end of the month. and really there's nothing in it there's nothing in it for me except for me putting something on the line and making me like double down and focus on it. Cause the other side of what I was saying earlier with being okay with not setting goals in certain areas, the flip side to that is I am very much a person that The harder that I push myself, the And the stricter that I am on myself, the more energy I get from that. Like I still get tired, but I it's like the more momentum I create, the more my brain just works. And I I'm not saying that maybe this is a bad thing, but for me it's good. I don't I'm not saying I feel more stressed, I'm not saying I can't get to sleep because my brain's just in overdrive or anything like that. But the less I do, the less motivated I am to do anything, the less goal. that I set the less will I have or excitement I have to go and push. So like I can sleep until seven or eight o'clock in the morning and I feel less motivated to go and attack the day. If I get up at 4.30 it's a bit uncomfortable. I don't want to get up, especially in winter. I don't want to go out and run in the dark. But when I do sets the rest of my day up. And I'm in a positive mindset and I get to the end of the day. And what I've felt over the years is in playing around with this is like I don't feel like I feel any more or less tired. Like physically, yes, when I was doing a lot more training, I can feel tired. But mentally I feel the same. Like I always thought when I was and I used to joke about this, is I was like, old age is gonna be a cakewalk for me, because Like in my twenties, I'm sore all the time. I'm tired all the time. It would get to the Sunday, I was like, I don't want to leave the house. I'm so tired. old age is gonna easy. And then when I backed off my training, I stopped competing, wanted to go to the CrossFit games. I was doing less and I didn't have this huge bump in energy. so I was like that threw me honestly for a bit, I was like. Is there something wrong? Do I need to like adjust my eating? And anyone that's followed my socials for a while has known I've I've played around with a lot of different types of eating and nutrition. I'm very well versed in that. I studied at university and all that, nutrition, carnival diets, keto diets, fasting, all that sort of stuff I've played around with in trying to fix like inflammation and asthma and just find out what works best for me and helps me do what I want to do. But there was no like you hear reports of people that go from eating one way or they finish training and they do this and like I've got boundless energy all day and I'm just like either these people are full of shit or they're like taking Ritalin or something like that or I'm doing something wrong. I have ice baths or a you name it. And What I have found though is that, at least just for me, pushing myself, setting hard targets throughout the whole entire day, and being able to like tick them off and create momentum and set these tasks that are hard but not unobtainable. So I have a goal, this is where I am, this is where I want to be. This goal is like my brand. Biggest brand in the world or winning the CrossFit games. unobtainable right now. But what I'm doing on the day-to-day is setting these little tasks that are still hard tasks to hit, but I know if I focus, I can do them. My one percent is every single day. And when I do that, granted, I get to the end of the day, I'm tired, but I'm no less tired, I'm actually in a better mood because I feel more accomplished, I get way more done in my day. And then the next day, yes, I wake up in the morning, I'm tired. But I go and do it, and then my day is just rolling, and I just operate way better that day, no matter what it is that I'm doing. So today was a great example. I woke up this morning. Like I said, it's only Tuesday. I've got my structure, like I mentioned. It got to like six o'clock when I'm supposed to go and do my first workout session and I knew this morning I was supposed to go for a run. Yesterday morning I was in the shed on my on Zwift on the bike so that means today is running and my legs were like a bit tired and tight. It was cold out, cloudy. I was just like, maybe I'll just go to the gym this morning and then I'll run later when it's a bit warmer. And I just like felt myself going through like procrastination. Maybe I'll just switch my day around to do this, do that. And I was just like, no. Even if it's the shittest run that you've ever had, go and do it. If you only run for 30 minutes. That's fine. You know you like I've got a goal of every time I run, I run at least ten Ks or an hour, whatever comes first, depending on how I'm feeling. Like I I don't really care right now if I'm hitting paces and all that sort of stuff. I'm just trying to get a certain amount of hours of like VO2 work in and a certain amount of hours of strength work so I don't shrink away to nothing. And So I put my shoes on, got changed, and just went outdoor. And it ended up being a really good tempo run. I was running like a 425 per K pace, which for me right now is really like a threshold type pace. It's a pretty good pace. And yeah, really good run. Got home, had a cold shower, had some breakfast, now I'm filming this. And the moral of that story is like. If you are out there and you're just starting a fitness journey or you've fallen off and you're way back, like and you feel like you can never get back, and you're struggling with your mentality around how do I become motivated again? I think I've just lost it, or I can't do it, or whatever it is that you're thinking, creating these scenarios in your head. I've been consistent for twenty years since I was a teenager. I'm now 35. I think the most time off I've had is like from training. I I haven't had more than a week off where I've done no exercise. And even like recently we went away for our wedding and our honeymoon. We were overseas in Sweden and Italy for three weeks. I think there was a period of time where I went like when we were moving through Italy to all the major cities and we had our hotels booked. And there was like three or four days where There was no gyms, I didn't want to run in the middle of the cities 'cause they were just packed and I'd whatever. We were still walking like fifteen Ks a day doing all our sightseeing, but I was just like getting so irritable and like down because I hadn't gone and done something like hard that I just had to go and find a gym, obviously. and then I was fine. So I the mo the thing I'm trying to say is I've been so consistent for all this time and still would I get up and I know how much I love it. I love pushing and I love I love fitness. I love running. This morning I was sitting there on the couch, I just finished my coffee and I was doing some work on the computer and I was like I don't want to go, like, I can't be bothered. I'll I'll do this, I'll do that. It's still a daily thing for most days. Like, there are days where you wake up or you're somewhere and it's warm and you're like, yeah, or you got someone, you're going for a run, it's like easy. But the majority aren't like that. So it is not new unique to you, and it is something that everyone deals with no matter who they are. Someone says that they never struggle, they're full of shit. Because I've met everyone at all levels of different sport, from the best to everyday Joes, and it is exactly the same. There are days and there are motivating factors, but it's the same. So don't ever be fooled to thinking that you're sitting there thinking this and you've just set these goals and it's only day two and you're like falling off already, like there's something wrong with you. It's normal. And The key to anything, business, fitness, whatever you're doing, is just saying to yourself, shut the fuck up, put your shoes on, get out the door, and do something. Run to the end of the street and back. You get to the end of the street, you probably keep going. If not, build on it the next day. The next day rolls around. Shut up, do the thing. When it comes to work, shut up. Sit down, write three things down that you want to achieve, write the outcome of trying to do those three things. You set a timer on your phone for 10 minutes of work on that one thing, write the outcome. If it's not ticked off, you've at least made progress. And just building that resistance in yourself to say, like, I don't really care what is going on in here right now, I'm just gonna commit to 10 minutes and see what the result is. If it's nothing. In that 10 minutes you'll at least have some ideas, and that's better than just avoiding it altogether and saying, I'll just do it tomorrow. So that's where I'm at. This is where I want to go with the brand, and I want to bring you guys along for each stage of this journey. I'm gonna be trying to put out two videos a week, and hopefully this content gets more exciting. I want to be able to speak to other people, other athletes, entrepreneurs. I'll even fly out, fly them in, build a proper podcast around what we're trying to do. And I'm also looking for a full-time videographer who can come in and help me document it and start to roll this content out and make it better and better. As well as capturing all the content that we're doing in the businesses, because it's quite exciting as well. So that's where I'm at, DLL in 2026. Let me know what you want to see, what you want to hear from me. I'm happy to address. anything from the background to what we're doing to work out info that you want to know health and nutrition anything you want to know CrossFit let me know and I'll see you on the next video. Cheers.