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In today’s episode you’ll learn:

  • How to create a business you can sell
  • When is the right time to sell your business and how to plan for it
  • Calculating your businesses market value
  • Tips for building a successful business ecosystem
  • How to find the best buyer for your business

Where to find Priya, and the books and podcasts she talks about on the show:

Where to find her:

Website: https://www.ninetofreesociety.com/

 

The Book:

Mindset: The New Psychology of Success

 

The Podcast: 

My First Million Podcast with Shaan Puri and Sam Parr

Transcript

Dahna Borg 

Hi, and welcome to the Bright Minds of eCommerce podcast. I’m Dahna founder of Bright Red Marketing. Your e-commerce advertising specialists. 

 

Today, we’re here with Priya from Nine to Free Society. Priya is an ex-lawyer turned serial entrepreneur. She’s the co-founder of four online businesses, including two e-commerce brands and the creator of the Nine to Free Society, a community for e-commerce entrepreneurs to grow and scale their businesses.  Believing in a better way to live, Priya left her career behind to build businesses that could create financial freedom, support her lifestyle and give her time with her family. She’s deeply passionate about helping others to do the same contributing to a new narrative around what it means to work. 

 

In today’s episode, she shares the journey of creating two successful eCommerce brands and all the juicy insider information on how to sell your business. 

 

So let’s get into it. 

 

Welcome to episode 30. 

 

Today, we are here with Priya from the Nine to Free Society.

 

Priya Radia  

I’m so glad to be here. Thanks for having me.

 

Dahna Borg 

It’s so good to have you on the show. So we’re gonna talk a little bit about you selling businesses before we do that. Can you tell us a little bit about the two eCommerce brands that you launched and created?

 

Priya Radia 

Absolutely. So one of them was called the Ovl Collection and the other one was called Self-kit. The Ovl Collection is a jewellery brand, very much dedicated to moms, but we did expand to women and it was all about inspirational jewellery. So jewellery with beautiful quotes, messages and cards that came with it. A very sort of connected brand and Self-kit was a brand where our very first product. And I say because my husband and I started this brand together, he assigns a journal that was all about mindset and mental health and tracking habits and sort of creating that optimal life for yourself. And it incorporated things like gratitude and all that sort of thing. It was a proprietary system that he designed. And so that became our first product, which was a journal. And that became, that was actually our only product before we ended up selling that brand. And so both brands have now been sold recently to international purchases.

 

Dahna Borg 

Amazing. And in the process of building those brands, tell us a bit, a little bit about that journey for the Ovl collected the Ovl Collection and then for Self-Kit.

 

Priya Radia  

Sure. So the Ovl Collection was, it took a lot longer to get that brand kind of pranking because I used to be a lawyer and I had no idea about anything eCommerce or anything, digital marketing or anything really about running a business. So as you can probably appreciate it took a while to really learn the ropes. And then I actually took 10 months off the business due to having a baby during COVID and you know, postnatal, depression, and all of that. When I came back to that brand, it was September, 2020. And I said, I’m just gonna give this, you know, one last shot. I actually thought the brand was a dud. Initially I was so like, this is not gonna work. I’m gonna give it 90 days. And within 90 days, you know, I managed to 10X, my revenue very quickly. And then, you know, within six months it was like an 18X returns to, you know, up to 25K month, which was a pretty amazing progress from where the brand was. And then with Self-Kit, I kind of knew what I was doing. We really knew all of the different elements of that sort of ecosystem or flywheel that we wanted to put in place. So we launched it and we were well into the 10K months by the second month. And so it just grew from there.

 

Dahna Borg 

Amazing. Do you have any sort of tips or strategies that you used to help you scale that quickly?

 

Priya Radia 

So definitely Facebook ads was one of the things that we used for both brands, because if we had used organic growth, only it would’ve taken a very long time, but also a lot of our customers weren’t on Instagram. You know, they were on Facebook and Facebook, organic growth on a Facebook page, not something that has been very easily accessible for people for a very long time. And so we definitely found ads were super helpful, but we also utilised everything. We utilised email marketing, you know, brought in SMS, marketing used, you know, made sure the website was entirely optimised. So while ads did help us scale, it was really having that entire ecosystem in place and constantly checking on all of the moving parts, making sure that they were still moving and nothing was broken, cuz things start to sort of drop off and you have to keep optimising. And so it was just constantly focusing on that, but just helped that wheel turning. Helped that wheel keep turning is what I mean to say

 

Dahna Borg  

No, I love that. So was the goal always to build a business to sell or if not, when did you sort of decide it was the right time to sell?

 

Priya Radia  

The goal? Wasn’t always to build to sell? Although I always had it in the back of my mind that I might sell one day, there was certainly a point for me where I thought these businesses both need to go international and they have every opportunity to do so. And then we had to make a decision about whether or not we wanted to be the people to do that. They were growing very rapidly and we have just been through quite a couple, like probably three years now of, you know, we’ve had really, our kids are really little and that’s exhausting. We’ve moved states to, you know, our dream at state Queensland right now. But you know, that move was a big deal for us. So we are both feeling, quite tired of building and going international. Would’ve meant that we’d have to launch into that next space of building.

Priya Radia 

And so we kind of assessed where our businesses were at and what we wanted for the short term before our oldest goes to the school. And we said, you know what? We just wanna have a mini-retirement. And our businesses are in a place where we could sell them and actually do that and take some time off before we then launch into building the next thing. And so that’s when we decided, you know what, let’s, let’s sort of build the brands in a way that we could then sell them. And then we’ll decide when it comes to that time, whether or not we wanna sell them once we have all those things in place and turns out we, we did wanna sell them. And so that’s what happened. And now we are, we’re very happy cruising with our decision.

 

Dahna Borg  

Amazing. So when it came to be the right time to sell, was that because Lifewise, it was the right time to sell or business-wise, they were the right time to sell or a bit of both?

Priya Radia  

Both. So I think, yeah, I think business wise selling when, for example, if you were someone who felt like a brand wasn’t working out, that’s a very different place to be in than selling. When, you know, you’ve had a really great track record of growth and it’s been consistent month on month and you’ve, you know, your profit has been consistent and you’ve got everything in place. And so there are certain times of the end we can get into this, but certain times of the year when it’s better to sell. And so when we made that decision, it was very much in planning for that to happen and ensuring that at that point, you know, everything was in place. And if we didn’t sell at that point, we would’ve had to wait another sort of six to eight months to do that.

 

Dahna Borg  

When is a good time to sell a business? I didn’t think that was a seasonal thing.

 

Priya Radia 

Well, it is because when you think about an investor or a, you know, an operator who wants to purchase your business, their number one priority is making a return on that money as quickly as possible. So in order to do that, they’re gonna be looking at the profit margins and how quickly can they, you know, make that return. And so if you sell, say during like right after Christmas, then they are going to possibly, if you don’t have another spike, they’re gonna be waiting a long time to make a return. So ideal times to sell. And it’s a little bit hard to balance because you also don’t wanna sell straight after a lull. So say in a lot of businesses right now are experiencing your lull. So, so say you listed your brand in April and you’ve had a lull for three months.

 

Priya Radia  

It might show negatively on your PnL because you just haven’t had those sales. So you wanna kind of sell when you’re coming off a high or at least sort of ramping up to the next kind of high. So those are the true points. And so selling with enough time for them to get their head around the business and implement whatever they wanna implement in order to recoup that investment. So for me, it was Mother’s Days coming up. And so that was a huge selling point for the buyer to go, Hey, you know, I can actually recoup that investment for mother’s day. And again, if you sell, say in August, September leading up to black Friday or Christmas, that can be a really great time as long as you’ve had some great months before that. So it’s sort of thinking about those two things.

 

Dahna Borg  

So it’s not seasonal in like it’s a bad time to sell a business at Christmas time, but seasonal to your business as to when the best time is to sell your business.

 

Priya Radia 

Correct.  

 

Dahna Borg 

Fantastic. Is there anything that you had to do to get the business ready to sell?

 

Priya Radia  

Yeah. So lots of things

 

Dahna Borg  

Give us a rundown.

 

Priya Radia  

A couple of the, yeah, a few like really important ones. So one of those is having a really strong PnL with, you know, all the data broken down really well. And I know that a lot of the time when you are running your business solo, you kind of, you kind of know where your business is at, but you’re not really going into every little bit of data and you might not have your PnL prepared. This is particularly important with ecom because you have to take into account inventory purchasing. And so if you are putting your purchases, for example, in the same line as expenses, it can actually sort of destroy your profit margin for those months. So it’s having a really good PnL that accurately reflects your inventory, your profit, your marketing spend, et cetera. So that’s a really important part of it.

 

Priya Radia  

The second thing we had to do, or we didn’t have to do it, but we wanted to do it was ensuring that our fulfilment was outsourced because when you are selling a brand and look, particularly in Australia, Australia’s a small market. So if you want to open up your business to international purchases, you need to have either a warehouse that is run by staff, et cetera, or a third party logistics company. And we decided to go with a 3PL because it just meant that the person purchasing it, didn’t have to worry about staffing and all of that. A lot of investors don’t wanna have to think about that. They just wanna know that it’s sorted. They don’t wanna have to then try and interview people across the other side of the world at a different time zone to, you know, be able to do that.

 

Priya Radia  

The other aspect of it is if you’re setting your business up to scale internationally, you need to sort out, you know, part of that 3PL process is bar coding. And so to sort of say to them, you know, you can now take this and expand it. We’ve set up all the ops. All the barcodes, all you need to do is send product to that 3PL provider in the Us, in Canada, in Europe, wherever they are, that’s all set up for them. So it removes that friction and they can just, you know, the purchases now are literally taking that product and taking these brands overseas.

So that was another process that was really important to set up, to just open up those opportunities.

 

Dahna Borg 

Amazing. And did they hand, I mean, obviously you would’ve handed over all of your marketing and things. Was there any kind of tricks or tips

Around handing over those sorts of things?

 

Priya Radia  

A lot of it was being really organised. It’s amazing how many apps and different things we use, whether it’s, you know, even as small as Google suite, which is like $8 a month or whatever it is, keeping track of all of those things, having passwords ready to hand over, it’s surprisingly quick. You can, you can hand over a significantly sized eCommerce business in a day, but to think about, but I’ll mention, I know, right? Like you literally give someone your passwords and because it’s 3PL there’s no stock handover. So it’s just like, here you go. Here’s your business. Thanks, bye. It’s slightly longer than that, but not, it doesn’t take very long. But one thing that surprised me was how long the domain transfer takes. And so setting up your domain, this is like a random little hack that I wish I had known was transferring your domain sort of a couple of months in advance. Cause you can only transfer a domain once within like a certain period of time and then transferring it to say whatever it is, Go Daddy, whatever it doesn’t have to be that we didn’t use that. But some domain provider that then the purchaser can also use that same domain provider and the domain transfer will be sort of intraday. Whereas if you are transferring from one host to another host, it can take five to seven days. And in that period of time, they officially don’t own the business. You kind of don’t own the domain. Like it’s all a bit complicated And it’s a bit flow. It’s very anxiety-inducing it. 

 

You know, one of the brands we just happened to have that set up already and we’re like, oh, it was so easy. And then the second one, we were sitting there going, oh my God, like, why is this taking so long? So that’s definitely a little, a little tip if anyone’s selling their brand to just think about these, these weird little things.

 

Dahna Borg  

Yeah. I would never have even thought about that.

 

Priya Radia  

Actually, there was another hack that I mentioned because it was so like we’re very proud of it. It’s actually something that my, my dad suggested and I was like, go dad, like this is epic. We were trying to work out how to all of the expenses are often on your credit card statement, on your credit card. And so when you are transferring over to someone else, they need to effectively change that over to their credit card. And you don’t really have a lot of control over that piece. So actually going and purchasing like a debit card and you can do this from like Australia post and transferring everything over to that debit card so that your liability is limited in that sense. So, you know, we had fantastic purchasers and buyers, but just say you get someone that is quite lazy with transferring that over. You’re not then paying all of those expenses going forward. So that was like, yeah.

 

So I was like, oh my God, that’s brilliant. So yeah, that’s a good one toI think, mention to people cuz that’s another thing that can cause anxiety. Like when you have a bigger brand you’re spending hundreds of dollars each month on apps and software and that sort of thing. It’s not like it’s not like dollars.

 

Dahna Borg  

That would include Facebook ads.

 

Priya Radia  

Oh yeah, that’s right.

 

Dahna Borg  

<laugh> like holy moley. Yeah. Okay. You’ve sort of covered this, but was there anything you’d wish you’d done or known in the very early days of your business would’ve made selling easier now or is just the things you’ve covered?

 

Priya Radia 

I think the biggest thing I would say is around mindset and I think it’s because people don’t talk about selling a business and what that process involves. I think understanding that between when you get an offer and when you actually hand over the business, that is possibly one of the most stressful times of your life when it’s a significant amount of money. And so to just kind of understand that that’s going to happen and to sort of put things in place to enable you to continue to run the business. And de-stress a little bit, and maybe have some people that you can talk to is really important because it is anxiety-inducing. When, you know, you’re trying to negotiate contracts and sign contracts, and this is stuff that most people are not that familiar with. It’s not something we do every day. And so it can be rather stressful.

 

And so I think just preparing yourself for that and putting things in place, you know, if you do have kids just, it sounds so ridiculous, but literally like setting up that period to be as easy and as seamless as possible, don’t add any additional stress to your life because that process can happen very quickly. But it’s like a very intense period of a couple of weeks where you just have to be on the ball. Like we were up at midnight negotiating contracts cause people were overseas. We literally didn’t sleep just because of the time difference. So yeah, just getting your mental state right in that this is really exciting, but it is going to be a high-stress situation at some points.

 

Dahna Borg 

Yeah. I can imagine obviously transferring businesses is quite a, a legal situation. How did you manage that? Or because your history <laugh>, that was the easy part for you.

 

Priya Radia 

I wouldn’t say it was easy. I was in a very different type of law. I was in commercial litigation, which is great, cuz I know all the things that can go wrong. <laugh> helpful, you know, helpful and terrifying. But one of the things I did was, was able to draft the contract myself and that was easy. And for one of the brands that was a very seamless process for the other brand, you know, it was a much larger transaction and we did need to hire a lawyer. And that was, that was something that was very beneficial to do using a lawyer who not only understands like what contractors, but the legal implications, someone that’s done this before, especially when we’re talking international because international laws are very different. You know, the laws of the US and Canada are completely different to the laws in Australia. And some of those things might be general practise there, but it’s not general practise here. And so I was quite shocked by some of the clauses and then, you know, the lawyer was able to help me understand like what is the practical implications of this only because he has had a lot of international legal experience.

So if you are, if you do have a purchaser like that, then it’s important to get someone who knows kind of what they’re doing.

 

Dahna Borg 

Yeah. That makes sense. So something that I’ve always been curious about is how did you work out the value of your business?

 

Priya Radia 

Well, it’s actually somewhat simple in that there are some guidelines around it. So with eCommerce stores that are doing, you know, if you’re looking at less than a million dollars a year, it’s around anywhere from kind of 0.8 to three as a multiple of profit. And it’s probably more going towards 0.8 to two as a multiple of profit. And that then varies based on different aspects of your business. So for example, it would vary based on whether you have a 3PL or whether you’re fulfilling out of home, your multiple goes up when fulfilment is with a 3PL your multiple also goes up when you have a good mix of organic and paid traffic. If you’ve never run paid traffic before, that can actually reduce your multiple because people are quite concerned about whether paid traffic will work. Yeah. But equally, if you are solely focused on paid traffic and have no organic traffic that can reduce your multiple, having all your systems and processes set up, you know, automated flows, et cetera, all of these things that make it easier for the buyer to take that over can increase your multiple brand value, loyalty reviews, all of this stuff that is inbuilt into the brand.

 

If they can clearly see that and they can see that customers love your brand, that’s always going to, you know, be in favour, um, and increase your multiple. And that’s where it gets a little bit tricky to say it’s exactly worth this.

 

Dahna Borg  

Is that where the negotiation then comes into play?

 

Priya Radia  

Yeah, that’s right.

 

Dahna Borg 

So did you sort of determine that you thought yours was say like a, I’m just guessing here, like a 2.5 and then they negotiated you down to like a 1.8.

 

Priya Radia 

Yeah, actually I got pretty much what we wanted and it, one of the cases we got more than what we wanted. So, um, that worked out really well for us. Amazing. We were pretty good at, in, you know, ensuring that we had like the right, the right multiple.

 

Dahna Borg  

Is it yearly profit?

 

Priya Radia  

Yes. So it’s annual profit, but it’s also, I guess the other thing is looking at month on month. So how much has the profit varied month on month? And especially with Facebook ads, as you know, like for a lot of people, they took a hit with their profit over that period of time. Especially last year. So the last six months of the year when people were still working out, how do we make this profitable? I know a lot of brands took a bit of a hit and that was something that a lot of the investors were talking about. Like, oh, are the ads still working? There was a lot of concern around that. So just looking at the consistency of profit. So if you had, even if you’ve had like a massive amount of profit, but a lot of that was just in January or February, and then it’s tanked after that. That’s not gonna raise your multiple just cuz the profit’s there.

 

Dahna Borg  

Yeah. Okay. That makes sense. I know a lot of people are interested in how you went about finding buyers either because people wanna buy businesses themselves or because they’re looking at selling, how did you find buyers? What was that process like?

 

Priya Radia  

So we listed it on a couple of platforms that are available. I know there’s more platforms than we used, but essentially, I listed it on a platform called Micro Acquire and on Flipper and both of those platforms that basically facilitate the sale of eCommerce brands. And so you’ll get lots of buys and sellers on those platforms. It’s a great way to also do research and try and benchmark yourself against what other people are doing. And so that was part of the research process. So like what are other brands selling for? What is their multiple? And so you can do a lot of research that way, but we listed it on there and we got, you know, a tonne of inquiries. 

 

They also have newsletters, so they have databases of buyers and they’ll send your brand out to those buyers. And sometimes depending on the quality of your listing, they will feature you. So we were featured a couple of times, got a massive influx of interest after being featured. So there’s some cool things that they do to help you actually make that sale happen.

 

Dahna Borg 

Yeah. Amazing. Can I ask whether that was a, a paid listing or a free listing or how does that work?

 

Priya Radia 

So Flipper is paid. So they have a model where you pay an upfront fee, which I think they will often waived. I think we got ours waived, and then they take a percentage of your sale price. If you sell through them, micro acquire, I believe is free to list and they don’t take a percentage if you sell through them. So that’s kind of great cuz you know, when you have to like give a, a chunk of your business after you’ve sold it. 

 

Dahna Borg 

I’m not, they make money somewhere.

 

Priya Radia  

Sure. They’re a must. But you know, I think the founder, I really, I really loved micro acquire. The founder is incredible. You know, they send, they send you a personalised email afterwards. Like it’s a great platform and they have lots of templates for legal things and that’s all free. So I think, you know, for them, they’re also potentially in the stages of really seeding that marketplace. And maybe they’ll change that over time. I don’t know. But  I loved using that platform. That was my sort of favourite platform.

 

Dahna Borg  

Amazing. You said you got quite a bit of interest. How did you go about sort of narrowing that down to, I suppose someone who was actually gonna follow through on buying, but also someone you wanted to sell to.

 

Priya Radia 

Yeah. So that is a process. I’ll tell you what you need a lot of time to get back to people. If you do have a lot of interest in your brand, part of it is they first up, they just want all your financials. And so they sign an NDA and you just hand over your financials. And then it’s really a process of just answering all of their questions. One of the things that I did was hop on zoom calls with people who were showing a lot of interest. So I would just offer straight up. Do you wanna get on a Zoom call after we’ve had a little bit of back and forth? And that was an easy way to tell if someone was very serious in the business or not. And then the people I spoke to there was a couple where I’ve actually rejected their office cause I just didn’t think they were the right fit for the brand. And you know, it was important because both these brands were very, I guess, meaningful in their own ways. It was important that they, for us, that they went to people who really loved what the brand was about and they would continue that going forward. So some of them were just outright, you know, they gave me an offer and I just said, I’m just sorry. Like I’m not, the offer was great, but I just wasn’t, I wasn’t willing, um, I didn’t think they were a good fit and you just get a feel like if people are rude to you, just, you know, don’t worry about them. <laugh> cuz that happens too. I know a lot of it is just waiting it out, you know, just answering the questions and going through the motions.



You just never know who it’s gonna be. That’s going to give you that offer. You’ve just gotta put in the work and it is work to go back and forth and you know, speak to all these people and give them all the information and everything. And some of them won’t come back to you.
And then you kind of sit there and you’re like, oh, alright then, you know, I just spent five days like answering all your questions, but that’s just the process. And I think I wanna be a bit transparent around that just to help people know that that’s normal. It’s like, it’s not that there’s anything wrong with you or your brand or any of that. It’s just, all of these people are also looking to purchase businesses. And so they’re probably doing this as much as you’re doing this.

 

Dahna Borg  

Yeah. That makes sense. Is there anything else you think we haven’t covered that you’d like to share about the process of selling businesses? Like I feel like we could talk about this for hours, but yeah. Like is there anything that’s sort of like really imperative for people to know or some fun statistics or data you’d like to share?

 

Priya Radia 

The one thing I would say is just not to rush it. I think if you are able, the longer you can plan out your path, the better your outcome will be. So I think if you’re able to, I know a lot of people get to this point. They’re like, I just wanna sell it. I’m over it or it’s not working and I wanna sell it. It’s always better to sell your brand when it’s working and always better to plan ahead because if you can plan ahead, you can put in everything in place to really get the most out of it. You’re selling an asset. And I think, you know, it’s like when you sell a house, if you sell your house, when it’s in a kind of, you know, bit of a shambles, then you’re not gonna get as much of an outcome or as good of an outcome.

Then if you, you know, do it up and get, you know, all the pictures on the wall and get someone to come and make it look beautiful and take professional photos and it’s the same with selling a business. So I set it up for success early and then you’ll see some pretty amazing results. And I know a lot of people wanna sort of build to sell. And I think if you can set up those things from the start and set it up in mind, like with all of these factors in mind, in terms of like having the ecosystem in place and you know, having good repeat purchase and just all of those little elements, if you think about them, when you’re starting a new brand, which is what I am now thinking about taking time off lasted two weeks for me. And while I am still taking some time off, we’re like, what are we gonna do next? 

 

Dahna Borg  

I assume you sold it for more money than two weeks worth of time off though. <laugh>

 

Priya Radia  

Oh God. Yeah, wait.

 

Dahna Borg  

More fantastic.

 

Priya Radia  

We could have taken, oh, like a long time off. And we were supposed to be like, we’re just gonna have fun and brunch and spend time with our kids. And now we’re like, Hmm, what’s next. Okay, what’s next? But you know, we’re very much going, oh, we actually really liked the ability to build and sell. And so anything that we create in the future, even if we don’t want to sell it, I think when you build a brand with the ability to sell it, you end up doing less work and making more money because you build it with that intention of like, it’s supposed to be easy. It’s supposed to be available for someone on the other side of the world to run.

 

Dahna Borg 

I feel like that is amazing advice. And I feel like even if you have no intentions to ever sell, you should run your businesses. If you’re gonna sell it because you just don’t know what’s gonna happen, like having it set up so that it’s automated so that it could be transferred to someone at the drop of a hat would make your life so much easier. If anything ever does happen. Things and you know that you make money. Cuz a lot of people go into business and they dunno their margins and they don’t know how much profit they’re making and they just hustle and hustle. But they’re hustling for cents on the dollar or they’re going backwards. So I think if you’re kind of building a business to sell, you’re really thinking about profit margins and how can I do this easier and who can I outsource this to? And it kind of frees you up a lot.

 

Priya Radia 

Yeah, absolutely. And I think we just never know what’s gonna happen in life and you know, not to sound morbid, but like things happen, things go wrong and you know, you might get to the point where one day you either just can’t sustain it or you have to make something else a priority. I mean, this happens all the time. And with eCommerce, like you’re building an asset, you have that ability to build it as an asset from day one so that you can actually cash out. This isn’t the kind of business where it’s time for money. It’s not a personal brand and you know, you don’t need to be there. You can literally, even if you didn’t wanna sell it, you could put someone in place to upgrade that for you. But you know, sometimes people need like a huge chunk of money or one day they just get up and they’re like, I’m just so done.I don’t wanna work anymore. And eCommerce like being able to build that asset gives you the ability to take quite a lot of time off if you don’t wanna work. So I think there is some advantages to building it as an asset, taking yourself out of the picture, almost like building it so that anybody from anywhere could run it. And that you could just literally like get hit by a bus and it would still work until someone worked out that someone else needed to step in and run it. That would be like the ideal way to do it.

 

Dahna Borg  

Yeah. And I think that’s, I think that’s very wise business advice. So we’ll just get into the last questions that we ask everybody. Just to give everyone a bit of background you have now started this other brand Nine to Free Society. So we’ll hear a little bit about that in a second. But do you have any strategies or habits you follow each day to help you stay on track?

 

Priya Radia 

I do actually. And so these are game-changing for me. I wake up every day at about four or 4:30 AM and I have coffee. That’s the very first thing that I do, but I spend some time just either and it changes. It’s not like one of those morning routines where I have to follow the same, like five steps every morning, but it is very much me time. It’s time for me to do learning. So if I’m ever needing to do training to upskill myself, I do that in that time. I sometimes meditate. I do, you know, lately I’ve been doing a lot of like visualisation, just these little things. I don’t exercise at that time of day, but I know that I can’t really exercise before eating, but like I wish I could. That would be a great time to get that in. But literally waking up at that time every morning just makes me kind of a better human, you know, I have two little kids who wake up with any weird mood.
 

So it makes me like have the ability to deal with whatever they are willing to throw at me from the second they wake up. But also just to make business decisions because business is super like, it’s like a roller coaster. I don’t check my emails at that time in the morning. I try not to be reactive. And so I think whatever happens in the day, I can just see the difference between when I have woken up early and done those things, whatever it is that I felt like doing on that day, but having that hour or two hours of time to myself, then when I wake up at kind of 7:00 AM and I’m all like frazzled because I’m doing a million things, trying to get everyone out the door. So that affect me has been game-changing.

 

Dahna Borg 

Amazing. I love how everyone so different. If I wake up at four o’clock in the morning, you would not wanna talk to me <laugh> but I was gonna say, what time do you go to bed if you’re waking up at four in the morning? <laugh>

 

Priya Radia  

I try and sleep by nine. See that’s it’s I it’s really hard. Like I, most of the time it’s probably close to nine 30 or 10, but I really try and be in bed.

 

Dahna Borg  

Still, that’s still a good six, seven hours. That’s okay.

 

Priya Radia  

 I’m not living a sleep-deprived life. Like I need my sleep. It’s just shifting that. I feel like when it’s giving parents like yourself anyway, so.

 

Dahna Borg  

You’re giving yourself some time to yourself and that is important. Do you have a favourite business book?

 

Priya Radia 

Ooh, I would say that my favourite book is actually Mindset and I’ve completely forgotten the name of the author, which is terrible, but.

 

Dahna Borg 

We can put it in the show notes if you wanna.

 

Priya Radia  

Remember. We’ll put it in the show notes, Mindset was one of the greatest books for me in business and in life and in parenting. It’s just one of those brilliant books. So I think it really, I read it probably a couple of years ago before, right before I made that decision to go in for 90 days on my business, I read Mindset. And so I guess I can see a very distinct change in what I started doing once I read that book. So highly recommend it.

 

Dahna Borg  

Amazing. Do you have a favourite podcast business or just fun?

 

Priya Radia 

Right now? I am loving the podcast, My First Million Podcast with Shaan Puri and Sam Parr that is like my go-to, I think they do two or three episodes a week and I am there every single day hanging on there everywhere. I love it.

 

Dahna Borg  

Amazing. And now give us a little bit of a rundown on Nine to Fee Society and I believe you had a special offer for our listeners.

 

Priya Radia  

Yeah. So Nine to Fee Society is something I started not that long ago, but essentially it’s, it’s more of, I guess, a passion project around helping other eCommerce entrepreneurs because ever since I sort of started seeing traction in my business, I’ve had a lot of people say, how do I do this? What do I do, et cetera, etcetera. So I started this and one of the things in there, which is a thing I’m focusing on right now is called the eComm Lab. And it’s, it’s a membership where I support people to do what I’ve been talking about, which is put in all those elements of the ecosystem. So, you know, the website optimization, email marketing, there’s a bit of Facebook ads in there. It’s kind of got a whole package to try and get people a little bit of momentum so that they can get to, you know, 10 or 20K a month and then start to outsource things.

 

And I think that I’ve seen some really amazing results from the members inside. And so I’m pretty passionate about continuing to grow that. And so it doesn’t replace if people wanted to hire like a full-service ads manager of full service, email marketer. But what it does is it gives them the resources to really understand how to do some of this stuff themselves to get those first 10, 20K of sales. Cuz once you are there, you can really start to outsource, but you need to have that fundamental understanding of what you’re doing in your business. And so that’s what it does. And so if anyone does wanna join, I am more than happy to give you a special offer and I’d love for you to just DM me. The membership is closed. So it’s hard for me to just go, oh, here’s a discount code. <laugh> but you know, happy to look after you. If you say that you’ve listened to the Bright Red Marketing podcast and I will look after you and yeah, I’d love to have you in there.

 

Dahna Borg  

Amazing. Well, thank you so much for joining us. It’s been an absolute pleasure speaking to you.

 

Priya Radia  

Thanks for having me.

 

Dahna Borg  

Thank you for listening to the 30th episode of the Bright Minds of eCommerce podcast. Don’t forget below all of the links and show notes on our website. You can find everything@brightredmarketing.com.au/episode 30. The link will also be in the episode description.

Dahna Borg

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