This Amazon Seller and Pro Networker Explains Why Networking Matters Today

One of the coolest things about the E-Commerce ecosystem is the wide range of people who are taking advantage of Amazon and entrepreneurship.

Today on the AM/PM Podcast, Tim Jordan welcomes Danny McMillan. Danny’s the host of Seller Sessions, a podcast for advanced Amazon sellers and a veteran of the music industry. He’s also a renowned public speaker and Amazon Seller who’s here today to talk with Tim about network, the entrepreneurial community and what a difference having the right mindset makes for people working hard to succeed in e-commerce.

Want to know what playing “offense” during COVID-19 looks like?

Tune in for Danny’s answer.

In episode 205 of the AM/PM Podcast, Tim and Danny discuss:

• 03:15 – A Financial Paradigm Shift
• 06:15 – Relationships – The Opportunity to Meet People
• 09:30 – The Power of Network
• 11:30 – Playing the Long Game
• 14:30 – Live on Facebook During the COVID-19 Shutdown
• 17:00 – E-Commerce Community Communications
• 19:00 – Entrepreneurial Inspiration and Support are Crucial
• 20:45 – Danny’s Podcast Methodology
• 22:45 – Raw Podcast Moments and Last-Minute Guests
• 24:00 – Learning to Say No
• 26:40 – Passion for a Project Makes Everything Easier
• 27:55 – “Scaring Yourself” into a Successful Summit
• 30:00 – Fear as a Double-Edged Sword
• 34:30 – It All Comes Down to Mindset 
• 38:00 – Learning to Apply a Heavy Filter
• 39:30 – How to Get in Touch with Danny

Enjoy this episode? Be sure to check out our previous episodes for even more content to propel you to Amazon FBA Seller success! And don’t forget to “join” our Facebook Group and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes or wherever you listen to our podcast.

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Transcript

Tim Jordan: Whether you’re talking about the COVID crisis or not, when it comes to business, two things are extremely important, network, community and mindset. And in this episode, Danny McMillan from the UK is dropping some knowledge bombs on us on all of those topics. Stay tuned.

Tim Jordan: Hi, I’m Tim Jordan. And in every corner of the world, entrepreneurship is growing. So join me as I explore the stories of successes and failures. Listen in as I chat with the risk takers, the adventurous and the entrepreneurial veterans. We all have a dream of living a life, fulfilling our passions, and we want a business that doesn’t make us punch a time clock, but instead runs around the clock in the AM and the PM. So get motivated, get inspired. You’re listening to the AM/PM Podcast.

Tim Jordan: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of the AM/PM podcast, we’re glad that you’re here today. We’re super excited about the content, the topics, and the guests that we have today. Today, we’re coming to you with Danny McMillan all the way from I almost said London, but you’re not necessarily in London, aren’t you?

Danny McMillan: No, I’m originally from London, born and raised. I live in a little village now, so I decided to move out.

Tim Jordan: So if you live in the village, they call you the city boy and give you a hard time. If I moved from Alabama to Manhattan, would it kind of be the same thing?

Danny McMillan: Yeah, of course. But you know, I’m quite happy to take that when you’ve got beautiful farmland around here, so I’m up for a bit banter, so no problem.

Tim Jordan: Gotcha. Do you feel like you moved up or move down in society? Cause my entire experience with England is Downton Abbey, right? Which I’m sure is a completely perfect example and I can portray all that. When I think of my Downton Abbey folks, they’re more squiring, a little bit more highfalutin, but not as cool as Londoners. Is that still about right?

Danny McMillan: It depends on where you’re from. I’ll come from humble beginnings. Okay. There’s a big stretch from being from the council state, which is you call them the hood or borrowers, or wherever you are in the US, and then moving out from the city from tower blocks and stuff. I mean, I’m going back years and years. We only moved here last year, but we lived in a nice respectable area last year, but we went in to move far route. So now when I opened my doors, my windows, it’s farmland or to rag around, whereas before it was built up here. There’s the change there. But if we talk about where I came from originally from the child to now that’s a paradigm shift in terms of where we are today.

Tim Jordan: Right now, you are doing a lot of cool things in the e-commerce space, right? You’ve been selling e-commerce for a number of years. You host your own podcast, you have a large audience. You’re kind of a, I don’t know if you’d like the term, guru or not. I know it’s turned into a bad term, but now give me– the anti-guru. So give me the three minutes of explanation, what was the biggest, you called it a paradigm shift already, to transition you from where you were, your humble beginnings in life, where you started to being flexible enough and financially stable enough to go from London and to become a country Squire and kind of living the dream?

Danny McMillan: I think when it came down to really is when you come from– like my background, there’s no financial education. And so, poor people would generally say to you, rich people are bad or they’re evil. And it’s like an ingrained thing, which is a complete lack of understanding. And it went into I read “Rich Dad, Poor Dad,” which I realized in that book, I think it was 2011. It wasn’t that long ago. It was nine years. But my mindset towards, and my relationship with money changed heavily then when they basically said in their– money will amplify who you are. If you are a good person, you’ll do good things. You amplify that money. If you’re not, you’re going to be unbearable to deal with. It was just kind of pointing out that the by-product of having money doesn’t make you a bad person. And I think part of that becomes ingrained and that’s very common if you live on account to a state and you’re working class, and you work on building sites and you may not have a good level of education. I mean, when I left school, I left school at 15, but I had no real education. I could barely read and write when I left school and I was on life support machine. So, 15 and three months you could start work, like part time and stuff. You get your agreement for the government over here. You’re able to get your what’s called your national insurance code. And, I was working at the British gas building in London and we had a plaster boards that we’re doing suspended ceilings and stuff. And I pulled down the sheet in and half a ton of plaster boards collapsed on me. For me, that was like a massive game changer on the life support machine for a number of days that about 20% chance of living. And that was a real wake-up call if you like for me to wanting to do what I wanted to do next, you know? But yeah, there’s a lot of parts to the story where it got me here, but the upgrades come through different pockets in life.

Tim Jordan: Man. That’s– I didn’t know that about you. That’s crazy. So you went from life support, barely able to read and write. Very– I would even say almost sub blue collar, not a whole lot of, as industry would identify, not a whole lot of future potential. And obviously that hasn’t happened. And I know there’s a lot of things that you learn. There’s a lot of great sage wisdom you’ve got. Probably a whole lot of information from the school of hard knocks, so to speak, but also know that one of the biggest influences that you’ve had has been connections. I spent connections to other people it’s been relationships. When we’re looking specifically at entrepreneurism, especially related to the largest amount of this e-commerce, what has the impact been on your e-commerce business from relationships and how do you think that other people are missing out on those opportunities right now?

Danny McMillan: I think they say you’re the average of the five people use most spend time with, and they say it’s cheesy to hear. So say your network is your net worth. And if I go back to the music industry and you talk about community network and everything else, it’s imperative that you do networking in terms of, if you want to grow things, you grow as a person or you want to grow your business. There isn’t any other way around it than having a support network around you that you take care of them and they take care of you basically. So I built my whole music career on building good relationships. That’s how I grew up in the music industry. I’m inquisitive in terms, I want to learn about people and people obviously fascinate me as well outside of business. But one of the things that I’ll give you an example is one of the major reasons that I started my podcast is the opportunity to meet people like we, over here in the UK, it was very primitive compared to Amazon FBA in the US right? If we’re talking about the Amazon community, and if you can’t get on a flight and get out to see people or circulate with these people, the next best thing you can do is to bring them onto your podcast. And then you go from the podcast and then you go and speak at events. In events, you meet other people, they fly into the UK, or I get flied over to speak at other events. And it’s a continuation from there. And I think that’s probably the one that the most important thing that you can do for your business, other than having the right model for your business. Does that make sense? It goes hand in hand.

Tim Jordan: And a lot of times that model will develop based on your connections. I know a lot of people that want to have a business, they want to get started. They don’t even know how to model that, but they are influenced by people within their network and their community and their connections, which help evolve that plan and that model. So what are some of the biggest mistakes that people are making right now? Or maybe opportunities people are missing by not actually taking time and proactively trying to advance their network?

Danny McMillan: I think the biggest mistakes is you commonly hear it all the time, where people, Oh yeah, they’re just tapping each other on the back. They’re going out and they’re at these events. And when you go to these events, I’ll give an example. My agency only got started because I spoke at an event in Germany and I would have never started a PPC agency unless Ellis had walked into my life. And Ellis has done a bigger, a massive amount of the algorithm work. And I would have never got into that field unless someone like him who came along, I mean, he splits the atom. He’s an algorithm expert, he’s a data scientist. And I’m like, I’ve built a business around him, but he’s the thought leader within the business. Does that make sense? And that’s all because I went to a conference, we struck up a conversation. We hung out for the rest of the week. We got on really well. He pitched me some ideas of software he’s developing. I said, look, I’m not interested in getting to the PPC space. It’s too fierce. But then when we broke it down and looked at the model, I was like, okay, now we’ve got a differentiator. Now we’ve got something, this blue ocean. Now we can stand out from the pack. Now we’ve got a route to market and everything was there for the taking to be put into place. So–

Tim Jordan: But that didn’t happen because you had a good business model that happened. Cause you got on a plane and went and met some strangers, right?

Danny McMillan: Yeah, because I started a podcast. Dude, let people listen to podcasts. I grew an audience. They invited me to speak. I speak at this place in Germany. And I meet an American person who’s been living in Germany for the last 20 years, who’s listened to the podcast come to me and said, really like what you do. So it’s all that stuff kind of becomes very organic. But yeah, it happens. The power of network, you know?

Tim Jordan: Yeah. And network doesn’t necessarily mean you go to an eCommerce conference or an entrepreneurial conference. This can happen online. One of my past guests on the podcast here was Rodrigo Blanco in Guatemala. And I met him at 2:00 AM on a Facebook group. I met Manny Coats the very first time with a random post in a Facebook group. So there’s definitely ways of fulfilling this need and this requirement, I think, to be involved in network and create your network and it doesn’t always have to be in person. Now, I do think that in person is very important. Some of the best relationships I’ve ever had were sitting– started by sitting at a random dinner table with a stranger or going to a random conference, a random free meetup, all these things. And you’ve already alluded to it before. You said, when you first got started in this space and trying to network, there wasn’t a whole lot where you’re at. The UK wasn’t like a den of meetups for Amazon sellers. You were having to go find those other places. And you’re one of the kind of forefront, frontiersman. I don’t know if you, if that’s where I would say it, but you’re one of the leaders in the space in the UK for starting live meetups and live events in the UK, right?

Danny McMillan: Yeah. I wouldn’t say I was started we won’t be the first, the last people to start events, but my mindset back then 2015, we have to build an infrastructure. My thing was to innovate. It’s like, let’s do what they do in the US but do it in the UK, but find a way of doing it. And I’m not scared of doing stuff to lose money or break even in order to play down the road in year three, year four. That’s where my vision comes in. Everything I look at, I played a long game. I’m happy to sit on the long check. We did back in 2015 and 16, we were putting on these meetups, like the meetup.com. We innovated the prices. Because I come up with a concept it’s like, let’s bring people in, give it to them for free. We’ll bring in some sponsorship, we’ll do free beer, free pizzas and stuff like that. So we were able to get going projects that way and used to do monthly meetups. And that become a model after that. The only problem with that model is that people will come in for pizza and they come for beer and there was a higher churn rate. And this is where I moved out of that space. So, I would say what we’d done realistically was we set a bar and we’ll carry on setting the bar even higher because I want the education for people in the UK to be on par with what’s going on in the US if we can.

Tim Jordan: And this was all happening while you were running your e-commerce business and I’m going to make a speculation here, but you weren’t doing these networks and these meetups as necessarily a revenue stream, this wasn’t a business. Like you said, there were probably the times you lost money. I’ve done meetups. I’ve done workshops where I lost my butt, but the relationships and the education and the experience and all those things more than made up for it. So I think that’s extremely powerful. So all of this was going on. You started to understand you over the past several years, the power of connections, the power of relationships, the power of community. And COVID-19 smacked us in the face. Last year I traveled 250,000 miles on an airplane, actual miles. And this year I was probably going to surpass that. And my last big trip was with you in London. And I’ve got London this January and COVID-19 happened. And I remember all of the events, the workshops, the networking, the meetups that were planned for March, April, May, June. And it all came to a screeching halt. And it was brutal, especially I had my own meetups. You had your own meetups and you’ve got sponsors involved. And it was a big struggle. But for people that aren’t even involved in the event space, the networking space, and they were just going to be attendees. They were going to miss out because they get their fill, they get recharged, they get fueled up by these events. So one of the things that you did is, I don’t know how this happened. I’d like to hear the story about what’s happened. But one day I saw this post where you said dadgummit. Every time I say dadgummit, people like Bradley Sutton make fun of me for being a redneck, but dadgummit, I’m going to go live every day on Facebook and I’m going to bring guests on and we’re going to have content every single day through the heart of this pandemic. Tell me how that idea happened. Tell me how that kind of evolved and became what it was.

Danny McMillan: So basically started off with me opening my big mouth didn’t know pandemic was going to be on. And I’m like, look right now. I think it was, we’ve had this conversation of course before, but it’s like a thing when the pandemic hit week one is everyone’s feeling out what’s going on, right? So I got– the first few days in, I’ve got three businesses to manage. So what happened to you spinning those plates, COVID hits, and then your attention is on all of these things. I was just speaking at an event in Prague and I was watching as the hotel was closing and closing, more and more flights were shutting down. This is before UK shut down. I shut down two weeks before it all hit because I see what was happening in Prague. So once I see that I took my daughter out of school. My wife worked from home as well, and they’re still here now, which is another great reason to live in the countryside is very beneficial there. But getting back to that, it was like, okay, we’re around seven days a week now, the community is going to be split in half. You’re going to have people that are going to be making money in the pandemic and people are losing money. There’s a lot of Amazon sellers that they’re doing seven figures that were pushed the needle in terms of their speculation in terms of their cashflow. And they don’t have cash on hand. I do, I’ve got three diversified business cause everything around me collapsed in about 2010. And I said, I’ll never go back there. That’s why I got diversified income and always retain cash in the bank based on the set of metrics. So my thing was, what can we do here is help the community. And it’s also good for you as well. Meaning me, it’s like from a selfish point of view, I’ll get to chat with people seven days a week at 4:00 PM PST, right. We just didn’t know how long it was going to go on for. And so from that, it was therapy for me, still managed to connect and speak to everyone in the space. And people get to look over the shoulder and check out the content. And it went really, really well. And then I think last week, we didn’t get to 80 episodes. We got to 77 episodes, consistent episodes in a row. We took a break once, last Tuesday, it was when we had blackout Tuesday and I’m very much I go on my gut and from where I’m from and everything else. It was like, no, I’m going to be supporting this. So I wasn’t thinking about 80– hit in 80. Does that make sense? I was like, it felt right. So we did it. Yeah,

Tim Jordan: But you went 77 days in a row. And for those of you who are doing math, you now understand how far advanced we have to film these things from the time they’re released with all the editing. But yeah, right now June 9th is we’re recording this. You went up until last week, 77 days straight. And I was on several of those and they usually went well over an hour. I mean, you probably have 120 hours of content that you guys put out. So in a time when people needed that fuel, needed that recharge, needed that connection community networking and couldn’t have it. What do you think the effect was when people are able to have– not necessarily that handshaking communication connection, but at least see faces and see collaborations and see these conversations. Because I know the format of what you’re doing is very kind of open-ended. We’d get on and we never knew what we were going to talk about. We just started talking a lot of times there’s a group of us, so it’d be me and Steve Simonson and Norm, and we just have conversations. So how important do you think that type of format was for people to see and hear and understand and learn because you were getting the feedback we weren’t?

Danny McMillan: Yeah, so basically, raw. It goes out unedited, I won’t swear on this show, I’ve got a potty mouth and it’s raw. It’s real. And I think what that did is that we’re able to introduce newer content, like mindset Sundays. And we would talk about so much stuff going, like in depth. We’ll talk about everything from narcissistic people to fear and dealing with impostor syndrome and all these different things. And I think what’s come out of it is that it’s very easy to put a nice shine on something and package it up and send it out the door. But I think what we’d done was very raw and– the messages, the private messages reflect that I’m not one to post stuff on Facebook, such and such said they found that episode heartfelt. That’s not my style, that’s private information, but that’s part of your motivation to keep going that you know you’re doing things the right way is when you get that level of feedback on a regular basis, people thanking you, especially as– like mental health issues that people had. I know that the private messages, some of those shows has helped people through mental health issues, financial issues, where they’re able to get inspiration from the show and implement some of the techniques and strategies and what was discussed on the show. So people felt also they had somewhere that they can go to on a daily basis is their little Haven. They could ask their questions, they know it’s natural.

Tim Jordan: It was their break, their time off and their connection. So, one thing about me and the folks that I work with on a regular basis know that I’m a really good strategist, a really good visionary, sometimes organization is weak. And in fact, let me rephrase that. I suck at organization. It’s terrible. I’m the worst at it. And, you’ve already said it a couple times, but you said, this thing kind of happened by accident. You opened up your big mouth, you didn’t go into this with a full-fledged plan. And you’re also operating all these independent businesses. So you had to juggle time. So when something like this happens and we as entrepreneurs run into this all the time. We load more on our plate than we can handle. Then what we think we can handle at least. And you have just committed to going live on Facebook for at least an hour every day for 77 days. And what people don’t understand is that’s not just an hour. The days that you brought me on six, eight hours before then you’re coordinating, you’re organizing, you’re setting up a social media content. So for every hour of content that was live, there was probably three additional hours of preparation. So four hours a day, probably for 77 days,

Danny McMillan: I’ll be honest with you. The way it would work. Very, very simple is because it all gets published to the podcast. I’ve got a team around me. The bit I do is on a Sunday, I’ll sit down and I will work out just in text editor what shows we’re going to do, who’s appearing this week. Then I make up a private Facebook group or messenger and say, Hey, can you do Wednesday? And then just title it Wednesday. And there’ll be Tim, Steve, whoever, Liran, whoever was in there. And, yeah, it was just like, I’ll put that together on a Sunday. Sometimes that people can’t make it and there’s a bit of fiddling around. But other than that on Streamyard, is 10 minutes to write a quick description now.

Tim Jordan: All right. You’re trying to make it sound easy, but it’s not. And my point is it was a lot of work.

Danny McMillan: Yeah. But you know, what was easy? Is that being open when you do almost like a panel, right? There’s so many different voices there. So someone can’t make it, someone else steps in and it keeps that flow in. The other thing is as much as I try and use newer people, we would rotate guests, which makes it a bit easier to do as well. So we almost said like our staples on a weekly basis, I think the foul products, one that we had a bit of fun with, I think we’ve done five of those shows once a week. And then you were on two of those with me. Right? And then we might do off Amazon, or I do one with Steve Simonson, and so mindset Sundays is a definite and then on Saturday is a women of Amazon. And so there’s like things in place, which makes those things a lot easier. But if it’s in the traditional sense where you’re coming up with content, because it’s raw because it’s live because people can swear and do what they want. Earlier on today, we recorded, I had a power cut in the village. I’ve gone offline, I’ve got Kian and Sharon carrying on, and then it– was it canned front door when maybe UPS or someone so ease up. Do you know what I mean? It’s just really bizarre, but I think people love that. They just loved the coolness of it. And then what you do is you make a joke of it. So it’s very flexible. And there’s a couple of times when it’s like it’s tend to fall UK time and I haven’t got a guest, then I’ll message you frantically in the background in messenger, but we’ve always managed to pull it off if we intentionally went to gunshot.

Tim Jordan: You’re still telling me how easy this was. And I just keep hearing about more things, Oh, last minute, all this stuff. So here’s my question. We as entrepreneurs that do load ourselves up and we have too much going on. A lot of times, we have a hard time pulling that off and executing it. So what’s your mindset, what’s your process? What’s your strategy to deliver these big projects over a long period of time and gets stuff done because the truth is there are a lot of entrepreneurs with great ideas. I was just on a leadership call, a seller funding guys. And Ricardo was talking about somebody who has these great ideas once a lot of financial support, but doesn’t have any sales. And he said, that’s kind of typical of entrepreneurs. You have these great ideas, but can’t execute. So what is your advice to people on how to reset their mindset, how to focus, how to stay relevant and tactical in executing these large projects.

Danny McMillan: Okay. So first things first, you’ve got to say no to about 99% of everything.

Tim Jordan: Which I’m terrible at.

Danny McMillan: Yeah. I’m good at saying no to stuff, but I try and do it in apply its way possible and not shut down that communication path. I just say, look, I’ve got too much on and I won’t be able to deliver on it. The second thing is you’ve got arrived or she goes. Some people chase a pound though. They love money. Yeah. I can’t get out of bed in the morning for a pound though, for me, it comes down to free things. It’s like, does it make meaning? Right? Does it make me happy? Will it make me money? And they have to fall into that criteria, all of those free, but in that order, it doesn’t matter when the money comes. He just knows at some point in the future will come. And so that’s how I make my decisions. And then beyond that is your team. Your team is everything. If you’ve got a great team, you get out of the way. And that’s it really like, I work generally work on the businesses, not in the business. So I put outward fires. I deal with all the problems. I like you. I like to visualize, I like to sit down and visualize the project, right? What we’re going to do? How are we going to do it? This is break ground. Does it give meaning? What is he going to be different to everyone else? I think of all of those things. And I articulate that to the team I get buy in from the team we go forward. So it’s a consistent process. I think the problem that people have execution problems is generally they, like you said, they overload, they don’t have their meaning behind it. They say yes to everything. Therefore they spread their self too often. Even if they’re only working on the businesses, you can still take on too much stuff. Because the decision fatigue as well. That’s the thing, you know?

Tim Jordan: What about days when you’re just not feeling it? There are days like I just do not want to log in and check myself. There’s days I do not want to have meetings. There are days I don’t want to get out of bed, but we have to, as entrepreneurs, I think that that whole concept of the four-hour work week is very misunderstood. I won’t say it’s ridiculous. Because I think there are some concepts of outsourcing and prioritizing and not doing the work shifts, but for the most part, I’ve never met a successful entrepreneur that works four hours a week. It just doesn’t happen. So where do you find, you’ve already mentioned motivation a little bit, as long as you’re focusing on a project that kind of fills a requirement of those three things, but how do you motivate yourself beyond that? Give us some short term hacks mindset tricks. Give me something I can use. Give me a nugget right now for what the next time I’m dragging.

Danny McMillan: Okay. The thing is, I’ll give you two examples. One is the first example goes back to what I said. Does it make meaning? So if you’re passionate about something, it’s a lot easier to get out of bed in the morning. If someone waves to check under my nose and I hate the person, or hate the process, or despise anything to do with that. And I’m running to take the check, I can’t get out of bed in the morning. But if I’m passionate about something is that reason. Two is, you got to find stuff that motivate yourself. So let me give you an example. We just done the Branded by Women Conference, right? Which is a summit. Originally, it was meant to take place September 11th, in London. And so I spoke to someone and it was like, okay, I’ve never done a summit before. And I was thinking to myself, right? I’m a bit drawn out, in terms of– it’s very easy to have a team go on WeChat, WhatsApp, get them to do stuff, but what is going to get me motivated? And there’s meaning behind doing that project anyway, I didn’t need motivation for it. Right? But the other thing is when you put your money up and put your name up against it, there’s nothing quite like that. Knowing that you let yourself down and everyone else down. That– what you do is so you scare yourself into it. It’s like, okay, I’ve never done a summit before and we’re going to deliver this in seven weeks. So put a five or six person team together and delivered on a summit in seven weeks. And I’ve never done a summit before, put a load of cash out, put my name against it. And that’s where it took us. Now that fear is the motivation, the fear of failure and everything else. Does that make sense? So, sometimes you have to trick yourself into doing stuff to get that motivation going.

Tim Jordan: But, that fear can also be scary because a lot of times that fear is what holds people back.

Danny McMillan: Yeah. There’s– or adrenaline. Yeah. There’s the adrenaline. And it’s like, you want to escape. You want to scare yourself enough that you have to drink from the mug, the whatever cup up. You drink from that, you know that when you wake up in the morning, you know that you’re carrying the project that if you don’t get up this morning, you’re going to let everyone down, including yourself.

Tim Jordan: But I still think you have to take it easy because I know myself, I’ll speak for myself. There’s a lot of times when I am putting my name on stuff, whether it’s something public like this, or whether it’s a product, a product launch. And I’m not sure if it’s going to work or this new business idea or whatever it is, even if it’s not the huge public going to see it. It’s my wife or my friends or my business partners or my– and there are a lot of times when I have actually withheld on something because that fear actually stopped me. So I agree with you. I’m not disagreeing, but I think there is a fine line between, Hey, I’ve committed. I have to prove that I’m going to overcome this potential failure or this fear of potential failure. And you have to balance that with how you can’t have so much fear lined up that you’re not going to do it because I think that– you and I are very aggressive. All right. People call me insane. The stuff that I come up with, but I know that there are a lot of people. I have people in my coaching program right now that have been looking at one product for four months. You validated it like crap or get off the pot, you got to move forward. And maybe there’s a timing. Maybe what you and I are both saying are valid points, but the timing is different. So maybe the fear is a problem. And I’m just speculating here. But maybe the fear is a problem at the beginning before you commit. But once you commit that fear becomes a driving factor. Because if you had the fear of, I don’t know if I can pull this thing off in seven weeks, it might stop you. But once you commit it and said, we’re going to do it, I’ve publicly announced it. Holy crap. There’s no point in the toothpaste back in the tube. Now that fear becomes a strength, which, and of course, we’re just speculating live. I’ve never thought about this, but maybe there’s a lot of truth in the fact that the fear, the thing that holds us back the most could actually become one of our biggest tools and one of our biggest driving forces.

Danny McMillan: Yeah. But it goes back to that same thing. Again, you’ve got to find the motivation, right? I’m talking about doing a– let me talk about some of the risks I mitigated. Now, I’d never done a summit before, but my developers have put 15 of them together. So I said, you’re going to need to hold our hands and I’ll do the rainmaking stuff. I’ll speak to the sponsors. I’ll get the speakers involved. I’ll get all the channels set up in terms of marketing. Cause we’ve done national press campaign. We’ve done press release distribution with YouTube ads. We’ve done Facebook ads. We’ve done affiliate mark in, we set up with TikTok. And who else was it? Instagram as well in terms of going down those channels where we’re dialing in our signups as well. So our email drip campaigns and everything, but I just, I put a team together and just basically went to it. So I suppose you can scare yourself into doing stuff cause you haven’t done it before, but then your interest in people say, well, he’s done 15 of them. If he holds my hands, we’ll work our way through it. So there is some taken off the plate there. It’s not like I’ve turned man said, all right, I’m scared of heights. And I’m going to jump out of the plane. And I’m going to prepare myself for that because that is something I won’t do. I don’t care how scared you may think I am or not. You’ll never get in me going up ladders or jumping out of planes for no love, no money. Does that make sense? I’ll put a load of cash up and my name up against something as speculation is like, right. That’s my window. And I’ve got to hit the numbers. I’ve got to do what I need to do to make that a success. So you are weighing up some of it. But the point was is that I think we’ve in COVID people were lounging around and freezing. It didn’t know what to do. And momentum is everything. I think what people forget is that no matter how much money you have, you can be the richest person in the graveyard. But I think what happens is people think they get money. And then that’s when the happiness comes. Well, happiness comes from progress and momentum. And so I felt the need of mid COVID is like, I’m getting a bit stale here. I need to get motivated. I need to do stuff. Why don’t I do this? Scare myself, do go into the unknown, get the adrenaline running and deliver on this project. Does that make sense? So I wasn’t going total deaf into being absolutely scared.

Tim Jordan: Yeah. It makes complete sense. That’s awesome. It’s about time we need to kind of wrap this thing up because people start losing attention and then I get complaints all the time. Make them shorter. My brother in law, who’s not in eCommerce. He sent me a text message the other day. “Hey, have you done any market research to see if shorter podcast episodes would be popular?” I want to slap him. No, of course we’ve done that anyways. But before we wrap up, let me just ask you this. You’re talking to tens of thousands of listeners right now, right? We are finally starting to see some of the end of the light from the initial lockdown. I’m not going to say into the light from the COVID pandemic. And there may be additional lockdowns later in the year, but the sun is kind of rising for a lot of people. Just yesterday, you guys know when we record this– just yesterday, New York city started unlocking. I know other countries are, what would you tell people that are– let’s just say e-commerce entrepreneurs right now that have been waiting to see how the environment played out. Because I know a lot of people were being a little bit timid. They didn’t know how the economy was going to react to stuff, but you’re talking to tens of thousands of listeners right now. We’re starting to come out of the initial COVID lockdown phase. What would you tell people to inspire them, encourage them and tell them to get their butts in gear and keep moving?

Danny McMillan: It’s all down to mindset. Some of the best companies were built in a recession and the down term don’t think for one second, we’re not going to enter some level of recession, but it all comes down to your mindset. I said to you, week one, a buttoned down the highchair dealt with low. The staff had to make some real serious decisions. And then I said to you, and I said to others, whilst they’ve one’s on defense, I’m on offense. And it all comes down to your mindset. You’ve got to go out there and do your best, right? You need to look at why when everyone’s around you and their furlough, and their staff and their mind is like, okay, let’s go back into the hole. But don’t think like that. Think creatively. Think of why you want doing that. If I do this, there’s less competition. So I’m not saying burn free cash. I’m not saying being using stupidity.

Tim Jordan: Yeah. Don’t be reckless.

Danny McMillan: Don’t be reckless. But the way that you think stuff, like my accountant says to me, she looks after three of my businesses, she said, you’re the only person I’ve spoken to who seemed upbeat and not at the term, your new one, because they want to blame their account and they want to furlough their staff and they went, do you want to furlough anyone? I went, no chance, not a million chance in the world. I’d rather create a new service or sell another product. Then think like that. That’s just a choice. That is just an absolute mindset thing. And this is what it comes down to. And people might listen to go, he’s crazy, blah, blah, blah. But try it. Try and think about is like, instead of thinking about, Oh, well we won’t do this and we’ll pull back off a marketing budget. Think about why actually what if I do push? What about if there are customers out there? What about if I do come up with that? So I definitely think it comes down to a mindset thing without shadow of a doubt. Get your confidence in there. Think about what you want to do. If you’ve got a good idea, put some money behind it and go for it.

Tim Jordan: And like we talked about before, make sure that you’re leaning on your brothers and sisters in the community, whether it’s a bunch of strangers in the Facebook group or a local meetup that you have, or anybody else that’s an entrepreneur. I tell people the network that we’re talking about especially in this episode is not, unfortunately your friends and family, it’s not. It’s a very different network. When we’re talking about business growth and we’re talking about entrepreneurism. Many of us don’t have commonality within our family and friends. My– I kid you guys not, my wife has never listened to a single podcast episode I’ve ever done from back in the day when I was doing Legion radio to all the ones I’ve been a guest on to any of these. And she may never, she has no interest in it. So even if I’m close with my family, my close friends, that’s not the same as a business network in a business circle. So make sure you’re doing that because if you’re going to push the needle, like Danny here is talking about, it’s not always safe to go at it alone, but there are a lot of people out there that are willing to help you, support you, that you can learn from. And hopefully you can teach him as well.

Danny McMillan: It goes back to the “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” thing. As a kid, brought up my mentality would have been completely different by what people feed around you. Right? So going back to network thing, imagine going somewhere and speaking to people that inspire you and say, you can do this, or if you tried this, or what about if I open this door for you? Right? That’s a lot different than maybe a family member got, or Dan it’s a recession, play it safe. You know, don’t spend any money. Don’t do that. Don’t get new clients, keep hold of what you got. And that can be fed into you. And I’m not saying that’s right or wrong, but it’s how you look at it, take information. I feel around 95% of the information, I love getting information in, but I will discard 95% of it because there’s always something that’s going to go that works. But you have to apply a heavy filter into it and take these decisions onto yourself. And it might just be that over time, that I have a ton of failures behind me. And I’ve got to the point where it doesn’t really matter. As long as it’s not fate or you live to fight another day, it’s worth having that punk. It’s worth putting something behind it. But obviously think about what you’re doing and include how you see things in terms of your mindset.

Tim Jordan: Amen. Well, thank you guys for listening to another episode of AM/PM Podcast. I’m going to ask just completely open solicited favor. If you like this podcast, if you like the content that we’ve done in past episodes, if you like this episode, you like what Danny’s brought to the table for us, go ahead and review this podcast. We’ve been looking at some metrics on the podcast and the more reviews you get, it’s kind of like e-commerce products. The more it’s shown to other people. So whether you’re listening on iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, whatever it is, drop a thumbs up, likes and if you would be so kind, it would be amazing if you leave a review, that would be awesome, good or bad. We want to hear it all. If we’re doing something terrible, that negative review’s going to help us adjust it to what you guys want to hear. So, Danny, thank you so much for being on. If people want to get in touch with you, how do they find you?

Danny McMillan: Easy. Just go to sellersessions.com, or drop me an email to [email protected].

Tim Jordan: Awesome. Thank you, Danny. It’s been awesome getting to know you over the past, especially year, but probably a year or two. And I cannot wait to come back to London and hang out again. When all this stuff passes by, we’ve got some catching up to do for sure.

Danny McMillan: Definitely. Take care, guys.

Tim Jordan: All right. Thanks for listening to the episode. We’ll see you guys on the next one.