From Chaos to Clarity: How to Build a Business you Don't Hate

Jeffro (00:01.998)

Welcome back to Digital Dominance. Here’s a question. What if you could build a business that didn’t feel like a constant grind? A business so dialed in that you never feel the need to escape from it. Well, that’s exactly what my guest today, Andrew HanDoza, better known as Doza, helps his clients achieve. As the founder of Geronimo Academy, Doza specializes in turning chaotic fitness businesses into streamlined seven-figure machines. And he’s on a mission to help business owners attract the right clients, systematize their operations, and scale in a way that doesn’t lead to burnout and on this episode, we’re going to get into how to build a seven figure business without working 24 seven, how to overcome the adversity and the mindset shifts that are needed for real success. We’re to talk about the separation Sunday strategy, which is how the best leaders get ahead and how to create a business you actually love running so you don’t feel the need to escape it. So if you’re a business owner looking for practical strategies to grow without burning out, get ready to take some notes. Thank you for joining me today, Dozo. Welcome to the show.

Doza (00:56.344)

Thanks man. Pumps.

Jeffro (00:58.828)

Yeah, mean, Doza, I got to start with this. You know, there’s so many business owners that say they want to scale, but when they try, they just end up working more. So in your opinion, what’s the real key to growing without getting trapped in that day to day?

Doza (01:11.694)

The biggest mistake that I see people making, we’ve worked with over a thousand business owners, small business owners, service-based business owners, is that they haven’t actually sat down to decide about the design of the business that they want to build. And so what happens is they just get stuck in this whirlwind, this whirlwind of business, where the days become weeks, works become months, months become years. And they look up every now and again and the business really hasn’t moved forward.

So I think that’s the first thing is they’ve got to really make the decision. You know, I empower business owners and say you, you’re the CEO, but you’re also the C, you know, the chief want officer, what do you actually want? What do you actually want? And rarely, Jeff, do they actually know. So there’s an exercise that we go through around that. Just making sure that that they actually design something they love rather than end up, you know, with something they

Jeffro (02:07.065)

Why is that a hard question for people to answer? Is it because they don’t actually know or they are afraid of saying that they want something? They’re not allowing themselves to want?

Doza (02:14.858)

Yeah, yeah, I think it’s a bit of both, man. I think it is because, well, first thing is you can’t be what you haven’t seen, right? So I don’t think they’ve seen what they want to build just yet. And if they have, I think the biggest thing that we have to do with our clients is we’ve got to encourage them, give them permission, dare to dream. And they kind of, you know, when they write down numbers, go, is that okay? that big enough? It’s not about me, man. It’s like, what do you want?

Jeffro (02:41.112)

Hehehe.

Doza (02:44.674)

What do you want? Like, and the third thing is no one’s really ever shown them how to do it.

Cause it’s not about reading a book or that shelf help stuff. It’s actually frameworks to get into the future and write it as if you’re already there and then track back and figure out what does that look like on a day-to-day basis.

Jeffro (03:08.985)

Yeah. Yeah. Well, there’s, there’s obviously a lot of moving parts too, and different pieces that you have to have in place. So tactics are one tools, you know, there’s mindset shifts, there’s delegation, like all of these things have to be in place and working. And if you’re, I don’t know, you got a mental block in certain areas, you’re going to run up against that wall and you won’t know why.

Doza (03:30.318)

Yeah, and I think sometimes as well, man, like when we actually do the research around the different levels of subconsciousness, you know, most business owners, small business owners, service based business owners, particularly spend most of their time in what’s considered the fight or flight zone. And when we get in that zone, our IQ actually drops in those moments, because like different parts of the brain, like we don’t access, you know, the full, the full power of the brain.

So by nature, we don’t make the best decisions. We don’t make the best long-term decisions. it’s hard, like Dr. Joe Dispenser always talks about this. It’s hard to create a future out of scarcity and out of fight or flight. So it’s just making sure that, it’s just making sure. And like, here’s a real tactical tip that I work with all my top leaders on. I myself am no different to anyone else. I also struggled.

Jeffro (04:12.117)

Mm-hmm. Right.

Doza (04:27.064)

to create from a place of scarcity. So I take myself away for three solo retreats a year. I’ve just come back from one where I’ve started writing a shitty first draft of my first book and it’s only there, Jeffery like, I can’t even tell you dude, like it took me a day to just uncoil. The second day, the second day, dude.

Jeffro (04:49.079)

Sure, yeah.

Doza (04:53.568)

like just stuff was happening in my head and I was like, my god, and I just got at about three o’clock on the second day, this tends to happen. I just get this massive download. Massive download and I was just tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, I just couldn’t stop man. I could not stop. And the stuff that came out of me was like, I was like, this is this is now we’re getting into that deep zone. Now we’re getting into that level of like, and that’s, you know, if you’re a leader, listen to this. That’s really the value of us as leaders in our companies is hopping into a time machine 18 months from now, three years, five years from now, what’s it look like? And then bringing that future to today.

Jeffro (05:33.717)

Yeah. How do you help owners give themselves permission to take that break? Because I think that’s part of why we stay there is we told ourselves that if I leave, it’s going to fall apart or I can’t trust my team. I can’t delegate this because they’re not going to do it the right way. Any excuse or reason. Some of those may be valid, but at the same time, like you said, it’s so important to get out of that fight or flight zone so that you can have clear thoughts and plan and make a better way forward.

Doza (05:45.976)

Totally.

Yeah.

Doza (05:52.61)

Yeah, valid.

Doza (06:02.496)

Yep. We almost forced them to by extraction. I’m a I’m a big dude. I’m six, three to 40 pounds, suppose you guys are in pounds. We we’ve got frameworks for everything. Like you need to have a system like for me to do the CEO retreats takes takes about four months like the first one took about six months of planning and now I can get that down to about two months of planning. And the beauty is like, eventually you’ll get to a stage where on the Thursday, was a Wednesday, Thursday, Friday home on the Saturday. On the Thursday, we had a record sales, sales day as record revenue day, single day, biggest ever in, in drawing my history. And I wasn’t even there. I wasn’t even online. So that’s the future. What it can look like. The first thing dude is, is we do this thing called, you know, our vision roadmap where we actually work with our clients to get in a time machine go five years out. Five years is tends to be about the stretch. I know people do 25 years, these guys struggle to think past next week. Okay, so to get five years out feels like an eternity for these guys. And then there’s four main areas that we want them to really permission to dream and write stuff down. What does your life look like in your work? What does your life look like in your wealth? What does your life look like personally in terms of what you have achieved, it’s already happened. And what’s it look like in terms of your relationships? Because a lot of the times, particularly in small business and service based businesses, it’s pretty hard to separate. don’t actually, I don’t actually agree with like, keep work separate. Like how the fuck do you do that? I don’t know how to do that. So, corrected, correct. So, so those four areas, we talk about what does it look like five years from now?

Jeffro (07:47.883)

I need work life harmony, not work life balance.

Doza (07:56.846)

And that’s the biggest thing that is heavy lifting. We tend to do this in a room of these guys or in a zoom room music on we do it together. Otherwise they’ll just never confront it. Okay. And the biggest thing we tell them is permission to dream guys. Yes. Yes. Go big. Yes. Like whatever you want. This is not about shoulds. What I think you should do what Jeffery thinks you should do. This is what you actually want. And you see them like resist at the start because they’re on almost like a bodily reaction, but eventually, eventually, you see their shoulders drop and they get excited that their chest puffs up and they actually start writing stuff down. And then it starts to build momentum. So we go, what’s it look like in five years? And then based on that, what’s it need to look like? What’s the one year version? And then we come up with our power 12, which I have a poster template that I fill out on Canva. And then now it’s up on their wall, I can drop in a photo of what they look like.

Jeffro (08:42.485)

Mm-hmm.

Doza (08:54.706)

And every single day, we encourage them to look at that poster three times a day to trigger that vision. And then to move into what does that look like in terms of traction? Because here’s the big idea. Vision without traction is hallucination. And traction without vision is burnout. And that’s that tends to be where they live.

The traction is the to-do list, is the never ending, like ticking things off the list, getting addicted to the dopamine hit. But without that vision, without the purpose of why we’re doing this, this is why I feel like shit.

Jeffro (09:33.343)

Well, because you need that so you can course correct along the way, right? You’re still going to be working hard, but you’re going to make decisions differently when you know that if that’s where I want to go, okay, I’m going to choose this option instead of this one because this one gets me closer to that, right?

Doza (09:47.564)

Yeah, there’s the direction that it gives you. And it also gives you the meaning for why you’re doing what you’re doing. And that, you know, when you wake up every single morning with a purpose, and there’s like those mission-made businesses, which I’m a big fan of, then, you know, burnout and overwhelm just turns into more problem solving. Like what, like now you’re playing with puzzles and you tend to gamify it a bit more.

Jeffro (10:14.452)

Well, I imagine you’ve gone through your own share of adversity and challenges in business. I think it’ll be interesting to hear from you if there’s a moment where you really had to dig deep, walk us through that and what did you learn from it?

Doza (10:28.262)

2022, December the sixth, I think it was. I, this is 7.50 in the morning. I’m at my favorite cafe doing my normal morning deep work routine. It was like a thousand mornings just like it.

I had a heart attack.

Doza (10:49.78)

And it was called a STEMI. So a STEMI heart attack is the most common symptom of a STEMI is a dead body. Now I had 15 minutes to live.

Doza (11:05.294)

I remember sitting, I remember lying down on this, the operating table and the operation in the operating theater with all these surgeons yelling at me. was so stimulating. I was freezing. I had no, like it was a hundred percent blocked one of my arteries and the other two other arteries, the two main arteries, the other two main arteries were 70 % blocked and my body was starting to shut down.

The one thing that I kept remembering to myself was if I get through this, it didn’t matter. The Range Rover I drove did matter. How many zeros in my bank account didn’t matter. Like I can’t give these people the money that I had to save me right now. If it was going to happen, it was just, you know, the miracle of whatever, whoever you believe in. But I had enough in me to say to myself, I’m going to make a deal with myself because I realized I was at that time I was working. I would have died working on a business that I hated. And I said to myself, if I get through this and get to the other side, if I live, things are going to be different. So this is when I went through this exercise myself. And now I’ve taught hundreds and hundreds of business owners how to do this to fucking to shake themselves out of this, you know sleepwalking that they’re doing in their business and go no, what is the business you want? Because I don’t want them to go through what I did into like almost die working on a business that I fucking hate it. So instead, what is it that you want to build? What does your life look like? What’s the 10x version of what your life looks like? And yes, you can, like let’s fucking like let’s go for it. But it says that this isn’t just hopes and goals. We’ve got to build the systems underneath that to make sure that happens. And the biggest system that I teach people is separation Sunday.

Jeffro (12:52.775)

Great phrase. Tell us what it looks, what does that look like? How does somebody start doing that?

Doza (12:54.892)

Yeah. Well, yeah. So separation Sunday’s design like, as when I got it when I was in recovery from that heart attack, you know, I couldn’t walk for the first 90 days, I couldn’t. It was just a mission to get to the end of my driveway and back and then eventually walk down the road. And I’m a guy who I train six days a week, you know, all that sort of stuff.

I start from aside from watching Yellowstone. I also went deep into productivity and thoughts myself right. Okay, when I get back into this and when my vocab comes back and when the mind comes back from the trauma from all that kind of stuff, I want to make sure that I spend my days living, not maintaining like I’m in the sequel now, Jeff wrote, dude, I’m in the bonus round, like I’m not gonna fucking waste it, man. And so I’m, I’m trying to encourage everyone to like,

Jeffro (13:42.099)

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Jeffro (13:46.845)

Thank

Doza (13:50.656)

Maybe we don’t know like we don’t all get to have a sequel, right? So what would you change if you had a second life? Cool. Now change it now.

So the first thing I did was I did this five year thing. What does my life look like in five years time? I’m gonna stop playing small. I’m gonna dare to dream all those things that I was like the shoulds, you know, I should be doing this, I should be doing this, I should be doing this. I banned the word should. I was like, I’m like, I have done it. I’ve already gone into the future. I have done it five years from now. Okay. Those four areas, work, wealth, personal and relationships. They’re my big four. Five years.

Jeffro (14:14.194)

Mm-hmm.

Doza (14:29.336)

bring it back to one year, what’s it look like in terms of a goal? And the goal needs to be, this is probably the biggest thing that I really want to stress to people. It’s got to be specific so I can tick it off. So if you’re going to show me your Power 12, it needs to be a tickable box. It’s not just get healthier. For me, the cardiologist said, my job is to make sure you stay alive with these tablets. Your job is to lose 10 kilos. I said, I’ll lose 11. So that was all my thing. Tick, done. I’ve got it here. Run 10 kilometers.

Jeffro (14:52.348)

Yeah.

Doza (14:57.986)

Which was mind blowing for me to do because I couldn’t at the time I wrote 10 K’s. I couldn’t walk to my letterbox.

So take that off. Like tickable things. now I’m down to the, yeah. So now I’m down to the year. Now on a Sunday, this is how it works. Because you’ve got those two things, every single Sunday is a check-in that I do with myself. And the way that I’ve done it, I’m not a massive believer in like three hour morning routines. This thing, I’ve got this thing, the timer for separation Sunday is the time it takes you to go to the,

Jeffro (15:10.94)

Something specific.

Doza (15:35.128)

to order your coffee and drink it. That’s the timer. So it’s about 20 minutes. So what I do, and I have a template, which I’m happy to give away for free. We normally charge for this, but for your audience, as a guest on the podcast, if people want to go to my Instagram account, which is instagram.com, obviously, hey.Doza, hey Doza, hey.Doza, and hit follow and then message me so I see it. Message me Sunday.

Jeffro (15:47.602)

Yeah, thank you.

Doza (16:03.628)

and I’ll get my team to send over the free training and the actual template that all my top clients use. So what you do is the first thing you do is you do a review preview. You go through what we call the rocks.

The diamonds and the stars, which is basically the rocks are like, where were the learnings from last week? Those like, those constraints, most people like avoid constraints. I said, no, lean into it. That’s your feedback. Lean into it, particularly if you get frustrated like I do. And I know a lot of small business owners get frustrated, right? So just lean into it. Don’t ignore it. Because that’s a feedback loop. Look for the signal in that. Okay. Write it down. What’s the learning? Then the diamonds are what were the wins from last week as it pertains to your goals? What were the wins from last week? And I want to see three in there three distinct ones, okay? And then the stars are what are you looking forward to from this week? What are you looking forward to for the week here? When you look at your calendar, what are you looking forward to for the week here? So that what that does is it kind of primes us into a, an abundant state to go into the next part, which is what I call the win the week. So the win the week is across those four categories, I want to know specifically, Jeffery, what has happened by Friday? So it’s done, you know, in future tense.

What has happened for you to say, I’ve won the week in those four categories to move you forward, like to be able to tick off those goals. This isn’t your to-do list. This is what has happened. So you’ve made 30 sales. You’ve dropped a kilo or a pound. You’ve done a three zone two on the Zwift, right? You’ve invested $2,000 into your ETF fund.

Jeffro (17:18.256)

Mm-hmm.

Doza (17:45.1)

whatever it is, but they’ve got to be like actionable needle moving things.

And then, so now we’re at the win the week level across those four categories. You’ve decided what the week is look like. You’ve decided how you’re going to judge whether you’ve won the week or not. Okay. And then the, and then to get that down to the day level, every night we turn the weekly view into a, am I going to do tomorrow? And we plan the perfect day the night before. That’s the biggest unlock. That’s the biggest unlock is you plan the perfect day the night before.

Jeffro (18:00.827)

Mm-hmm.

Doza (18:19.426)

you’ve already got a head start. So when you wake up and you do your deep work in the morning, right, as our mutual friend Dan Martell says, that first 90 minutes of the day, you need to violently attack that goal violently.

And then, so every day you commit to three, which is like the three things that you’re gonna do to move you closer to hitting those things. And then by Friday, dude, in my companies, Fridays, the vibe on Fridays is at a whole nother level because it’s fuck your Friday. Right? And we call it fuck your Friday because I want people to go, fuck yeah, I done that, fuck yeah, I did that, fuck yeah, I did that. Like they’ve ticked stuff off there in the week.

Jeffro (18:52.25)

Nice.

Jeffro (19:00.655)

Mm-hmm.

Doza (19:00.696)

And then when you sit down on the Sunday again, you review last and it just, it’s this cycle, dude, I can’t tell you like this has been the most powerful 20 minute routine that all my top clients use every single week to the point where if they don’t do it, they notice it. Their team notices it. They don’t, they feel restless. They don’t, they feel naked. Like they feel like they haven’t done something. Yeah.

Jeffro (19:15.674)

Mm-hmm.

Doza (19:27.598)

So yeah, if your audience wants to grab that, they’re more than welcome to grab that. Just head over to my Instagram and then message me Sunday. Make sure you hit follow so I can actually see it. Otherwise you’ll go into message requests.

Jeffro (19:38.352)

All right. Well, that’s awesome. And thank you for offering that guys. So we’ll put that in the show notes as well, just to remind you how to do that and how to find the Instagram account. But guys, I mean, this is basically a mini masterclass here on high level productivity for anybody, business owners, know, personal life like this. You can set goals for anything here. Right. And I love Doza how this isn’t just like, you know, when you’re talking about these things, there’s not just a nice poster on the wall. This comes from a place of deep personal conviction because you’ve gone through it to the point of almost dying in a business that you hated. I mean, that obviously comes through and I hope people are hearing that if they’re just listening and not watching the video. guys, this is real stuff and there is no reason you can’t just start today. You don’t need to wait till you have a heart attack. You just got to decide, I’m going to stop wasting my life or messing around with these distractions or whatever and start making it happen. So, I love that. Thanks for going through all that for me. How old were you, by the way, when you had the heart attack? 40. Okay.

Doza (20:10.574)

Correct.

Doza (20:29.72)

Yeah.

Doza (20:34.606)

40.

Jeffro (20:37.806)

Man.

Doza (20:38.998)

I know. Crazy man. Nah, it’s crazy. Yeah, it, it, yeah, it broke a record at the local hospital, which is not a good record to break, but.

Jeffro (20:41.113)

Crazy, that’s not that old. I’m 40, personally.

Jeffro (20:50.382)

No. All right, well, we’ve got a couple more minutes here. Before we wrap up, let me see. I know we also promised the listeners that we talk a little bit about branding and marketing specifically. we’ve now laid the groundwork for getting stuff done and moving forward in your business. what’s, let’s say, what’s one of the most underrated strategies that a business owner should be using in their business in terms of actual marketing?

Doza (20:52.152)

Yeah.

Doza (21:01.805)

Yeah.

Doza (21:05.933)

Yep.

Doza (21:15.352)

Well, can I start this by giving you, I asked my sales team to send me the updated stats on where our sales are coming from right now, okay? Which is really important. So we’ve just hit a sales record month here, and it’s coming from places that I almost feel like no one’s talking about. Okay, so month to day total, SPC, we’ve got 30 % of our sales from our, like, so we track first point and last point. So there’s a clue for people. In terms of your tracking,

Jeffro (21:22.891)

Yeah.

Doza (21:42.646)

Like you’ve got to know your numbers. You’ve got to know where this money’s coming from. We track first point, last point. these are last point stats. So where did the lead come from at its last point? What was the trigger on the last point? Sell by chat is 30%.

Jeffro (21:59.47)

Okay.

Doza (22:00.166)

Now that, if I just do a quick back of the napkin maths here, our average lifetime value is about 30 grand. So we’ve sold 10 from that. So that’s $300,000 from Sellbo chat. Jeff wrote, where the hell did that come from? where the, and when I say that it’s like through Instagram, but it’s like we push content out there. We do some things on paid people come over, they hit follow and then my team engage. I’ve got two charters now. I’ve got an opener and two charters.

Jeffro (22:14.83)

You

Jeffro (22:19.212)

Yeah.

Doza (22:27.918)

And that has come out of nowhere. Honestly. Honestly, it’s crazy. 30 % have come from call and set. So this is a big thing that I see. I one of the biggest mistakes a lot of small businesses make is they spend all their effort to try and get a lead. When the lead drops in, they just, they don’t pick up the phone and make a call. 30 % of our sales. So another, you know, 300 grand this month has come from

Jeffro (22:32.91)

Yeah, that’s amazing.

Doza (22:57.198)

calling the leads and setting an appointment. So these are leads that didn’t set themselves, they didn’t book in themselves. So a lot of people wouldn’t have even touched them, they just kind of sent them another email and see if they purchased. I’m telling you, sales is a contact sport.

Doza (23:14.286)

Uh, 20 % have come from the bookings straight from the ads. 10 % has come from our podcast. We’ve done a hundred episodes. We’ve got our own pod, 10 % from emails and 3 % from a workshop that I just did yesterday. My point here dude is I think the unlock is to combine what you talk about in terms of digital, like to get your digital on point as well as old school sales and getting on the phones. If you want to, if you want to, this is our personal experience and what we teach.

in our academy, if you want to 100x your conversion rates, you’ve got to call leads within the first five minutes. Almost as if they’re still on the website. That’s the game you want to play. The Harvard stats. So the Harvard stats.

Doza (24:07.948)

Yeah, yeah. Okay, so yeah, so that we’ve got some pick up stats that we got from Harvard. If you call your leads within the first five minutes, you are 100 times more likely to get a conversation a successful conversation than if you call just 30 minutes later. Now that hundred times drops down to if you called within one hour, so not five minutes, but now it’s an hour’s gone by that hundred X that hundred times.

drops dramatically down to only seven times. Still good, like one hour is still better than a day, but it’s not a hundred times. Now, if you wait one day, you’re 60 times less likely to get in contact with that lead than in that first hour. And if it’s after a day, it’s in good luck territory.

Jeffro (24:57.794)

That’s.

It’s crazy. And I love that you have the specific stats for this. And guys, if you’re listening and you’re like, I don’t know my revenue numbers by channel or first point, last point, like, okay, that’s a good indication. Maybe you should track stuff better because when you measure stuff, you can improve it, right? And this is a great example of knowing all that because now you can double down on the stuff that’s working, right? And fix the stuff that’s broken.

Doza (25:23.212)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Jeffro (25:27.594)

All right, well, we are getting to the end of our time here, Doza. I’m so glad you came on the show today. I love talking about this stuff. I love hearing your story and the energy that you’re bringing. I know this has been helpful for our listeners. So guys, if you want to connect with Doza, his websites, Instagram and podcast links will all be in the show notes. So make sure you reach out to him. Last question for you, Doza. If someone’s listening to this and they’re stuck, overwhelmed, they’re just not where they want to be. What’s your one simple shift that you recommend for them they can make to start seeing real results?

Doza (25:57.422)

Book yourself in for a coffee date, take yourself out of the business, sit down and allow yourself to dream and decide. You’ve got to decide. Like the most amazing, most fulfilling business is absolutely within your reach. The first thing you need to do for everyone around you is to decide what you want. Once you decide what you want, then just the universe starts kind of reordering for you. trust me, you’re probably not like the most fun at home, you’re probably not the most fun at work either. Everyone around you wants you to do this. Okay, so take the guilt out of it.

Jeffro (26:32.6)

That’s awesome. So I hope you guys do that. I’m going to do that too. I know I tried to, but it is hard and we can’t just make excuses. We got to say this is make or break territory, right? No excuses. So thanks again, Dozer, for being here. Thanks to all you guys for listening. Figure out what you’re going to do to separate yourself from the competition, when you’re going to find that time to dream. And I’ll see you guys all back here for the next episode of Digital Dominance. Take care.

Doza (26:40.28)

Gotta do it.

Doza (26:54.904)

Thanks, Jeffrey. See you, mate. Bye-bye.