Democratizing Proactive Wellness with Jim Donnelly: An EOFire Classic from 2021

0:01Boom! Shake the room, Fire Nation. JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire. brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals with great shows like Business Made Simple. Today, we're pulling a classic episode from the archives and we'll be breaking down how to democratize proactive wellness. To drop these value bombs, I brought to Jim Donnelly and to EO Fire Studios. Jim is the co-founder and CEO of Restore Hyper Wellness, the leading proactive wellness company in the country. Restore Hyper Wellness is on a mission to make proactive wellness accessible and affordable so people can do more of what they love to do.

0:37And today, Fire Nation will talk about how success doesn't have to change you if you live a fulfilled, mission-driven, and good life. How to know yourself, know what you're good at, and pull up people that are around you. So important, Fire Nation. And a lot more as soon as we get back from thanking our sponsors. The Next Wave, your chief AI officer, hosted by Matt Wolf and Nathan Lands, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Matt and Nathan are leading AI creators in your guiding light in the AI and technology frontier. AI technology is transforming the way we do business and the media landscape is fragmented.

1:16The Next Wave strives to be the leading podcast on AI technology and how you can apply it to growing your business. Listen to The Next Wave wherever you get your podcasts. Ever thought about giving a TEDx talk? It's one of the most powerful ways to share your message with the world. And four-time TEDx speaker, Taylor Conroy from Thought Leader can help you get there. Visit thought-leader.com slash fire to join Taylor's free training where he teaches you how to land a TEDx talk and spread your message to millions. Jim, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with.

1:55I think that probably the biggest thing that I would generally disagree with is that you have to change in any meaningful way. You know, I know a lot of successful people, they get a lot of money and they do fundamentally change. They start to focus on the money piece of it and what that does. And they do some silly things, which is fine. If you make money, you ought to have the ability to spend it and do what you want. I think they start to change some of their relationships. They become almost a different person. I personally don't think that's necessary. Now, having said that, I do think you do have to change how people access you.

2:44I do think you have to put some guardrails around your time because you're being asked by a lot of people to do things. But, you know, I feel like I've become successful and been successful for a long time. And I always say I'm married to the same woman. I drive the same truck. I treat my kids the same. I live in the same house. And so I don't necessarily think success has to fundamentally change you if you're living the kind of life that is fulfilling and the kind of life that's mission driven and the kind of life that provides you all the sort of satisfaction you need. already. Fire Nation, authenticity, genuineness.

3:24The worst advice you will ever get is fake it till you make it. Nobody wants a fake or we can smile them literally a mile away through their voice, through their facial actions. We can just smell it through their pheromones. I mean, you need to be authentic, transparent, and genuine to who you are if you really want to achieve not only the financial freedom, but also the lifestyle freedom that I know you're after. So we're talking about democratizing proactive wellness today, Jim, let's talk about this, but I think to really start off on the right foot, break it down for fire nation. What the heck is proactive wellness?

4:02We talk about the hyper wellness lifestyle. That's something that we've trademarked and something we've built our business around, but the hyper wellness lifestyle starts with number one, making health a priority. If you're going to make a big impact on your health, You need to make it job one. Doesn't mean you have to make it onerous. Doesn't mean you have to make it unpleasant, but you do have to make it a priority. Number two, you have to control the things that you control and not worry about things that are outside of your control. So we're obviously living in a pandemic. And so this is top of mind for people.

4:42But what we say is, you know, sleep better. Get out in the sun. Put good things in your body. Do the healthy stressors like heat and cold that are going to push your body to do good things when it comes to health and wellness. So all of these things that are obvious that you can control in terms of how often you do them, how frequently you do them, those are the things that we're talking about. You know, people talk about things like, well, genetically, you know, my family has a history of this and that. Listen, you can't control your genetics. You can't control some of those things. But you also shouldn't let those things hold you back because the reality of it is genetics is a much smaller part in terms of what's going to happen to you in terms of your health trajectory than the things you can control.

5:34So Fire Nation, I'm not trying to brag here, but I just listen to and consume the content of the right people like Jim and like other health individuals in my life. So because I listen to the right people and read the right content and just overall consume the right content, my morning routine is amazing. I take my dog out on a two and a half mile walk first thing, getting the fresh air, the sun here in Puerto Rico, getting that blue sky into my retina. so my cortisol spiking, then I'm going downstairs, hitting the weights, then I'm in my red light therapy, then I'm in my infrared sauna for 30 minutes, then I'm in my cold plunge for three minutes.

6:11I'm doing all these things every single morning and just doing it once or twice isn't going to add up to big success, but doing it 350 plus days per year, that will add up to success over time. And so it is these little things that we can start putting into our routines, Fire Nation. I didn't start out with that morning routine. I started out with just walking my dog. And then I added, okay, now I'm going to do weights. And then I kept adding things slowly as I could get into my routine and then make it a habit. So you love the phrase, Jim, democratize wellness. What the heck does it mean to democratize wellness?

6:50Many of the things in the medical space and the wellness space are very expensive. and they've been the purvey of rich people and pro athletes. And so if you're going to change society, you've got to move beyond rich people and pro athletes in terms of what's accessible and affordable. And so for us, democratizing wellness is making the hyper wellness lifestyle more affordable and accessible to people of all kinds. And so what we're most proud of at Restore is that Restore works everywhere. It works in Wichita, Kansas. It works in New York City on Third Avenue. It works in Miami. It works in Montana.

7:32And so the reason I think it works is because we did take the approach. We were going to make it affordable and accessible by putting locations where people are, by having a transparency that when people came in, they weren't dumbfounded by what we were offering. So accessibility isn't just there's a store near me. It's also there's a store near me. And when I walk in, the people there treat me appropriately, are very friendly, and they're transparent in terms of what I need and how it's going to affect me. So making everything affordable and accessible is how we define democratizing hyper wellness.

8:12So let's be honest, Jim. COVID changed everything. Some ways very small, some ways not quite so small. So what is it like for you running this hyper wellness company in the world that we live in today? What I'm quick to tell people all the time is if you let, let's, I'll focus on the coronavirus world of the last year and a half here in a second. But what I would say is take the word coronavirus out, put heart disease, diabetes, cancer, Alzheimer's, the flu, viruses in general, all kinds of things in. The prescription's the same. And the prescription is, once again, going back to that notion of proactive wellness, do a better job of managing the things you can control.

8:59So during coronavirus for us, we actually have, it's been business as usual. We've been in the office since the end of last April. We've got 100 people in our office today. During the time that coronavirus was flaring up, we did not shut our stores. We were open in the worst of worst times in New York City and everywhere else. And so if you're going to do that, you have to have a plan. And so once again, we doubled down on this proactive wellness approach. We had nurses come into our offices. We had nurses in our stores that were giving IVs to our employees so that they would have vitamin C, vitamin D, zinc, magnesium, and other things in their body so that their bodies were best prepared to handle whatever came their way.

9:52We were part of a big mission. So there was a sense of community and being part of something meaningful. By the way, people underestimate that in a big way in terms of how that affects your health. We pushed every week to make sure that our employees were getting better sleep, that they were using our modalities at our stores. So in essence, they were prepared for whatever they had to deal with. I in no way, shape or form will ever underestimate the impact of coronavirus to certain folks in our society. If you had comorbidities that are pretty obvious, you know, coronavirus was a big thing. But I can say that over the course of the last year and a half, we had zero issues with coronavirus.

10:43We had many people get coronavirus. It was a non-event, mostly asymptomatic, no major symptoms. And we were able to do business as normal. We opened 40-plus stores. We grew 400%. We were an essential business. And I'll tell you that the story that best exemplifies what is wrong with a sort of fix things after they're broken approach, which is the sick care model in the United States. We don't prevent things. We're not proactive about things. We fix them after they're broken. During the heat of the coronavirus crisis in New York City, you know where the nurses and the doctors from the hospitals came to get their IVs?

11:26They came to restore because they literally couldn't get them at the hospitals where they were working. That's absurd to me. Of course, we're happy to do it. We had a program for first responders, medical personnel, people that were working on the COVID wards. We literally had a special program to make sure they were getting the IVs with vitamin C, D, zinc, magnesium, and other things that they literally couldn't get in the hospital. Fire Nation, this is when you know there's a broken wheel in the system that needs to be fixed. And guess what? That's where the opportunity lies for businesses, for entrepreneurs.

12:08when they see something that is not being addressed, when they see a void in the market, when they see an underserved opportunity that is not being created in a solution manner to the level that it could be to a massive, real, and specific problem. And we're gonna be talking about purpose-fueled missions. We'll be talking about scaling rocket ships when we get back from thanking our sponsors. We all know that starting a business is hard, but there are tools out there that help make it easier. HubSpot is one of those tools. And just one way HubSpot makes starting a business easier with their all new entrepreneurship kits.

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13:21When I moved to Puerto Rico in 2016, I bought my dream home, the backyard overlooks El Yunque Rainforest, our community of Palmas del Mar, the island of Vieques, and the Caribbean Ocean. and that's a hard combo to beat. I love hosting family and friends here because it allows me to share the magic of Puerto Rico in addition to our amazing home and view. About a year ago, we took hosting to a new level. We invested in a property here in our community of Palmas Del Mar and decided to Airbnb it. Since we've become super hosts and have nearly 45 star reviews, sharing your home is such a joy and you don't have to have an investment property to make it happen.

14:03If you travel for part of the year to attend conferences, go on vacation, or to visit family, why not Airbnb your own home? Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at airbnb.com slash host. Do you have a message inside that you know is meant to be shared with the world? Giving a TEDx talk is one of the most powerful ways to share your message with the world, and Thought Leader can help you get there. Thought Leader is a speaker coaching company that has helped over 550 and counting coaches, speakers, entrepreneurs, authors, and experts land TEDx Talks. Thought Leader is not affiliated with TED or TEDx, but they're able to get these results because their founder, Taylor Conroy, is a four-time TEDx speaker himself and past EO Fire guest.

14:46You might be thinking a TEDx Talk sounds great, but where do you start? Taylor has put together a free training that's going to teach you how to land a TEDx Talk in as little as 90 days. join Taylor to learn exactly what TEDx organizers are looking for in their speakers, how to write a talk that goes viral once it goes online, and more. Visit thought-leader.com slash fire. Join Taylor for this free training and get your message out of your head, out of your heart, and out into the world where it belongs. That's thought-leader.com slash fire. Jim, you do have a purpose-fueled mission. I mean, you can hear it in your voice.

15:23You can see it in the way that you operate. Talk to us about what it's like building a business around a purpose fueled mission. I've got young kids and I tell them all the time, you get to choose what you do in life. They watch certain shows and they follow certain people that they find interesting. And I'm like, those guys didn't end up there by mistake. They chose that. And so my philosophy has always been, there are lots of ways to make money. I'm going to choose things that number one, I'm passionate about, because if you're not passionate about it, you're generally not going to be good at it.

16:02And then number two, marry that to something that's going to help society. And when I say society, I put quotes around that because in some instances I've built businesses where that meant the world around me and, you know, very close to me. In other instances, it literally meant all of society. In the case of Restore, we are fundamentally trying to transform the way that America takes care of people from a health and wellness perspective. We are trying to move people to a more proactive approach. We think that's better for a whole number of reasons. By the way, we also know that traditional medicine does a lot of good things and we are a partner with traditional medicine and that when you put the two together, it's a much better outcome.

16:53So for us, you know, we wake up every day. We reiterate the mission by focusing on the number of people we're helping, the number of services we're doing. Those are the metrics that we put before making money. We make sure everybody in Restore knows that. We make sure that everybody here lives the hyper wellness lifestyle. If you don't live it, you can't be a champion of it. And if you can't be a champion of it, we're not going to have as big an impact on society as we want to have. But I will tell you, it is absolutely lovely to be in a business where everyone understands we're doing something great.

17:37And so I tell people all the time, they're like, Jim, you must be working so hard. And I said, listen, guys, I don't ever work. Coming to restore every day is a joy. Why not wake up every morning and go to your joy? Do your delight. And I do love that message that Jim passes on to his kids. It's like, hey, you get to choose what you want to do in life. Like sometimes kids never hear that message until it's too late. so I love love love when parents are sharing that early now we all love rocket ships Jim let's be honest but how should we as fire nation look at scaling a rocket ship growth company what does that look like it helps when you have a business that's as fundamentally sound as restore I mean let's be honest you know everything about restore is on trend the world is looking for what we do And so there is something to be said for you've got to have a good raw material as a foundation for a rocket ship.

18:40And we have a really wonderful business that is the right business for the right time and the right people running it. So I think that is important in a rocket ship. I think the second thing that I always talk about is being self-aware. You have to know what you're good at and you have to know what you're not good at. And then you need to go make sure you're pulling in the people that accentuate your weaknesses. And to do that, sometimes you have to hire people that are smarter than you. You certainly have to hire people that have wonderful, unique talents. And I say a lot, I am relatively egoless.

19:19I would much rather have smarter, more talented people around me that are going to get much better outcomes than worry about my ego and taking credit for everything. So I think that is the third component. You got to share the credit and you got to create a shared feeling of we're all part of this. And this is not Jim doing this. This is not Steve doing this. This is all of us doing it. Then I think you got to figure out as you grow at this rapid speed and realize you're building a rocket as you're orbiting. Like it's not only that you have a rocket ship, you've got to continue to grow the size of that rocket ship while you're literally in orbit.

20:01So you then got to start to look at your processes and you got to look at your software that you use for different, you know, functions and that sort of thing. And you've got to constantly be looking for better, more efficient processes, moving to enterprise level software when you can afford it. constantly evaluating do you have the right people in the right roles the one thing about a company that's growing as fast as ours is it's very different for the people who've been here for a while when they were here in the beginning they touched everything they were a part of every decision and so now we're we're to the point that we have 125 people in the corporate office and everyone has a role and they're part of a function and they don't get to touch everything so now we spend a lot more time putting all the pieces together.

20:53Whereas before, everyone was involved in the important decisions. And by the way, you have some people that fall out as a function of that process. They don't grow with the rocket ship. And so you got to be prepared to have really good conversations with those folks. You don't want to, in any way, shape, or form, create this notion that anybody is expendable because we certainly don't. But you do have to say to people sometimes, listen, you're not growing with the company. You've either got to change the way you're working, change your mindset, or you need to go do something else that's really wonderful.

21:30And I think those conversations happen as well. But at the end of the day, understand your mission, understand your weaknesses, be self-aware, be relatively egoless, continually improve, always improve. So this month we're good, next month we're better. And if you do those types of things, I think a rocket ship continues to go higher and higher at an incredible rate. A lot of value bombs here at Fire Nation. One thing that I want to hone in on is be self-aware. I mean, really ask yourself, are you just chasing the next big thing or are you building something special? Special to you, special to society?

22:15And I love this quote by Jim Carrey that I really feel like summarizes this very well. You can fail at what you don't want, so you might as well take a chance on doing something you love. Because I mean, what more of a disaster in this world is failing at something you don't even want to be doing. I mean, that's just such a waste of life. So Jim, wrap it up for us, brother. Give us one key takeaway you want to make sure Fire Nation really gets from everything we chatted about here today. And then any call to action or ways we can connect with you and then we'll say goodbye. I would say one thing.

22:50I do get to do what I love and I do have a joyful life in every possible way, personally and professionally and restore is a dream. But I will say that people ask me all the time, how do I follow my dream? I do want them to know this was a set of building blocks. I did the hard work. I went to the blue chip companies like Coca-Cola and developed new brands and Kraft Foods where I was a brand manager on Jell-O pudding and Cool Whip. I was an army officer that went to ranger school and learned leadership and did all of those things. I didn't wake up one day without having done all that and then have this foundation for pursuing my dreams.

23:38So I do want to always tell people when pursuing your dreams is absolutely the right message, everyone should do it. Everyone should find joy in what they do. But remember, you got to lay the foundation. You can't just snap your fingers and say, I'm going to go from point A to point Z. There are lots, there's, there's hard work. There's, there's a little bit of grinding it out. There's figuring out like what you really do want to do. You know, that changes as we get a little older and, and putting those pieces together. And then at some point, then you're ready. Then you're ready to risk everything.

24:13You're ready to put your life savings in. You're ready to bring your friends on board. You're ready to do all of that. So that's one takeaway. I will give one other takeaway, given that I'm the CEO of Restore. You can do better in terms of how you treat your health, prioritize your health. And once you do that, you are in a much better position to deal with whatever comes your way, whether that's coronavirus or any of the things, the five things that kill people every day, heart disease, cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer, those sorts of things. you can do better and you can do it by being proactive.

24:50I love the description of your daily routine. It is as simple as that. Move, get outside, do things that you like, put some exercise in there. Don't put crap in your body anymore when you don't have to and be a part of something. Be a part of a community. Have other people help you be accountable. Have some fun. And don't stop playing all of these things. Wow, Fire Nation, wise words. And you know this, you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. You've been hanging out with JD and JLD today. So keep up that heat. Head over to eofire.com, just type Jim in the search bar and the show notes page will pop up with everything that we've been talking about here today.

25:34Links to all that jazz, to Jim's company, ways you can connect with them more. And Jim, thank you, brother, for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation today. For that, we salute you and we'll catch you on the flip side. Thank you, guys. I appreciate it. It was fun. Hey, Fire Nation. Today's value bomb content was brought to you by Jim. Fire Nation's successful entrepreneurs, they accomplish big, huge goals, which is why I created the Freedom Journal to guide you in accomplishing your number one goal in 100 days. And we're talking step by step. Visit thefreedomjournal.com.

26:08Use promo code podcast for a$15 discount. And thank you for listening to my podcast. I will catch you there or on the flippity flip flip flop side. The next wave, your chief AI officer hosted by Matt Wolf and Nathan lands is brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network, the audio destination for business professionals. Matt and Nathan are leading AI creators in your guiding light in the AI and technology frontier. AI technology is transforming the way we do business and the media landscape is fragmented. The Next Wave strives to be the leading podcast on AI technology and how you can apply it to growing your business.

26:45Listen to The Next Wave wherever you get your podcasts. Ever thought about giving a TEDx talk? It's one of the most powerful ways to share your message with the world. And four-time TEDx speaker, Taylor Conroy from Thought Leader can help you get there. Visit thought-leader.com slash fire to join Taylor's free training where he teaches you how to land a TEDx talk and spread your message to millions. Thank you.