How Stress Can Make You a Millionaire with Puneet Nanda: 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 ideal destination for business professionals with great shows like Success Story Podcast. Today, we're pulling a timeless EO Fire episode from the archives, so the giveaway may not be active. And we'll be breaking down how stress can make you a millionaire. To drop these value bombs, I have brought Puneet Nanda into EO Fire Studios. Puneet, aka Dr. Fresh, is a serial entrepreneur, innovator, and inventor. And in 2015, he launched the essential oils brand, Guru Nanda, which promises to bring a 100 % pure and natural therapeutic grade essential oils to the masses.

0:40And today, Fire Nation will talk about how you can be successful by being genuine and being better and how successful businesses always have one product or one service that fills a void in the marketplace and is challenging to educate your customers, but you will eventually gain their trust if you provide them with value and so much more. And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Puneet and our sponsors. The Hustle Daily Show, hosted by Juliet Bennett-Ryla, Rob Litters, Ben Berkeley, and Mark Dent is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals.

1:13The Hustle Daily Show brings you a healthy dose of irreverent, offbeat, informative takes on business and tech news, like a recent episode on hackers versus casinos, where the hosts talk about MGM Resorts and Caesars Entertainment and the devastating potential of cyber attacks. Listen to The Hustle Daily wherever you get your podcasts. Many EO Fire listeners have launched non-food franchises, and Fran Bridge Consulting has guided them. Fran Bridges founder and frequent EO Fire guest, John Ostenson, has done more placements than any other in the country and his service is free. Sign up for a consultation with John or get a free copy of his book, Non-Food Franchising at franbridgeconsulting.com.

1:51Dr. Fresh, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something interesting about yourself that most people don't know. So John, thank you for getting me on the show. And I would actually disclose something that actually not only most people don't know, maybe my family also doesn't know. What? Interestingly enough, you might have heard that I am originally from New Delhi and I went to Russia. From Russia, I came to New York and to Los Angeles. and while I was in Russia, it was early 90s, everything was in shambles and everybody and their brother was trying to see, there was like opportunities galore.

2:44I had originally gone there for medical college and I saw this opportunity where there was super high demand. I was a young kid, and I wanted to see how I could make enough money so that I could go back often to India, which was a six-and-a-half-hour flight, because I was very homesick. So I met this friend of mine who was actually bringing in condoms because you could fit a lot of them in a bag and bringing them and selling it to the... Some people in the boarding school would come and take them all and pay them double the money or triple the money. He said, hey, I made like$300 getting these in.

3:35Maybe you should do the same. That way the ticket used to be on Aeroflot used to be$178. And I did that a couple of times. So this is something that nobody knows. Dr. Fresh smuggling condoms across the national lines. I love it. And I hope some people in your family right now are laughing their little booties off hearing this story. And Fire Nation, as we shared in the introduction, we're going to talk about how stress can make you a millionaire. Well, heck, it definitely made Dr. Fresh a millionaire. So let's start, Puneet, with your entrepreneurial origin story. How the heck did you get started?

4:17As I told you, I was in Russia. There was a demand for anything consumer products. And I got started in toothbrushes because my family had a business with toothbrushes. And they were doing contract manufacturing for other companies, which I hated. and I said if I'm gonna it's almost like doing contract manufacturing is like being in a glorified job because you really can't do anything you're literally uh you get two cents a piece let's say and you make millions of them the toothbrushes but you really don't have any say in it you can't increase or decrease you can't do anything so I said if I'm gonna if I'm gonna actually do business which my dad was ready to kill me when he knew that I'm going to do it because he wanted me to be a practicing doctor.

5:14And when he came to know, he was very upset, of course. But I said, if I'm going to do my business, I'm going to do my own brand. And Dr. Fresh was my nickname in my medical college. And I started with that brand in Russia originally. And then when things became really bad in Russia, I came to New York. And from New York, I finally came to L.A. And I got a big break with 99-cent stores because I saw Colgate and Procter & Gamble not paying attention to poor little 99-cent stores or dollar stores at that point. so very before i knew i was the most popular product in dollar stores because i i had a very good idea how to make a very good quality toothbrush which was colgate or oral b quality but make it at one fourth or one fifth the cost which i introduced to the dollar stores and at that time dollar tree had started growing dollar mania dollar land all these guys were there that were coming up 20 store 30 store chain i i used to get up in the morning six o 'clock start dialing every person cold calling and literally started to become extremely popular something that nobody else had done and i literally innovated a market that was not there and that's how i grew But very quickly, I knew if I have to go to mainstream, I need to innovate.

6:49And that's when I invented Firefly, which is a kid's light-up toothbrush, which became the number one kid's toothbrush in the world today. So that's kind of my story. And then everything was easy after that because with the cash flow, I bought Binaka. and then we added in a private equity fund and we ended up buying reach toothbrush from Johnson & Johnson. So before we knew we were 200 plus people and doing extremely well. But one thing I did not do really right was that I forgot to take care of my own self. I lost that work-life balance. Yeah. and I was working 18 hour days, eating McDonald's and Jack in the Box, drinking Coke, sitting on a chair for more than 8, 10, 12 hours a day, not moving enough in between, literally always being on phone, lost touch with a lot of friends and family, always working And literally, my only goal was to grow Dr.

8:04Fresh to a point where it could be successful. And to a point where I wanted to always reach B number two or three in the country. And I did go to that goal, but at the point of literally burnt my candle, if you understand. So I had gained a lot of weight. I started eating a lot of, popping a lot of pills and I was in pain most of my hours in the day at the very end of Dr. Fresh. So that's where I was. So Dr. Fresh, thanks for breaking that down because I can tell you most entrepreneurs who have any form of success do go through that time in their life when they just don't have that work-life balance.

8:50They don't have that focus on health, that focus on family and relationships. and you know, we learn, we learn in Fire Nation. That's why you're listening today. So hopefully you can learn from our mistakes because I've made the exact same one. So let's now talk about how that led you to developing the Guru Nanda brand and kind of continue on with that to share with us what's different about Guru Nanda. So interestingly, after I had this alarm one day in Dr. Fresh where I actually had a big chest pain, and my secretary, Natalie, called 911. And at that point, it was just a fake alarm. It was an anxiety attack.

9:35It wasn't a heart attack or anything. And I was like 39 or something at that time. And I said this, one of my friends came to meet me, and he said, you got to calm down and just focus on yourself because if you're not going to be there, everything else is immaterial. So that's when I decided to sell the company. Incidentally, we found the right buyer. I had the time. I took a year off, and I went to an ashram in India. I really focused on my health. I lost 40 pounds. I became extremely healthy. I literally lost all the pills that I was eating and my blood work came out great in the meanwhile I decided to come back and open up a yoga studio that's what I did so I opened up a yoga studio in Beverly Hills and I thought I'll just teach the rest of my life and incidentally I started getting a lot of gigs.

10:44I ended up being on Jay Leno's Garage and other celebrity appearances and stuff started. But in the meanwhile, I saw a lot of these young ladies using essential oils by this multi-level marketing company called doTERRA or Young Living. And these are Utah-based multi-level marketing companies that sell phenomenal quality essential oils but they are very very expensive like 10 to 20 times more expensive than normal so i saw that but then i went to amazon and i saw essential oil selling for a dollar a piece and i ordered some and then And since I'm a scientist, I'm a chemist by background, I went ahead and analyzed those oils.

11:39And I saw everything literally selling on Amazon was fake fragrances. And then I researched and found a lot of these. Then I started to really work on it. And as an entrepreneur, I saw immediately a light where I said, if I could become the doTERRA of retail business, there is nobody else. There's absolutely nobody else to compete me because everybody else is selling totally fake product, which is not real essential oils. And why I got into essential oils is because I used to have a lot of allergies and I was eating Claritin off and on almost on a every other day basis. And oil of arachnol, a couple of drops, actually let me, since that day, I haven't ever had any allergy pill.

12:37Like that was one thing that kind of restored my faith into essential oils. And then one by one, I started reading it. I'm a person with biology background. So I started marrying my science background together with aromatherapy background. I enrolled myself into a couple of aromatherapy schools, plus I ordered every book on the internet. and I really got involved. And then I even ensured that I follow what doTERRA and Young Living were doing because these two companies, they were actually doing a pretty amazing job, farm to barrel kind of job, which they call it seed to shelf. And I called it farm to barrel.

13:28And that's exactly what I did. I went all around the globe. I had the time. I had the money and I had the will and now I had the motive and I literally went all around the globe, farm to farm, created my own network of global ethical farmers. And we decided to bring the product, farm to bottle, nothing added, nothing removed, and then bring it to retail. and when I did that my whole plan was more to be a social entrepreneur where I'll help the farmers by helping their kids get educated plus I will bring the product to Walmart's of the world so that a lot of people who cannot afford multi-level marketing products can still get the advantage of getting really good product although it was very tough because market is full of so many fake oils that and 99.9 percent of them are actually not direct farm to borrow and that is what made me feel very different and that is what helped me create a brand that was different and i was able to the brand that used to be there before I was there was a big four or five billion dollar vitamin company that used to be there in Walmart.

15:00But when the buyer saw my passion and the product and the quality, he actually got rid of that other major billion plus several billion dollar company and gave me the space. And Fire Nation, that's where I hope you're really taken away from what Dr. Fresh is talking about right here. It's that you can build a moat around your business. How do you do that? By doing things better, by being the best, by being the most pure, by being the most real. And that can be in a physical product, that can be in a virtual product, that can be in a lot of different ways. Because believe me, Fire Nation, there's a lot of fake, hollow, ungenuine stuff out there.

15:41And when you can identify, just like Puneet was able to identify that, hey, there's just so much crap out there. Let me actually create something great. And then you follow that through with passion, with excitement, with heart. Things can happen. And we have so much more to talk about when we get back from thanking our sponsors. The fourth quarter is here. It's time to hit your revenue targets, finish strong and win the quarter. But before you can win Q4, you have to close deals. And before you can close deals, you have to fill your pipeline and nurture prospects, which is oftentimes the hardest part.

16:16So how can you get a jumpstart on your Q4 sales goals? What you really need is an easy to use all-in-one sales software like HubSpot Sales Hub. It's where sales teams can prospect smarter, grow revenue faster, and mine deeper customer insights. Sales Hub's all new prospecting workspace gives reps a single cohesive view of their work so they can focus on building relationships with customers. And with a new deal management tool, reps can easily categorize and prioritize deals so they can identify ways to accelerate revenue growth. It's smart software for smart sales teams who want to close the year strong.

16:51Win the fourth quarter with Sales Hub. Learn more at hubspot.com slash sales. More and more entrepreneurs and investors are discovering the awesome franchise opportunities that exist outside of food. Franchising can simply be the better path. And interest in franchising is at an all-time high. Lucky for you, John Ostenson, founder of Frambridge Consulting and a frequent EO Fire guest, is here to help you explore the premier franchise opportunities today. John and his Frambridge Consulting team are part of the largest brokerage in the US and have vetted the market thoroughly. Frambridge is hands down the premier source for the best opportunities in the non-food franchise world.

17:29They represent every type of non-food franchise from healthcare to dumpsters, youth sports to business services, specialized senior care to pet grooming to insulation and floor coatings. John has served as an Inc. 500 franchisor, a multi-brand franchisee, and he does more placements than any other in the country. Sign up for a free consultation call with John today, or get a free copy of his book, Non-Food Franchising, at FranBridgeConsulting.com. That's FranBridgeConsulting.com. Kate and I love home-cooked meals, and a company we've tried out while looking for quick and easy options is HelloFresh.

18:04Let me guess, you don't feel like you have time to cook? Well, I've got good news for you. HelloFresh has 15-minute meals. That's less time than it takes to get delivery. Plus, HelloFresh can also save you money. They are cheaper than grocery store shopping and 25 % less expensive than takeout, not to mention the convenience factor. While I can't take any credit for being the chef, what Kate loved about HelloFresh is that everything comes to you pre-portioned. That means no messing around with buying ingredients you might only use once and no repeat visits to the grocery store for forgotten items.

18:38Oh, and did I mention that HelloFresh is America's number one meal kit? Go to hellofresh.com slash 50EOF and use code 50EOF for 50 % off plus free shipping. That's 50 % off plus free shipping when you visit hellofresh.com slash 50EOF and use code 50EOF. So Dr. Fresh, we're back. And I'd be curious to hear what your Hero product is. You know, that product that really made you into an aromatherapy and essential oils household name. name? Actually, Hero product is a funny, not essential oil, which is, it's not a big product line with me, but it is something that got me into this business really. And that is a product that it's called oil pulling.

19:32What oil pulling is, it is taking the oil of specific mixture, sunflower, sesame, coconut, and peppermint, and actually pulling it, like swishing it for about 10 to 15 minutes. It is that particular product that I consider a hero product, because that's how I started Guru Nanda. I was giving that out to my people in my yoga studio, and some people started saying that we can't take it free. Why don't you put it on Amazon? And I put it on Amazon and oil pulling, the reason I got into it is because before I went to the ashram in India, I had an infection in my tooth and the doctor had said, the dentist, that you need to get a root canal done.

20:25And when I was in the ashram in India, I was very scared. He'd given me antibiotics. I was okay, but I was very scared that I don't get that pain back. and this guru got me into oil pulling. And while I was there and ever after I've been doing it, I've never had a root canal ever since. All my teeth are intact. And that is what really had gotten me into, okay, I'll share it with the world. And it's called Guru Nanda Oil Pulling. I introduced this product into the world because a lot of people were doing just coconut oil pulling in the hippie culture or in the yoga culture, but they don't understand coconut oil is very cooling, so it may or may not work the same way for a lot of Caucasian and African Americans, the way it works for people in Philippines or Mediterranean parts of India.

21:22So that's what kind of got me into it. But essential oils, essential oils, I would say the top sellers that we have are peppermint and lavender and tea tree and eucalyptus, these four. But if it comes to myself, which we don't sell because it's not oil that people understand how to use. my favorite which I use as soon as I get a little whiff of any kind of cold or flu or allergy is the oil of arachnid. Fire Nation, one thing that I've definitely recognized over the years is that successful companies and successful entrepreneurs, they're able to inject one product or one service into the market that they are just best in show for because they really identify a need.

22:12They really identify a void in the marketplace. And then once they get that little traction, that little momentum, then they can expand out across that marketplace and really do great things just like Dr. Fresh was able to do in the way that he described it. So it obviously wasn't all smooth sailing, Dr. Fresh. Give us your number one challenge that you faced along the way when you were trying to develop Guru Nanda into what it is today. Basically, what I used to do is I would take the competitive product that was already there in the market in their retail stores. I would take them, test them from a third party, test mine from a third party and show the reports to the retailers.

22:52And 95 % of the retailers would tell you, oh, we don't care. Are you here to bash other companies? So they would want to throw you out. So I was just trying to make sure that there is a level playing field and nobody really cares. And a lot of the buyers keep changing. They are young. They are not that experienced. And they don't care. For them, it's the price and what price is in the market. And they always want to compare themselves to what is selling on Amazon. Apart from that, do they want to get into the history of science of anything? 90 plus percent of the buyers don't have the time or energy to do that.

23:36And that is a huge problem when I was starting the essential oil business to educate them. So I started to make videos and put them online on YouTube. I started to educate the public because so that I could actually at least try to do my part in doing that. But apart from that, essential oils is a growing business. But lately, what you've seen is everybody, including a detergent product, has just written with essential oils so big. Then there is an air freshener selling for$0.97, writing essential oils, the biggest part of their business. But if you go and look at it, it says inspired by, very small, almost negligible.

24:28These are billion dollar, several billion dollar worth of companies. And then the detergent guy has one of that product plus fragrance. Whenever you have fragrance and essential oil, you can put one drop in like 100 gallons and you can still say you've put in something. That doesn't mean it doesn't have fragrance. or it doesn't have all the, and you know that fragrances, 3 ,000 plus chemicals are used to make fragrance. And according to the pact between fragrance companies and FDA and other bodies, they were not supposed to disclose what goes in the fragrance because most of the products that go in the fragrance industry are carcinogenic.

25:16So that is what made it a very difficult road. It's very diluted. Education to customer is the biggest challenge that I've faced. Fire Nation, educating the customer is a challenge. But again, it's one that once you overcome it, the know, the like, the trust is with you, the company or the individual that's given them that trust, that's given them that value, that's given them that solution to that pain point. So, Dr. Fresh, as we close down here, what's your plan for the future? My plan for the future is to keep my mission of bringing the best essential oils to the market. Also, simultaneously, I plan to, because earlier in the business, I did not realize that growth and profitability are the two most aspects of business.

26:09It's almost like breathing to a living being. and I decided, you know what, I'm going to be a social entrepreneur. So I was not focused on that. So what happened is first few years, I kept on losing millions of dollars nonstop. Lately did I realize, you know, if I'm not around, how can I bring my message around? So I started to actually do profitable products and I've started to charge a little more to where I'm profitable back again. and I am going to continue to be profitable so that I can use that money to educate more people to actually bring my best products onto them. Puneet, what's your call to action for Fire Nation?

26:56Where can we connect with you? Where can we find out more about you and your products? Share away. So, gurunanda.com, which is guru is teacher, G-U-R-U and Nanda is N-A-N-D-A dot com. Nanda is my last name. So I originally kept my yoga studio's name as Guru Nanda, which in lack of time, we just kept the same name. And it clinged on so well that because we saw every other brand was related to either nature or earth. And we said, you know what, we're different enough and we need to continue to be that. But I think it's actually worked out in our favor lately after years of hard work. One call of action is go to gurunanda.com, check us out.

27:47The other thing is we are in the vitamins section in Walmart, and we do not sell into non-vitamin section because there's a lot of fake product called so-called essential oil that is being sold in other areas. like home and home decor and stuff. So we focus on being in the vitamin area. So if you go to a Walgreens or a Walmart, those are two stores that keep our product. Plus we also have our products on amazon.com, but you'll have to type in Guru Nanda because anything and everything with 50 ,000 reviews that you see on Amazon, you need to be smart to understand that 90 % of those 50 ,000 reviews are fake reviews.

28:33how many times have you actually gone and written right page reviews so you understand if you're smart you'll get it fire nation you're the average of the five people we spend the most time with and you've been hanging out with dr fresh and jld today so keep up that heat and make sure to head over to eofire.com and type punit p-u-n-e-e-t in the search bar for the show notes page which will pop up with everything we chatted about here today links to all that jazz make sure to go and visit It's gurunanda.com, G-U-R-U-N-A-N-D-A.com. Look for him in the vitamin section in Walmart and other places.

29:13And of course, on Amazon, directly type in Gurunanda. Go right there. Those 50 ,000 plus reviews that he's talking about, those are all made up fake reviews. At Amazon, by the way, they're tackling those, but it's just too much. It's slowly and surely for them. so you know you're getting the right stuff from Dr. Fresh. He wouldn't have it anyway. So Puneet, thank you so much 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, John. Thank you so much. And every brand, every name, every product has my last name on it.

29:51Nanda, you can be ensured that I'm putting my family name on the line. Every drop is tested, retested, and double tested through a third party before we get it out. Straight fire. Thank you, brother. Dr. Fresh, mic drop.

30:26or I'll catch you on the flip side. The Hustle Daily Show, hosted by Juliet Bennett-Ryla, Rob Litturs, Ben Berkley, and Mark Dent, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. The Hustle Daily Show brings you a healthy dose of irreverent, offbeat, informative takes on business and tech news, like a recent episode on Hackers vs. Casinos, where the hosts talk about MGM Resorts and Caesars Entertainment and the devastating potential of cyber attacks. Listen to The Hustle Daily wherever you get your podcasts. Many EO Fire listeners have launched non-food franchises and Fran Bridge Consulting has guided them.

31:04Fran Bridge's founder and frequent EO Fire guest, John Ostenson, has done more placements than any other in the country and his service is free. Sign up for a consultation with John or get a free copy of his book, Non-Food Franchising at franbridgeconsulting.com.