Hey, folks, welcome to another episode of Builders Business Success Podcast!

The podcast that is designed to help overcome many of the destructive and frustration-causing processes. There’s a whole bunch of things that builders do the same to copy each other, that causes a whole lot of unnecessary problems.

What we’re gonna endeavour to do with these episodes, is to give you ideas on how to eliminate them from your businesses.

It’s not about doing everything different it’s about just doing a few things different.

The Agenda

• I’m gonna be talking to a chap, his name’s James Swanwick. He and his brother, they’re both Australians, both live in the US. And they have built a multi-million dollar business, selling blue light blocking glasses. I’m gonna be talking to James about the benefits of all of those sorts of things.
• I’m also going to have a tech review in this episode, and you wanna hang around for this bit of technology, it is going to absolutely blow your socks off when you see it. You’ll want immediately.
• We had the cameras rolling during the weeks just in case I said anything worthwhile recording and repeating. That seems to be something that’s happening almost every week now there’s something worth recording comes up that we can put into the podcast.

Links

• Get a Pair of Swannies! https://www.swanwicksleep.com
• James’ Website https://www.jamesswanwick.com
• Joby Gorilla-Pod https://joby.com/au-en/gorillapod

*Transcription of the show*

Hear my conversation with James Swanwick!

– So James, one of the things that I wanted to talk to you about is the whole effectiveness for builders, for tradies, all of that sort of stuff. I don’t know, because I didn’t know how important sleep was and the contributing factors to it, and kind of how I found out about it as you and I we’re both, we’re coached by the same business coach, and there’s a whole bunch of people walking, I shouldn’t put the finger up like that but that was just, that’s the ring .

– You’re already giving me the . One minute into it.

– Sorry, man. No disrespect intended. But this ring here, there was a whole bunch of people walking around with these aura rings, and I didn’t know what that was, looked into it, and it measures sleep.

And then I started to look at well, when I found out my sleep was rubbish, I started to look into ways to fix that net when I ran across swannies and blue light blocking glasses, and lo and behold, we go to a conference and they, while we’re sitting in a table together. It was fantastic.

Can you just give us a little bit of backstory about how you stumbled across it and how you just decided to start the business with your brother?

– Yeah, so my sleep was always just okay. It wasn’t horrible. It wasn’t fantastic. It was what I would describe as probably about a six out of 10 meaning that some nights I would struggle to fall asleep, other nights I might toss and turn in the middle of the night.

Other nights I might sleep seven or eight hours thinking that they were pretty blissful seven or eight hours but I’d wake up still feeling tired and I’d be confused as to why.

I was in Palm Springs in a hotel restaurant with a friend of mine and he started to wear these really ugly orange goggles in this like five-star restaurant and there was a table of very attractive ladies adjacent to us and they were looking at him shaking their head and I turned to my friend I said, “You look ridiculous and more importantly, “you’re making me look ridiculous by association.”

– Yeah.

• And he went on to explain that he was wearing these orange goggles because of the artificial blue light that was coming out of the hotel restaurant whites. His cell phone screen.There’s also a electronic blue light in your car, in your speedometer, the traffic lights, your microwave light, your kitchen light, your bedside table light, your bathroom light. And all this light when you’re exposed to it at nighttime. It triggers your or stimulates your pituitary and pineal glands which suppresses your melatonin production. And melatonin, of course, is a hormone that helps us sleep. And so I went back to L.A trusting him cause he’s pretty. He was a pretty big health enthusiast. And I actually dug up an old pair of ski goggles myself and I wore these ridiculous ski goggles while I watch reruns of the TV series, “Mad Men” for about two weeks and lo and behold, If I wore in the last hour before I went to sleep then removed them, I actually fell asleep quicker and I woke up feeling more refreshed. The only problem was I didn’t wanna look like a myth chemist by wearing these goggles. So and I’m just vain enough Mick that I wanted to look stylish and cool and I was living in Hollywood at the time where everyone’s cool. So I’m like I’m gonna design a stylish pair of blue-light blocking glasses. And so I started that business with my brother and we very quickly, we did a million dollars in sales in the first year and it’s just grown from there and wearing these orange lens blue-light blocking glasses consistently in most importantly close to bedtime can really improve your sleep quality.

• Yep, I know that you rock yours. I mean, you look cool in yours.
• Thank you. Thank you. Appreciate it.
• I struggle. I don’t know whether–
• Look at here. It’s not like a who wore it best competition–
• Well, I know but I mean. Ever since I started to wear them and I wear them like even during the day now because I’m in front of a computer screen and we just an hour ago got off a four-day zoom conference with in the coaching group and by the way I did the four hour morning one and the four hour evening one so I just got off 32 hours or whatever it was of doing that.So the one thing that I’ve noticed apart from sleep like has made a massive difference to sleep but wearing them during the day. If your computer screen and all of that sort of stuff. I just don’t get the eye fatigue that I would have. I’m just looking at screens all day so that’s fantastic.Just explain a little bit because this is the bit that really helped me understand how important the rhythms or circadian rhythm thing was and daylight affects you. And then if you’re sitting by candlelight or a fire that thing like when you go camping that made a whole lot of sense to me.
• Here’s the gold standard for sleeping the best that you can. And answers your question Mick. First thing is, first thing in the morning, expose yourself to as much natural sunlight as you can. That means go outside, let the sun hit your skin because–
• Naked. So you’re outside naked?
• If you’d like to do it naked, that’s preferable. In fact, if you’re a man, if you let the sun directly onto your testicles on your scrotum, it actually boost your testosterone levels huge amounts.
• Have you got that everyone listening, so we want to see photos on the Facebook group. Everyone doing the best for their health, good stuff.
• If you’re not gonna do that, if you’re not gonna expose your testicles to sunlight, just expose any part of your body to sunlight. Because…
• Oh okay.

• Our skin has receptors in it and when the sunlight hits our skin, it tells our body’s internal clock which is named as circadian rhythm. This is wake up time, this is daytime. So what happens then is that your body floods with daytime hormones, you start to get up, you start to move around, you start your day, right now you’ve got clarity and focus and energy hopefully. And then at nighttime, the best thing you can do is block as much artificial light as possible.The artificial light comes from your cell phone, your, I should say, from mostly , your mobile phone, your TV screen, your iPad, your bathroom light, your kitchen light. In relation to candlelight, candle lights, and fire and flame does not disrupt your melatonin production. Which means that in actual fact, the best way to live your life is by candlelight at nighttime, quite frankly.However, it’s 2020. It’s not realistic. No one’s really gonna be like saying, “Oh, lights out. “We’re just gonna have light candles and that’s it.” But if you didn’t do that, quite frankly, you would sleep better than you’ve ever slept before. And your life would just feel amazing and you reference camping this before me.

  Of course when you go camping right, you’ve got a flame, you’ve got a candlelight, like you’d not you don’t have electronics. And guess what? You always sleep beautifully when you’re camping. So expose yourself to as much natural light as possible in the morning, block as much artificial light as possible at nighttime and if that’s the only thing you do that I would offer you that you’re gonna see a noticeable improvement in your sleep quality.

What’d I Say?

– So one of the challenges that most builders have when they’re creating any sort of content for the what we call in Blackbelt, Attract Strategy, the marketing posting on Facebook, there is this perfection problem trying to get everything right before they press the Go button and what I’d like to suggest to you all is just there’s no other benefit or there’s no other better way of doing it, then what I just called dirty reps, my coach calls some dirty reps on there.

It’s just the repetition of doing it. Everyone’s got a whole bunch of every videos in them. And the only way to get to the good videos is to get the bad videos. What do you think of the bad videos out first, having said that, there’s been a bunch of people that feel embarrassed, or they don’t think that the video that they’ve done is very good, but you watch it and you go, “Man, this is so pleasant to watch. “They’re really comfortable on camera.” And all that sort of stuff. And it’s not remotely what they’ve described, that they felt it was like.

So we’re our own worst critic where, I hate the sound of our own voice or watching ourselves on video and that sort of stuff. And here’s one last thing to think about. We talk about this all of the time that I know in our case, we spend a lot of money trying to get our marketing videos seen and I think part of the embarrassment is if I put this up there, I’m gonna look like a fool or whatever.

Honestly, if you can, if you can put a video out and get it seen by enough people to find someone who’s gonna come back at you and say, that was terrible or very unprofessional or whatever, let me know because how did you get it sane?

Even sane by a few people like it’s so difficult to be able to get it seen until you’ve got quantity, right. So it all works out perfectly. Because you can get all of your ugliness out of your own mind done in the early videos, no one ever sees them.

But it creates a foundation of quantity because you don’t actually start to get seen until you’ve got quantity and repetition and it shows up on Facebook or YouTube or whatever platform you wanna use enough times where you start to get recognized by the algorithms and all of that sort of stuff and are allowed to be seen by people.

So it works out perfectly, you get your dirty reps out.

And then by the time you start to get a little more slick and comfortable with it that’s when you start to get attraction with it, so my advice is just press the Go button, shoot the video, put it up on Facebook, put it up on your YouTube channel, put it up on Instagram, put it up wherever you want, everywhere you can, and just keep doing it.

Like, I would suggest to you do one video every single day and just post it, like let’s say in your Facebook page, or your Facebook group or something like that. Doesn’t need to be hours long.

It just could be three, four minutes, about a very, very specific thing like I’m talking about now. And that can become a nice piece of content. You can put it on all sorts of different platforms to create that foundation of quantity, get stuck into it, hit the Go button and record. That’s my suggestion.

The Review

– As I said, this tech review is gonna blow your mind. And I wanna show you a bit of tech every builder needs to have. Are you sitting down? Here it is. And if you’re just watching or just listening to the audio version, I’m holding up a very small tripod to put your phone on. And this particular one I think is a GorillaPod or whatever with the bendy legs.

So the cool thing about this one is you can actually bend the legs around and hang it from staff or put it on the fence or on an organ on a standard wall or anything like that to hold your camera.

Now why am I jumping up and down about this as if it’s a wicked bit of tech? Well, the reason is this, because it is. It’s all about being able to shoot content, to promote your building business to get people to become aware, number one that you exist.

Number two, you’re a real person. And number three, you understand what their fears frustrations wants and aspirations are. One of the big reasons that I think that I get that people just don’t have the equipment to be able to capture the stuff and you’ve got a phone?

That’s all you need. Like the latest iPhone 11 has the most wicked camera on it. And even previous phones, the cameras are better than the previous dedicated cameras that we used to use.

So just you need something like this that will hold your phone. Now the one that I’ve got here is, as I said, it’s an adjustable Joby Gorilla-Pod, I think they’re called with the flexible legs, but then I’ve basically just screwed a selfie stick on top of it, selfie stick’s good because you can change the height of it.

And I’ve got the fittings on the top so I can sort of make it go this way or that way over I want so I can make it go landscape or portrait but the cool thing about just checking this in the truck like it takes up no room, you can squeeze the legs together like that it’s nice and flat, it takes up no room, it’s very light.

You can just grab it and start to create content.

And you’ll see a lot of guys walking around and they’re holding the phone. And it’s really distracting and wobbling and all of that sort of stuff.

So you can either get somebody else one of your guys to film you, if you’re walking and talking. You can turn this into a selfie stick and get it away from you if you’re doing the walking talk. But one of the best things that you can use this for is you just pop it on the desk, if you have permission to record a conversation with one of your clients. Testimonials are incredibly valuable.

And here’s the thing that most people get testimonials at the end of the like the handover that sort of thing, and they make a big deal out of it. You are having a conversation and you go, “Man what you said there would be awesome “for us to use in our Facebook posts and what have you, “ever would you mind being out? “Would you mind saying that again “and letting me record it?” Don’t say, can you say that to camera or anything like that? Would you mind us talking about that again, and let me record it.

And if all you do is you just grab your phone and plunk it on the desk, like this, have it facing the person but they’re not talking to the camera they’re talking to you.

So you’re over here directly in front of me, the camera is over there, how I’m looking at it now it’s only just in my peripheral vision and it doesn’t bother me at all.

So I can just have a conversation with you forget that that’s even running, and you can get some really wicked footage. So have something like this with you all of the time. So there are no excuses for you to gather testimonials and content for your attract or marketing strategy for your building business.

So there you are, a bit of high tech there. A selfie stick on a little flexible tripod. Carry it with you everywhere. This can make your business 10s of thousands of dollars a year in additional profit that you wouldn’t have made. Because you’re putting yourself in front of people with your content. Absolutely fantastic.

Make sure you get yourself one. And love to see a whole lot more of this showing up on our Facebook group. If you’re not on our Facebook group already, easy to remember, this is the Builders Business Success Podcast. What you can do is jump on Facebook and find the Builders Business Success Forum.

And that is a closed Facebook group for builders only and if you’ve got any questions about how to do all of this sort of stuff, you can jump in there, love to help you out.

Back To The Conversation With James!

– I can just hear some people listening to this say sleep when you’re dead, all of that sort of stuff. I mean, if you really wanna achieve what you wanna achieve, and we’re talking to owners of builders, building businesses here, and they’re contacting us all of the time, can you help me with this? Can you help me with that?

Can you help me with the other? How does sleep affect your health, your decision making, your behavior, things like that, because all of those three things that I just mentioned have to affect the results that you get in your business, financially, emotionally, effectiveness, all of that sort of stuff.

How does having good sleep improve? Because people are gonna think, “Well, I haven’t got time to sleep, “I gotta be up early or, or whatever. “I’ve got to go to work. “I can’t just sleep.”

– Yeah, if you’re saying I don’t have time to sleep, you’re essentially saying I don’t have time to make another 100,000, 200,000 to $300,000 in my business this year.

– Yeah.

– That’s essentially what you’re saying because sleep. Oh, sorry. Let me start with poor sleep. Poor sleep has been linked to fogginess, to a lack of clarity, to poor decision making, to over eating because you’re trying to generate energy because you’re so tired to drinking more than you ordinarily would drink because you’re tired and you’re wanna get a little boost, people are also drinking at night to try and get to sleep.

All of these things affects your, your sleep quality, it affects your weight, it affects your mood. It affects your ability, quite frankly as a business owner, to be able to make good solid, strong choices and decisions.

So if you’re sleeping less than what your body wants you to sleep and it’s poor, and it’s restless, sleep it’s the deal you don’t make the next day because you’re tired. It’s the person that you procrastinate on firing in your business, because it’s all too hard.

It’s the additional phone call that you didn’t make, which could have led to a $50,000 deal in your business, because you’re dragging your ass all day feeling like a six or seven out of 10.

Now the flip side of that is if you focus on your sleep, if you sleep well, if you wake up in the morning and now you’ve got clarity and focus and energy.

Well what does clarity, focus and energy give you?

Clarity, focus and energy gives you good strong decisions, it gives you an additional deal. It gives you a better deal. It gives you more productivity, it gives you strategy to be able to actually have this compass in your business and to be able to direct it to a point where now you go from a million dollar revenue business to a two or $3 million revenue business in half the time than if you were sleeping poorly and being foggy and lethargic not strategic in your business.

So sleep is everything, is so important. And I can tell you that since I focused on this almost a decade ago, I’ve generated millions of dollars in revenue, my relationships are better, I’ve lost weight. I’ve got the body nature intended me to have and as a performance hack.

Wow, you wanna be in peak performance in your business. Sleep great because that will equate to you having a much more effective business.

• • Yeah, perfect. Now, as I mentioned, we were just on the four day I call an intensive with our business coach. We’ve got a business coach. His name’s Taki Moore. He’s a business coach who’s specializing in coaching business coaches, and he’s one of the most positive, energetic enthusiastic coach you’ll ever come across. I mean, you’d have to agree with that.The first two days because I was, as I said, I did the 8 a.m to midday, and then I did the 6 p.m to 10 p.m version as well, because he’s going across different time zones.The first couple of evening sessions he did, or the first evening session he did, he was nude from the neck up, he wasn’t wearing any glasses. He doesn’t need glasses for reading or anything like that that will need them to see the screen and reading and the mornings where he wasn’t wearing them. Like he looked really drawn.

    He didn’t have the energy yet to wind himself up and really push in the morning. But then for the first time ever, I saw him with a pair of swannies on in the evening sessions. And he was sort of we were bagging him out and all this, and he didn’t think he looked good.

    I thought he looked just fine, but the difference in the morning sessions after he’d been wearing those and so I’m telling you this folks because it was instant, he wasn’t wearing them one day, and I could tell he wore them the next night and the very next morning, big difference in the energy that he had.

    I can’t sing praise about these things from the rooftops hard enough. Having said all of that there are different models like Swannies make different models for different purposes.

    Can you run us through that because I’ve only got this pair, I’d wear them during the day and in the night because I’m gonna look like everyone keeps calling me Elton or Bono or whatever, they’ll get all of these jokes through the Facebook, but I’ll just wear those ones because these are a bit prescription.

  • Yeah, so I’ll explain it. In simple terms, you must wear an orange lens, blue light blocking glass or pair of glasses at nighttime. If sleep quality is your goal, okay? So that means you wear or you put on a pair of these you can, they are obviously orange lens right? I’m wearing a pair here of like our diamond collection you can wear the aviators. I think you’re wearing the diamonds which is what you’re referring to as the Elton John’s style.
  • I just need to learn to sing like him, that’s all.
  • And you can also wear those orange lens glasses during the daytime on your computer, it will again, it will block that blue light during the daytime ironically it will give you energy and clarity and focus.

At nighttime wearing them it will actually start to calm you down and start to relax you and prepare you for sleep. So you can actually just get the orange lens pair of glasses and use them for both nighttime and daytime.

Having said that, some people don’t always wanna wear an orange lens. Some people wanna have a clear lens. Now to be clear about clear lenses. You must only wear the clear lens glasses during the daytime.

These will not help you with your sleep quality at night because it does not block enough of that artificial blue light that’s responsible for messing with your sleep.

• Yes.
• Okay. So daytime, computer use, you’re in project management, you’re on screens all day. What these clear lens glasses do is filter the blue light. They don’t block as much of the blue light as the orange lens glasses do but they block enough of it to give you clarity and focus and energy during the day and more importantly not have you feel drained and foggy and lethargic and like rubbing your eyes and having a headache and feeling like you need to take a break the whole time.So I hope that clarifies that. There are many blue-light blocking glasses companies out there that actually–
• How many have you got there?
• Have got a lot.
• This is like a fashion show .
• I got the classic style here. I got a pair of blue glasses. I’ve got the diamond glasses and then I’ve got the aviators. And I like the “Top Gun: Maverick,” kinda look. So yeah, orange lens, nighttime and daytime, clear lens daytime only.Just wanted just a word of warning. And this is not to just play mine up and discredit other blue-light blocking companies but there are a lot of companies that do sell blue-light blocking glasses and they sell the clear lens and they still have sleep benefits on it, they still say it helps solve your sleep, that is just completely inaccurate.In the known universe that we occupy, there is no physical way to block enough of that artificial blue light that is responsible for your melatonin production with anything but an orange lens.

  So I just wanted to be clear on that cause I see a lot of people at nighttime wearing clear lens glasses and thinking that it’s gonna improve their sleep, it won’t.

• I can back that up because these are my reading glasses with my prescription and I went to the optometrist when I first heard about it, and I said can I have the blue blocking and I said, “Do you do the orange thing?” And they said no, “We just put a film on the glasses.” And it definitely worked with the computer.I felt a little clearer and didn’t the eye fatigue. During the day, these orange ones a far superior and you get the that sort of melatonin production at night. So I’m a convert. I’m a fan. I’m a believer and can’t recommend them highly enough.So having said all of that, if I wanna get them, where do I go to get them? How do I do it?
• Yeah, so if you go to swanwicksleep.com. My name is actually pronounced Swanwick but because I’ve been living in America for so long, the Americans don’t understand the silent W so I usually just say Swanwick. But yeah, the company name is Swanwick. The website is swanwicksleep.com.You can grab a pair there, they’re also on Amazon as well if you wanna get Amazon, you just type in Swannies or Swanwick, and should come up there as well.
• Fantastic, I appreciate you being on the show. Sharing this incredibly value, productivity hack. That’s what I would call it productivity life hack. It’s absolutely brilliant. I’m a big fan. Go get them.Thanks James, hopefully we’ll be talking to you again. I know you’ve got a program that helps people with alcohol that’s again, something that some people would go, “Oh no, don’t go there. “Don’t talk about that.” But we’re gonna go there. We’re gonna talk about it. So I’d love to get you back and talk about that sometime.
• Wonderful, Mick. Thanks so much for having me and you’re looking like a rockstar trust me. A little bit cooler than Elton John even I think with your swannies.

Takeaway & Summary

So as always, we’re Builders Business Success Podcast, we want you to have a Take Away, something you can action and gain benefit from it.

The thing that I’m thinking about is it’s the small decisions that can make a big difference in the tech review, build it up like some big amazing thing and it was just a tripod with like a selfie stick.

Having something like that, grabbing something like that can make a big difference to whether you in fact gather testimonials or content for your marketing and attract strategy, but also the quality of it.

So just investing in something like that I like the selfie stick was like 40 bucks from Amazon.

Not even Amazon was some camping store I got it from and the tripod was 50 bucks or something like that from a camera shop. And it’s really good quality and it’s much better than how hand holding it and having it all wobbling around. It’s a small decision to go get that and so it’s there and you start to use it but the difference it can make because you gathering testimonials and content can be massive.

We spoke to James Swanwick about the glasses. Now I’ve had these for a number of months now and the difference that I’ve noticed I strain during the day because I do tend to be on the computer a lot if we’re doing workshops and so forth on the computer screen using zoom and what have you that’s one thing but then at nighttime, putting them on when the sun goes down to get rid of the blue light that is everywhere in your house can make a profound difference to your sleep.

The quality of your sleep affects the quality of your decisions, it affects the quality of your health. It affects the levels of energy and what you can get done in the course of the day.

So this small decision to go get yourself a pair of it could be swannies at least you know where to get those but blue blocking, not blue filtering but blue blocking glasses can make a profound difference on a whole bunch of areas of your business. Small decision, small investment, big result.

So that’s my Take Away from this episode of Builders Business Success Podcast. As always, I wanna suggest too that if you’ve got questions, if you want guidance, if you want to have your hand held and walk through a process, something we’ve talked about on the podcast, an issue or problem that you’ve got with your building business that we’ve spoken about am more than happy to help.

All you need to do is reach out, book a call, and we can have a conversation, I can point you in the right direction. It’s not all about, whether you wanna join Builders Business Blackbelt or any of that sort of stuff. I’m just here to help you, to point you in the right direction. I have lots of conversations with builders every week.

They don’t necessarily join Builders Business Blackbelt but I point them in the right direction to start to get what they need to help them build their business.

So if you wanna jump on a call, have a conversation, have me run my eyes over a problem you’ve got with your building business, is pretty simple.

All you need to do is hit the button underneath this video if you’re watching this podcast on our website. If you’re listening to the audio only all you need to do is navigate to buildersbusinessblackbelt.com that I you…

You see there there’s in the middle of the screen there’ll be a schedule a call, Hit that, that’ll take you to a form. Fill that out, that tells me a little bit about your business and what you want help with.

And then once you submit that, it’ll take you to my calendar and you can schedule in a call.

We’ll be on the phone before you know it and heading you in the right direction. Let’s jump on a call. And let’s have a chat. So I hope you enjoyed this episode of Builders Business Success Podcast.

We will be back with another episode before you know it so we will catch you then I’m Mick Hawes Builders Business Blackbelt. That’s it. Bye for now.