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¶ Welcome Nathan Baws: Business Athlete Journey
This is the Real English Conversations Podcast.
Clearly and confidently in the conversations that maybe in the workplace and your professional life. Everyone, it's Curtis Davies here from the Real English Conversations Podcast. Global professionals to speak clearly and confidently at work. This week's guest is Nathan Boz, someone whose energy, honesty, and obsession with business could power an entire city. He has built and scaled more than nineteen.
teen businesses, including multiple seven figure companies. And he's open about the ones that crashed and burned too. He's been on Shark Tank Australia. He set a Guinness world record for ice baths in 2024, and he recently co-authored an international best-selling book with Tony Robbins and Brian Tracy on business growth and optimizing dopamine for peak performance. He calls himself a business athlete and the topics he teaches are unlike anything you've heard before.
And the four of them that we're going to dive into today are opportunity alchemy, which is about spotting business opportunities others build for you, zero budget dominance. which is about out competing big money players with no budget, Resilience Engine, which is about transforming setbacks into momentum. Flow state activation protocol, which is about biochemical switches to activate flow on demand. High energy, hilarious.
deeply strategic. You're gonna walk away from this episode with actionable insights you can use immediately in your life, career, or business. Nathan Boz, welcome to the show. I'm excited to have you here for this one.
G'day Chad, it's lovely to be here mate, thank you for the welcome.
Right on, let's start here. You've built and scaled more than nineteen businesses. That's a lot of businesses, my friend. Some succeeded massively and others just crashed and burned. When you look back, what pattern, mindset, or inner switch separated your winners from your failures?
Yeah, so i it definitely has been a journey and um there's been a lot of learning a lot of learnings along the way, so s lots of ups and lots of downs and just when you think you get it right, then life has a a way of smacking you in the chops and saying, Ah actually mate, nah not not quite uh
Not quite me yet. Got a few more lessons to learn. So uh that was certainly what happened to me. I I'd exited out of um the health industry, which I had a lot of background, a lot of skills. I I studied that side of things. And then I had eight years of mentorship off the back end of that.
and then went into business and grew health shops and a vitamin supplement brand that are sold across Australia and did really, really well out of that and then had a had a big exit out of that and then thinking you're bulletproof and you can do anything. And uh apparently not. So, um I went from there into restaurants and many, many ways of losing lots and lots of money and then uh sort of, you know, grew from there. So being in lots of different industries, wildly different industries.
And I think that's just so much fun when when you're in the business zone and you're you're seeing opportunities everywhere, you think, Well, how can I build a business around that? You know, there's massive opportunities which comes a bit of a problem, uh because you know, you there's this shiny stuff everywhere so it is a bit of a challenge trying to keep your direction but also it's so much fun trying to find solutions to problems that exist and commercialise those outcomes.
Turn it into a business.
Lots of going back to the drawing board uh here and there a few times, right?
Hundreds of times, yeah. Yeah, and but the thing is it's getting so much easier now to launch businesses with the internet, with AI. You know, my fastest business I've launched was four hours from start to monetization. Um
And that's the same thing.
You couldn't d used to do that. You know, it wouldn't have been possible um many years ago, pre pre AI, pre internet. But there's so many ways of building businesses now that cost you nothing and there's zero risk. and there's maximum leverage. So it's a pretty exciting time that we're in right now for being in business.
Mm-hmm. Much easier now than 20 or 30 years ago. And uh that's fascinating. And it connects perfectly to one of your core teachings. You teach something called opportunity alchemy. What does that mean? And how can everyday professionals, not just entrepreneurs, learn to spot opportunities that others completely miss?
Yeah, so there there are so many opportunities out there. It's once you tap into seeing opportunities, it's hard not to see it anymore. So, you know, for people who say there's There's no opportunities, there's no there's no future, there's every everyone's stolen all or or has already executed all those good ideas. Just so far from reality now, there's just opportunity everywhere you look.
And I think it starts with asking the right questions and finding ways of doing things that don't require high cost or high risk. And opportunity alchemy for me is all about that is just finding businesses that can be created, particularly using other assets that you don't have to own yourself. You know, like the Uber Eats we were just briefly talking about Uber and Uber Eats before the podcast. And And that's a phenomenal scenario because it's just
collaborating with restaurants, so Uber Eats restaurants at one end and drivers at the other end and connecting those two. And I think there's so much traction and leverage that you can get out of that business model where you're the puppet puppeteer, you're pulling the strings and you're connecting different businesses together and coming up with a value added proposition that no one has really
created before. And I I think with opportunity alchemy it's all about creating opportunities that already have a fair bit of traction, already have a fair bit of knowledge. You're not building something from scratch that no one knows about. because there's so much time and there's so much money that has to go into that side of a a business creation because you have to once you've built it from scratch, you then have to educate people uh about how your product is so revolutionary.
And there's a lot of time and a lot of money that goes into that side of the education. So for me with opportunity alchemy, I love to bring really, really well known things together that didn't exist together before and create a collaboration, a business, an offering that is just blows the competitors out of the water because no one else has brought that value together.
So to give you an idea, I have been in business for forty plus years and I've always ha I've always struggled with my bookkeeping, my bookkeepers and accountants. I've always wanted a bookkeeper or an accountant To actually give give a crap about my business. Who who would actually be Yeah, I know that's crazy, right? But but but a a bookkeeper that actually made an effort to help me grow my business.
What a crazy idea that that would be, right? Or a mountain that would actually be involved actively involved in growing my business. Never has happened. I I build a business about a couple of years ago and I was looking for a new bookkeeper, a new accountant for this business.
And I rang twenty one accountants in uh across Australia and I said to them, What can you do for me? W why are you different? Why would I choose you over everyone else? And twenty one out of twenty one accountants gave me the exact replica answer. You should choose me because we're good at compliance and I've been doing this for a hundred and sixty years, right? And I'm there sitting sort of going, Oh, yeah, sorry, why should I you know, falling asleep on the telephone. It was so boring.
And none of these guys had the ability to sell. None of them had anything. As a business owner, the one thing that I care about is growing my business. That's it. Right. Period. Right. And I'm just craving an accountant or a bookkeeper out there that could say, I'll help you actively grow your business and didn't have So I thought stuff this uh there is a massive opportunity here.
Imagine an accountant or a bookkeeper that would say to you, We'll do your books, we'll do your compliance, but also I'm gonna meet with you once a month and I'm gonna kick your butt and make sure that you move your you know you know, A into gear and um and I'm gonna help you grow your business because that's what I should be doing. With those numbers I should be using that to to advise.
So I built I built a business called Number Five and we've got a bunch of very, very switched on bookkeepers and we do bookkeeping in the USA and Australia. And everyone that does that bookkeeping has conversations with myself or a team member who's a specialist in and and obsessed with business growth. So and that's all included. That's all included. So we we build this little engine, this little structure that everyone knows bookkeepers, everyone knows
you know, that what bookkeepers do. Everyone knows what a business does, but no one's really value added and put it put those two together. And the other thing I wanted to do was create I'm a bit of a tight ass. So I Whatever I I I look for, I look for opportunities and you know, I think that's a bit of my background where I've been brought up on potatoes and and rice and any other cheap
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product that that uh single mum yeah put in the dropping the the uh shopping trolley. So that has always directed where my businesses go and the ability to look for zero cost ways of of building business.
So what I had to do as when I built Numberfide, I wanted to give really, really phenomenal bookkeeping because I'd had a gut full of crap bookkeepers over the years. We interviewed hundreds and hundreds of team members, outsource it so it's done at a compet really, really competitive price overseas. but they have to all have Australian qualifications and US qualifications. And we then integrated business coaching with that. So as I say,
When you're creating opportunity alchemy, we're creating businesses. People already know bookkeeping, people already know business coaching. But imagine a package that puts it all together and adds value is way cheaper than the competitors out there. but gives people what they want. As a business owner, I want really clean books and I want to grow my business. So that's the sort of idea behind that crazy thing.
You really don't see both of those together. Either the bookkeepers and accountants are expert mathematicians or they love math and they don't really bring in the business growth aspect and what you've done there is really merge
¶ Zero-Budget Growth and Resilience
and probably highly sought after as well. So that's uh that's impressive. And speaking about what others might overlook, that leads right into the next thing that that you really teach and focus on is your zero budget dominance. concept. This is such a powerful and unique concept. Can you break down how someone with no budget, no audience and no connections can still out compete the big players, the big guys?
Yeah, yeah. It i this took me ages to get my head around. Again, it's one of those things when you see it you can't unsee it. When you use it for business, uh you you just don't think twice about doing any other way. You know, again, my background in potatoes and rice have have made me ask the question, well, how can I grow a business without any money?
You know, and I think the questions that we ask ourselves give us the the life that we want to live. So the the better the quality of the question, then the better the answer and then the better the the outcome that follows. So to me it was all about I wanna grow like crazy. I'm obsessed with growing businesses. You know, I'll learn everything, I'll sit on the internet, I'll I'll
devour loads of content, books, whatever it is, anyone who's killing it out there. But then I'll ask the question, how can I do that without spending a dollar? And you ask the right questions, you get the right answers. This someone out there that's already done it, whatever the problem is, someone's already solved it. So we just have to look for those people. Um so what I eventually ended up doing was bringing in joint ventures and collaborations and utilizing
'Cause I was really crap at building audience myself. It you know, for I I always went to build businesses where the the audience already exists. where their clients really existed. But, you know, I know some people who can build a cafe in the middle of nowhere and and they're
crazy busy. You know, they'll they'll attract the customer too. But I was never good at doing that. I was always good at finding business uh finding customers that already exist that are hungry that are really craving your product. and tapping into that. So it saved me time, it saved me money and it it it just built the the business overnight. So what that's all about is leverage, is finding ways of leveraging other people's
databases, other people's clients, other people's infrastructure, and just plugging in the vehicle into that and collaborating and saying, Hey, why don't we do a little J V? Let's do a profit share. I've got this great product, it would really suit your audience. I'm gonna set it up so there's zero risk for you, there's no effort, you don't even have to lift a finger. I've done all the marketing, I've done all the the emails that you can send to your clientele.
Everything is super, super easy, smooth. It's a it's an absolute seamless process. What I'm thinking is I'll give you this access to this product, zero cost, no risk. And why don't we offer it because it's perfect for your clientele. So that's that's the beauty of joint ventures. There's no risk you can plug straight into a huge existing databases.
repeat that over and over and over again with multiple joint venture partners. And if you structure it right, it's never going to cost you a cent. So that's a lot of power and a lot of leverage and zero cost. So that's that's what excites me.
Do you think people get into this this mindset of it takes money to make money and that's why they never think of those joint ventures or they overlook them?
Yeah. I I just don't think people have the awareness around it. And I'm actually in the middle of building a uh a J V course w and and an app where it can help people find p you know potential J J V partners because people just don't think in those terms. They think, oh, I have to pay for an ad.
Now, paying for an ad up front without any results beforehand is in my mind quite risky. You wanna de risk when you're in business so that you can leverage to the maximum. So Uh yeah, I love the idea of joint ventures just to to find different ways of growth without the dollar cost.
That idea of turning limits into leverage ties directly into something else you talk a lot about too. You talk openly about failure, pressure, and crashing businesses. What is the most brutal setback you've experienced? And how did you turn it into a breakthrough using resilience engine?
Yeah, cool. So it what I discovered a while ago was we determine the way we respond and react to things and we can either stack it in our favour or it can pull us down. you know, there's no there's no right or wrong. You don't go to jail because you react a certain way to an event. Because society society and parents and and all sorts of influence
has a way of determining generally how we respond. But what if we didn't have to respond that way? And what if we understood that potentially a a way that we respond to a negative situation or a and a stressful event is limiting our growth and me being obsessed with business and and growth, I I kind of figured early on that that was
kind of silly to allow society to influence how we felt about a certain way. For example, I'd I mentioned this before where I'd just come off the back of a really good exit from fr from the health industry and thinking I was bulletproof and indestructible, I went straight into restaurants. Uh and they say how how do you make a million bucks in restaurants? You start with ten million and you end up with one.
Um, so that's how you get to a million and that's kinda what I did. So um I opened one restaurant, it went well, and then I opened another one and another one. and didn't have good bookkeepers kicking my backside and keeping me accountable, which I do now. And I went from, you know, really, really good exit to really, really losing a ton of money. Uh, you know tens of of thousands of dollars every month in these restaurants.
And so you can let that stop you and a lot of people get to the stage where they give up and they throw in the towel and they say, I surrender, that's it. I'm no good at business. And or you can say to yourself, Wow. There was some serious lessons in there. So I can either let that stop me or I can learn from those lessons and I can make that now benefit me going forward.
And thankfully that's that's where I focused on. I was focusing on how do I chan turn those challenges, those setbacks, that learning experience into never going down that track again, never losing a lot of money again. And I think that's what's spat me out with these whole J V structures and really getting passionate about them. because I realized we could get the same thing without the infrastructure. We could become the Uber Eats without owning the taxis and the vehicles.
we could orchestrate the overall event, put people together, collaborate, bring them in, and never have to put out those sort of hundreds of thousands of dollars that are put into building restaurants. and, you know, just collaborate with people and get the same outcome. Get all the uplift but none of the downlift. You know, none of the risk.
So that's that that was a a big mental shift for me, saying, Okay, I've learnt from this, let's put it into practice, not let's give it up. Um, l let's never go back there. I never want to be in that situation again. and let's be a bit smarter about structuring businesses going forward.
¶ Activating Peak Performance On-Demand
Sounds like past experiences became stepping stones to the resilience. that encourage you to grow and to try other things. And once someone builds that resilience, the next piece is learning to perform under pressure, which brings us to flow. That flow state activation protocol you you call it.
Sounds like biohacking meets business strategy. How does someone activate flow on demand, especially during high pressure communication moments like presentations, negotiations, sales calls, that sort of thing?
Yeah, so there's a couple of elements to that. One is when you're in that state of high anxiety then again it's kind of the mindset thing of saying, I'm feeling this nervousness. What if we were actually to say, hang on a second, this isn't actually nervousness. This is excitement. Right? What if we just did a tiny little pivot and turned that nervousness into excitement? Well, I am punked. This is gonna be so good.
It's it's those two energies are so similar. It's it's quite funny. So instead of you know, nervous, you're buzzing with excitement. So just again, it's it's up to us. We dictate how we see things. So stuff the way that society sees things. Like, let's let's stack it in our favour. Who cares what what they say about I should you know, I'm going in front of a hundred
audience and I'm really, really nervous out about a presentation. Well, I just get pumped. I just get so excited and and it's just a little pivot of saying, actually this isn't nerves, this is excitement because I'm so passionate about delivering this message. I I I just can't wait to get out there. This is gonna be fun. So you know, I think that
that's a mind shift of of doing that. The other side of it is I think a lot of people just go through life on stimulants and just keep going from from one to the next, you know, pill popping pills and drinking coffee and and just keep trying to push through. Now they don't build the foundation. My background was in health. I was originally a naturopath and I I learnt a lot about changing the biochemistry of your body and particularly when to
the the uh ketosis that side of things and I actually am setting up a couple of hotels in Indonesia doing a weight loss program through ketosis and what it trains you to do is change the body fuel and if we can burn fuel a lot healthier instead of the carbohydrates when we cut down on All that rice and potatoes that I ate as a kid, maybe that's had another influence in me. Um, saying, you know, no more of that. So
Ketosis is where you go in you you change your body fuel to a really, really clean burning fuel. So instead of carbs and glucose, we start breaking down fat tissue and release ketones. Now that has a really good effect on our energy, our mood, our dopamine levels. And dopamine is something that I love to focus on in business. And everything that we do, whether it's health or mindset or business,
tools is all related to business outcomes'cause I'm just I just love business and I just love growing businesses. So even though, you know, you can optimize your health, which is fantastic for your longevity and your and your brain function and all the high energy things, but I'll always link it to, okay, how's that gonna benefit my business? So
Beautiful.
Yeah, so there's a big a big foundation of of health, nutrition, mindset and business tools to to all come together.
What a unique concept that you're merging everything together. I've I've never seen anybody do it so well. You clearly treat business like a high performance sport, which is exactly why you call yourself a business athlete. Calling yourself a business athlete, what routines, habits, or mental frameworks make you perform at the the high level of consistency?
Yeah, yeah. So that nutritional foundation is really key. I've uh been in ketosis for about six years. I measure my ketones every day. On my desk somewhere I've got a little ketone breath analyzer, so I just blow into that, that check m my state of ketosis. So on the health side of it, personally I pretty dedicated to to the cause. I sort of fast until two PM every day and um you do the same do
Oh, yeah.
Oh yeah.
fasting, meditation, that sort of thing. Haven't done the ice baths yet, but uh had a had a previous guest from the UK that uh is all about breath work and ice baths and things like that and got me really thinking, well that that's gotta help. But you're you're merging it with the business and performance and becoming a business athlete.
Yeah, and so everything because I just love business, everything that in the background is all geared towards that. Because I figure if I can outlast my competition, if I can stay longer, focused for longer, if I have more energy, all these things are gonna help with my business, right? I can put more hours into the day. There is no such thing in my life. life balance. I I'm terrible at it, so I won't pretend uh to to give any advice on that. I suck at it.
Um but but what I am focused on is just one thing which is business and growth. So everything in the health side of it. Ice baths are fantastic. In fact we're involved in a Guinness Book of World Records for Ice Bath. and w we we did the biggest ice bath in the world with the most amount of people. And and that was just part of of the journey of business again. So every day I go down to the beach, summer or winter, zero degrees, doesn't matter.
I I'll throw myself into the ocean and just get that woof that dopamine hit. And the dopamine is fantastic. It it's such a big part. I mean, ice baths and cold water therapy, they've measured the dopamine increase. the neurotransmitter in the brain that that's really important for motivation and keeping people focused. And when you go into an ice bath for three minutes at fourteen degrees or l less Celsius, then you you stimulate your dopamine can go up to about two hundred and forty percent.
uh which is stronger than a lot of drugs out there. So I get my little hit every day, jump in the ocean, doesn't matter what the weather is, and then bring that into the day and then when I'm in that moment of discomfort of what the frick am I doing this for? And I'll always think, Well, actually this is gonna help me and in throughout the day I
I should be able to close more deals. I should be so there's a a direct link and a correlation between that discomfort and the great outcomes. So yeah, that's that's where ice baths fit into my daily routine.
¶ Shark Tank Insights & Empowering Questions
And speaking of performing at a high level, few environments test confidence like Shark Tank. You were on Shark Tank Australia and that environment is intense. When you were talking about earlier about being nervous versus excited,
were you more nervous on Shark Tank or were you completely thrilled, you're like I'm gonna I'm gonna rock this, I'm gonna blow this out of the water? Did that experience teach you about confidence, communication, and holding your power in uh in such a high stakes situation? situation.
Yeah, so i i it was a bit of a combination of nerves and and excitement and the focus was trying to convert the nerves into the excitement. And Shark Tank's an interesting one'cause they can either give you a really good edit or you can come out crucified. And it's totally up for them. For whatever reason, they decided to give us a g a good edit. So they they turned us out looking okay. So when you go in you film it, there's about forty minutes, probably took about forty, forty five minutes.
and film the whole lot. There's about nine or ten minutes that they cut out of that and edit that and show that on the T V. And
Luckily, as I say for us, they edited out all the all the bad bits and made us just showed us the good showed the good bits which which was fantastic. But and that was phenomenal marketing and that was a a marketing stunt that we did for uh for the restaurants and uh at that stage I had one restaurant and I had opened the second one and every time they did a rerun on the T V we just had tons and tons of people come in and purchase, you know, dine at the restaurant.
So it was a fantastic marketing strategy. Uh very stressful at the time, but still a lot of fun'cause we were really focusing on just having a good time and having converting that into into excitement.
Nice. And uh yeah, I watch the video. It's up on your website. And it was very, very interesting, very cool to see that. So let's bring this home for our global audience here on the Real English Conversations podcast. For global professionals listening, people navigating career changes, leadership roles or or business opportunities, what is the single most important mindset in what shift or strategy they should adopt today or to activate more opportunities in their life.
I think asking the right question is a perfect starting point for that. So getting better and better at asking better and better questions. As I was mentioning, the the quality of the question that you ask yourself determines the quality of your output and the life that you live. It's like AI. The better the input, the better the output.
So I think we should all spend more time asking ourselves better questions that will lead to better outcomes and lead to a better path because sometimes we just jump into life and do it blindly on autopilot and go through our day without questioning anything and without really saying, Is this the best use of my time? Am I passionate about what I'm doing? Is there something else that would do fulfill me more or could could ha lead to a better upside?
So I think starting at those really good questions of just hang on a second, why am I doing this? You know, and is there a better better way of doing it or what else should I be doing? Or just asking yourself a bunch of questions just to start those neur new neural pathways being triggered and saying and and just creating more awareness around doing things a bit differently and better for better out.
Like a uh self audit.
Right?
Yeah, check in with yourself and and audit yourself. Ask yourself the right questions. Give yourself the right props like you would use AI. You have to give it the right props. You you can't treat it like like a Google. You you have to prompt it and and guide it and and ask it the right things, you should be doing that with yourself. So that's such a powerful way to frame opportunity. Absolutely. Nathan Boz, this has been an unreal conversation. High energy, practical, full of insights.
people can apply immediately. Your approach to business, mindset, merging the two together with with performance is something I know my listeners will take a lot from. Where can everyone connect with you, learn about your outstanding work, and dive deeper into your business framework?
Yeah. Welcome to Connect through LinkedIn, uh, under Nathan Bores and my website NathanBors dot com and uh always always Happy to do collaborations with people and and help people if they've got any if they're stuck in business we meet once a month and we all sort of help each other to grow. can you know, starting to create a little community around that. So bring it on, anyone's welcome to come and play.
Outstanding. I'll put that information in the show notes in the description of this episode. And thanks once again, Nathan Boz, for joining me on the Real English Conversations Podcast.
Thanks, Keras. Pleasure. Thanks.
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