Something that doesn’t get talked about enough is how often entrepreneurs or business owners give up – whether due to stress, burn out, or life getting in the way.
When E-Comm expert Andrew Tan noticed how often his students destroyed their own progress just as they were about to succeed, he decided to switch things up.
Today, 80% of his students own successful E-Comm businesses.
Listen to today’s episode of Founders Go Naked to find out:
- How the “lazy man’s way” of E-Commerce makes you money – while you just enjoy life!
- What kind of assets do the ‘real rich’ people spend their money on? (And how it makes them richer and richer)
- How to utilize your company’s heads, butts, hands and legs for greater teamwork.
- How to manage and HEAL emotional trauma throughout your entrepreneur journey
Transcript:
Meet Andrew Tan: The Holistic E-Commerce Entrepreneur
[00:00:00] Terence: Hey everyone, this is Terence with a new episode of Founders Go Naked. And today I have a very special guest because he’s not only just a successful person in the coaching space, and he’s been around for a long time, but he’s also a great friend and someone I admire from the bottom of my heart as a friend.
And he’s just so, so cool to hang out around with. Like we could spend hours together, Andrew, just chatting. So it’s really good to have you today on the podcast, Andrew. So yeah, welcome.
[00:00:32] Andrew Tan: Thank you for having me. When are we going out for drinks again?
[00:00:34] Terence: Yeah. Yeah. I need to get myself to KL soon so we can go for drinks.
[00:00:39] Andrew Tan: Yeah, nice to have you here and thank you for the invite.
[00:00:45] Terence: So Andrew, yeah, I guess we’ll get started. Maybe you can tell the audience about yourself, your business and who you are. Just some of your highlights and accomplishments in your business life.
Andrew's Journey: From E-commerce to Financial Healing
[00:00:57] Andrew Tan: Some people would call me a cockroach. Because I cannot die even in the Holocaust.
In Chinese they call it… [Chinese phrase]. I’m a survivor. For everybody listening in, my name is Andrew Tan. I’m an e-commerce entrepreneur. I’m also an asset builder and I’m a financial healer as well. Um, essentially I teach people how to make use of marketplaces like Shopee, Lazada, Qoo10, Carousel, and eBay to create their side hustles.
And my approach is not about product first. It’s always about finding out what people want to buy and are willing to pay money for, then you give them what they want, and along the line, create your own brand so that you can carve out your own space to have a community follow you. Then after that, you start selling subscription based or residual based products that can give you month on month residual income.
And I have a philosophy which I like to call it my lazy man’s way of doing e-commerce. Which is, I don’t like to do all the packing and the delivery on my own. That’s why I will outsource those to a fulfillment center to take care of all the nitty-gritty. I do believe in automation very very much, for example if you can make use of software to receive the orders on any platforms and then send it automatically to the fulfillment center. They will have staff who will go to your shelf, take, pack, send to the customer for you. And what do you do? Enjoy your life in whichever ways you want to enjoy it. Okay. So that’s a bit about me.
Investment Philosophy and Financial Wisdom
[00:02:39] Terence: So Andrew, thanks for the introduction. So I understand apart from being an e commerce entrepreneur itself, you also teach other people how to replicate your system and how they can gain the same level of success that you do in your life.
But also, I believe you also teach people how to invest, right? Yeah. Can you tell us a little bit about that and how that all fits in?
[00:03:00] Andrew Tan: Okay. See, uh, when we talk about investments, many times your money is in the investment. And it kind of gets locked in. And you cannot kind of take it out whenever you want, or you’ll lose out in the maturity, et cetera, et cetera.
So one of the first philosophies in my life is you must always have a steady cashflow and the cashflow usually cannot come from a job because a lot of times the job cashflow is very limited. There should be some kind of variable income portion that allows a person to make more. So I used to be a person who spent a lot of money, who makes a lot of money, but I spent a lot of money on, um, designer stuff.
It’s crazy. One year, I bought a 30 pairs of designer shoes, 30 pairs. Even my wife doesn’t have that much. On average, around the lowest would cost, in US dollars, uh, about 600 US dollars to maybe a thousand plus US dollars.
So I had a bit of a humbling lesson and I know it’s a long way to answer a question about investments, but I think it’s important for people to realize, if the attitude of a person is one of “money comes so easy, I can just spend it all that, right?”. The money goes easy as well.
And what I find is painful is the mindset that comes along with that. See, I have been taught by a few of my friends whom helped me out in a difficult situation after COVID. They said that there are three kinds of people in the world. They are the poor, the fake rich, and the real rich.
And it’s all to do with your personal P and L account, profit and loss. The poor person always spends the money that they don’t have yet. So they are forever in deficit. And for the rich person, the fake rich kind, has got the ability to make a lot of money, but the fake rich also like to to buy assets that depreciate.
So what do I mean by assets that depreciate? The watches that you wear (some people argue on that) but then the watches, the house that you live in on your own, Robert Kiyosaki quoting, okay. And then the designer bags, the cars, all these are assets, you know. There are assets that kind of make you, your face look good, your ego feels good, but then every one of those assets keep depreciating in value.
So needless to say, all these fake rich people eventually burn out. Uh, they keep working hard and they keep trying to keep up with the Joneses. And that was me last time until I crashed. I lost 800,000 in like, five months and then I start to realize all these old habits, right, really didn’t help at all. Then I realize what is the real rich when I start to meet the real rich people. They don’t need all this luxury stuff. Maybe they get one or two just to feed the ego. They may drive very ordinary cars even like Toyotas or Hondas, you know. Um, but they are very cash rich and what they do with the extra cash is they will put into assets that increase in valuation.
So these would be things like property, investment, land, even cryptocurrencies, if they want to do a bit of trading. Or people go for the safe ones, they buy insurance, like endowment policies and all that, or they put into funds, you know. These are all very, very safe ways to invest.
And I truly believe that if a person doesn’t know how to manage their cash flow and they adopt a gambling style of attitude for investments, right? Someday it’s gonna crash. That’s why my philosophy becomes start off well, start off good, but know your own weaknesses and make sure that you put your money aside to make it sustainable.
Then when we set a target, say the residual income per month is 10, 000, then per year will be 120, 000. So the target becomes how do I get assets that give me 120, 000 a year. Then we work on the percentages, et cetera, et cetera. Does this sound like a complicated way to answer a simple question?
Business Goals & Personal Goals: Why it is important?
[00:07:27] Terence: No, but I think it makes a lot of sense even though it’s a long winded way of answering it.
But I think it’s so, so good that you shared your, your personal journey because that’s, you know, pretty crazy how you had 30 pairs of luxury shoes. I was actually at a strategic coach meeting last Friday night. One of the things we talked about was the goal setting, right? And I realized that I didn’t set a goal for my passive income.
I just keep setting goals for my business, but then I forget to set goals for my passive income, my investments. So that was one thing that gave me a big aha moment: okay, I really need to start setting goals, not just for my business income, but also for my passive income as well, because, you know, business income, it’s kind of like up and down, right?
But your passive income, if your passive income can sustain you, you have so much more security and you can, you know, really take more risks in your business and not worry about it so much.
[00:08:30] Andrew Tan: You see, I have a take to that one. When you talk about goal settings, okay, many people think that there’s a separation of business goal and personal goals, but what I realized is that personal goals must be the underlying goals beneath the business goals.
Give you an example. We all know that every business, we should set our mission, vision, and value statements, correct? And usually when we submit a vision statement, we say, okay, that belongs to the business, but then under the business, if you set a personal goal, like for example, one of the personal goals I tell my team is I would like every one of you, my teammates to become intrapreneurs, where you start to build a business brand where every month you get a 10, 000 residue or net profits, you know? So once these kind of personal goals are set in, the personal goals are in the employee’s DNA.
Then the business goals can easily be achieved because when when a staff is satisfied with their current direction and their finances, right, they help you, they are congruent and they are even congruent to help you build your business goals. Does that make sense?
Empowering Employees: The Intrapreneurial Approach
[00:09:51] Terence: Yeah. I I’m curious, Andrew, what do you mean by, I mean, I understand the whole concept of, of being an intrapreneur, but how do you say, okay, here’s why I want you guys to become, become intrapreneurs and then aren’t you kind of concerned?
Okay. Then they kind of like, get the whole idea that they can make more money and then they can go elsewhere or start their own business and that kind of stuff. Um, you know, how does that work?
[00:10:19] Andrew Tan: This comes down to my philosophy around business. Am I going to be the quote unquote Chinaman style entrepreneur that controls everything?
And my staff are my subordinates and they are just my tools? You know, this kind of way of doing things… it’s almost sure the employee will leave because they don’t feel like they are appreciated, they are just being wring to squeeze out every drop. And then they just burn out and they go. Okay. I’m not the kind of entrepreneur.
I’m the kind of entrepreneur that says, if I built my staff team as a people, okay, as, uh, as people with vision for their own lives, and even if they learn whatever they learn from me and they go out and they make good for themselves. Okay, then to me I have made someone better. Funny thing is that gratitude actually does come back.
I do see that when you treat a teammate well, the team member will treat you well in return. We backtrack a little bit. Of course, I’m talking about protections. Of course, you got your intellectual property and all those kind of things, right?
Those you need to put as an employee contract and this right from the beginning, in an employee contract. So there’s the employee contract that ties down about the restrictions and all that. That’s for protection. And the human relationship part, I want them to learn as much as possible, even have personal goals that makes themselves a better entrepreneur or intrapreneur.
Does that make sense? It’s about philosophy here.
Regular Employee VS Intrapreneur
[00:12:02] Terence: Yeah. Okay. Tell me what’s the difference between a regular employee and an intrapreneur and how is that helping your business to, you know, become more successful.
[00:12:14] Andrew Tan: Okay. Three types of employees. here’ll be those who are the higher level ups.
We call them the heads. The heads’ job is to think about vision, mission, direction, strategies. And what I don’t want the heads to do is to be the third level, which is the hands and the legs. Okay. Then the middle level, usually what we call the butts. Okay. Because they are the people who, the butts, they are people who cannot sit down. They are people who say you cannot have a butt because if you have a butt means you keep sitting down on your couch and your chair, you got nothing to do.
Those are the people who needs to take whatever the heads, the brain, say from the top level and put it into operations and systems and supervision, you know, and they are the ones who are supposed to tell those at the third level there, the hands and the legs to say, this is what you want to do, follow the S.O.P. and then give me the results. And the middle management just tracks the results. So, three, there are really three types of different employees, I would say, and, um, whichever one you hire, you just have to understand some rules. The top does not have hands and legs. The middle does not have butts. The bottom have got no heads.
They are just hands and legs. Does that make sense?
Andrew's Entrepreneurial Journey and E-commerce Success
[00:13:40] Terence: Okay, okay. That makes sense. Um, so Andrew, I want to ask you about your, entrepreneur journey. Can you give us a brief summary? Well, relatively brief summary of your whole entrepreneur journey that has taken you the last 20, 30 years to go through.
[00:14:01] Andrew Tan: I’ll try to make it concise.
Okay. Uh, I, again, state I’m a survivor and why I’m a survivor? Because I started off without a degree. So I don’t have a degree. My job salaries are always low. So knowing that if I want to go for, uh, more degrees, education and all that, I also don’t have the budget, don’t have the time or more like didn’t want to commit to the budget and the time for degrees and masters and all those kind of thing, just to go and get a job.
I needed money fast because my family had financial issues. So I started off in eBay in 2003. But when I first started on eBay at the time, I was just like dabbling on here and there every month. Maybe I make about a few hundred US Dollars. It wasn’t a lot. It wasn’t even serious at the time Then I started to get a bit more serious with e-commerce and I got myself a mentor to teach me a systemized way of starting an eBay business.
So my mentor, his name is Derek Gehl. He’s from Internet Marketing Center. He the partner of the legend, Corey Rudl, one of the founding fathers of internet marketing. And he taught me a five step system on how to do eBay. So being a person who liked physical products, I used his system. And within six months, I went from zero to five figures USD every month.
So, when I saw his system, I said, wow, you can actually make use of big data. That time we use a software called Terapeak. Okay, T E R A P E A K. And then it’s still, you can still use that today. And before you even spend any money to buy any stocks at all, you can confirm that this is a product that people want to buy.
You can do a profit calculation to this website called salecalc. com. S A L E C A L C dot com. You got an eBay calculator. All you need to do is just enter the numbers and poof, it’ll tell you how much money you’ll make after you pay all the commissions So if you know beforehand that you will not lose in every single transaction, that’s when you start to take the stocks and make the money.
So that’s my my first taste of a lot of money using eBay. So later on I started to teach courses about eBay, that was in 2009, and I made quite a few power sellers under me. Then, eBay had a problem in 2011. They had this thing called seller restriction, means on every account, now they put a limit to how much you can list.
It’s counterintuitive. You should be able to list as much as you want to be able to expose yourself in multiple eBay markets in the world. So it makes it easy for customers to buy from you, correct? But yet they put a limit to say, if you are a newbie now, the limit is, uh, 100 US dollars…
If let’s say one product is 10 USD, they put quantity 10 pieces. Poof! Your limit is hit. Although I had a good selling limit, my selling limit was like a few hundred thousand dollars. But then again, a few hundred thousand dollars of limit actually gets capped very quickly if you got many, many SKUs.
So when I saw eBay was like in this kind of iffy situation, I asked them how long is this selling limit gonna last? And they said indefinitely. So I knew that I had to shift already, and that was, uh, and that time the world was localizing. E-commerce used to be eBay and Amazon, but it was localizing. In Malaysia it would be Lelong, Mudah, you remember those days, right?
Yeah. Yeah. And, and then in, in Singapore it was Qoo10. That time it was called GMarket. Okay? Then later Lazada came up. And now we know that the local marketplaces have their own ecosystem. So I took the same principles and transfer it to local. And basically with the profit calculation. And this thing called the rolling inventory system.
What do I mean by rolling inventory system? Holding stocks that last for only one week so that your replenishment is just in time. And because we use this just in time model, first, we need to have a good freight network that sends the products from China to our countries. And usually it takes about maximum two weeks to arrive. So if we understand from the data, one week, how many orders can be sold by one seller, we know how much stocks we need to hold if we have a system that says we only hold one week of stocks.
What’s the good thing about the rolling inventory system? You don’t have to hold large quantity.
You don’t have to spend a lot of money to buy stocks and you don’t even need all those big warehouse. And one more thing, you never get caught with dead stock. So because of this, right, that philosophy transferred into our local marketplace pretty well. And my students started to make like five figures a month.
I started to hit about six figures a month, you know, so this became a comfortable zone for a few years, then competition became much higher in around 2006-2007. More and more people are starting to do e-commerce.
[00:19:41] Terence: You mean 2016-2017?
[00:19:43] Andrew Tan: Yeah, sorry, 2016-2017. Competition was getting stronger.
And that time we needed to pivot already. Just by selling other people’s products and fighting on price war, right, it’s not going to do it. It’s not going to make a long term sustainable income. So that’s why I studied direct to consumer brands, DTC brands. And that was when I created my diaper brand.
And then once you create a brand, the funny thing is that you don’t need to be a big brand like Pampers. You don’t have to beat all those big brands. But if your brand can target a need that the big brands don’t target, right, even if you have small amount of sales, that could easily be a replacement for your full time job income.
And if you really think of it, financial comfort. Okay, for a family of four, how much do you really need to spend to be basic and financially free? Would 10, 000 Singapore Dollars be good? Would 10, 000 Ringgit be good?
[00:20:51] Terence: Okay.
[00:20:51] Andrew Tan: I mean, if we really calculate, humans don’t really need that much money to feed your family, ordinary car, have a roof above your head, can travel two times a year, you know.
That’s a pretty decent, good life. So 10, 000 would be the benchmark.
[00:21:08] Terence: Yeah.
[00:21:08] Andrew Tan: You want to say something?
[00:21:09] Terence: No, no. I think that’s great. I think, you know, just, I think when most people want to start a business, obviously, you know, and when we kind of offer this to the marketplace, if they see a clear path to what’s like just replacing their current income or making a little bit more than a current income so that they have that comfort for the family.
I think that’s what most people are looking for.
[00:21:33] Andrew Tan: Yeah, and with that, right, I also want to say to people, don’t pressure yourself unnecessarily. I mean, I have this philosophy called, you only choose the battles that you can win. And this one was basically… I studied ancient Chinese generals from the legend of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, there’s this general called… the general that always wins.
I read a passage somewhere, I can’t remember where, it says that the general who always wins may not be the best at fighting, but he’s the best at choosing the battle that he can win. So then I applied that into business, you know. I said, oh, okay, if my target is to hit 10, 000 a month, then let me choose that battle that I can win if I create one brand and my net profit is 20 percent net profit, my revenue.
Just say straight lines, there are some expenses in there, but let’s say 50, 000 revenue, 10, 000 net profit. 20 percent is your profit percentage. That’s your target, that’s a battle that you can win already. So if you talk about 50, 000 revenue a month, then you gotta think about how many SKUs you need.
So if let’s say it’s 50, 000 per month, then if you go for a very conservative 1, 000, um, dollars of revenue for each product, then you need 50 products. 50 products, each one, 1000, you can get ordinary products, you know, and you can hit that number. Of course, you need to do all the packing and delivery, which is why I outsource all the nitty gritty stuff to third parties to take care of the, those stuff so that I just manage the numbers.
Does that make sense? So yeah, the point is when you have your own brand, you attract customers, you’ve got a database, you can sell them subscription models and that’s how you get residual income.
[00:23:32] Terence: Okay.
Surviving 2020 (COVID): Challenges and Resilience
[00:23:33] Andrew Tan: Now, so that that’s my year of 2016, 2017. So 2020, I think I need to say why I known I’m known as the cockroach that never dies.
That was actually said by my secondary school friend, you know. I said, what do you mean, she said, Holocaust come also, you won’t die. Oh, okay, I understand already. So I took that as a compliment. A weird compliment. So anyway, what happened? Uh, 2020 February, my seminars business went to a halting zero because nobody could do offline seminars that time.
And expenses still needed to be paid. And my diapers business had no diapers to sell because the non-woven fabric, which is the material, had to be redirected to create masks and medical gowns. And just that one ingredient alone increased cost by 700 percent during COVID. So no diapers, no seminars.
Income becomes zero overnight, stuck at home, cannot go out. Okay. And then I had 23 team members then. Okay. So you can roughly understand really. Then I had no diapers. We still took in pre orders, you know, and pre orders we wait for one month, two months, customers don’t receive the products, right?
Online flaming, calling us scammers and all those kind of thing. All come at one time. Then, my staff, although they were understanding, they tried to have a pay cut, etc. But it came to a point that they knew that, they couldn’t stay in the company, just didn’t have enough cashflow.
So my entire team, and that time I had partners leave me as well. I mean, bless their souls, uh, they had their own situation and difficulties at that time. So it was kind of like every man for… I hate this word. I wouldn’t say every man for himself. I would say that if they could, I would prefer that they stayed on, and let’s fight the battle together.
But unfortunately they didn’t. It’s okay with me now. I chose to stay on because I felt I had some responsibilities to the investors to say, no matter what, let’s just fight it all the way. So, um, interestingly, my staff team came down to only four left and that was the biggest headache, because I got to handle 26 people’s jobs.
Four of us handled 26 people’s jobs. I lost 800, 000 in five months. And the stress was like, I lost 10 kilograms in one month. I couldn’t sleep. I was walking to and fro in my house from like 3am. Walking to 7am, 8am. I cannot sleep because my mind just has so much inside. I don’t know if your audience can understand, that this is stressed to the max. Despite all these things we still had to hustle.
Pivoting to Success: The Online Sales Strategy
So I learned to pivot to online sales, I learned to, in fact, at one point in time, I sold durians. I sold, I went to Facebook Live and I sold durians. Not bad. Like one night can make like 4-500 like that. Okay. So yeah, beggars can’t be choosers. So whatever it is that happens, just make money.
July 2020 diapers came back again. We could sell. And when we started to sell the diapers that time, we didn’t insist on high profits. We did warehouse sales. So it’s volume, volume, volume, and we did volume. We got back some stability in cash flow. So by the end of 2020, we made about 1. 02 mil and, uh, my seminars business pivoted and in 2021 itself, we made 1. 04 mil in the seminars business. So then after that, just a little bit more. If I put a one year mark from the time, right? Um, I went from minus 800, 000 to positive 1. 4 million. Okay. And I’m not saying this to brag. It wasn’t easy at all.
If you all are listening in, you want to know what is the insider stuff that people don’t tell you? I took loans. I knew that my savings could cover most of the debts, and I still had a deficit of 250,000. And thankfully because of my business, I have good credit score. I took loans. I took 350,000 of loans and that 250,000 pay off the debt, so I had remaining 100,000.
That was my rebirth money. And what I did with the rebirth money was I actually called the bank and said I want to convert this loan to interest only for one year. And because of that, right, I didn’t have to pay for a huge repayment. And that 100, 000 rebounds me to 1. 4 million. So, there is no rocket science.
It’s just pure grit, guts, asking for help when you need help. I had friends who gave me platforms to speak. Um, and, and when I look back, that made me who I am today. If I didn’t go through that, I wouldn’t have been humbled. I would have been still thinking about luxury stuff. I wouldn’t think about investments and because of that bounce back, right?
Investment Strategies and Achieving Financial Freedom
I didn’t anyhow spend. I took the money and invested it in durian land. I invested in crypto. I invested into Albacia wood. You know, and I did agriculture, mostly agriculture stuff and properties as well. I bought two properties using my e commerce formula. There is a formula, you know, that if you, I just sidetrack a little bit.
If you have your revenue every month, 30 to 50, 000 revenue. And if your net profit is about 15 percent and there’s a track record month on month over a one year period of time, the banks look at your company as loanable for properties, you know, because of this track record. So I use that formula within one year after that, I had got some money for the down payment, right?
Then I bought 3 million worth of property, two industrial units. One is a flatted factory and one’s a three story building. And the important part is I have cashflow because I did that, right? The smaller unit gave me 1, 500 a month of cashflow. The bigger unit gave me three thousand a month of cash and this helped pay all the loans and all those kind of things.
Nice. Isn’t that a beautiful way to to make more money?
[00:30:40] Terence: Yeah, I mean that’s like four four thousand dollars every month. Not a bad start.
[00:30:46] Andrew Tan: And it pays for quite a lot of stuff. Pays for the mortgage, for the car, loans, installments. It is a bit more relaxing because I got this residual income coming in.
[00:30:59] Terence: Hmm. Okay.
Teaching and Empowering Others
[00:31:00] Andrew Tan: So where was I? So, yeah, that’s my entrepreneurship journey. Then 2021, I’m thankful for the bouncing back up. And then along the way, 2023, I started to teach more students. And we got some of them to make about four figures in one month or two months. We got students who hit about one million a year.
And I started to realize that. It’s simple framework, which is my five step framework can make people can help people make money whether it be four figures to six figures a month. And I felt proud about that.
[00:31:44] Terence: Okay.
The Importance of Emotional Healing in Business
[00:31:44] Andrew Tan: Yeah. So up till now I’m an investor and there’s one more part, which is I’m a financial healer.
Uh, why did I do this? The weird thing is that I’m still… my core nature is still an e-commerce entrepreneur, and I’m also a teacher. And I find that many of my students can’t break through. There’s a level where they self sabotage. Maybe they work hard. They reach almost a point that they hustle a bit more, they will get their residual income, but they crash and they give up.
Some stuff happened in life and I was like, what’s happening? You know, so that’s when I realized that business is simple. It’s a set of rules, strategies, and systems, but emotions? Emotions mess up business. Do you agree that? So emotions can mess up your decision making, can influence your business.
And that’s why I started to become a healer. I did get a degree in the end. I got a degree in counseling psychology, that was in 2016. Okay. And that was because I had my pride to say, I just want to complete my degree. And when I got that counseling degree, I used to work with teenagers on the wrong side of the law.
It doesn’t pay well, counseling doesn’t really pay well, but it’s very rewarding to the heart. And when I applied what I learned in counseling to my students in e commerce, the funny thing is they started to… the percentage of people who started to achieve and start to make money went up to about 80 percent of my entire student cohort.
And then now I’m at a stage where, if you want to be a really good entrepreneur, even an investpreneur, not just skills, but internally, the person needs to be emotionally resistant, resilient,
That’s my journey up till now.
[00:33:41] Terence: That’s fascinating. So, Andrew, that was a great story about how you basically came up, kind of like, learn some lessons.
I guess the Universe always gives you some lessons. And then, you know, how you basically lost everything pretty much and came back up. So that was really cool. I think one of the key things I’m hearing here is that, you know, because of your personal journey, you are able now to impart a greater degree of learning of experience to your students and what works and what doesn’t, because what you’re saying there is kind of like, uh, I don’t know, can’t find a better word for it, but maybe like holistic entrepreneurship in a sense.
[00:34:28] Andrew Tan: It is, you know. Yeah.
[00:34:31] Terence: The being, the financial, and the business itself – does all three things, right? Yeah. Is there anything that we’re missing there? I mean, cause like with the healing, can you maybe elaborate a bit more about why it’s so important? Obviously you’ve mentioned how you managed to help the students break through, but I think a lot of business owners struggle with the same thing, right?
We kind of like hit a certain level and then we get stuck for whatever reason, or we crash, right? So how does this healing help people break through?
[00:35:09] Andrew Tan: Okay. Um, this is something that I would say almost every one of us who are entrepreneurs will face one day… burnouts, communication issues with our team, we get lost.
The funny thing is, I think many of our teammates expect us as the drivers of the company to be very clear about direction, tasks, and all that… But do you agree that it’s always fuzzy? We are always making things along and we are just doing the best given our current data or resources that we have. And it’s easy to just miss out on a certain detail and poof, our business goes south and then we go into depression whatsoever.
And it’s a lot of stress. So I’m not saying that there is a magic pill to cure all the stress and you’ll be poof all good. But one thing is there are ways that we can manage all these pressures that we’re feeling. And as we manage these pressures, right, then because we are a lot more grounded and stable as people, our decision making becomes much clearer despite the problems that we face.
So the problems are still there, but you become stronger to face your problems. So what do I do is I adopt this, um, thing called Blocked Qi Release technique. So how did this technique come about? I have a master, his name is Master C.K. Tan, and he was the one who taught me this technique. In fact, it’s backed by science,. There are certain ailments in the body that are psychosomatic, which means physical illness that are manifested from the brain.
Okay? So what, what am I talking about? We all as human beings… just answer me on this, okay? Every stage of our lives, we will face with some emotional ups and downs, correct? Yeah. And some emotional things become trauma and, as normal human beings, we would process it. Maybe we cry or we just sweep it under the carpet and just shove it aside, correct?
[00:37:19] Terence: Yep.
[00:37:19] Andrew Tan: So, all these emotions that are not processed properly actually gets caught up, is blocked Qi or blocked energies in the body. Now, these block energies are emotions. And they can be lodged in the various organs in the body. So we make use of kinesiology. Okay, with kinesiology, you can talk to the subconscious mind.
And there’s a framework that tells us, okay. Um, what is the emotion you are facing, you know? What’s the name of the emotion? At which organ do you have that emotion? At what age did that emotion actually happen, you know? So we can even use kinesiology and trace back. So I’ll give you an example, okay?
Person, 50 years old, comes up having back pain, lower back pain. It’s like, what’s the lower back pain about? And we ask, what’s the, what’s the scale on one to 10? Is it level eight? It’s always nagging but doctors say there’s no problem, but it’s a back pain. So in the energy healing field, we know that back, lower back pain is usually due to money stress.
How do we clear out that stress? So with kinesiology, asking a few questions, we went back to when he was 29 years old. And when he was 29 years old, he had to be thrown into a foreign land in a new job. And he actually didn’t have much money at all, in fact the money was not even enough to survive to pay for basic necessities when he was going to that country.
So, there was much of unworthiness in him that he was feeling. Okay, and when we identified that he felt unworthy. Why? Because he felt that it should have been his brother to get the privilege to go to overseas. Instead, he went there and he felt that the family, his brother, had to be left behind to quote unquote suffer the financial situation at home.
So there was all this unworthiness that was happening within him. And when we identified that, at that age he had that unworthy feeling, he suddenly remembered, oh, I remember what happened. That time my story was blah blah blah blah. So then what we do is we make use of magnets and meridian points and we flush the meridian points and flush out the energy and we set an intention to say to those emotions:
Thank you. We let you go, we let you go, we let you go.
And after just about a 15 minute Blocked Qi Release session, his back pain went from a level 8 to a level 3 in just 15 minutes. So, all these things, physical is the easiest to explain, but then emotional stuff also cause self sabotage. So sometimes it could be an emotion from childhood.
Uh, abuse, you know, that kind of thing. And once that feeling has been brought up to surface and cleared out, right, the person feels better, more convicted. Decision becomes clearer and then in return, money becomes better. Business becomes better. Okay. So yeah, I know it’s a long answer, but I think human beings, we need to learn how to clear all these trapped emotions in our body,
[00:40:46] Terence: So let, let me kind of like, see what I am getting this right. So if like you have certain emotions locked up in certain parts of your body, they will resurface now and then, and that can, especially for entrepreneurs, that will be damaging for your business, right? Certain things that trigger that emotion that’s lodged in your lower back or your heart or wherever it is, they can resurface with the right triggers, right?
[00:41:10] Andrew Tan: Yeah. In fact, it’ll trigger as either physical ailment and pains, emotional ups and downs, or even self sabotage in their business. That means when you are reaching a goal, you’re almost there. Some little difficulty happens and the person shrinks, you know, and the shrinking might be because they have been bullied since they were young.
Since they were young, they learned to, to shut up and listen, and then when a person is there on their own, depending on themselves, right, a lot of this programming can surface in moments of time where it’s stressed. Yeah. So that’s why one of the big things now I realize is emotions. You need to handle it
Insights on Building a Successful Coaching Business
[00:41:51] Terence: Fascinating. Well, Andrew, before we wrap up, I want to ask you a question like, okay, this is specific to your coaching business, right? You’re speaking slash coaching business. If you had one tip to give away to people who aspire to build a successful coaching business. What would that one tip be that you can share today?
[00:42:11] Andrew Tan: Be available for your clients. Be available for clients. That’s important because I’ve seen many coaches who take the money and they delegate it to their staff to do the work and they themselves are not there. It is all about the heart. A good coach must have the heart for the client and if you’re not even available to even listen, to them talk to them, there’s no relationship there.
So the success for coaching business is really about your heart to care for the client and giving off your time to listen. Sometimes you don’t need to give the answers or the solutions. You just need to acknowledge that person’s feelings and he feels so much better or stronger.
[00:43:01] Terence: So I’ve got a follow up question on that, Andrew. So what if like, you have, say thousands of students, right? And they all want your attention. How do you manage a situation like that? Because it’s physically impossible to give attention to every one of them, right? Yeah.
[00:43:17] Andrew Tan: Um, group coaching.
That’s one thing. And now with AI, uh, somehow I, I’m able to take my knowledge and put it into AI and my framework into AI, and they can ask all the most basic fundamental business questions, then the AI answers. Then what I do is with my time, I do group coaching and I do in batches. Of course, I don’t go for thousands of students until it becomes overwhelming in any one batch.
I take about 30 students. So at least every two months I take one batch. I won’t be overwhelmed with the time that I can give the time to my students. Now, of course, I would say it, it may not be, um, financially that much of a cheap thing when you meet a coach. And if you want a coach’s time and the coach is really going to make some changes for you, sometimes it comes at a cost.
And the good thing is the cost would pay out if the relationship works. 50 percent is always the trainer, 50 percent the attendee, and if the attendee is willing to put in the work that the coaches push them to do, the results will be so much worth the fees that they pay for.
[00:44:36] Terence: Right. And coming back to your original thing, it’s about investing, right?
Investing in yourself. If you are, you’re someone who wants that in your life.
[00:44:45] Andrew Tan: Yeah. And I guess at the end of the day, all of us are really looking for financial freedom. And we want to have the money come in automatically. And we want to have the choice to say, I don’t want to work today. I just want to relax.
So I would still say, first thing, get your cash flow clear, have a business that brings in regular income. Once you’ve got that ready, right, then save the money, put it into investments.
Final Thoughts and Contact Information
[00:45:11] Terence: So, Andrew, if people want to find out more about you or want to follow you and learn your philosophies, how can they find you or what’s the best way to reach out to you?
[00:45:20] Andrew Tan: Find me on Facebook. My website, my website is askandrewtan.com. Okay. Okay. That’s andrewtan.com and also my Instagram is theandrewtan.
[00:45:40] Terence: Okay, so askandrewtan.com or theandrewtan on Instagram.
[00:45:46] Andrew Tan: Yeah.
[00:45:46] Terence: Yeah, there are thousands of Andrew Tan, so I’m glad you made it easy for us.
[00:45:52] Andrew Tan: Yeah, if you find me on YouTube, my YouTube will be, uh, Inspiraction Channel. Inspiration and action put together into one word. Inspiraction Channel.
[00:46:03] Terence: Inspiraction Channel. I like it.
[00:46:05] Andrew Tan: Yeah.
[00:46:06] Terence: All right. Andrew, thank you so much for your time today and for your words of wisdom.
It’s been an absolute pleasure having you on Founders Go Naked.
[00:46:13] Andrew Tan: Most welcome, Terence. And I hope for you, ladies and gentlemen, my message served you well, and I hope it helps you become a much, much richer person and much more fulfilled and happy person. Thank you.
This podcast is hosted by Terence Tam, author of Lead Surge: 8 Radically Effective Marketing Funnels for Coaches and Experts. He is also the Founder of Radical Marketing, a digital marketing agency that partners with high-ticket coaches to scale their businesses with Webinars – by using a proprietary blend of story ads and battled-tested sales funnels to achieve better returns on ad dollars.
