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There are three primary business types. The first business type is Retail Centric business. By retail-centric, I mean you sell to individuals. Hundreds and hundreds of individual people buy the products that you produce. So whether it’s like a restaurant, or you have something that you sell directly to the consumer, which is like a retail store, or if you’re working with a brand, you sell something straight to the brand, or if you’re an affiliate marketer, and you’re selling directly to people, that’s what retail is.

Three Layers of Products

1. Message

Now, you have a customer. What you need to do is set up three layers of products. The first thing is you need to do is start publishing your message online. What is your message to the consumer? Two ideas are, you write a Facebook post or a LinkedIn post that begins with these words “Did you know that” and “How to”. You’re educating your customers to be more discerning about how to do business in future. So this is the kind of message that goes on and on, and that’s going to attract eyeballs.

2. Core Product

The second thing is your core product, which is the actual product that you’re selling.

3. Consulting-Based Activities

The third thing that you need to have is a community. You need to build community-based or consulting based activities around whatever your core product is.

The first thing is familiarity, which you do by putting your message out. The second thing is trust by doing it consistently and building a little bit of community. The third thing is value. If you are putting a message out, make sure there is something of value over there.

Channel Business

Then you have a channel business. Channel businesses are of two types. You have a business house. The number of customers or the companies that you supply to throughout India, let’s say there are either more than 200 such companies or less than 200 such companies. That means this one is a pretty infinite market. Don’t worry about how many customers are applying; even if they’re like five, it doesn’t matter. But if the total number of such companies that you can supply, or if the total number of potential clients are more than 200, then you follow the same method I taught you here, which is just treat this as a retail model and use either LinkedIn or Facebook targeting. You can actually target vice-presidents, directors, or managers on both these platforms.

You write a message, and it goes straight to them. It seems like because you are putting out all of this content that educates them. They’re like, this person appears to be very nice and honest. So I would like to do business with them. So it builds familiarity and trust.

Target Audience using Facebook

Facebook is as good as LinkedIn. Because there is enough research done in the last two to three years that says people actually take business based on what they see on Facebook and Facebook has better targeting. So, if you put out a paid ad for very little money for less than maybe two, three, or four thousand rupees, you can actually pay the Facebook algorithm to target only the vice president’s in these 200 companies. So it’s pretty targeted. Get the message to where it needs to go.

If you have less than 200 companies or less than 200 potential customers, what you do is go to your competitors. There are other companies who are in the same game, just like you. Let’s say there are 2000 such companies. Then instead of sending a message out here, what you do is you tailor your message to these companies where you can say three things to do to maximize your profit options, four things to do in order to maximize your number of deals to close in a quarter, five things you can do to protect yourself from post slowdown. And then you start building your trust with these people. The first thing you come out with is the course because nobody will hire you as a consultant if you’re a competitor.

You can sell your course for upwards of 990 rupees. The base price is 1999. And the highest price is 9999. This is the stuff that people buy online. Beyond 10,000 rupees, they typically want to meet somebody. So your target market is not your end customer. It is your competition. But the way to do it is you create a course for them that they buy online, and you don’t need to be involved. That’s how you do it.

Now, the third option is imagine your business house that has literally only one or two potential customers in India. So imagine you make something in the space domain. Make some spare parts for spaceships or something. The only customer is like, so, okay. I’m assuming your business will not be impacted. If there is only one such buyer, there are only four or five lacs of rupees, so it’s probably not going to be affected that much.

Follow Your Passion

But if you still want to take your game to the next level and make huge amounts of money and add another maybe 50 lakhs of crores, you need to forget about this and go for your passion. So the thing that you put onto the internet (your message) has to do with your passion. What do you do? I mean, you must have some hobbies like painting, singing, cooking, or something that is targeted towards the retail market and not the business market.

So that is the idea. If you have two customers in all of India, then who do I want to market to? So let your business be ideal. It should be recession-proof. But if it’s not, then you need to relook at what’s the backup area that is an area of passion. Something that drives you, so you don’t get bored out of it. You can do a lot of things for money, but in today’s market, if you do something only for money and it doesn’t resonate with you, then it’s not fun. It’s not good when God has given you so many other options.

Video builds familiarity. So you’re not doing a video to create an impression or to impress people. That’s not the idea. You should have familiarity built up with your audience. People buy from people they know, like, and trust, not from the people who’s the best.

We will talk about a little more tactical items as opposed to some of the more strategic and conceptual stuff that we’ve been discussing. Today, we’re going to talk about how your sales and marketing process is designed. Typically, in most businesses, the sales and marketing process is designed into three separate stages.

Advertising

The first stage is called advertising. This is where you’re sending your message out about what you do, etc. What does your product do? What sub-industry you are in and trying to get attention from the customers who don’t even know about you.

Marketing

The second stage is marketing. This is where you’re providing customers with a little more information about what you do, and you’re also looking for customer engagement or customer responses. So this is your marketing.

Sales

Typically, when a customer walks into your store, environment, or ecosystem, that is your sales meeting. And that part is called sales.

What Businesses do

The issue I see with most Indian businesses is that, traditionally, there has been a difference in how Indian people have done business versus how business has evolved in the West. When I talk about how Indian businesses have evolved, I will be talking about the post-independence era because there were 200 years of oppression before that. Before that, we don’t know how Indians were doing.

Many people say Indians have been great at business from the old times, but we don’t have much-recorded history. So we don’t know. Since the post-British era, what has happened is that India has been a growing economy. So demand has constantly been growing because India was an impoverished country when it was recently liberated and got its independence. Because they were poor, the only way to go was up. Slowly the standard of living kept rising, and then internal demand inside the country kept growing.

When it comes to doing actual industrial level business or any business on a large scale, what typically happened was that Indian companies used to have one or two big customers in the West. I’m talking about manufacturing companies, and then you have Services Companies like IT companies. They used to have one or two big customers in the West, and then, they would build a supply line from India. So, typically we were on the supply side, and we did not need or have a lot of experience creating demand.

Most people say, well, our community or our state or people are good at business. You’ll see certain people saying, oh, we are good at business. My family is good at business. My communities are good at business. They have mostly been good on the supply side. So, people who were in the retail store business, or people who have been in the restaurant business, or people in the garments business, etc., have been more on the supply side. So people have been figuring out how do we get better quality garments from Thailand? Get them over here and sell them at a premium. The people who have built industrial level businesses or large businesses have also been on the supply side. They’ve typically dependent on one or two big clients. Their whole focus has been on providing the supply rather than creating the demand.

Why people don’t understand the sales and marketing process

I gave you the example of when I was doing export consulting in 2007. I had a bunch of clients from the Pune industrial area, which is called Pimpri, famous throughout India as a very robust manufacturing hub. Even if they were of the scale of 100-200 crore rupees a year revenue, most of the people had two major clients; it was either Tata Motors or Bajaj or maybe TBS. Their whole business was structured around what do those guys need? And those guys will tell us what they need. Then we’ll go out and buy the machinery, set up the equipment, do the workforce training, and start producing machine parts, machine tools or gears for those big one or two clients.

From my experience, when I work with Indian clients, they’d don’t understand the sales and marketing process very well. Maybe at a certain point, that will come and bite us in the wrong place because when you look at the thought process abroad, they are visionary people and know how to create demand.

Create a Demand

So, when you look at marketing gurus like Steve Jobs, who created a demand for a premium smartphone when you can get the same functionality in a 15,000 rupee phone. They’ve created a demand where everybody wants to buy their 80,000 rupee phone. That’s a Visionary.

Back in the 70s, you had these big computers that would take up your entire house. And if you ordered a computer, it could take upwards of $1 million to order one computer. Then you would have to get a truck and a lot of people to shift that computer into your house. You can’t shift it into your house. You have to shift it into a factory or someplace where people could use it. The only people who could use it were scientists. The only use for a computer was for big companies or governments. When Bill Gates said that my vision is to get a computer on every desk inside every home, people said, you need psychiatric help because not only can you not get a computer inside a home, who would be able to afford it for a million dollars? And why would somebody need a computer in the home? Because anything that a computer did was useful only for companies. Normal computers did not have the functionality that a normal people person could use. But that’s where the vision God created.

Their focus was on how to create this computer smaller, faster, and cheaper. They created a demand for that, so everybody started wanting and needing more computers. So, if you don’t understand this demand creation, you will not be successful in the New Age businesses.

Even the old age business, who’ve been throughout the three generations of people, have been running. They are suddenly starting to feel the heat because the old market is now changing. As consumer demand shifts here and there, it’s up to grab who’s going to survive, and who’s not going to survive.

So let’s just get back to the point. Another thing that most Indians in the business community do not understand is the difference between advertising, marketing and sales. That is where most of the potential is in the market because that is the most nimble and flexible form of setting up a business. So, in the down market, those are the businesses that gain the biggest because they are nimble and flexible. But if they don’t have the understanding, that’s a problem.

What is advertising?

It is when you get your message out to the market, and by message, I don’t mean your conceptual message that we’ve been discussing. What I mean is whatever information about your products and services is in the market.

And then you could have things like Facebook ads and WhatsApp broadcasts. So that is basically your advertising, or you could have a website and then pay Google to send a lot of traffic to your website. So that comes under advertising.

What are the differences between marketing and advertising?

There are huge differences between marketing and advertising. The difference is that marketing starts when a customer has initiated the contact, or we call it permission in the new business terminology. If a customer has permitted you to contact them or otherwise expressed interest. So if you have a pamphlet that comes to your house that says 50% off on pizzas, the store has opened up, and you give them a call to ask about what options they have. What you’ve done as a customer, you have expressed an interest, and that’s where the marketing starts. Before that, it was advertising.

If you have a flyer and you have to book an appointment for yourself, call this number and then you call that number. That is where the marketing process starts or when people say come to my webpage and put in your email address. They will send you offers, and that is where your marketing starts.

When you go to a store, and they take your email address and phone number, we never ask why do you need my email address and phone number? But as soon as we give that email address and phone number, it is assumed that you have permitted them to contact you. And the next day, you’ll see these SMS every day saying 15% or 20% off. So that is where the marketing starts, SMS marketing or email marketing.

What is a Sale?

The sales process is where a customer has expressed interest. They have said, I’m interested in your product and service. Tell me how it can help me order the pricing. So it is an express discussion about features, benefits and pricing. They already know what your product does by then.

A huge issue with business houses is mixing up these three items, advertising, marketing and sales. The first thing you should do is understand the difference between advertising, marketing and sales. They try to sell at the very first stage.

Point number 1

The only goal of advertising is to get the customer to marketing. The only goal of marketing is to get the customer to sales. And the only goal of sales is to get the customer to buy. So, if a customer shows up to your store and says that I saw your pamphlet, and I don’t know what it’s about. Can you explain to me? So I can figure out if I want to buy? Tricky Question. What stage is that customer in? If they want more information or are coming for information, they are not in the sales stage. They’re probably either in the advertising state or marketing stage. That is very important to know what stage the customer is in because that will help you decide the course of action. If a customer says, I saw your pamphlet, and I’m interested in your product, which cost 10,000 rupees. If they say, they’re interested, what I would typically say, so give me the 10,000 rupee cheque? And they say no, I want you to tell me more about your product. They are definitely not in the sales stage. They are either in the advertising stage or in the marketing stage. And if they are in the advertising stage, what is my only goal? Is it to tell them about the pricing and try to ask for the cheque? No, if they’re in the advertising stage, my only goal is to get them into the marketing stage. That is my only goal.

If I try to sell at the advertising stage, I will fail. If I try to sell at the marketing stage, I will fail. If I try to sell at the sales stage, I will fail about 8 out of 10 times, but at least the customer and I are both on the same page that the goal over here is that you have enough information. All I need to do is provide you with the feature benefits and pricing, and you give me the money.

Let’s just get back for one step and just make this simpler. Typically, if you try to sell in the advertising stage, the conversion rate at the advertising level is 1:100,000 to 1:10,000. It also depends on what kind of product you are trying to sell. Where should you try to sell it in? How should you try to sell it? Because otherwise, you’ll be wasting a lot of time, and you’ll go out of business. In the new market time, the focus is going to be of the essence because if you’re doing the wrong thing at the wrong time, the thing won’t work, you will blame it on the post-pandemic slowdown, and you’ll go out of business instead of getting smarter about it.

What are the conversion rates at the marketing level? If somebody sees my ad, they call me, and they are at the marketing stage. If I try to sell them then and there, the conversion rate is 1:10,000 to 1:1000. That means I’m going to get only one sale out of 1,000 people.

If you’re in sales, it’s not a one-shot process. What I recommend to people is that you have an Express Highway approach. If you follow this approach, your conversion rate otherwise could be 1:200. But if you follow this approach, your conversion rate could become 2:10.

What is the goal? What is the number one rule of sales and marketing? The goal of any one stage is to take the customer to the next stage. It is not to get the money out of them. It is to reach them to the next stage. So, point number one is, the goal of any one stage is to reach them to the next stage, not to make a sale. Imagine if you were trying in the advertising process to sell something to a customer and the conversion rate is 1:10,000. Your product would need to be at least worth 10,000, and your flyer would need to be rupee 1 or less. That means to distribute the flyers, you would probably pay the newspaper vendor, newspaper distributor one rupee per flyer. Don’t expect anything from that flyer because it’s a lost item. It reaches every house, but sometimes they fall out. Then you would expect every owner of the house to read that flyer because sometimes the servant takes the flyer out of the newspaper, or maybe the dog picks up the newspaper. All the flyers are all over the house.

Despite that, you would expect maybe one out of 10,000 people to make a 10,000 rupee decision. You’ll have to price your product to 10,000. Otherwise, you will be losing money on the whole thing. What are the chances in your experience that somebody who reads a flyer spends a cheque worth 10,000 rupees? Not very many, not in India, at least.

So the whole thing is a failing exercise unless you understand the rule. The rule is that if a hundred thousand or ten thousand people see this, my goal is to get at least 1000 people to a stage where I can market them. At least 1,000 people should express an interest to mean some form or the other for me to be able to take that process forward and start my marketing process.

Point number 2

It brings me to rule number two. This whole process of marketing and advertising is a two people teamwork. Two people have to work together on this; your customer and you. So if a customer shows up to my store and says they want to buy a 1 lakh rupee product. They’re not willing to listen to me, and they’re cutting me off, and they telling me no, just tell me this, or I just want to know this. They’re not being a team. What are the chances they want to do business with me? None. So why should I waste time with them? Should I waste time with them? No, if you try to waste time with 1,000 people trying to sell your product where they do not express enough intent to work with you as a team, your time will be wasted. And how much time do you spend working with a thousand people? Probably 20 years if you were to sit for one hour or half an hour to give a sales presentation, or try to give somebody information on the phone over 5 or 10 minutes. Ten minutes into 1000 people is 10,000 minutes. That’s like a hundred hours of your time. If you are working 8 hours a day, that’s like 12 13 days full of work. And what are the chances of conversion? Hardly any. Why would you spend 13 days giving information to people who’re not at the stage where they have a good chance of converting?

So always remember these two lessons. The goal of any one stage of this whole process is to reach the prospect into the next stage. The second thing is two people teamwork. At any point, if the customer starts behaving as if they are not part of this teamwork, you need to move them out of the system. There’s no point wasting time. I get a lot of calls saying, hey, I’m interested in your service but tell me this, and I’m like, let me just take a step back and walk you through the whole thing. They say, no, I’m not interested in that. I am a vice president of marketing in such a big company, and I just want to know your pricing. And I’m like, even if Bill Gates called me, it would be the same process. You have to go through the first stage. And when my team gets back to me that you’ve done all of this, then I’ll probably be giving you a call. Maybe I’ll give you a call, and we’ll talk about it. It’s a waste of my time, considering that you’re vice president and not the company’s owner. The chances are even lesser that you have the decision-making power. So I don’t waste my time, and I do them a service by not wasting their time. Some people think it’s rude of a business person who is in the market to sell their services not to be upfront with a customer, but I know it’s a waste of my time.

Where did I learn it from?

When I was in my medical career, I had lots of friends in the business communities running businesses that their parents had started. So they were second-generation inheritors of those businesses. We’d be just hanging around driving around or having a coffee. The customer would call them and say, I’m interested in this, can you meet me? And they’d be like, yeah, I’ll meet you in the office on Monday morning at 9:30, and they’d be like, no, I’m interested now. I want you to meet now, and he’d be like, well, I’m not at work now and then they’d be like, you’re being rude to me. I’ll just probably go and do business with the competition, and they’d say, sure, I can’t control that. I couldn’t understand it. I was trying to learn how to do business, sales, and marketing because I did not want to stay in my medical profession.

These are the people who inherited the business from their dad, and they’re not respecting it now. Why don’t you go? If a customer is ready, then you should go and meet them. They said, well if a customer is ready, they will come and meet me on Monday. It’s not that I’m not making it easy for them to do business with me, but we have a process. If they don’t follow that process, they are more than welcome to do business in the competition. And I’m like, well, the guy was probably going to give you 50,000 rupees. You just lost that money, and he’s like, yeah, sure my competition catches all these customers. And sure enough, five years down the line, the competition would be no longer there, and these guys would still be there. That taught me a lesson that if you spend 5001 rupees or 50,001 rupees charging for a 50,000 rupees of opportunity, you will be out of business.

So once again, the two lessons are the goal of every one stage is to reach the customer to the next stage and this whole process is two people teamwork. If a customer behaves like they don’t want to be part of that team, you don’t do business with those customers. You will waste your time, waste your money, and make losses in your business.

We’re going to start a community for like-minded individuals interested in doing something creative to protect themselves from the post-pandemic slowdown. There are three levels of information. One is on the startup frat page, the business page, which is a public page. So you go to facebook.com/startupfratcom.

If you’re in the group and would like to join the public page, you can do that. That’s optional because most of the information on the public page is already posted inside the group. If you’re reading this on the public page or somewhere else and want to be a part of the group, go to facebook.com/groups/Startupfrat. That’s the group.

Then there are webinars, which I announced within the group that you have to attend at a specific place and time. I try to make it convenient for both you and me, and then these webinars as a policy are not recorded or replayed. If you are in the webinar, I will provide some useful information at the end that will be actionable that you can work on and start building your new brand. That information is not available outside the webinar. It is not available on the group or public page. You have to be there to get that information.

Levels of Information

The public page is level one. If you get all the information in the group, you’ll realize that even that free information is worth more than any education you will get outside despite paying money to management people. Then you have information that is a little more focused because I’m trying to get an idea of the people who are a little more serious. I want to provide this information only for them. That’s the second level.

There is a level three information provided in the webinars, which is highly focused on actionable information. So if you want information, you need to be there on time. You need to check the announcement page. The group has grown pretty big, so I don’t know if you are able to see some of the posts or not. You need to do this every day at least once or twice because if you miss the announcements, you won’t be able to attend the webinars. The information from the webinar will not be sent to you on WhatsApp.

All of these levels of information is free. If you are in the group, and you’ve gone through some of this information, if you think this is the industry’s best possible information not available anywhere, I would like you to interact with me and put a comment.

All of this stuff that I’m giving you, just to show you to focus your attention, is coming from hundreds of crores rupees worth of business building in the last 15 years. This is real stuff that works in all the markets; it works in the US, India, Southeast Asia, and all the markets that I’ve ever worked in. This is real stuff. You want to follow it. You need to pay attention to it. What you need to do is be very active in the group. Because the organic reach is not there, I cannot reach my message to you by force because Facebook is not probably showing all the posts to everybody. Organic reach is dead, so you need to check for the announcements and attend the webinars if you’re in the group.

How to attend the webinars on Demio

If you want to attend the webinars on Demio, you need to clean out your cache because the webinars are heavy on the browser. So what you need to do is clean your cache and preferably attend the webinar on an incognito window. Open an incognito window and paste the webinar link. The experience will be smoother for you. You will be able not to be thrown out of the room because if your internet connection is heavy, Demio disconnects you.

Niches and Sub-Niches

We are going to talk in detail about the niches and sub-niches. Once you hone down on where you want to work, where you want to strike, and what will be a message, which is your arsenal, the rest is all easy. The rest is a game of just assembling tools and technologies and getting your message out.

If I can do it, you can do it because I’m technically challenged, but I’m learning how to do this myself. Now what you want to do is have that PDF with the hundred-plus sub-niches whenever you’re selecting or just thinking about owning down on the industry, or sub-industry type. I’ve given branching into the very depths if you go down into the vent. The deeper you go, the easier it is to do business because the more specialized you are, the easier it will be. You may not have all the skills right now, you may not know everything like I wanted for the last ten years, I wanted to do some kind of internet marketing, but I was not good at it. I was not good at the technical stuff, but I’ve trained myself up to do that in the last two or three months, and I am 80% good at it now. You may not have all the skills or the specialty, to begin with, but you need to read a few books or take a few courses. To get your knowledge up, you don’t need to be a specialist if you have better knowledge than the average person, which is good enough.

H-shaped Strategy

So what we are going to do is we’re going to use an H-shaped strategy. The first thing is you need to have a wide enough knowledge about a range of topics in that sub-industry. Then you need to have profound knowledge in one area in that industry. In my case, I have a huge amount of all this variable knowledge for marketing. Then I have a very high level of knowledge in high ticket sales where if you sit in front of a customer how do you get them to sign a cheque of 5 lacs or ten lacs of 15 lacs. It has been my speciality in my career. So I know a lot about this, and I know a little bit about other areas like marketing and how to get your message.

Then what you do is you have to go wide in the market to get your message to enough people who may not even know that you exist. If you get your message in front of enough number of people, you will be able to get your market. You will be able to build your presence. All the specialization will be built inside the market with paying customers. So, no need to worry about that. You don’t need to be an expert, but you need to select your niche based on your passion or area of expertise.

Do you think you’ll be able to work in that area for another 5-10 years? Because at the end of the day, business is a long-shot game. I give you all the 60-day and the 90-day plan, but unless you have a long vision, the 60 days will not work.

Discover your Area of Passion

Michael Jordan was the number one player in basketball, or maybe Kobe Bryant was the number one player in basketball not because they were the smartest and they were born with the right skills because they loved the game so much that they were willing to spend 20 hours a day practicing, even in the offseason. So if there is an area of passion for you like this is an area of passion for me, I’m not getting paid for this, but I want to make sure I built out at least one video every day. You need to pursue that.

We are going to use an H-shaped approach. If you’re, right now, thinking and doubtful and wondering, I’m getting a lot of messages. I have doubts but don’t worry about it. Just select anything that you believe is an area of liking for you. I’ll just give you a quick trick on finding out what’s an area of liking for you.

You go into your YouTube, internet, and bank credit card history and observe what have you spent your time and money on when you were not working but relaxing. What content do you prefer to watch on YouTube? What content do you prefer to watch on the internet? What is the stuff that you buy with your credit cards?

Example

A friend of mine is a very well-established dentist in Chandigarh, and he’s like, tell me something more creative to do. We went into his credit card history. The only thing he buys is golf magazines. He plays a little bit of golf, not very much. He can’t hit the ball very well, but he still buys many golf magazines on the internet. I’m like maybe, golf is your passion, and he’s like, well, I’m 40 years of age. I cannot become a golf player at this stage. I said you don’t need to have that kind of mentality to be a player. Think about the ecosystem. Think about it at an ecosystem level. If you have golf, you have golf apparel; then you have golf coaching. Then you have online golf videos on how to perfect your swing. Then you have golf magazines and golf sponsors. All of this forms the ecosystem.

So there is one point of entry where you’re going to get in like for example, this guy reads a lot of magazines, so he knows what kind of magazine content makes a good magazine and if he realizes that there are only one or two golf magazines in India and maybe 100 golf magazines in the US. Then there is space to enter at the magazines’ side, you enter there, and then you go wide, and then you use your one big skill, and you get it to in front of enough number of people, that’s an H-shaped strategy.

Build an Ecosystem

So think about it from an ecosystem perspective, as somebody had said about agriculture. That’s good. But agriculture does not mean that you’re going to do all the farming. Do you want to think about where all the best seeds are coming from? What are all the bio-friendly ways of pest control in the fields? How can you maximize? So there’s technology-based farming that’s there in the US. How can you maximize the yield per hectare? Fifty-plus years of advancements in farming in other countries. We (Indians) are still doing manual labor, manual farming, chemical pesticides, and fertilizer. Our yield per hectare is pretty low in most areas as compared to the world standard.

Just think about the whole ecosystem. Do you have clout in the supply chain? Can you get products that are fruits and vegetables over to the end retailer faster? Do you know more retailers than most people know? Do more they have clout in more cities to get your stuff out faster and get it sold faster. Do you have some expertise to get organic at a cheaper rate because it’s organic and you don’t use pesticides and fertilizers? 3/4 of your crop or 3/5 of your crop may be destroyed because you’re not using chemical fertilizer or pesticide. So that means whatever crop is left, it’s 100% organic. If you’re doing 100% organic farming, it is two and a half times more expensive than any other selling brand.

So how to bring that cost down? Can you create some videos or material around that? So what you do is you build your influence using that information. Then you pull in the interest, and then you go ahead with whatever your offerings may be. We always recommend you go in with at least three offerings because the way the market is changing, any one offering may fail. That’s how you position yourself in the ecosystem.

It’s making me seem that

1. You’re more myopic in your view that you’re thinking only linearly, only in one area
2. You are a little bit scared. You have a little bit of fear. Hey, what if I choose my niche wrong? Can you help me choose my niche? Don’t worry about it.

You cannot go wrong. As far as building a business is concerned, most principles are the same. The same principles were used in dealing in real estate in 2007, or the same principles are used working with startups or the same principles are used today. So the principles of collecting information, making it packaged and building products around it and making it consumable by a large number of people, the principles are the same. Even if you go wrong in the niche, you can always change that. It will take you another 30 days or so to change your approach.

We’re going to walk through three main areas of how to position yourself for success. The first is how to predict the slowdown. And for some reason, there is a predicted slowdown, and there are two different schools of thought. Some say that maybe India will rebound after this whole disease situation much faster than the other countries. Then there’s the other school of thought, which says there will be a slowdown. So, how do you predict a slowdown? I’ll share some examples. Maybe they make sense to you.

And the second thing is how do you negotiate to a slowdown? What does all the things that you ideally should do? If you are a corporate professional, this applies to you. If you are a pure professional, this applies to you. And if you have a small or medium-sized business, this will apply to you.

Third is what exactly you can do in order to ascend the food chain, which basically makes you a little bit recession-proof for the future.

First Area to Position Yourself for Success

How to Predict a Slowdown?

Demand vs Supply

Now, how do you predict a slowdown? How do you figure out this thing is going to work? This thing is not going to work the way we do this. The first thing is demand versus supply. You determine whether the industry is going up or down based on the demand-supply equation. So if the demand for a particular skillset or a particular product is high versus the supply of that particular product of skillset, then the price for the skillset will keep going higher. There’s a lot of scope in that industry. On the other hand, if supply is high and the demand is low, then it’s not a good reason. You must evolve and figure out how to do something different in order to stay in business.

Educated Class

So, what’s happening in India is very interesting for the educated class of people. The people who have old fancy degrees (specific only about India may not apply to other places). There is automatic democratization of education that is good for everybody. But it has led to an oversupply in the educated market, especially for doctors, engineers, Chartered Accountants, lawyers, etc. You’ve had a boom in the number of colleges that offer these degrees, and pretty much everybody that wants to become a doctor or engineer can find a college seat and collect that degree.

Now, what happens is that the supply of an educated workforce in the Indian economy has overtaken the demand by miles. For example, in the medical setup, the number of super-specialty hospitals that have come up is not commensurate with the number of super-specialized doctors that are there in the market. So what happens in that situation is the overall price or the overall income group falls, the demand falls, the demand with relation to supply falls, and the overall income group falls.

The same thing applies to lawyers, engineers, and chartered accountants. For engineers, the glut is so much that mostly all the engineers are basically have gravitated towards either management jobs or sales jobs because of the oversupply. So, education in India has been a double-edged sword. The democratization of education has made the overall pay ranges lower for all of these. So that’s what’s happening. If you are in the professional segment, you may have felt that.

Cost Arbitrage

Now, what happens in the corporate setup? The demand was artificially high because of Cost Arbitrage. Cost Arbitrage is if an American or British or a German company sets up its offices in India, they will get access to a qualified workforce because of the education glut. They will be able to get a benefit because they don’t have to pay someone on site who will probably charge more. If you look at the pay scales, how their pay scales have risen over the last 20 years, and the average pay scale in the mid-segment in India is commensurate equivalent or just about thereabouts to an American pay scale. If you live in a tier 1 city and draw sixty thousand dollars a year in the US, it is considered pretty good. And then they may have a commission on top of that. It equates to about 40 lacs a year in India. If you look at the Indian pay scales, it may be lower. Some people say, well, yeah, but the level of jobs people do in the US at 62 grand a year costs pretty less in India. But as compared to 20 years back, an Indian employee was 120^th of 5% the price of an American employee. Today, they must be maybe half or maybe 3/4.

So, when I say the word commensurate, it means the cost Arbitrage has not been commensurate, which means it has been declining sharply. And if you add on management costs and the headache of managing teams working in a different geography, it may or may not make sense for many foreign companies to maintain the heavy workforce over here in India. So the loss of cost Arbitrage is not a good sign. So the demand-supply situation in the industry is not good.

Ticket Size vs Delivery Format

The second thing in the industry is if you look at the ticket size of different products and services being consumed. At the end of the day, the consumer has to pay for your salary or income. The format in which they consume certain products and services has changed drastically in the last 10 to 15 years, and this is across the board. This has been happening over a longer period of time in the western world, but it has happened in India in a much sharper curve, much more dramatic fashion.

For example, think about something like a financial planner. If you’re in that industry, there were financial planners who used to come to your house and educate you about the different options to invest in the market. Based on their advice, you would balance your portfolio. The delivery format has changed so much that consumers do not want to spend their time. They don’t want to spend 30 to 60 minutes sitting down with somebody and getting educated when they can actually find that information online on money control and just go ahead and invest in a mutual fund etc. So the democratization of the Educational Service that a financial planner was providing, the change in format has basically put all those people out of their job. The stress level is so high because they have to go and make an in-person sale to somebody willing to buy without their personal presence. So, the delivery formats of things are changing. If you stick with the old delivery format, you may not be in a great situation.

Similarly, think about the industry-wise delivery format of food. People would like to go to a restaurant before, but today they’re like, I’ll order and probably eat something at home. Think about entertainment. The delivery format of cinema halls will very soon be obsolete because, over a period of time, people will realize, especially during the slowdown, that it is amusing to sit down with the family that they haven’t sat down for a while with and it’s great to do Netflix and its great to open a beer at home.

The delivery format will be impacted because there is no real value in going to a cinema hall in any event. Cinema halls lose money on the actual screening of the movie. The only thing they actually make money on is the 400 rupee popcorn. So if a new law comes that says cinemas cannot force you to buy their popcorn, you can bring your own burger in a parcel into the cinema hall. Then they’re pretty much out of business. So the delivery format of different things is changing. People are happier consuming entertainment in the comfort of their own homes.

Look at primary health. People don’t really go to a doctor anymore. If they have flu or a fever, people just go online and see what’s happening to them. They’ll probably buy paracetamol. You have the One MG app, which basically will educate you about your health. All you need to do is put a symptom in there, and it will tell you the things that could be the possibility, the medicines, the contents of the medicines, the safety level, and the side effects.

For basic things, you can pretty much take your own decision. So if you are a Doctor who’s a general practitioner, the market is not looking very good for you. If you’re a chartered accountant, things are not going to go your way. People know more about taxes today than they knew ten years ago, and they’d like to check things online. They like to fill in their IP returns. If you are staying in the old delivery format, if you don’t change, your delivery format will impact you.

Same Market But With Better Tools

Many people ask me, it is so maybe because the competition is higher in this market and the demand is commensurately not scaling that much. Would you recommend I go into a market that has lower demand, which has no competition? That’s not the idea I am getting at. You don’t need to change your market and go into an area where there is no competition. The competition is great. There’s a lot of vendors if there’s a lot of different suppliers playing in one market. It is great because that means a lot of money to be made in that market.

It is just that you have to jostle with a lot of competition. So stay in the same market but use better tools. Bring better weapons to the game. So in the computer gaming kind of scenario, bring a better Avatar with a lot more powers to the same game. You have more elbow room; you take away a larger market share. So play in the same market, but with better tools.

Second Area to Position Yourself for Success

Levels of Influence

Now, before we go to the actual tools, we’ll quickly go into the mindset item, which is how you build your influence? So at the end of the day, you will be paid if you solve a problem either for the customer or your employer. It is the perception of how well you can solve that problem versus other people. It will decide your survival and also your price point in the market. It is the perception that you are the right person who can solve their problem better than others. That comes from a personal influence standpoint, which is very relevant in today’s market. That is building your personal influence yourself.

Why do we talk about the five stages of influence at a personal level? Because the rise of the internet and social media has democratized your voice and my voice. In old times, people would spend 40 years building a specialty. Then they would probably go ahead and write a book at the time of retirement and then utilize their industry connections to make sure that a publisher would accept it and publish it. So the whole thing was in the hands of your industry connection or your publisher. In today’s times, it’s not like that. You can grow your influence pretty fast if you don’t think in a linear fashion if you think about putting a footprint in different buckets all the time. So, what are the different buckets?

First Level of Influence

Level 1 of influence is a done-for-you service. If you’re in a service where you do something either for your employer or your client, you’re basically in a done-for-you service. That is level 1 of influence. Only your immediate customers know you. If you’re good at what you do, only your immediate customers or employers know you.

Second Level of Influence

Level 2 is done-with-you, which is you do half of this, and I will process all of this. So you can have many more customers. If you have a template format of what they need to give you, all you need to do is look at the template and utilize your expertise in the industry processes in some fashion. So your time gets leveraged better, and you can handle more customers, and your influence is obviously higher.

Third Level of Influence

There’s a level 3 of influence, which is hyper-specialized doctors, lawyers, or companies, proving one-on-one services, which is basically, I will consult you. I will tell you the solution to your problem, but I will not work with you or work for you. That’s a Level 3 of influence.

Fourth Level of Influence

Level 4 is where you have group consulting, group coaching, public speaking, and that whole industry where you have many people. You’re sitting somewhere and have 50 people in your workshop, and then you give them information. They’ve signed up for that workshop for 3000-6000 rupees. If you can get 40 people to fill a room, just think about how much money you can carry home for that one day of work.

Fifth Level of Influence

Level 5 of influence is an ecosystem. Where not only can you bring a prospect in, they can actually buy an entry-level service from you where they can get socialized, not a very high-risk thing for them. And then they say, this guy seems to understand and relate to what I am saying. Then they go and buy your consultation and then buy something else, and the overall lifetime value for a customer is maximized over a period of time.

That goes with companies who created entire ecosystems like Amazon. Amazon loses money if you buy anything worth 200, 300, 400, 500 rupees because they absorb all that cost of getting it from China and shipping it over to you in the space of one day and charging a rock bottom price for it.

But over a period of time, as the confidence grows, you’re going to buy a TV from Amazon, you’re going to buy a fridge from Amazon. What typically happens over the lifetime value of a customer, they end up being profitable. So while all of the other retail stores etc. are going out of business, Amazon, even at a very low-profit margin, is the biggest and most valuable company in the world because they have a customer for life. Once a customer buys from Amazon, they are never going back to any other retail store, retail platform, or online app. So over some time, if you want to have the maximum lifetime value, you find the customer once. They will do business with you for life, not only on one product line but also on multiple product lines. In fact, everything they ever need in a particular area, they will buy from you.

So that’s how influence works. If you are at a one-on-one consulting level, you would ideally need to go downstream and build a small product that people can consume off the shelf. Then you need to build higher product lines, which people can consume in a different format where it takes less from your side to produce, but more and more people can get impacted.

Third Area to Position Yourself for Success

Ascend the Food Chain

Linear vs Full-Stack Footprint

Now the next is, how do you ascend the food chain? First of all, instead of a linear, you need to have a full-stack footprint, which is if you are at a particular level on the influence spectrum, you need to have downstream products, which people can buy off the shelf. And then you need to have upstream products, which educate not only the customer about your industry but also the other players about your industry.

For example, if in a restaurant business with so many restaurants coming up today and there are many restaurants in the market, Zomato is willing to give you a 50% discount if you just book through their app. That’s because the restaurants are hurting and if you were a restaurant, what you would also do in addition to your core business, is to create a little bit of education around. What are the different types of restaurants you should go to? Not only that, you will create content that is useful to other restaurant owners saying that the 15 different things you need to look at before setting up your own restaurant, the 20 different things you need to look at before setting up your own eat out, takeout shop. How to get partnered with Swiggy, partner with Zamato, and improve your business by 40% just by adding takeout to your menu. A lot of top restaurants are doing that. Many restaurants that used to be snooty earlier are now happy to make food for you and send it to you because they’re hunting for the business.

All you need to do is create some value around. What are the best practices in the industry? And literally, give that value to other people, which could include your competition. When you do that, it may not necessarily be a for-profit product. You may not make any money off of those consultations. But what you do is a signaling item. Its signals that you are an authority in that industry.

When that happens, not only does business comes to you from customers, business comes from competition because they’ll say, hey, why don’t you join my board as a consultant and just help us outside this place up.

And the third thing is you get a lot of visibility in the investor lobbies. So if a multinational chain comes and they want to set up like five restaurants in your town, then all the signaling that you’ve done and established yourself as an authority in the L3, L4 space, they will say, hey, what we would like you to do is come and work with us in our team and will give you stock options, etc. And just help us set up these five restaurants or a chain of stores or restaurants in your city. And that’s when you start getting into the L5 segment, which is creating an ecosystem, just like Starbucks is like an ecosystem. You have a Starbucks literally on every corner.

What these people had to do when all these foreign chains had to come to India, they needed Indian partners. Whom did they choose? They chose only the top, the most visible experts in the industry to partner with. So, you need downstream products that people can say; I trust this brand, I’m just going to order some stuff right off the shelf. Then there are upstream products that are more educational in nature, which can feed your competition but establish you across the different footprints of L2, L3, L4, and potentially L5. You don’t need to go out and grab attention and grab business and fight for business every day; the business flows to you. This is not easy to do. It may take a year or two to do, but this is a mindset item. If you apply your brains, you can expand your footprint across these different areas.

Overarching Themes

Now, what are the overarching themes that will be prevalent in a post-recession or post-slowdown market? These are the failsafe, foolproof themes that are going to be growth areas in the post-Corona era, guaranteed.

Health

The first thing is health. People are going to be more health-conscious. Regardless of what business you are in, if you can have a theme around health, even if you’re in the restaurant business, let’s say you have a restaurant where alcohol and all the unhealthy things are served. If you still come out with workshops on the off days, saying we’re going to have workshops, where we will teach people on how to create healthy food recipes, we’ll teach you how to create continental dishes that are healthy, and you can drum up in 15 minutes, people are going to be very interested and will definitely join you.

During the lockdown, people realize that they need to have some cooking skills. If they have only four dishes on their spectrum, and if they get locked down again, they’ll get sick and tired of eating all that. So if you hold workshops, which are centered around health, if you have something around immunity, or if you have an educational program, these things will do very well.

Career/Finances

It doesn’t matter what area you’re in right now, if you can draw from any of these six areas (health, career, business growth, personal improvement, relationships, entertainment) and over an upstream or downstream product, it will help you. It will help you to add income streams to your existing income stream. If you are a chartered accountant, you can have a workshop, teaching how to plan your finances, how to get the maximum return on investment on your savings, it’s going to be a smashing success. So, in addition to a done-for-you service, a level one service, you are now providing a level 4 service, which is that workshop.

Business Growth

Anything around business growth, if you have any products, consulting, books, audio programs, or video programs around business growth, it will be big in the post-recession error, or even in the post-Corona, assuming that business stays healthy.

Personal Improvement

Anything around personal improvement is going to be a huge burst. Now that people have the time to look internally. They have the time to contemplate; they’ve not been running around towards different attractions and what you call the shiny object syndrome. There will be a lot of change with people introspecting and building new goals. And there’s a lot of new things, new initiatives, that people may have taken during the lockdown days, and they will want to continue with them. They will want to utilize their time better, they will want to do a little bit of exercise. So if you can have anything around the personal improvement space, you are doing great. If you can just have an educational product, which teaches people how to do one, two, three items, that is the area of passion for you.

Relationships

The next one is relationships. If you have a passion, if you have any insight around how to improve relationships with people in general, areas like a spousal relationship or family relationships: how to be a better parent, how to be better with kids. Then you go into the abstract area, which is how to be a better person, how to concentrate the energies of your mind, how to be into sound healing, how to heal yourself. So a lot of these energy areas are doing very nice right now. They’re going to continue to do well again because, over a period of time, people will realize that we are becoming as a society very consumer-driven and very materialistic. And during this phase, they will realize that they need to connect back with their higher self. That’s a huge potential area.

Entertainment/Gaming/TikTok

And then there is entertainment, gaming, and TikTok. Many people would have probably developed a passion for games because they’ve been playing them during Covid. Tiktok is huge. It is pure play entertainment if you can have educational content on tiktok right now. You’re going to find a fortune in TikTok because the TikTok adoption has gone up so much just because people are sitting at home. And then they’ve done their Netflix for two hours, they’ve done their Facebook, made calls to all the relatives, checking if everybody is safe and TikTok, as of right now, is a brainless micro-entertainment. It has created a huge amount of audience. So if you can create microlearning and go to TikTok, that’s a huge opportunity.

So these are some of the overarching themes. It will be huge if you can have your current business inside any of these themes. So whatever your current business is, you can set up a layer over it, or you can set up products under it, which are the commoditized products. These are some of the ideas on how you can add income streams.

Absorb Complexity

Information Overload

The world is reeling under information overload today. So what’s happening is that there’s a whole lot of information. People’s curiosity is aroused, but it’s complicated in their minds. They watch so much of YouTube and Facebook that everything becomes complicated in their mind. They end up thinking that all of this stuff is great to consume, but maybe I can never do something because there’s so much knowledge out there. I will never be able to do this.

While in reality, the actionable knowledge is less than 2% of what’s there on the internet. Some bloggers have made an entire living out of talking about 20 different points on how to select a good cell phone. When there are only three points on how to select a good cell phone. So when you watch some information like this, your brain goes into overdrive when you’re like, oh my God, this is complicated. So, what you do is you can absorb any complexity for your customer, whether it’s in the information, education domain, or whether it’s in the domain of the hard product.

I’ll give you the example of Amazon. People say, well, Amazon is an e-commerce company. Amazon owns the largest fleet of aeroplanes in the world. Amazon owns most of the shipping routes. They have their own ships doing freightage. They own the largest warehousing space in the world. They have 600,000 employees in the US. So what they’ve done is they have absorbed the complexity of the customer, which is if the customer wants to buy something, then the customer takes their car out. They go to a different place, invest 20 minutes of their time. They waste an hour of their time looking for something, and finding the exact model they wanted is not even in stock. So they just wasted an hour.

Not only that, the only time when a customer has time to shop for things like groceries, for example, is on Sunday. Going to the grocery store on Sunday is a hellhole because, guess what, everybody is there on a Sunday. You have to stand in a very long line. You don’t find parking etc. So, there’s a lot of complexity in the retail domain. Amazon has sorted that out for customers. You don’t need to worry. Whenever you have time, you can place an order. Instead of you coming to my store, I will get it delivered to you. Not only that, I’ll get anything in the world delivered to you right at your doorstep, even if I have to get it all the way from China overnight. So, in order to do that, in the hard product space, they don’t make anything of their own, but they have figured out how to get anything over to you at the lowest possible price over from China overnight without you ever stepping out of your house. So they have absorbed all that complexity.

iPhone absorbed all that complexity. What you had to do on a laptop, they put it inside a phone and right from the next day, the world changed. So with your product, if you can absorb complexity from your customer, then even with your service, or even with the education, that will be an overarching theme.

Lack of Actionable Structure

If there is any kind of information overload that you can clear out and give people actionable information, which is I can help you do one, two, and three things within 30 to 60 days, I’ll get you this result. Then you have a space in the market. So be in the results market, don’t be in the skills market because going back to how the industry has grown and died, the skills market is not great.

We’ll to quickly go over the what, when, and why we are here together? The reason we are here together or the core focus of the Startup Frat Hangout is freedom, and the other is abundance; freedom from constraints, freedom from pressure, freedom from mental stress, freedom from society’s bullshit, freedom from anything that might be holding you back from where you want to be, where you need to be in life, on a personal, or professional level. And the second thing is abundance.

The abundance of whether you want wealth or time or to be a better person, abundance in terms of mental peace, etc. So just a place of peacefulness and abundance and freedom from constraints. So, that is pretty much the theme of this Startup Frat group. We’ll quickly go through these points with the why, when, who, and how we are here.

Why are we here?

This is relevant for three types of people. If you are a corporate professional or an independent professional like a doctor, lawyer, CA or something. Or if you are somebody who has been wanting to look at setting up their own brand enterprise, whether it has a commercial interest or a non-commercial interest, you want to set it up just to leave a legacy, or you want to set it up to make money. Or if you’re a corporate professional and want something more out of life, or you are an independent professional who’s sick and tired of jostling around in a sea of other professionals. Then this is for you.

When

The other reason we are doing it at this particular point in time is because of timing from an economic perspective. It is very critical right now because we’ve been seeing a bunch of different slowdowns happening, and the whole thing has come to a head because of the Tipping Point of the whole coronavirus situation. Before I go ahead, if you have anyone, a friend or family member, who has suffered from this scourge, my heart goes out to you, and I take full cognizance of the pain that they might have felt, or you might have felt.

Having said that, anytime there is a deterioration of the fundamental economics of society, then there is a landscape event or a Black Swan event like the coronavirus is; it always leads to a bunch of upheavals and a lot of people are impacted. That upheaval is followed by a period of upswing. Only the fittest and the most flexible, and the most ready people can scale the peaks in that upswing that happens. Timing is everything in life and business.

How Steve Jobs made his dream come true

I’ll just give you a quick example. Steve Jobs was fired from his company in the 1980s because he had a dream of making a near-perfect computer, which would be a work of art, and it would take $3000 to make that computer. He wanted to sell that computer for $2000. The average monthly income of a family in those days in the US was $2,000 or $2,500. So, it was not economically viable. He was fired from the company because he was hell-bent on driving the company to the gutter in order to fulfil his dream. It was his own company, but the board of directors decided to fire him.

Twenty years later, when the markets had changed and things were different, they brought him back. They made him CEO, and he still had the same dream, which was to make a near-perfect computer and it will cost $2,000. That’s why it’s going to be near perfect. Thanks to the Chinese and Thailand manufacturing and American median income level rising to beyond $3500-$4000, computers suddenly became a reality, and the rest is history. That’s what made Apple what it is today. So, it was the difference in timing in which the same exact dream, the same exact company, the same exact audience were able to purchase a computer.

Why Timing in Business is Important

I’ll just give you a personal experience. In 2008 when the housing crash happened in the US. I was working with a start-up in Silicon Valley. I was on a B1 B2 Visa, so I was technically in India, but I was working in a Silicon Valley company.

When the whole show was coming to a halt and people were jumping out of windows, and the stock market was nothing, real estate had crashed. After the 2008 crash, I was incidentally working as a sales and marketing consultant in a market research company. After that crash, many companies suddenly realized that they needed to find newer markets. They needed to find whether their competitors had left the market or the competing companies had been destroyed. They wanted to go and take charge of that market and those customers.

Suddenly, they needed that advice from people like market research companies who had all the information of who’s going out of business. What are the customers doing? Where can you find this kind of business? Long story short, we doubled our revenue from 2008 to 2009, doubled our revenue again from 2009 to 2010, and doubled our revenue again from 2010 to 2011.

It taught me a very important lesson in life that timing in life and business could be everything. So you will still do the hard work, you will still do the smart work, you still have the bright ideas, but if you apply them at the wrong time, they could get you fired. If you apply them at the right time, you could be the number one company in the world, or the number one inventor in the world like Steve Jobs was. So that is where we are coming from. So we are at an interesting point in time. And my goal is to provide you with the information and the tools necessary to make this downswing and upswing of the market work for you rather than against you.  So, this is the “when to apply an idea.”

In India, the issue has always been that we are always willing to work very hard, usually working very hard. Most Indian people work six days a week when the whole world works five days a week. We are always willing to learn more things, but usually, the information of what will happen is always coming to us late because we are the back office for the rest of the world.  I’m trying to share some information which could be useful for you.

Usually, when people talk like this, they typically have something to promote. They have an idea to promote. They have a product to promote. I have nothing to promote. In fact, I will give you 100 different ideas on how you can make this stuff happen for yourself. We’ll discuss what you can do regardless of whether you’re a business owner, a professional, a corporate professional, or an individual to get synced with the new market.

What are the basic blocks? There are some industries which are going to go down. There are some Industries which are going to go up. We don’t know what’s going to happen to manufacturing. Some people say all that manufacturers are going to move from China to India. We hope so, but we don’t know. Some Industries are guaranteed to grow, and that comes from the way humans feel. The human situation is changed during the slowdown. A lot of people are thinking differently. They’re feeling differently. They realize there’s a lot of waste in our life that we don’t need. A lot of people are getting back to the basics.

The basic premise is do not be wasteful in things that won’t keep you grounded. They’re not going to add any value to your wealth. The second premise is to conserve your resources because you will need firepower when you need to ascend the market curve. If you don’t have that firepower and are tied up in the real estate, the stock market with stocks is just going down and not going up. All of that, then basically, you’re losing your firepower in the wrong thing. Even if the whole thing comes up, two years or three years from now, you would have lost the opportunity where you could have made huge, significant changes in your positioning or finances.

What are those five or six areas?

Business growth and development

The first area is Business growth and development. If you are a person who’s into consulting companies on how to grow their business and maximize their profits. If you are a person who works in this kind of an area, then this is a great area to be in. And this is the area that’s going to grow after the slowdown is over because I have seen that happen first, and I’ve been in it. So this is one thing. I’m very sure about the other team.

Healthcare

The other area is healthcare. Health Care means something over and above the sickness care industry. Health Care is more of a self-help industry. So things like yoga and how to get your immunity up because the medical industry is probably not going to be able to help you if you have coronavirus. Maybe they will, maybe they won’t. But if you have your immunity up, that is a much bigger asset than knowing a good doctor. So the healthcare which is more from a self-help standpoint, how to be healthier, how to have better immunity, how to have lower fat, how to avoid blood sugar, is going to be big because, during this time, there’s a lot of scent self-introspection that has happened in the mind of the individual. They realize that they love their families. They would like to live longer and be around them more. Their focus will shift from their professional pursuits to their health, which brings me to the next point.

Personal Development

The next point is personal development. If you are in any shape or form connected to, or if you can hit your wagon to it, it doesn’t matter whether your current business is related to any of these areas or not, but if you can hit your wagon to personal development, then things like minimalism and meditation, and how to appreciate things better in mindfulness and how to be a better parent, and how to be a better human being etc. is going to be hugely important.

Career and Finances

Career is for businesses. Finance is for individuals; at an individual level. What can you do if your career is not going well? If your company lost a lot of revenue because of this whole situation. And now your job is in danger. If you are a corporate professional, then Career & Finance will be very important for you. If you are a person who can help other corporate professionals, who may be feeling this heat, then this is an excellent opportunity for you to help other people and also benefit yourself, probably build a business or a brand around it.

Make money Niche

Make money Niche, where people have a huge market for business opportunities, and things like multi-level marketing, insurance, and financial advisory. So people who want to set up businesses or their individual consultancy in advising people about insurance and, how to grow their money, about how to make money financial advisors, even people who are into business opportunities and multi-level marketing, and think this is going to be a huge going forward at least for the next five years.

Entertainment

Now, this is not about big-ticket entertainment. It is not about setting up your cinema hall or your restaurant. That industry is probably going to suffer a little bit. But this is what small ticket entertainment is. If you’re into gaming, if you’re great at gaming, and if you can create some products around to help other people on how to become like a Hotshot in PUBG or something, this is going to be big because a lot of entertainment is shifted from big-ticket entertainment, cinema halls, bars and clubs over to entertainment in the house, which is playing random games and doing TikTok stuff. So if you’re in this industry or have any idea of how you can create some products or services or content in this industry to help other people enjoy more from their smartphones. Then this industry is going to be big for you.

We’re going to discuss Lean Startup Concept and how you can set up your business for yourself. There are three types of people that this blog is meant for.

1. The first person is somebody who wants to set up their own business that isn’t dependent upon the employer.
2. The second type of person is somebody who already has a small business or their current business is impacted by the Corona situation and wants more options in life.
3. The third person is somebody who has no commercial interest. However, they would be interested in setting up their own brand because their brand or message is something that will outlive them.

Structure of Business

When you’re off from the planet, you don’t want only your kids and grandkids to remember who you are and what contribution you made. So it’s essential to start setting up your brand, even if you have no commercial interest.

We’re going to discuss the basic structure of your business which is three-tier. We’ll be talking to you in straightforward language and then collating that with some of the more complex terms used in business, but it doesn’t mean anything complicated. If the business were very complex, all the high-school and college dropouts would not be doing business.

Components

The first component is your message, and the third component is your business house. When I say your business house, it doesn’t mean a big building with many employees and a big board in front. A business house is a collection of products and services that you bring together to solve the problem of somebody in the market.

The Message

So, the first part is your message, and that’s where it all starts. What happens is when you have a message and when you share that with people, some of the people may get attracted. They’ll begin to hang around. They’ll contact you and will be interested. You can figure out what their interest level is, using some tools and techniques. Then what happens is that some of these people take a journey with you where they come to your products and services to solve a problem. So at the end of the day, a business is about solving problems. And what you do is you attract the people whose problem is to be solved, using a message. What is it that you’re trying to do? Whom are you trying to do it for? How do you intend to do with that? That is your message.

Then the people who choose to join you in that journey and hang around you are what we call prospects. Some of them will take this journey all the way from your message to your products and services. This journey is called conversions.

What is Important in Business

Most people think that products and services are the most important part of a business. They want to do business, but they don’t know what products and services to offer. They want to do a business, but they don’t know how to set up their office, hire employees, where to start, etc. That’s the least important part of the puzzle.

Some people say that conversions or basically selling, they aren’t very comfortable in doing any kind of selling because it makes them uncomfortable. And usually, when they try to sell to people, it makes them uncomfortable as well. They don’t want to be in a situation where the customer and seller are not comfortable. They don’t want to cause any discomfort to anyone. This is the second least important part of the puzzle. There is no discomfort involved, and the whole thing is on auto-pilot.

Now, the important part of this whole puzzle is your message. A lot of people say, why is messaging important unless you have a product to sell, you cannot do business because money doesn’t change hands unless you have products to sell. But if you look at the last 200 years of history, which includes almost the entire Industrial Revolution, you will see that any big company or any big brand that has been there in the last 200 years history has always been driven by a message or a philosophy. If you look at an interview that any business owner, billionaire, CEO, or chairman of a large group of companies, anybody who has ever given an interview has talked about their message or philosophy.

Why Big Companies always talk about their Message or Philosophy

You look at TATA, Ambani, MDH, The Virgin Group, Elon Musk and his company, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Microsoft, Apple and Steve Jobs, any interview in print, or on TV or YouTube, they always talk about their message and the core philosophy that is what drives a big company or a business. But to a middle-class listener, we never listened to the message. We barely hear the philosophy; it doesn’t even register in our brain. What registered in our brains is how many fleets of aircraft does The Virgin Group have, how many offices does TATA have, and how many different products Ambani has? What is the turnover? How rich is he?

If I were to ask you about the last five interviews of any five big business CEOs or chairman of the board that you have listened to, what do they say about their message or philosophy? You will probably not remember. However, all the businesses are driven by some message or philosophy because it’s the message that attracts your potential customer whose problem you want to solve.

Why is Selling Easy Today

The message is the most important part of this whole puzzle. In fact, in the information age or the optimization age, the conversions/selling and business house are so easy that you can go head-to-head with any multi-thousands crore brand today and have similar results, which means you could compete on products and services with any 10000 crore rupee company and have similar results.

Of course, you aren’t going to start today and suddenly build 10000 crore company, but if you were to approach a hundred people with your product, and they were to approach the same hundred people with their product, you have an excellent chance of out-selling that multi-crore rupee competition because of the age that we are living in. So those barriers don’t exist today, but still, 9 out of 10 businesses fail today because they’re set up by the people doing business for the first time. They miss the most important part, which is the message.

How do we build our message together

Your message is going to bring or attract different people who think like you. Your message goes out in the market and people come looking because the message attracts them. The message may be focused on their problem that will attract them. Or it may be focused on your unique perspective in life that will attract them. And once you do that, any products or services you recommend, they will buy. Some of these products or services don’t need to be developed by you. If you try to build complicated products and services to service the market, two problems happen. First, it costs a lot of time and money that most people do not have. Secondly, those products and services enter a market that is already glutted with other products and services. There is so much stuff in the market today that you cannot compete if you’re in making stuff. It’s challenging to do that. So, don’t be in the making-stuff business, be in the servicing-a-community business where all these things (products and services) can be put together.

What are some other products and services that you could sell to customers?

The ideal structure of a recession-proof business is that we keep working for you even if a Corona lockdown happens. There are three components.

Hard Product/Service

The first component is a hard product or service, which is like a traditional product or service, you could be providing professional services if you are a lawyer or a doctor, you could be providing allied services, which is helping people improve their sales, you could be assisting individuals in getting more peace of mind using meditation, which is a huge market today, you could be helping people become healthier by the use of yoga, which is also a considerable market.

Digital Product/Service

The second component of your product and service portfolio is going to be a digital product and service, which is digital, downloadable advice from you, which could be in the form of a PDF, which could be in the form of videos, audios, templates, where people can get some benefit in their life by downloading your advice or a step-by-step method to do something that gives them that benefit.

High-Ticket Consultation

The third component is high-ticket consultation. This is a market set that has the budget to afford your products and services or a budget to afford you and your personal time. They ask you to give them one hour of your time. They want you to come into their company or house and teach them this stuff, and they are happy to pay you whatever your rate might be at that time. You can charge anywhere from 5,000 rupees to 35 lac rupees per hour for your consultation. There’s a method to get there, you can’t start from day one, but this is the product and service of an ecosystem you offer.

Why the affiliate marketplace

Now, if you’re currently starting and do not have a hard product or service, instead of wasting your time and money building products and services that may or may not be successful in the marketplace. You could pick up products and services from the affiliate marketplace where they pay you to promote the product and services. Also, the customer pays you to recommend them the right products and services; you get paid from both ends. All you do is pick a hard product or service up from the marketplace and deliver it to the customer, and both parties thank you.

How does it work for me?

The way it works for me is I consult for sales and marketing acceleration. I help companies improve their sales and marketing. During the sales marketing acceleration or automation, sometimes they require certain software to do the job for them. At this point, I have an alliance with five or six different software companies that provide the software which does that job. What I do is I tell the customer, it would be best if you hand off the job instead of a human to machine and these are 5 or 6 software that I recommend. I tell them that I’m a promotional partner or an alliance partner with these software companies. If you can end up using a product, you will be using it at the usual rate, but they probably pay me something at the back end, if that’s fine with you. But if you don’t like that, you can do anything you wish to use in yourbusiness. Eight times out of 10 say you’re a consultant. You have to install it. You’ve to make it successful. I don’t care what you do as long as it’s within my budget. I don’t care what brand you use. What happens is, that I end up installing a software product or software license at their location. I get a small payment from the software company, in addition to getting the payment from the customer whose problem I am resolving.

If I were to build this software from scratch, it would cost me millions of dollars because these companies are million-dollar companies. I would not be able to do it very well because I’m not a software engineer. In my product portfolio, I have hard products and services, and I have high-ticket consultations. You can get my consulting, and I will teach you how to do it. In fact, I will come in for four to five days in a row and help your sales and marketing people understand how to do this job better. Then I’d recommend something that will put the whole thing on steroids and get you 100x return for a little bit of licensing fee. You can go and buy any software you want, but I have 2 to 3 software that I highly recommend, but beware that while I’m recommending them, I have something to gain from them. In 7 to 8 cases, they say we don’t care as long as you are the one installing it and you are the one getting the results.

Why are Digital Products/Services the way to move forward today

Then you can have some digital products where you don’t need to be involved in dealing with anybody. You can have a website or an Instamojo store where people know about you, or hit your Facebook page and go to your Instamojo store. You can sell them a course, templates, or an entire step-by-step method, how to implement one, two, three, and four items. And you don’t need to be involved in the sales; people can download it themselves.

Digital products are quite exciting because they stay up during the Corona Virus time. While you cannot go to work and you cannot sell your products and services during Corona Virus time, Digital products can stay alive even during these times. You don’t have to be personally involved because people are going to your website and buying, watching, or downloading these digital products from there. All of this is your business house.

Business Message

Now, let’s talk about your business message. It is the most important thing in the puzzle. People want to solve a problem, but hundreds of people in the marketplace claim that they can solve a problem for the prospects. How do they know whom to hire, whose services to buy? People buy from people or companies who seem to be in the best position to solve their problems for them. Not only do they want a solution for their problem, but they also want the best solution from a person or a company that they can truly trust, which is where your message comes in.

People usually ask their friends for any advice before going to do something or going somewhere. That’s because they can connect with them. Similarly, if people can connect with your message or philosophy, which could be as few as three sentences, they’ll immediately see you as a friend and the best possible person to take advice from when solving your problem.

How do you craft your philosophy?

Basically, your philosophy is composed of three layers. The second layer is called your personality. Your personality type will attract certain people with similar personality types because it gives them a good feeling that this is the best person to solve their problem.

The issue with personality type is that most of us don’t even know what our personality type is until we’re 30-45 years old. Especially when it comes to going into business, then we start to have all kinds of questions. They know their personality type, but they don’t think it will be helpful in any type of business. However, your personality type is honed and crafted by incidents in your past. If you’ve not figured out what your personality type is, or if you have a personality type and you don’t know how to have it connect with other people, you start with incidents in your past.

How incidents of past may help you discover your personality type

There always have been some incidents in your past being a child or when you were growing up or even when you are an adult. There have to be some incidents that give you an indication of what a personality type is or your overall philosophy in life is or should be. From those incidents, we start recognizing our personality type. We start accepting our personality type. We grow into our personality by the time we’re 25, 30, 35, 40, or 45 years old. Some unlucky people are unable to grow into their true personalities, even till the age of 60 or 65. That’s a whole different other problem. But if you don’t know your personality type or don’t understand how it would relate to other people, then look at some of the incidents that have happened in your past. That could be an excellent indication of what your personality type could be, and what your relative aspect could be, or what your philosophy could be.

So I’ll give you some examples. There are defining incidents in my past which helped me understand my personality type. What happened was I was good at following the system. The society said you have to be good at studies, so I was good at studies, went to good schools, and got a good education, all thanks to my parents. When I passed out of my school, not only did I top my entire national board in 2 out of 5 subjects, I got admission in India’s number two ranked medical college on my first attempt. I was in the top 50 students who got selected.

That was a very prestigious thing, and till then, I’ve been following society’s system. I started feeling something was off somewhere, and it was not making me happy even though I was good at it. To get advice, I spoke with somebody who was senior to me and whose advice I would have otherwise respective, but when they gave me what they thought was good advice, it did not resonate with me. They said that this is the profession you’ve chosen, and if you cannot stay loyal to your domain, you will never be successful in life. At that point, I had a straight disconnect. Then I understand why everything doesn’t seem to be alright and I don’t seem to be super happy despite all my achievements. It’s probably because everybody’s part of that system that wants you to be a certain way. Despite being good at that game, if it doesn’t make you happy, you have to look at other things. When you look at other things, these people are going to stop you from making that decision.

Basis of my Philosophy

So that one incident formed the basis of my philosophy, which was if you want and are willing to work for it, you can be anybody you want in life, in any field you want in life regardless of what your education is, regardless of what your upbringing is, irrespective of what your family background, your social circumstances are. If you choose to do something and you’re willing to work hard for it, and if you dedicate yourself to it, then you can be anything you want in life. That’s the core of my philosophy.

So a minor incident in my childhood started forming that message. It was still in its infancy, but that was the core of it. It may not need to be a difficult incident like the one I just wrote above. It could be a positive incident where some mentor or senior suddenly told you something, and it connected immediately. You have to have that instant connection that you pause and say I could have said it myself. In fact, I resonate with this big time. Or maybe a friend that you are hanging out with suddenly said something that hit home so hard that you are like that is wiser than 20 years of education that I’ve had so far. That one statement really hits it home.

So that any such incident, which could be positive, could be difficult or negative, or whatever that held you locked down and say this is it. Just because you’re one personality type doesn’t mean you won’t attract people of different personality types. It is a part of your overall message. Some people work 18 hours a day and for six days a week. But I work 6 hours a day, and I’m quite an easy-going person. I want to take life easy. I don’t want to work more than five days a week. That’s my personality type. I stay the happiest when I am in that zone.

Third Layer

The third layer is formed by people and the books you read, the videos and movies you watch, the kind of friends you have, and what is it about them that you like the best? Then other influencers you may have had from outside that you resonate with form part of your philosophy. If you’re unable to figure out your personality type from your past incidents what your philosophy should be, look at the kind of books you like to read, the kind of movie, you like to watch. What is the thing about those movies that you like or appreciate? What is kind of friends that you like to have? And what is it about those friends that really attract you to them? These are the things that will help you form another layer of your philosophy. The three forms of my philosophy are:

1. You can be whoever or whatever you want to be with the right kind of effort.
2. In order to pick up the correct skills that you need to get to the next level, you can pick up and master these skills to about 80% of the world’s standards within a period of 90 days with the right kind of training. It’s called the 80/90 rule. To achieve a certain result in life, whether it is in the financial domain or personal improvement, you need to develop specific skills. You need to become a different person in order to get different results.
3. The third part of my philosophy is whatever the system is if you’re not comfortable with it or it does not fit very well after a certain amount of time. You need to change into a new system. But when you try to do that, just expect that the whole system will try to pull you back. Snap out and shift out and escape from the matrix.

Build a Market

These three points are the message that I take out into the market. If I were to compete with the software companies, I’d have no chance because I’m not making the software. But if I bring this philosophy to the table that says whatever you want to do, it will take 90 days of constant effort to master 80% of it. And whenever you try to snap out of your current mental paradigm to a new paradigm, it will always pull you back. There will always be a lot of difficulties, but life is better on the other side when you break through that difficulty. When I take this message to the market, some people resonate with me. When they resonate with me, they get an opportunity to sit down with me, and I have a sales process where I walk them through my parts, and then some of them say I want to do business with you. And when they do business with me, they pay me. They need some software, and I recommend them 2 or 3. But I tell them that the software companies will also pay me at the back end as I am their marketing partner. By that time, they say we like what you do. We like what you think. If you want to be there for me, we don’t care what you do as long as it’s within our budget.

Suddenly, I have a market. I have a market in an area where I have zero expertise because I don’t have a software degree. I have leverage in an area where I am literally a nobody compared to the market’s big names. Hundreds of thousands of gurus teach sales and marketing, and some are bigger than me. But with my philosophy, I collect a little bit of attention where some people are willing to do business with me, and that’s enough for me. You’ll collect the right kind of people who will do business with you because they believe in the same things you do.

Exercise

Now I have a little exercise for you. I want you to write down a few incidents of your childhood that can define your personality. Write down what you think your personality type is and how that would resonate with your message. If not, write down some of the names of your friends. Write down what is the connection between you guys. What is kind of movies you like? What do you watch on YouTube? What type of books do you like reading. Write all that down and try to find your personality type.

Lastly, write down three lines; it could be less than three lines of your philosophy around which you’ll build your fan following and your market. Define what your message or philosophy to the market is going to be? How has it benefitted you in your personal life?

Hello and welcome congratulations this is Rajat from Startup Frat thanks and congrats for crossing 20 000 members ever since we started on April 28 2020 so what is it six or eight months eight or nine months twenty thousand members thank you very much and hooray to everybody who has been an active part of

The community has been liking commenting sharing you know you’ve been part of the community you’ve interacted shared you’ve been part of the different uh open programs you’ve been part of the academy programs thank you very much so the reason this community was created was in the middle of the lockdown I didn’t have any of my corporate clients you know bugging me all day long and I was sitting at home free.

So I just started giving out a bunch of videos as a way of uh you know sharing my knowledge with people who have been sending me emails saying how can you help me and I’d never ever responded to those emails because you know at that point I said you know maybe they can’t afford my services I’m mainly a corporate guy etc and then I started you know giving out this these videos as a form of

Just expressing my creativity sharing my knowledge and becoming a great community now I will stay committed uh you know the reason it’s become this big is because I do stay committed in spite of after the lockdown and all of that I do stay committed to sharing the knowledge because uh like I told you before in many other videos it’s been an emotional reason when I was

Quitting my job in a hospital and trying to learn the reason I realized I need to learn sales and marketing is because I did not know how to get patients yeah so, I got all the best education I got a good medical degree and everything I didn’t know how to get patient and somebody said well you got to learn some sales and marketing skills and once I learned that I realized

You know I don’t need to I don’t need to sit in a clinic by myself because once you learn that skill you can apply it to any market right and then getting this knowledge is very difficult I used to live I still live in a small town you know in Puna which is actually not no longer a small town and nothing used to happen in Puna like nothing used to happen in Puna so if you wanted to attend there was the internet

Was not this advanced and if you wanted to attend a good seminar or go to listen to a good speaker or find a good consultant even to get an initial consultation you had to take a bus and go all the way to Bombay okay you had to take a bus go all the way to Bombay it was expensive because I didn’t have much money and then my mentor at that time said unless you invest in your learning you know all the

Money in the world comes from learning and knowing yeah knowing the market knowing what’s happening what’s going on the wgo formula what’s going on okay so one of the reasons very close to my heart is that uh you know uh that I don’t want to make information a barrier for anyone’s success so you will always get the best information from me and I know before I go on that people have been sending me emails, especially a couple of queries

Came in from restaurant owners I’ve already sent you an email saying I’m a couple of days delayed but today I’m going to give you a special video so we’ll hopefully solve your problem before you get my email response okay so I do stay committed to that cause and if you see that the 20 000 people in this community less than maybe three or four hundred are part of our academy programs which

Are some more advanced programs where you can get to work closely with me and everything but you know it is my commitment that we will keep this community running a lot of different people are getting involved in the actual creative part of you know doing more and more things so we will talk a little bit about that today okay so stay tuned get your pens pads papers and pencils and I have two very special

Gifts for you at the end of this video okay at the end of this video so what is the process going to be I’m going to give you two very special gifts okay then in the month that is going to follow from now till maybe about we hit about 25 000 people I’ve done the run rate and all the run rate is pretty good so we will hit 25 000 people between now and this point I have committed that I will give you

At least training worth at least a lack of rupees if not more so if you’ve gone to MBA school and if you spent two lakh rupees or three lakh rupees in your MBA education you’ll probably get an equal or better amount of education over here in the next one month if you stay tuned okay and you’ll probably write me an email and say man this information was worth

More than a lack of peace, okay much of this information comes from paid programs academy programs and my corporate consulting where I charge by the hour, okay but that’s fine okay there’s your big congrats and thank you uh thank you for that once again from the bottom of my heart okay now let’s get started first of all I’ll give you a solid training today okay solid training today

Uh so if you’re a restaurant owner and you’re saying okay I’m a restaurant owner or a cloud kitchen owner you know uh what do I need to do okay what do I need to do remember it’s a demand-supply situation at the end of the day if you can break down every little thing into a demand-supply situation you will understand what you need to do now this what you need to do let me find a duster, yeah now what you need to do is you need to understand the

Demand supply situation because once you understand that it may not help you get you to know like your million dollars your profitable market right now or anything but if you keep focusing on that you will get a lot of good ideas that will help you reposition over the long term let me show you some examples so now you are you’re a restaurant owner, okay and you have something called demand

Okay and then you have something called supply okay demand and supply on a fulcrum supply okay in a global market in a global market you got to have your own little market or your own span of customers who in your particular product line nobody else can supply but you okay there is only space for number one there is no space for number two there is only space for number one okay so what is the demand-supply situation

Looking like in the old times if you had a restaurant you were either a Chinese restaurant or a general multi-cuisine restaurant or you know like a cloud kitchen that would give out tandoori chicken and starters to people who are drinking whiskey on the weekday weekends or something right and then the span was limited you would get all the orders from people in that area because they have you know only so many restaurants and you know you have

Only so many customers so you have a demand-supply situation where you have some other people who are supplying and then you have got all this demand market okay you got all this demand market now what is happening is there are two kinds of competition first of all restaurants even on a smaller scale it’s easier and easier to set them up you can set them up as cloud kitchens or

Whatever it is becoming easier and easier to set up restaurants which is why there’s been an explosion in the supply now the supply is like hundreds of people in your area okay there are restaurants in my town in puna there are restaurants that run out of literally one kitchen and four seats like a cafe outside or something and they deliver half of their stuff so swiggy and everything okay which brings

I to the other point okay Swiggy is the worst form of competition because either you are in the Swiggy platform where you’re competing with hundreds of others of their members of the whatever the suppliers that are there and if you’re out of the Swiggy platform you’re competing against Swiggy themselves right so it’s the worst aggregators the worst kind of competition aggregators

Are here to stay and all of that stuff right so that’s cool so you have competition the second thing is your demand is going down because people are careful about what kind of food you know they order how soon how frequently they go out which is reducing because the government restrictions and things like that and then you’ve got things like uh um you know there is way too much choice

So you don’t show up like there’s way too much choice it’s like going to Netflix it takes 30 minutes just to figure out what you want to watch so you know people don’t even go to Netflix anymore like the newer and newer content engines are coming up and they’re hyper-specialized if you want to watch Hindi stuff it’s better to go to like z or something like the sony live or something if you want to watch a particular kind of other content go to

Somewhere else youtube is getting so crowded it’s so difficult to search for stuff that people are going to Patreon and happily paying two dollars a month just to find exactly the right content that they want to watch the wastage of time and figuring out whom to do business with is costing you literally all of your customer attention which basically means that a confused customer will not buy from anyone

Confused customers will not buy from anyone you could still get your business from Swiggy where people just open the thing and they figure out they want to buy let’s say tandoori chicken and if you are a tandoori chicken person they’ll buy from you maybe you’ll get some business that way but there is no growth there is no future in that business because you’re controlled within it’s like having a class 4 government job a class 4 government job

The growth is not there the prospects are not there you’re just basically stuck in that box and that’s your entire life so if if that works for you that’s great but if you want to get out of there then what do you do okay if you want to get out of there then what do you do there are three ways in which to make more money there are three ways in which to make more money the first is

Get more customers the second is to get these customers to pay more frequently okay and the fifth way is to figure out how they can pay you more and more per visit and more per visit which is also called ticket size okay if an average meal for four costs three thousand rupees in your place how do you figure out to sell something

Worth twenty 000 okay how do you figure out how to sell something like 20 000 right so let me tell you a story and then I’ll tell you three or three more factors in which you can probably help yourself okay let me just look at my notes real quick over here so what if I were to tell you that most people in the market whether it’s this type of competition or this type of competition is gonna go for this

Okay they’re gonna try to get more and more customer share from each other it’s a zero-sum game because today everybody is ordering the maximum amount of meals they can possibly order you know from the outside the market is not expanding it is either static or contracting okay so this game is a zero-sum game and everybody else is playing this game which is how to try to get customers from each other or whatever okay now there are two more markets which are how

Do you get customers to pay more uh frequently and how do you increase the ticket size the funny part is the restaurant business falls under and usually targets the lowest customer segment okay the lowest customer segment what is that there are only three reasons that people buy the first reason is urgency okay urgency the second reason is

Utility and the third reason is emotion okay the first reason is urgency the second reason is utility and the third reason is emotion, okay and the restaurant market okay only caters to this particular thing the urgency okay the urgency uh what is urgency restaurants make most of their business from Friday night to Saturday night

Friday night Saturday night Friday night Saturday night why there is an urgency in the customer who’s coming out of the office after five days of tiring work and then they say how do I make sure that I make all this worth my while I have one night or I have two nights and both those nights or one of those two nights they will go out drink a lot of beer probably eat a lot of food outside or something try to make as much you know just kind of help

Themselves out of this whole frustration of their job or whatever it is right so it’s an urgency issue and that’s the only two nights this like contributes to 60 70 of a restaurant’s business okay now with the arrival of cloud kitchens and these lunch box items the utility segment is also being targeted what is the utility segment if I’m an office goer and I can get lunch in my office via Swiggy for 20000

Bucks then I don’t really need to cook at home right so that’s a utility market it works all day of the week and just the convenience level is so high that it kind of works now Swiggy’s already playing in that market so how do you make it more you know unless you start your own circle or something okay you can think of playing in that market the third thing is emotion, okay very few people are able to play in

This market but this market is 1000 times as big 1 000 times as big as the emergency market 1000 times as big as the urgency market okay what is emotion have you ever seen how Salman khan launches these movies, yeah the promos start four months earlier okay and then the momentum builds up to an emotional frenzy where people are emotionally tied into

The movie and they want to have it not only do they want to have it on day one okay that is emotion building, okay so very few people know how to harness this particular market and this particular market is one thousand times the size of this particular market okay just compare your chemist

Downstairs near your society whatever your chemist is in the urgency business okay a hospital is in the urgency business where somebody just absolutely needs it they’ll walk in they’ll get it right they’ll walk in and they’ll get it to compare that to how insurance companies market health insurance or life insurance or something okay that’s why they’re that big why are they that big because they figured out how to tap a huge market an emotional

Market okay in a fashion where they get paid it’s very difficult to tap that market, okay but it’s thousand times as big okay insurance companies really make a lot of money as compared to your chemist or even as compared to any working hospital okay insurance companies make a killing insurance one of the most difficult things to sell okay in the world of salesmen if you’re any sales or marketing professional if

You’re any xerox professionals out here yeah you would know that insurance is the world’s most difficult market and insurance companies are constantly hacking how to tie their product to emotion okay you get 1000 times the amount of sales but you got to figure out how to do it successfully you got to figure out how to do it successfully now I’ll give you just one idea today and then

Tomorrow we’ll have another long training because I really want to focus on the gifts today but I do want to give you the delivery of what was promised to you okay so emotion is very very important how do you tap into different different different different emotions okay so let’s let me tell you a story so back in the days of the gold rush in us yeah there is a series also on Netflix called the west yeah the west

This shows this in some episodes gold was found in some river beds in California and everybody from the east coast of us back in like the 1700s or something like that you know just dropped everything sold their lands and showed up for the gold rush which is trying to go with a small pan into the riverbed and try to find gold nuggets okay gold nuggets now this was a dangerous business because

There was no police there was no government over there you pretty much went there you nobody knew each other everybody is finding gold and the day you found will find a little bit of gold that day somebody is going to try to murder you to take it away from you that day somebody is going to try to murder you to take it away from you okay 90 of the people in the gold rush actually never made any money because

They’ve always fought among themselves they were you know it was not a happy situation and the people who actually found gold sometimes it turned out that the amount of time that they had invested the amount of money that they had lost in only traveling from east coast to west coast over many months and wasting all that time to find gold the value of the gold did not pay for their trip back did not pay for whatever they had lost in

The bargain okay they did not that you know that that they’d lost in the bargain however the gold rush by itself that activity by itself was very very prosperous for the economy in general okay so for example if somebody showed up in the train okay from the east coast and got down the first thing they would want to know is

Where is the gold to be found okay like where is the place where actually go and look for it so you had to basically there were these guides and all who would charge a small fee and they would take you to that place then there was premium information which is where is it that the last gold nugget was found yesterday yeah because everywhere that gold was found a month back

You know that information is useless because there’s a thousand people already in there right so where was the gold found yesterday that’s the most premium information those people would charge 10 times as much as your regular guide okay and then before you went to actually dig for the gold before you actually went to dig for the gold what would happen is that you would need

Somebody would show up and say are you gonna get on your knees in those pants those trousers of yours because once you go into the riverbed those pants are going to get screwed over and they are going to get torn and everything yeah so what did you need trousers made out of tarpaulin-like material which later became the denim jeans yeah so they would sell you that yeah and then somebody would say hey are you going to use that little pan to to

Pan for gold no you got to use these materials which are going to you know help you get to get to get to the gold faster and then they said okay so you know those were also chargeable services okay so what happens is that if you’re playing in a market that is over competitive and dead you got to figure out an enablement market and then what you got

To do is you got to enable the other people who want to play in that market and have decided that I want to play in that market, okay and that’s where the chances of your prosperity are what is the second thing there are already you have tools built into your business you have results built into your business you have a certain way of working that is very very useful to an end customer okay in a setting different from your

Business setting in a setting different from a business setting let me give you an example when you set up a restaurant don’t you set up the interiors don’t you set up the ambiance to make it very very attractive okay is that service not useful to somebody who wants to throw a big themed party for the kids birthday or they’re calling all of their relatives over for some big get together

Yeah wouldn’t they want to throw a good themed party people who love food isn’t a certain percentage of them who want to figure out how this food is made in restaurants let me ask you this question you’ve invested all your money in assets that are costing you money that is costing you to maintain them from Monday through Thursday Monday through Thursday okay and that one product that you’re selling which is

The food or whatever it is is not making money okay that real estate can make the money for you your knowledge your staff your hardware all of that can make money for you the people who want to learn how this stuff is done in restaurants so they can make that stuff at home are willing to pay you for that learning and not only that the people who otherwise competed with you if you just go out to enable them if you just create an enablement service

For other restaurant owners, you would go into a market which has only demand you created and only you converted an only supply market into an only demand market where you my friend are going to be the only player now before you ask me I know the question that’s going on in your mind is yeah yeah all these are ideas are fine all these ideas are fine but how do you know this is gonna work how do you know this

It gonna work okay now I could give you case studies I could give you examples and testimonials and all of that but I won’t give you any of those because the hard fact of the matter is this because nobody is supplying that market you are bound to win and the second big thing is there is nothing to lose by doing it and everything to lose by not doing it yeah that is going to be the theme of this

The year 2021. yeah imagine if you didn’t die like your business didn’t die you okay did covet make it more powerful or stronger okay how can you know they say in English right if it doesn’t kill you it’ll make you stronger yeah so if Kobe didn’t kill your business is there any little way that it has made it stronger and if not you gotta really introspect and figure out what it is you need to do in order to make sure that covert makes your business stronger because staying

In a static market and competing for scraps like those people who are fighting for gold and killing each other is not the way to live my friend it is going to be the market of innovation and enablement and if you want to decide now if you want to find out how this game is going to be played then just hang on write in your comments below if there was there were any doubts questions what were your takeaways etc and wait for another video training that I’m going to

Come up with tomorrow okay because right now I can’t talk more than this because I got to go into and go into the gifts for today all right so just if you’re a restaurant owner or a small business person is there any doubts questions I don’t think this thing works yeah or what were your takeaways I think this thing works these were my takeaways just write them in the comments column, okay and I have two very special gifts to

Kick-off this festive season yeah it’s a festive season 20k season okay what are the gifts we are running something called the 6 am club which is an academy level program where uh we get together we write a goal it’s a 15-minute meeting every morning but within 21 days of running it in December like six people were able to launch their product lines, okay six people are able to launch their product

Lines so it’s a pretty tight meeting and everything and it’s 15 minutes it is not a whole lot of content or Guyana or anything like that everybody gets together everybody pretty much writes their goals there’s a little bit of uh there’s a little bit of gratitude all of a little bit of note checking with each other how’s everybody’s thing going etc and just that little activity right at 6 a.m in the morning has created life-altering change in the

Minds and the businesses of the people that are involved myself included all right so access to the 6 a.m. club Facebook group okay so 6 a.m. club happens on zoom it’s streamed on Facebook access to that Facebook group is restricted to a few people and you know there’s a fee associated with it which is a minimum which is a nominal 150 bucks a month however the community after seeing all the benefits etc has

Decided that this cycle January cycle for 21 days you know for this January season of the 6 am club there’s going to be no fees and this is what the community the academy program members have decided and I’m here to serve you know what they have decided so a bunch of academy program members will actually be leading this uh January season of 6 a.m. club that’s 21 days starting tomorrow you and I are going to

Be getting together if you so choose at 6 00 a.m. in the morning in that Facebook group it’s going to be live okay I’m gonna be there you’re gonna be there if you want to join in um you know then I have something coming up for you that’s gift number one okay that’s gift number one the second thing is that over the period of last uh six months or eight months you know zoom has emerged zoom has emerged as the number

One player in all kinds of video production video transmission video communication with one-on-one calls or webinars or group calls or even people who want to do recorded stuff you know if you’re in a profession uh like you’re in teaching or something which now requires you to record your lessons and this requires visual aid you want to share your PowerPoint mind map do some calculations on an excel sheet while you’re recording the session and

Everything all of these features literally 99 of these features are free inside zoom okay so what I’ve done is I’ve created a 50 minute like almost an hour long zoom training okay zoom training so once one you have the six am club okay and then you have an hour long zoom training okay that you can get free access for there is no fees for it today or ever okay now this is also part of an academy uh academy program called video

Production mastery but I created a brand new spiffy one-hour long training where I go into my zoom panel and I show you every little thing that I have done with zoom with all the hardware and everything in the last six seven months producing these videos and things like that you know and thus growing the community and everything now of course this particular type of video is being recorded on a camera phone okay but if

You want to do visual aid you want to share PowerPoint you want to share mind maps do excel sheet recordings you want to do webinars and things like that okay everything that I’ve done including the headphone gear etc that I’ve used in the last six seven months pretty simple stuff you know I’ve recorded in this one hour long training I want to give you free access to this training this is I checked up on the internet very few trainings I think all you won’t be able

To find any training like this so detailed all right so I want to give you free access to it and if this interests you what I would like you to do is head over to startupfrat.club/zoom okay so startupfrat.club/zoom never mind the handwriting I’ll put a ticker on top of it startupfrat.club/zoom okay now I just want to warn you

Okay we are going into a double opt-in as a default which means you put in your email there’s an email that shows up in your account which says your confirmation is required you gotta hit that link in order to get access to your training okay sorry about the two-step process but we have decided to go with the highest security standard we love your privacy and I want to protect your privacy because every time you access

Something in my system you’re basically your computer is leaving traces cookies you’re leaving your email phone number etc in there so what I want to do is I you know we have gone to a double opt-in which means we do this whole security thing but you put in your email you get a get a message saying please confirm your you know please confirm your details you hit the link in there and then you get your training okay so sorry about that

But again I’ve worked hard on creating this training for you so if you do want to access it okay then you can have it for free it’s uh startupfrat.com forward slash zoom it’s a one hour super solid training okay I won’t put a uh you know price tag to it because it’s not a fully paid product it’s part of a larger paid product called video production mastery okay and you get access to the 6am club once you do the startupfrat.cloud/zoom.
All of this information will be sent to you it’s a two-in-one package take it all okay I hope you like this training let me know what you thought in the comments box etc and watch out for the training tomorrow I’ll see you bye.

Hey there Chayan hey Rajat how are you I’m doing great man so finally I have uh pushed the record button so we won’t lose this interview just a quick message for the viewers man first we went you know the internet went down halfway through the interview then the second round I forgot to push the record button but hey if people think that some of the answers are practiced, they may be

Right because we’ve already done this okay let me start uh let me start real quick for the sake of the recording so you know so basically you know Chayan many people in the community already know you because you’ve been on some of the calls and then some of the people who may not be uh part of the launch program or something have also been on my webinars and I play

Some of your one of your older testimonials from February march time frame so they will probably remember your face but again some of them have not decided to be part of the launch program and all that so they may not know some of the future you know some of the next few achievements that you’ve made in these past few short months so let me just go to the questions and ask you the first question and then we’ll go from there so

Can you introduce yourself like just give us a background of your you know of your past career before you did your Startup and how was your journey up till the point where you decided that I need to work for myself sure uh so as I would say like I’ve started my journey around you know 2008 or early 2009 where I’ve worked with so many around four digital marketing companies

Where those include the software development and the web development and some of the pure services companies where you know I have I give my I know to give it my best but you know I have learned a lot of things you know in terms of technology in terms of marketing and uh how we can you know to market the product in the market and but so far uh if I say so my experience or my journey with this my previous organized uh

Are with the very ups and downs you know where I couldn’t cut that kind of success in terms of my growth as I have personally you know gained a lot of knowledge in terms of the technical knowledge and marketing which I have gained a lot and I’ve got a good growth amount of growth but when I talk about financial yeah I’m still lagging behind I was thinking taking the height on that because uh some of you know the previous organizations uh had to

Stop services in the market or maybe they’ve got shut down and if I talk about my you know the last employer where I almost work for six years you know where I have done each and every aspect of the marketing and help their customers where they can achieve uh that their goals and the results and the revenue in the market so I held them but I couldn’t you know

Actually, grow me in financially so when I met you know as we have been working with you know from four or five years and uh when I saw you know your work yourself, you’re working on the healthcare products uh so far and one deal you know size was around five lakhs so that that got me the interest of you know how you do it and I know how do you do it to get the customers and how to do

You deliver the product and the way you where you know looking after the business that got me the interest in that and yeah that that moment I thought you know I could actually do the same you know I can come into the market and you know do the stuff in the market you know I can do my own Startup so you were like Abhishek Bachchan in guru you said if my leads can generate

This guy five likes why don’t I work for myself yeah yes okay great let me just quickly read up the next question so now um of course so that was your journey till the point you decided that you I need to work for myself but this is not working out in a job but when you do make the jump or at the time that you’re deciding to make the jump there are definitely some barriers

Or something that you know success is never smooth right so definitely there is some past that brings us motivated it makes us motivated to do the thing but once you make the jump it’s never easy so were there any challenges whether they were maybe economic challenges psychological or whatever the thing that goes on in the mind the main battle is in the mind the metal has to be one in the mind before the battle can be one on

The ground so can you talk about some of the things that were going on in your mind did you ever think about failure what happens if you fail if you aren’t able to make it what did you have a plan b in place or something how did that whole thing work sure uh so like and I’ll tell you about it in today’s market it is not good enough to be in a good enough to get a job but you also need to showcase it properly and I actually eventually did

In my previous employees you know I was a top performing employee and the all my uh previous employers you know I thought I would award only on the people that’s it because I had never been recognized you know as you know where I can grow financially which I couldn’t uh so far so uh the barrier which I had is because I had no bank I know background where I can I have a lot of money and putting under my background when I can expand on my

Startup so that’s the thing which you know I was scared of you know I don’t have a backup with me and uh I was not sure how I do that but yeah I think when I when I joined you I you know I read your show you saw your videos out of it when you helped me to understand the market concepts and then marketing obviously yeah I have been learning digital marketing from a long time but I didn’t know how to put it in the right format and how to

Present it in the market so that you know I could have generated the revenue itself so yeah when you show me those tricks which I have been I’m using right now uh which has helped me a lot in order to gain customers in the market so real quick thank you first of all for uh appreciating me it feels uh you know I appreciate being appreciated it feels

Good you know when people when I would like to bring other people on the journey and then we are doing this journey together with you so if you uh you know make me a part of it I’m very blessed but uh I just want to bring this is not meant for kind of self-praise or anything because one day on this planet Rajat Sinha and Chayan will not exist but I hope that Startup Frat and the concepts will exist so can you point to

Maybe one or two of the concepts that I have based the Startup Frat model on that you think that those concepts are solid maybe they’ve helped you and they can also help other people so what are those concepts that you think would probably help uh firstly I guess uh if I talk about concepts and then you know you need to come out from your comfort zone

Because you know you need to do you know it’s like you need to change your psychological mindset you know whether you can do it or not I think the first thing is the main thing where you need to decide whether what you want to do in your life you know if you want to really want to start then you need to you know to break your to your comfort zone and you know to come out from that comfort zone and change your mindset, okay you would be able to do it

Or not so that’s the main factor uh that which I’ve learned so far and secondary you know your expertise you know that I know let’s say digital marketing is my experience and SEO is my expert so if I know that I can definitely I can help customers uh working with the within organizations why can’t I help customers working my for my own so yeah I think these are the two main

Factors which I thought you know I could actually do it okay that’s great so let’s talk about I marketing army you mentioned in bits and pieces that you keep your customer interest predominant and all that but what exactly are your services are there any other players do you have any other competition in the market and then if there is any competition what helps I marketing army you know kind of dominate or probably

Succeed in the market in spite of competition or whatever I don’t know the landscape if you can talk about it yes sure so basically what we do is we do the complete you know uh digital marketing offerings we have where we build websites we build a bit of the designing right we do the SEO we do the Swedish campaigns whenever based on the requirements of the clients so how we work is you know we first gather the requirement from the customers and I

Understand you know basically what are their needs what they are looking for if they just want to drive traffic we help them to drive traffic if the customer is you know really looking out for leads we only focus on the generating leads for them because you know we know the pain point of the customers you know you know how they are suffering in the market and what they want to achieve so we only work on those points you know we are very goal

Oriented okay whatever is your in our goal will help you achieve that so basically, I can say in a few words like we are a complete technology marketing setup like you know only for the revenue growth amazing stuff man amazing stuff so if there were any message from your site so okay so we’ve spoken about I marketing army’s spoken about some other yeah I just forgot to

Mention one more thing you know I have may have you know mentioned this earlier but uh while sitting I know over here and when I was discussing with you I have just acquired one more customer which is retainer customers again from the Uk market you just got that email yeah just now [Laughter] so do I get a commission out of it because yeah absolutely

Absolutely let me ask a personal question yeah whatever happened to your website do you have you built your website finally what is it because I remember you didn’t have I mean you were still building your website I’m still building it I know we I’m a technology you know uh background which I have but I should have the website but with you with the help of yours Instamojo marketing stuff

I think I’m able to generate you know six figures income now and I just gave you the news you know I just got the confirmation email from a prospect which is from London UK and he’s ready to start from uh Monday itself so I guess yeah I’m going to build a website soon it’s going to be ready in a couple of days or maybe next week yeah seriously you did get a customer I cannot believe this no the viewers are

Gonna think man we are making this stuff up man I think you’re making this stuff I can I can show you the invoice if you want no but for the um for the benefit of the viewers maybe you can come on one of the team calls man you’re never on the team calls and all that which is fine you have a big business, yeah maybe you can come and just say that that was not

A bs story but let me quickly ask so you are it’s okay if I built my business before my website was built because I’m not a website guy and many of my students are non-tech guys and I teach them don’t with all due respect to websites will not make you money just build out the funnels build out your offering to your webinars and that’s my model maybe there are other things which work better I don’t know this is the

The thing that has worked best for me after six-seven years of failing online but you are a website-making company and you don’t have a website it doesn’t look, good man, I don’t think I can publish this interview at all because it just creates the wrong impression I know I know I know I can understand that but you know I like it to be frank but a bit busy with you know acquiring new customers with the help of your you know

Ideas the tricks which you have given it to me so, to be frank, I did not get time to you know build the website that’s why I’m going to build in next week because you know so that anyone can see because you know if am I if I’m having you know a good amount of customers and counting in every day then I guess the website is not in a need yeah that’s in a basic need where you need a website to showcase your product or your offerings and all but

Yeah as I said the numbers are increasing for me so I got a little bit busy out of it so how are you able to convince these customers that you’re the best person how were you able to convince this UK guy they probably don’t even know you so how do you convince them that you’re the best so what basically yeah so what I do is basically I do them I give them you know seven days trial

Service uh which is a completely free package to give it to them and I show them you know how what kind of campaigns I can run on the Facebook or maybe or on the SEO or maybe in the google ads or maybe sometimes on the YouTube ads so after you know seeing the results they decide whether they want to go ahead with me or not and to be frank you know I charge them very heavily out of it you know I don’t charge anymore because there are n number of companies

In the market and the freelancers in the market, let’s say they probably built your website in 5k or 5 grand or 6 grand in the market or some of the freelancers will do it in 2 but I generally don’t do that because you know if I commit something which I deliver so you do the same you can say I’m sorry to interrupt you but that’s why my organization name is I marketing army so I am the one who

Is the complete army of the marketing and technology and you have employees and freelancers and everything working for you now Yes I do have a community of a couple of freelancers as well as some of the developers with me uh who works full time so you have a free product which is what we call like the lead magnet or whatever and then you go straight to a high ticket sale you don’t have you don’t do

Any of the in-between stuff you don’t do any no hey man if somebody ever asked me I usually give out your name here and there if somebody said I want to do a digital you know just so you have no offerings for the community people maybe you’ll help them out here and there sure I would love to because you know as even though I am part of that community so you know uh when I when you know when

When I joined your in a group on Facebook itself you know I am seeing your videos you know twice a day because you know you would be publishing you know day and day out videos on the content and that eventually, I think every community member should do even though I will eventually start doing that though I’m not doing that start fulfilling but yeah we should do that I guess even I would suggest to everyone yeah man video marketing is going to be

Big tomorrow and these days even audio man all these audio what do you call the voice recognition software and all man audio is going to be big yeah even though if I tell you about google uh algorithm is only pure on the voice search so I think the content of the amount of content you produce for your business is going to help you that’s what I have learned so

Let’s leave by I marketing army let’s leave Startup frat to let’s leave Rajat and the community out of it if person to person you’ve done this journey you faced your struggle you faced the time when you had no money and family is not willing to back you on your Startup you still did it because you were like screw it let’s do it but if there is a person who’s watching this video who has who’s unsure of themselves, they’re probably good at

Their job they want to share they want to keep their client interest up upfront they want to help people or they want to help companies like you’re also helping individual people also and companies as well large companies also what would be your two messages to them assuming that they’re in the they’re facing the same psychological financial issue they’re at a place where they’re

Unsure of themselves what would be the two things that you would like to share with them that can potentially impact their lives so no first thing I would say like start learning as fast as possible because uh I was like I was a guy like if I have to learn something from a small junior employee in my company I will definitely learn it from him so if you learn very fast that’s going to help you a lot

Secondly never stop trying to monetize your true potential you know because the years of experience you have gained yourself your work with different you know aspects of the life and then in your career as well so you know maybe you don’t know your potential but you need to you know to take the steps to realize you know what potentials you have let’s say if I talk about me

Potentials yeah, I didn’t know when I started my career you know I would be a strong digital marketer or a strong technology guy but living all this you know 10 12 years in the industry that helped me you know understand and when I did this psychological jump in the market you know then I realized oh I can enjoy that so yeah so never try to

Monetize your true potential I would say that never try to stop monetizing you have to pretend yeah go for it, yeah okay yeah you may have some roadblocks but you need to you know at least let’s say if I give an example when you have to start your bike then you have to you know to push your kick that’s what you have to do it may come back sometimes you may not be able to

Okay very well but you need to man it has been a beautiful experience thank you for giving your time thank you for redoing this video after I botched up the recording so just for the viewers once again this is a retake  I bust up the recording the internet also went off but can you know it’s funny that we could not do this interview on Thursday when we

Originally planned but you know today is independence day and the message from Mr chairman of I marketing army is go for financial independence this independence day if all of us can give gift ourselves and our family the gift of financial independence that is the true message from the start of fat community and from I marketing army it’s a beautiful day in my office over here it’s raining the rain is also

Cutting out the internet sometimes but it’s funny the way providence works we were supposed to do this interview Thursday and after many hassles and hurdles we’re finally doing it on Independence Day and I think I’ll try to process this recording and post it today as well so happy independence day to all our community members and I think you I you’ll agree with me chain when I say man let’s give ourselves a family the gift of financial independence yeah yes

Yes thank you so much for your time today bro we’ll meet up and definitely if you show me that invoice man you’re gonna buy me a beer next time we meet man sure all right so thank you very much thank you bye

Hey there this is Rajat here from Startup Frat and today I’m bringing you uh section 2 chapter 2 of the product packaging secrets and today what we’re going to talk about is what exactly you need to do if you already have a product line or if you have a skill like you’re a doctor lawyer accountant or you have a skill in the corporate sector like you’re an hr person finance

The person or you already you’re already a small business owner um but you know dealing in certain kinds of products then how do you do product combinations how do you do product packaging right so there are essentially two types of uh product packaging you know in the market today that is very successful and both of them work uh you know work at scale one of them is uh definitely going wide and the other is going deep okay so I’ll just write these

Down while we talk about them and I’ll also be reading from my notes you know just so I don’t go wrong and waste your time and everything and then we can have a discussion on this like a live uh probably meeting sometime tomorrow okay so what are the two major concepts you go wide and you go deep okay so what should be your product

Positioning in the market what should be a product positioning in the market so that you collect the maximum value from the market while also providing the maximum value to the customer and thus ensuring that regardless of whether the times are good or bad you have your products are successful you have a little bit of flexibility and just like the billionaires do right every time money is released into the market or the economy is growing or whatever it is at

That point you can really reel in the big fish and make sure you collect a lot of wealth for yourself okay so how do you do that see uh business works the best at scale which means you’re going you’re growing the business 10 20 or hopefully more than that 50 to 100 every year right now every business type has certain secrets that allow it to scale every business type has certain secrets that allow it

To scale and if you miss those secrets what happens is you will be in business you will probably even be well known in your area and your customer in your customer community or something like that but it will not allow you to scale and the ravages of time hit the business is going to get hurt okay the business is gonna get hurt I’m gonna give you live examples uh in this training so how does a wide

Product portfolio work how does a wide product portfolio work, okay so what a wide product portfolio does is every product basically solves a problem for the customer, okay and then you want to make sure that you’re known for that line of product as wide as you can go which means you get everything under the sun in that product line so that typically works very well in the retail scenario that works very well in the retail scenario how does it work

So let me give you an example of a chemist okay or a hardware store hardware and electrical store okay hardware and electrical store or a chemistry chemist is known for having all of the things that are related to health medicines for certain diseases and things like that right even skin care shampoos and things like that so all of these things can escape

So it is very well known that if you wanted to buy something for your health or if you have a prescription from a doctor the place to go is a chemist so what happens is that they are known as the point place to go okay the place to go the name doesn’t matter which chemistry trader is in med plus or medicare or any one of these other brands or something or even if it’s a local chemist or something okay people in the area know that this is the shop

Where I have to go to get uh you know to get any health-related stuff similarly a hardware and electrical store I need anything for my plumbing I need anything for my electronics electricals or something I need to go to the hardware electrical store they’re gonna they’re gonna have what I need okay so this is called a wide product portfolio which means if anybody wants something in hardware you are the person to go to or electricals

You’re the person to go to if anybody wants something anything at all any brand multi-brand you know they want anything in the health or sickness sector you know you’re the person to go to it doesn’t matter what brand you stock you make a commission on everything there is no you don’t have your own personal brand except for the fact that you have your own you know reputation in the area where

People know that this is the person to go to okay similarly you have something which is called product depth, okay what is the product depth is more uh results oriented okay product more depth is more results-oriented which means what problem are you going to solve these are typically long-standing complex problems okay long-standing complex problems that you’re solving so, for example, let’s take the example of a gym

Okay what does a gym what is the difference between a gym and a chemist, okay a gym solves a complex problem which is health okay which is health which is you know people taking care of their own health rather than the sickness market right so what does a gym really do you’ve got all kinds of things over there people want to have healthy diet people want to have healthy exercise there are various types of exercises

Various types of workouts various types of regimens there is yoga there is calisthenics there is weight lifting there is bodybuilding there is uh you know high-intensity interval training there is long distance marathon running swimming etc right so you’ve got diet you’ve got exercise and the third thing is these things are these things a lot of times you will find that these things are community-driven

Why community is driven because there are comp they are complex problems to solve the long-standing motivation required to crack the code, okay the long-standing motivation required to crack the code is only to be found in hanging out with like-minded people okay it’s only to be found in hanging out with the right like-minded with like-minded people in an in a like-minded conducive environment okay so I’ll just write like-minded people

Lamp okay and then I write ce which is a conducive environment the environment should be something that encourages the user to keep on keeping on till the goals are achieved right so how does the product portfolio of a gym look like how does the product portfolio of a gym look like they have the infrastructure for sure they have the actual gym, okay then they have other uh co-working

Spaces a space that can be used for yoga and you will find on the walls they have these rock climbing things built in today’s gyms right so people want to do these full body exercises like rock climbing you have the thing built on the wall and then you have a functional exercise like those tires that you turn and all of those things okay so yoga plus other formats and then what do you have so they and they will usually have different

Membership options if you have to want to have access only to the gym but you want to do it only afternoon time in the downtime and there’s a different price there’s a cheaper price if you want to have 24 hours access to the gym that the full membership is a typically higher price then if you want to have a yoga another format they’ll have certain add-ons and then they have value-added services like if you can take a training personalized training, okay that’s that’s

You know an add-on is more expensive and then you have something like supplements okay and in order to bring the community together they have you know like a monthly challenge or something like that or they’ll have a three-month challenge twice a year okay which will talk about the biggest largest loser challenge or whatever it is right so which means people who lose the highest amount of weight within the challenge period they will get

Felicitated they’ll get a prize or something like that okay and then they have other community events centered around the gym which will be like parties and things like that okay so this thing it goes deep which basically means there is a product for everyone regardless of how deep they are in the game which basically means if I’m just exploring then I can take an afternoon membership to the swimming

Pool I can take an afternoon membership and just you know to come to the treadmill and basically walk on the treadmill for a little while and after a while, I feel better I say okay I’ve been able to do this I’ve been able to attend it now I want to go you know I want to come in the mornings I want to do some weight lifting I can actually pay them more money convert my membership into full access which means I can come any time of the day so I’ll come at 6 am which is

The rush hour and at that time you know I’m going to be doing some weightlifting they’re going to be a different set of people who are going to be available in the morning doing those things so I have that environment built in at six o’clock seven o’clock whatever okay and then I say okay this was good I’ve learned something there are so many things I don’t understand what do I need to do I’ll take a personal trainer for a month you know that costs another seven eight ten

Thousand rupees extra or something like that right and the trainer gets you going and by the third day or fourth day they’ll ask you well what do you do for diet we have you know free diet plan and then we have some supplements or you can buy a diet plan from any nutritionist for three months and then you can have some supplements to supplement that diet plan the supplements will obviously cost you about five to ten thousand rupees a

Month uh depending on how many months you want to take the regimen right so this is a depth which means over a period of time you get more and more motivated to achieve a higher and higher level of goal and they have a product line to support all of that okay now there are certain product lines like they have the challenges like they have maybe they’re part of a marathon or something like that is everybody going

To be using that product line no probably less than 10 percent of the customers are using that product line what is the initial product line which is you know you can have an afternoon membership come here to do some treadmill whatever okay and that is probably the cheapest product line you can pay two-three thousand rupees a month for that right and then they have this whole what do you call a product funnel where different product lines attract

Different types of customers on each of them the deeper the customer goes the higher the profit for the you know for the ins for the establishment okay over here this is reputation based the more number of over a period of time the more number of customers seem to have you at the top of their mind okay where do you want to go to for a chemist where do you want to go to for tablets where do you want to go to for hardware where do you want to go to for

Electricals the more mind space you build over a period of time that is your secret uh you know to to to making money over the long term to make long-term profits yeah so what are the costs involved what are the different costs involved and how do you actually make the profits and attract the wealth over long periods of time the cost over here is inventory cost okay inventory cost you have to keep lots and lots of stuff

In-house so that every time somebody wants a bunch of different different different different things you have you’re there to supply them right over a period of time as your reputation grows what happens is that the customer acquisition cost okay the this is the big cost over here this cost doesn’t really exist because this is kind of more based on reputation you don’t really you know you don’t really

See your chemist sending out flyers although some some of them will restaurants will actually send out flyers and everything okay so customer acquisition cost which means they don’t really spend on attracting people they don’t really spend on putting banners up they don’t really spend on putting pamphlets into newspapers and things like that but what typically happens is that all of the cost 80 of the cost is going in stocking the equipment that you

Have to buy on a cash basis right and the amount of equipment that moves you actually reinvest in replenishing that over a period of time you figure out what is it that people of this area require and those are the stocks I need to keep the other ones I don’t need to keep right inventory is the big cost over here in the depth definitely if you’re running like a gym or something then infrastructure is a big cost

Infrastructure is a big cost which means the actual setup of the gym and those tires and those little things so you have to build it once and the initial cost could be high initial cost could be high and then the customer acquisition costs are also high because you know a gym is not the kind of place where people go to by default they have to be attracted to come to the gym right they have to be attracted to come to the gym so i’ll just write customer

Acquisition costs over here okay and then over a period of time since they’re solving complex problems once a person likes getting healthy you know they’re happy about it they keep paying because they want to be part of that community they want to have access to the gym and they want to keep doing those activities so you will see that only their top 10 or top 5 customers over a period of time will stick with them for a lifetime and those 5 10

Customers are enough to keep the establishment running for long periods of time, okay so you have customer acquisition costs are high there is not a whole lot of inventory cost over here okay but there are some secrets there are some strengths and weaknesses that I will read out from my notes and tell you you know how these things what are the little secrets that help these businesses stay or stay in business or

Probably get out of business after a certain period of time okay so the three secrets that keep a width based business in business is or the first one the scale okay i’m going to talking them talking about these in great detail scale of product line product line as well as customers yes scale

The second thing is customer service third thing is convenience okay scale of products customer service and convenience and what is the little secret I’m going to talk to you about little the biggest little secret that that will make or break your business that i’ll talk to in five minutes okay scale of product line there is no point going to a hardware store if one

In three times they don’t have what you want there is no point going to a chemist store if one in three times they don’t have what you want okay people don’t like to do that so a lot of times a product a store that does not have the scale of the product line will need to be very strong in customer service you say what do you need well I need x y and z I don’t have it right now but give me your address I will have a person bring

It over to your doorstep within two hours three hours by tomorrow morning whatever yeah so the customer service also has to be strong or the product scale of the product line has to be strong why because people don’t like wasting their time getting out of their house going to the chemist or going to the hardware store and then they don’t find what they want okay it’s a complete waste of their time so customer service has to be strong and the scale of

The product line has to be strong okay either they get everything that they want you will see a lot of different chemists in the area but everybody pretty much 80 percent of the people go to one particular chemist as a default as their default for their medicines for their for their you know kind of grocery items like shampoos and skincare stuff and stuff like that why because they have everything that these people need okay and the second thing is

Definitely, customer service needs to be very strong because these kinds of businesses are very very prevalent in India very very prevalent India why because the real estate is highly optimized if you see a good chemist or a hardware store they’ll have a little shop they’ll be filled to the brim with everything these this person just has a little two by two space to sit and on that little stool they sit all day long so the real estate is optimized so

What they do is for essentials like hardware or electricals or for chemists or groceries they know that the business exists because India is a populated and growing country they know that the footfall is going to be there they know that footfall is going to be there so you will see over a period of time many different chemists in the same shopping center couple of different hardware and

Electrical stores so it’s a competitive business the competitive business so what’s gonna work is either the scale of product line which means everybody knows that this is the person who’s likely to have everything I need and every time I go to the store they always have it okay they always have it and the second thing that they need to have is customer service or convenience which means you can pay me via paytm you can pay me with cash i’ll always have the change you can

Give me a 2 000 rupee note i’ll always have the change people over a period of time will gravitate away from the stores where they say give me exact change or I don’t have this payment method you know discuss basic convenience and then customer service how they interact with you and things like that do they you know do they have the trust uh do they have replaceability of items and you know I come from originally from delhi where they say you know the

The standard answer of every chemist is that they’re not changed right which basically means you just take what you want if you don’t like it bring it back i’ll exchange it that is the level of customer service that will keep people loyal to you uh you know for a long period of time now in the online world how does that work and what are the risks that we don’t see in this business okay let me come to the final secret which is

Customer behavior okay i’ll just write this in big bold customer behavior okay if you notice what happens in the online world is a hyper-accelerated form of business progress which means in the online world it takes very less time and it’s very very visible on who’s winning who’s losing and it takes it’s it’s a very fast time before people go out of business so if you see there were

Hundreds and hundreds of e-commerce companies in India before amazon came in there was flipchart everybody knows about Myntra but we don’t know about the hundreds of different e-commerce companies that used to operate that would give out their ads on Facebook where you know different companies are selling cell phones all kinds of cell phones and all of that there were hundreds of e-commerce companies in India and today

Either all of them are making losses or all of them are getting sold to foreign giants like flipchart is okay so what is the big secret is customer behavior okay and what is customer behavior which is what products I need to keep what is it that customers in India like the customers in this city like what do I need to how do I need to service them what are their different you know wants and needs that I can

Supply that cannot be measured in money and then what is the convenience that I’m providing these guys okay so customer behavior so what typically happens is over a period of time word gets around that it’s in one in three times we can’t find stuff at this particular guy uh word gets around that you know this particular guy doesn’t take this form of payment it’s very difficult to get

Refunds returns etc and you know this particular guy doesn’t have the right inventory etc over a period of time people start gravitating away from the business now this is a very low-margin business why because all of the money is going right back into the inventory very low margin business because you’re not the product manufacturer yourself you cannot control the margin on things it’s pretty much you know the other companies that are stocking their stuff at your

A place that are controlling the margin so very less margin game maybe 10 to 15 okay 10 to 15 margin now what happens is that as behavior starts to gravitate away from you where the customer preference starts to gravitate away from you the profits are eroded and you you’re very likely to go out of business if you see e-commerce which is the internet form of a chemist or grocery store hardware and electrical

Store or whatever the e-form of that you will see that the moment amazon came they had a better scale of product line which means anything that you order that is made in India made in China made in Brazil made in US you can browse it through the algorithm and they will deliver it to you the second thing is the customer service is basically next to none next to not even at two o’clock in the

Night if you just search a product okay where is this product of mine you can hit that button they will call you on your phone even at two o’clock in the night and they will sort out your problem for you there was this case that happened just about one month back I’d ordered some uh you know some embedded led lights and all for my terrace and everything and the lights got four days delayed and my electrician was supposed to come I just kept calling

Them a couple of days saying you know I just need this order today I know it’s four days out can you do anything about it and they made sure I got it I don’t know how they did it they made sure I got it right and then the last thing is definitely is convenience which is in the old days if you had to order anything that is available only in America but you need it you will have to order it and then they will charge you the shipping extra

And then they you don’t know how much the customs is going to cost so if you order something via Aramex or something like that from the US some shopping you did abroad or something like that then you till the last point you don’t know what date it will arrive and you don’t know how much customs will be applied so by the time the product shows up the rmx guy will say now you suddenly owe customers about 1600 rupees on a 2000 rupee product and then you’re like oh my

God this just cost me two times what I figured I would it would cost me right but in amazon, it’s just one price you order something that’s not available in India they will tell you it’s gonna take 15 days to come but they’ll charge you one price which is you know whatever the price is and you know everything is included they’ll figure out the customs at their end I’m sure they make a profit and everything it doesn’t matter you give

One price they give you a date the product is yours on that date right so customer behavior and then figuring out what is customer behavior how they’ve got this algorithm to figure out customer behavior which basically means if you go out to search for kitchen fittings or bathroom fittings or something like that what will typically happen is you will see other recommendations coming side by side so they figured out if a customer wants

One item like this another item like that then they’re typically moving into a new house or something like that and then they’ll keep recommending to you the things if you ever search for a 50-centimeter long or 50-centimeter wide bathroom stand they’ll immediately the algorithm understands what the dimensions of your bathroom are likely to be and they’re going to start showing you uh allied products which could not be

Bathroom style which would be other products that will fit into your house within the same size range and things like that within the same pricing and things like that once you get into surfing amazon by the way it is much more addictive than surfing YouTube or playing video games or something amazon algorithm is super addictive okay so depending on which one of your spouses is more the shopping person you know whether it’s the husband or the wife

Don’t let them [Laughter] get started on surfing the amazon algorithm because what’s going to happen is this thing is addictive you know it’s just gonna you know you just you can just spend hours on it and end up spending ten thousand five thousand rupees a day okay so customer behaviour and that’s how the algorithm is learning what to stock what not to stock it’s gotten so much better in India today

That if you order something at 12 o’clock noon time you’re likely to get your delivery at three o’clock for many products yeah why because they’ve learned what is it that customers in every area need and the nearby fulfillment center is actually stocking these products ahead of time so even before they get the orders they’ve got a local stockist who’s actually stocking all of this is like a mega mall this is like your chemist store or

Grocery store or hardware store on steroids, yeah so this is how this business line works okay again this is your secret this is where you want to focus on and these are the three principles that you want to focus on okay if you didn’t know them uh then these are the secrets now how does a depth-based product portfolio work how does a depth based product portfolio work something like a gym or something like a financial service what does the

Financial service do like a bank or something they will take your money keep your money pay you interest on it okay then you have surplus you will have a get a call from them saying we can invest this money for you you’ll get probably better returns or something we’ll probably charge some commission from those returns or something like that which is your mutual fund advisors uh hey you’ve had a relationship with us for 10 years do you want a home loan or

Something your supply will give you a home loan again these are all different companies because by law a bank cannot sell mutual funds and by law bank cannot be a home loan company together so then they have to create separate companies so you have ICICI housing is separate from ICICI bank is separate from ICSA mutual funds but they all work under the same umbrella, okay and they’re all providing you financial stability security whatever it is

Different tools and different products to help you get more and more financially stable over time if you need a home loan they’ll be happy to give you a home loan based on your qualifying criteria and everything is okay so that is an example of a depth-based product portfolio what are the secrets what are secrets let me read from my notes again so secrets are the number one is motivation

The second is movement and the third is I will write tribe building or you can say community building okay motivation movement and tribe building or you can say community building now what is this the first is nobody uses these products unless they are sufficiently motivated okay nobody wakes up in the morning and goes to the internet and searches for the best investment tools of 2021

Okay so somebody has to actually call you somebody has to interface with you and motivate you or market to you the importance of doing that hey sir you have x amount of money in a bank I see that you have maintained an average quarterly balance of five lakh rupees why don’t you transfer it over to an fd why don’t you why don’t we help you know get it into mutual funds you’ll probably you know make more money than you’re making on the two percent three

The percent interest rate in the bank or whatever it is okay the customer has to be motivated externally in a gym even if you do have a membership 85 percent of gym membership owners never go to the gym regularly they have to be sufficiently motivated to do that, okay so they need to have some sort of motivation built in to constantly get customers to use their products, okay the second thing is because they have a depth based poor

The portfolio they have to help the customer move among the different products, okay they have to help the customer move among the different products the only employees today that sit in a bank branch are the ones who are the sales people who are basically helping customers move through their product portfolio and in return, the customers using more and more of their products okay same with the gym you know you will always see somebody

You know saying hey you know you’re already doing this why don’t you do that as well why don’t you know you’re already taking personal training why don’t you take the diet plan as well you’re already taking the diet plan why don’t you use the supplements as well okay so they’re constantly moving you through their product portfolio okay unlike a chemist is not frightfully interested in moving you through the product portfolio because

They know they are the go-to place if you ever get a thought like that in your head, you’re gonna come straight to them similarly amazon you’ll never see amazon giving you an ad saying use my products yeah because they know that you’re gonna come anyway okay and the third thing is tribe building the sense of belonging has to be built because these becoming financially secure is not just a two-day job or one

Transaction job becoming financially secure something that takes 10 years 20 years becoming healthy is something that takes 10 years 20 years right if you have any kind of skill building you will see music classes or you have these yoga ashrams coming up you know a lot so they will have a lot of online stuff they will have a Facebook group they will have uh you know their live classes but if you live locally you can actually come and subscribe for the classes one

Month two months three months at a time they will have two or three different products and then they will have a lot of motivation built in they will have they will be you know they will be constantly motivating you to be a part of the challenges to be a part of the community you know to have a group to be part of the group and things like that okay so again uh in in the Startup Frat program we have different

Different products and one way we keep everybody motivated is by providing a lot of free value in the Facebook group like I’m providing to you hey by the way if you are finding a lot of value in this particular video can you just help me out and put some comments in there and in return what you also get is the more comments you put or the more number of times you interact with these videos Facebook will keep showing future trainings to you otherwise they will

Stop showing the training because there are 20 000 plus people in the group now and the organic reach of this particular training is probably only about 2000 to 3000 people so if you want to stay plugged in make sure you put a comment and if you want to help me out and give me a give me a little bit of encouragement and put a nice comment yeah okay now what is the little secret that you have over here what is the little

Secret you have over here the secret you have over here is efficacy or results which means our results okay what is efficacy which basically means you can you can basically [Music] the way you promote and how what is the guarantee that people actually getting those results like I mentioned about 85 percent of people who buy a gym membership never actually go to the

Gym at all so how well-oiled your business is that once people buy a membership you suck them and you make sure that they come to the gym and they do get the benefits because if they don’t get the benefits if they don’t attend the gym they’re not going to get the benefits if they don’t get the benefit they’re not going to buy any of your other products right so what is the efficacy in you know in online the

Online world we call it uh product and audience match yeah product market match so what is that which basically means what are you projecting to the people how much is the effort required are you making that clear to the people that just buying the gym membership is not going to get you’re not going to get them the results and how are you making sure that once they buy the membership, they keep attending this the sessions

They keep showing up so that they do get some of the benefits right so what is the efficacy in getting the results how efficient is your system even though you may be making money on the front-end getting people to come and pay to you how efficient are you and making sure that they stay with the program they get the results so they so they come and buy more products right hopefully they want to they want to up and up the physical game which means the next they want to

Do a marathon you know they want to be able to do some swimming they want to learn some new kind of sport or something like that okay that’s what keeps them coming and keep kind of buying more and more of your products uh similarly uh for example I just give you a real life scenario I’d invested some money with in in certain mutual funds with one of the banks and then the moment and for the last two years I was scribing saying you know the returns

Are not good I can see it and with a locked-in fund which basically means the moment it became three years I could probably withdraw the funds before that I could not withdraw the fund so it was a three-year lock-in now the moment the three-year window came up for some reason you know the market went up a lot of it because of us dollar printing etc that I spoke about in the previous video and the fund suddenly went up by 15

Okay so as soon as my encashment window opened up which means I have the freedom to end cash the thing goes up 15 okay and I immediately get a call from my rm saying so the fund has become 15 if the fund has grown 15 which means you made x amount of rupees or next lack of rupees what I would recommend is while the going is good would you want to reinvest and you know so what they’re trying to do is immediately they’re saying hey I’ve got you this result you

Know to buy my next product or reinvest with this same fund or let’s move it into another fund where you probably get the same similar returns in the next three years as well okay so their main goal should be and the main goal of your business should be to keep getting the results for your customers and not only getting the results to publicize the results to the rest of the community so if they’re not plugged in you know they

Want to start attending the gym they also want to get the results and then you want to keep rolling it so that the motivation lasts and it also carries on to the other newer customers and things like that okay so efficient efficacy and results of a depth-based business is very high now if you do it very well you could have a profit margin of 40 percent over here 40 profit margin if you don’t do it well you will lose

Your money because community building and tribe building is not an easy exercise over here you don’t need to do any tribe building or anything you know it’s a simpler business but the product that the profit margins are 15 very highly prone to competition because you know you just go out and see how many chemist stores are there in your area just see how many Kirana stores are there in your area they’ll be like you know many different Kirana stores many

Different chemist stores right so competition are very high but the revenue is pretty much you know revenue flows in the footfall is there but if you don’t understand customer behavior you will go out of business in this particular type of business if you don’t provide the efficacy of results you will go out of business okay so if you like this training and you’d like to know more about more examples about how we are helping our community build out these

Product portfolios for themselves and what are the uh different uh what are the different you know results that they are getting then head over to a master class which is called startupfrat.club/product a free master class you will get the value of at least 15 000 rupees just watching that master class we’ve got lots of customer studies of how the Startup Frat team has been

Helping community members to create products uh product lines for themselves etc and you will probably also be offered a promo of the month that we are running this month okay so just head over to startupfrat.com product and check out the master class it lasts for 45 minutes make sure you login only if you have the 45 minutes now if you would like to meet me live and ask me questions and everything

I’m going to be doing a Facebook live I’m thinking probably tomorrow or maybe the day after at 7 30 so just comment to me at what time you would prefer I can do it at five o’clock I can do it at 7 30 for the next two days and just let me know which day you would prefer it to be wanted to be Tuesday Wednesday or Thursday and I’ll probably do a Facebook live just like to know if you want to meet me live to ask me questions have me

Answer your questions on the live video just uh let me know in the comments what uh what day of the week Tuesday Wednesday or Thursday and what time slot 5 o’clock 7 30 or maybe 9 00 p.m. I can also do 9 p.m, okay so I’ll see you in the next video bye.

Hi this is Rajat from Startup Frat today we are going to talk about the key question that if you’re a business owner or a salesperson you probably have seen many times in your sales interactions and if you’re a customer you probably ask this customer ask this question every single time during your purchase interactions and the higher the ticket size of the purchase

The interaction which means the more expensive the product or services the more chances that you’re going gonna ask this question at some point okay which is will this work for me okay uh I have this travel deal you know I can go to Manali can this really work for me can I really do this I have a road trip going to Leila should I really do this does this is this really for me okay will this work

For me uh if you are going to a gym taking a gym membership you see a person with a good healthy physique you’re not that healthy a little rounded up perhaps like I am right now and you think is this thing for me can I ever be like this will this ever work for me right mutual fund investments any kind of investment bitcoin is going to make you

Money mutual fund is going to make you money retirement fund stay share market trading whatever and you’re thinking is this for me okay now my answer to you is if you ever ask me this question as a consumer which means you ever met me in a consultation if you’ve ever met me on a webinar where there has been a chance for you to purchase any of our paid products or something and if you’ve ever asked me this question you will know

That I never answer this question if you’re a salesperson or a business owner or somebody my recommendation to you is there is no answer for this question okay so never answer this question and I’ll tell you exactly why in this video uh by the end of this video I’m  gonna promise you a couple of solid places where you can get some uh very good training and everything but you’ll have to take some actions for that and I can totally

Guarantee you that’s going to be worth your while so just watch till the end okay this is a very important question nobody’s talking about it uh usually we talk about it in a high ticket sales formula in the academy program so if you’re an academy program member you exactly know where this fits in you know inside your inside academy program so this forms part of something which is called an express highway

An approach that we use in the high-ticket sales formula and what we teach is or what we recommend is that you should build an express highway which has you know free stretches of run going in one direction only and it has some toll plazas and then free stretches of the highway going in one direction only and some toll plazas and before the customer pays toll at every single point they have the option to exit okay that’s called the express highway approach

I have different videos inside this group that talk about how the express highway approach works in different scenarios so if you scroll up and down you’ll find them if you’re watching this video on YouTube  you know you just google or just search express highway approach Startup Frat you’ll find the videos okay so how does the whole thing work and why do we not answer this question there are different stages of a customer

Interaction with your business okay there are different stages within the customer interaction with your business and usually, customers who have known you very less or who have seen you for the first time second time seeing your product for the first time grab their attention grab their interest they are less likely to ask this question the only customers who ask this question is who have already spent a lot of time thinking about your product who’ve

Already examined your product your pricing your services you know all the different items terms conditions everything in great detail and they’re at a point of signing okay they’re at a point of signing so if they’re at a point of signing why do I recommend you don’t answer this question because there is something called talking past the sale Sunday got talking past the sale no salesperson should ever do that there’s a point after which your job is done you

Know it’s like the express highway customer decides they want to pay a toll to go through or they want to exit those are the two choices nothing that you say can actually make or break the decision for them at that point in fact anything that you do or say shall and will be used against you in a court of law which means it could spoil your speed okay now let me just take my notes over here just to make sure I cover

All the points that I have written down okay now the easy answer for you as a salesperson or for me when I’m  when I’m  you know producing when I’m  presenting my uh paid programs or whatever is to say yes this is over for you for one two three reasons this is the customer who it has already worked for they’re part of your industry exactly like you etc all of those things so why do I say you should never answer it there is something called top

Of the funnel and bottom of the funnel in sales okay top of the funnel and bottom of the funnel in sales and this particular objection happens in the bottom of the funnel okay now this particular objection has two basic routes okay there are many different routes of why people have different uh objections different concerns why do they don’t take action and things like that okay

At the bottom of the funnel, we call this type of objection this type of question will this work for me this is something called an internal barrier I want you to evaluate this as a customer which means you’re a buyer sometimes you ask yourself this question will this work for me and also as a salesperson or business owner which means you’re the business owner you’re

The salesperson your customers are gonna ask you this question okay okay internal barrier okay an internal barrier is formed exactly at which stage customers have actually you have grabbed their attention, okay they’ve gone through the product offerings they’ve asked about you here and there they’ve probably done enough of googling Youtubing cross-referencing with their friends and family and they come to a point

Where it’s time for them to decide this time for them to decide they know everything you showed them everything you’ve told them everything this is the price point this is when we start these are the terms let’s do it okay and that’s when this barrier comes up that’s why it’s called an internal barrier there are two major sources of this barrier the two sources are they might be asking for information

Will this work for me what information can you provide me that helps me to digest that it will work for me the second thing is assurance okay assurance which is I want just want another human being to hold my hand and tell me that yes this is gonna work for you is it gonna work for you my child let’s do this together and they’re with your information and assurance two things that they need there are different

Different types of internal barriers towards the end of this two or three-part training I will give you the resources where you can learn all about it master and become a ninja at your game if you’re a salesperson or business owner but for the right now let us assume there are just two things information and assurance now information is not the reason a customer usually asks this question and why is that because you already spent an entire cycle giving

Them the information so the key reason is not really information so what is the reason they’re asking this question the reason is assurance the reason assurance and the next reason you could say assurance or belief assurance or belief assurance or belief okay assurance is something you can probably give them you know to hold their

Hand say you know it’s gonna be okay my child come with me let us walk through these dark waters I’m  there with you holding you I’m  gonna be your shepherd whatever okay belief is something that they need to have on themselves because to get any type of result in anything they need to be able to take some actions even in the business building I’m  a coach for business building marketing teaching your sales I can give you the best sales book on

The planet okay it’s called how to sell anything to anybody I’ll give you the best sales book on the planet and you will take it in your hand and there is no guarantee that you will succeed with it or not unless you have the belief system that helps you take all of the steps that are mentioned in that book consistently over a period of time for years together till you actually become the kind of person who attracts

All that success okay so clearing their belief won’t help if they have a belief problem giving them assurance won’t help because there are multiple steps involved in them achieving any particular result your product is just one of the little things that help them achieve that result there is no product in the market guarantee there is no product ever made in the market which can

No single product that can help a person achieve any possible result whatsoever unless it’s like weed killer for 200 rupees that you can buy on Amazon please put weed killer all over your house you won’t get cockroaches yeah that kind of product will probably give you the result but if you want any compounded complex result that you know that that’s kind of a little more evolved than you know simple

Commoditized you know uh can I buy some soap wash my hands will they make that clean yes the answer is yes no customer ever asked a question for that sort of product people ask this question where it’s a more evolved goal will they go to the gym and lose weight yes or no will they do this x y z thing and make money yes or no will they be able to go to this guitar class be able to learn how to how to play the guitar you know will they be able to go to this

Couple’s counseling and actually you know the husband-wife stop fighting will they really be able to go to anger management and become a better parent you know will they really be able to take that PUBG course and become a better pub g player will that that gaming chair of 15 000 rupees really help them get those extra points in PUBG etc these are complex results where your product probably provides one or the two of the

Big kind of inputs that will help them get down that road but if they have a belief problem or assurance problem they will not go there now quick tip for you assurance in a salesperson increases the less they bend over and try to convince the less you bend over and try to convince your customer the more the customer will have an assurance in you as the right party to go with

You as the right party to go with okay you look at all the different products on the planet the people who have fixed prices the products which are premium the products that don’t bend over backward for the customer you take an apple, for example, iPhone number one the most expensive but the number one highest selling why assurance comes from a product or a product seller being unbending because they know they have the right thing for

The right amount of people if you missed a customer or miss customer think it’s not for you you’re probably right because you’re not the right kind of person that will be able to utilize this product to its best possible advantage okay now the moment you hold that kind of stance okay you will see that the customer assurance actually increases they’re like wow this person has so much posture they must be right they must be right

They must have a reason for having that posture which is probably a lot of customers are seeing the value probably they don’t need my business and that is the reason that I want to do business with them and I want to do business with them okay so this is the one thing now if you are a business owner or a sales and marketing person who’s been watching all kinds of different

Information on the internet and the world has totally changed in the last one or two years uh you know digital was there for the last five or ten years changing the game etc and then you know 100 MBPS internet happened a small producer content producer like you or me could suddenly become as big as a big brand immediately because you know we can I’m  putting this video out in front of you over 100 MBPS of upload speed right and the third

Thing was that the slowdown or the lockdown has made it imperative that people figure out ways you know to do business and to appear on top because everybody there’s not a market space for everybody to exist the market space is contracted right so you really need to reinvent in order to stay on the top if you were on the top and if you were in the middle if you’re in the bottom you really have to reinvent to survive otherwise you’re

Finished right so this is the kind of time when sales and marketing people and business owners which is you know people like you guys that I service if you have ever been faced with this question saying should I do this should I do that do I need to learn more sales do I need to hire more people do I need to go digital do I need Facebook ads do I need a website or whatever it is that you know a lot of people ask will this I’m  a financial advisor will this work for my

Industry no financial advisor has had a personal website before for example no financial advisor actually uh you know done this does this kind of things in this space it’s only the big company that does it it’s only the solopreneurs they do it’s only the digital guys that do is only the techies that are doing it you know does this work for me in my industry etc if you’ve been faced with these changes in the last one or two years and you’ve ever asked yourself

This question I have two little secrets for you and then I have an action point and then I’m  gonna see you tomorrow a day after okay the two little secrets are okay you go with something called first principles there’s something that Elon Musk coined the first principles because he built all of his companies from ground up recreating the wheel at every step and he said why do you recreate the wheel why don’t you just buy from the

The market he’s like because I want to go down to first principles which are the basics okay which is the basics so always go down to first principles for me I built my career I quit the world of medicine within my first two years of hospital job and being from a very prestigious college so I had all the options all the cards in my hand but the first principle said that the people who become rich and famous the people who are doing sales and marketing not the

Doctors in 20 years my mentor told me in 20 years the skills market will be replaced by the market of the results which means if you can do sales and marketing and get a product out in the market people do not care what skill you have and people with the skills will get paid lesser and lesser over time that seemed to me right because that had already happened in many other developed countries of the world right the second thing was the second first

Principle second first principle was if you’re into sales and marketing do everything possible to expand your reach because if the people don’t know you if they don’t have they’ve never seen you know then the expansion of reach is going to get you more results than getting better at convincing, for example, yeah if a thousand people know you could be horrible at convincing okay and you’ll still get two customers but if you have

Only five people to talk to you could be the best at convincing what are the chances you’re gonna do two customers not many chances okay so they were first principles uh so working with first principles I went into uh first went into sales learned how to do sales hand-to-hand sales in in-field sales then I learned how to do telemarketing sales because you could call 300 people in a day you started

With 70 or 100 and then we said okay let’s put an auto dealer nobody was using an autodialer for selling high ticket items like I t contracts yeah so we said okay let’s increase in the amount of reach those are the first principles and digital came I tried my best to learn all the Facebook ad you’ll see some of my ads in here and there all of this I’ve learned myself why because first principles are never wrong you build on top of first

Principles even though you know you may not be sure that it works for you okay so the first thing is the first question is that when the principle is strong enough the facts don’t count you may fail you may lose money how do I know whether it works for you or not but these are first principles if you don’t do it there is more to lose than doing it you could do it and still lose

Yeah but if you don’t do it you will lose a long-term guarantee the second thing is you can only accelerate from a running position you can’t accelerate from a sitting position which means if you’re not doing anything then you first need to do something to figure out if it’s going to work for you or not okay you can’t figure out from a sitting position you can’t figure out you can’t

Be sitting and then running at 10 kilometers an hour the next minute you can only accelerate to 10 kilometers an hour if you’re already jogging if you’re already at least walking or fast walking or something like that right you can only reach a speed where you see the truth okay uh from a running position or from a sprinting position not from a sitting position so people who sit around and say oh yeah this thing is never going to work because x y and z

That is never going to work they don’t know what are they talking about unless you know for sure can’t be sure and you cannot know for sure unless you’ve tried it and you cannot try it unless you have that perspective of the first principle saying if it matches the first basic principles and the principle is strong enough if it’s a fundamental principle the facts don’t count even if you do get failure

In your initial uh tries you know you’re still going to grow from the experience just like Elon Musk did building rockets up from scratch okay that’s the message I have for you now I have some very special training for you coming up tomorrow and day after and if you want those gifts if you want to see it what I want you to do is type your best possible comments in here what were your takeaways what is the scenario in

You have seen this happen to you where you have questioned yourself is this gonna work for me give me a scenario, okay and I’m  more than happy if you write it in the comments I’ll be guaranteed to reply to them okay I’ll be guaranteed to reply to them why I’m  asking you to put comments because there are twenty thousand plus people in this group only very few only about two thousand people will ever see this video so if you keep commenting Facebook will

Show you the next training if you stop commenting Facebook will stop showing you this training kay so I hope I get to see your comments do let me know what were your takeaways and I will see you tomorrow or maybe the day after seeing you bye.