We’re going to talk about time. There are two types of business owners in India. I have seen this in my own experience and have been there personally. I am talking from personal experience that there are two types of business owners in India. One is the kind who wants to do something and make money. They want to do something constructive and bring some value to the marketplace and make money.
The other type is the one who wants to feel like they are doing something. Even if the money doesn’t come, they keep on fooling themselves that we are doing something. We are in the setup phase. We are in the funding phase. We have to hire employees. They’re always in this phase, and the money never comes. And then, after six months, the funding partner pulls out. Then they’re like, oh, I did that business, but it didn’t work for me. I have been an option two for many years of my life, so I know the mentality.
I’ll clean up the understanding for you because business in today’s time has become easy. What happens is that in this age that we are in today and have been in this age for many years, it is becoming easier for a normal person like you and me. Or like a middle-class person who doesn’t have the necessary qualification. Except that because the same reason that it has become easier for people like you and me to do business, it has those reasons we don’t really recognize the importance of the right thing.
I’ll just give you an example. We always associate doing business with a building or office. You think I need to get it fitted out with some nice decorations and all because employees will sit. Also, there has to be an AC, and then there has to be broadband. Once the office is set up, now you say, I need an employee.
That will take another three to six months because although we are loaded with a hundred and 35 crore people, it’s very difficult to hire employees. This whole thing takes six months to nine months. A lot of money has been spent. When you come down to finding business, you’re like, now I need to hire a sales guy who will bring the business for me. And if you haven’t brought business for six to nine months, I can guarantee that your sales guys will not bring any business for you.
We’ll just go into the main topic. What are the problems in society that you can solve? That’s what you got. Don’t think about I want to set up a factory. All the people are setting up factories and are running out of the country, and the courts are after them because they were unable to pay back. So, everyone is getting paid in the real market.
- Everyone is getting paid to solve some problem
- The more painful the problem, the better.
Why? Because the more urgent it is for people to solve that problem, they’ll hopefully pay you for it.
- Now the third thing is the more people that are impacted by that problem, the better.
- Find the people who are willing to pay to solve that problem.
That’s everything that comes under your message and outreach. That’s what you got to do. You got to figure out what problem we’re going to solve. How many people are impacted? Can I find these people? That’s it. And that’s your way to the money, which is why I say, The Lean Startup can get you into the cash flow scene within 60 to 90 days.
Coming back to the Indian context, because we are a broadly prosperous society. All of us are linked to some roots somewhere. We have a landed property somewhere. We have a large joint family somewhere. It is never an urgency to turn the key and make money because the other countries where if you don’t produce, you may not get to eat.
There are many stories of very successful people who said that the point had come to a point where I could not put food on the table for my family, which is why I changed this. Suddenly my whole thing changed, and I started becoming successful. Though the pressure was there in India, there’s no such pressure; everybody’s funny. So that’s why they invent a million different useless tasks to avoid doing the one task that will get you the pivotal results, which is calling a high ticket customer; getting this is the pivotal thing. And that’s what I advise. Also, just start doing videos with whatever your message is. Start building Community for yourself.
That’s going to be the pivotal thing. That is the pivotal thing you can do today that was unavailable to you ten years back. Because the internet was there, but social media may not have been. Social media came in 2011-12. The video capability of the internet and of the devices that shoot the video was not so high. So it was limited in its capability. Today, if you have a little community of 50 people, hundred people, or 200 people that are watching your live video, you’re like the Amitabh Bachchan for 30 minutes. You have the attention every single day, and that is pretty much it. Watch your market even better if they resonate with you. Then you have a community that is tightly knit. So you got a movement going on. Those are the important things of life.
Revenue generating tasks vs Non-revenue generating tasks
High Impact Tasks
Large, Complex Problem Solving
How can I get my message across? How can I connect with more people? How can I get them to take action? These are large, complex problem-solving issues. How can I build the skills? How can I learn to do videos? How can I edit my video? How can I do this PowerPoint with the camera thingy and put it on Facebook live? For me, it was a difficult skill to learn. Before I go on Facebook Live, I have people consulting.
So what is happening is that when I put these videos out every day, I see which topic resonates more, and which topic resonates less, and that is building an understanding of what the pain is. If I like marketing in life, I’ll do these videos about them. I’ll do about 20 of them in a month. And then, depending on what the comments are, it’s teaching me what the market is? What is the pain point in the market? All of this market research is free. Facebook is free, and videos are free. Uploading is free, and the internet is almost free for 500 rupees. So it’s all pretty much free. You did not have this opportunity 5-10 years back. So this is the pivotal game. Making phone calls to your customers is a pivotal game. Closing High ticket deals and solving other problems is the high ticket, the real high-impact game.
Skill Building
The second is the skill buildings. I already told you some of these skills I am bad at. I need to build them, and I need to build them in a moving environment. So I have to take time out at night. Sit around, watching the internet. How do you do this? How do you do that? And then probably call some friends in the morning saying, hey, you are an expert at this. Can you help me with that? It is skill-building. It will take you some time, 30 to 60 days, but you have to do it every single day to master it. That’s a large, high-impact task.
Calling/Meeting Prospects
The third is calling and meeting prospects. So, in my business, I have customers, high-ticket customers who pay me for the sales and marketing teams. And then, even when I have done my job, I’ve been paid in. They keep sending me emails because they need some help and also have to keep helping them out. That is my customer community that I’m helping to expand their sales and marketing.
So that is a high-impact task for me. I do a lot of email marketing for these companies in Europe. If I get some responses, all I have to do is call them in their time zone. So, that is a high-impact activity.
All of the other stuff like I need to have an office, do I need to have employees, do I need to have AC, do I need to have all of this stuff, is just a useless waste of time, and it tells to feel good. You come back home. You tell your spouse that I am into business, but you’re not into business. You’re wasting your time unless you’re doing these things which are bringing in the money.
Go After Big Goals, See through the Competition
It is going after big goals and seeing them through to completion, including everything that may come in the middle.
What I’m doing here is I’ve got a big complex problem to solve. So what is the large complex tasks that I have taken up? I told you that I wanted to do something retail facing, which is I wanted to help a bunch of people and do some online marketing. I had never been a success in it, and then I met somebody who later became my coach, who said that you need to start building online communities. And that’s how you can help and maximize your impact. And he also gave me a goal. He said to do something that impacts at least 100,000 people like sales, marketing, and entrepreneurship, because that has been my passion. That is what I have done in my own career.
So I said I’ll teach the stuff to maybe 100,000 people. It’s different when I am supporting corporate clients because three or four of these clients pay my whole needs of the Year. Then I have licensing deals. So life is good.
But if I’ve taken up this goal of helping like 100,000 people, then that means it’s a whole different ballgame. I need to develop new skills. I need to develop this entire message, learn this whole video marketing stuff. Sometimes it doesn’t work. The very first webinar I did back in early April, nobody showed up to the webinar. So there are failures sometimes. Saying, this is not for me, it’s not working, it hasn’t worked for me for last 5-7 years. So maybe it’s not for me. But when the goal starts achieving, you need to dedicate yourself to see it to completion.
If you train your brain to go after big goals and you may not have done that earlier in life, that’s fine. But train your brain to go after big goals and dedicate yourself that I will do this no matter what and build all the other skill sets required along the way. This brain muscle or mind muscle will help you become really big in life.
If you develop this method of going after a big goal, it does not require an office or employees. None of this is required. Only the real stuff is required.
What problem are you going to solve? Are you going to make sure that you solve it to the best ability possible? And then how are you going to get that message out to the market? Once you create a customer community, everything becomes easy because you can literally pay somebody else, even your competitors. You can pay your competitors to provide the same service.
Low-Impact Tasks
Checking Email Incessantly
Checking email all the time and responding to emails, even if they’re from your customers, you are trying to do something, stop doing that. Get your brain down into focus mode. Your hand is moving towards something. It’s just kind of moving towards, and you open that Facebook, you open that email, and you think that you’re doing something constructive or responding to customer emails morning, noon and night, but it’s not a value-adding activity.
Value-adding activity is getting your message perfect and making sure that you have a customer community, and then making sure you do a good job on it. Some of this email stuff is essential. Some of this email stuff is not essential. So all of this social media, all of this checking email insistently, stop doing that. You are just wasting your time by not doing anything constructive.
Pointless Meetings and Phone calls
People are on the phone for way too long, and it’s a complete waste of your time, and it’s not money generating. All is pointless. These meetings and phone calls are not required.
Waiting on people to do stuff for you
I’ve seen a lot of businesspeople or so-called businessmen, especially in the small business segment. Hey, that thing didn’t get done, or I have told that other guy to do this thing. I’m not going to do anything. We are not making any sales because my sales guy left. And now we’re not going to have any sales till my HR person hires me another sales guy.
That’s basically a way to procrastinate and not do the constructive thing that will lead you to the next level. So waiting on other people to do stuff for you is a thing of the past because you needed people to do stuff for everything. Today, you can have machines do the stuff for you. So if you want to have a customer, you need to make your own sales. You don’t have to sell. You don’t even need a website. My website is still under construction. I don’t even have a website.
So what I do is I just put a message out on Facebook, send it out. There is a customer community. If they’re interested, I send out another batch of emails saying this is my pricing level. If you want to get on a call, get on a call. The customer can see my calendar on calendly. They can actually book their own appointment. They can see a free slot. They can book an appointment day or night. I will make myself available, and then I do the consultation sometimes, I do an in-person consultation. It’s all a paid consultation. I say you have to pay me, and they do.
My question to you is, are you ready? Or are you afraid of your success? Are you afraid of your own potential success?
Now all of this other back-office stuff is all useless. Stop obsessing over useless things like websites or offices. People wait for weeks to get their website up and running. My website has been with the developer for three weeks now, and it’s still not up and running, and I don’t care. I want to go to the market, provide value, collect the money, get the things going, and get the solution in my customer’s hands. My website is not going to help me do that. Websites did not exist 20 years back. So, it’s not something that’s going to help.
Big Goal completion formula
What is the Big Goal completion formula that we use in the Lean Startup? Learn new skills, do them now and if possible, teach them to somebody. Learn new skills and teach somebody to learn from you. Don’t worry. Do it yourself, do some video journaling yourself, make a video of yourself doing a task. That’s how you do the big goal. That’s what your big goal completion formula is.
Now we are going to quickly go into the high power activities that are going to make you money and the low-power activities that are going to take money away from you.
All of this other stuff, watching Netflix and all of this wasting time on social media. That is 0 money. All of this basic stuff running errands, buying groceries, waiting for your internet to come, cooking meals, attending useless meetings and phone calls, any of this stuff answering your phone all the time, this is all complete 100 rupee per hour. That means you can get someone and pay 5000 rupees a month to come in and do this stuff for you on a part-time basis and fix it and be done with it.
Then you have immediate benefit problems, immediate benefit activity. These are two thousand rupees per hour activities. If you’re solving a problem for a client, talking to a qualified prospect on the phone, writing an email, this is immediate sales. Then outsourcing saves your time. Outsourcing useless stuff and then creating business process documents where you don’t have to constantly be confused. Everytime, you’ll have to juggle a lot of different balls in the air as a business owner. So if you document everything over, then you pretty much have to juggle multiple balls.
It becomes easier for you. All of this posting, marketing content on social media is 2000 rupees per hour. So it could double your net worth. Some of these activities could double your net worth going forward.
Then there are the super pivotal activities: you have a war map and plan your quarter every day on that war map. And if you plan your day on your Google calendar on a daily basis. Going forward, I’m guaranteeing you that your net worth will become 5x within a year or two. You will double or triple your income. And I’ve done that at different phases of my life.
I can accommodate that goal in my brain and can work towards it. So just take my word for it. The only thing you do is if you have your next two days planned out on your Google calendar or your War map, you don’t need to plan it right down to the minute. You should go for the large chunks of time.
Working on Long, complex problems and building skill sets will really change the game for you. Negotiating a high-tech deal with the client, so if you finally find a client, are you ready to ask them for money? You need to be in that position, building sales funnels and webinars. So some of these webinars that I do, I do them for my clients as well. So if I build out an email marketing funnel, where I send out 20,000 emails, and then people learn then click on a link, there is a video of mine, then they learn what I can do for them. I get on a call with them, and I say, this is what I can do for you, you’ll have to pay me. This is high-level stuff.
Now, we are doing webinars for the school courses as well for people over and roll into the courses. That is high-level stuff. Even if I’m doing calls with you, if you are enrolled in the startup launch course, and if I’m doing a one-on-one with you in my mind, for me, that’s a very high power activity. If you become successful, that brings me closer to my goal of 100,000. So I take those things very seriously. Writing ads, copy of sales, copywriting ads on Facebook or getting your message are high-value tasks. Then the thing with digital robotics and algorithms is that you do it once, and it is out there forever. It just works for you all the time, and much of it is free. Most of it is free. Creating email campaigns that are autoresponder.
There’s something called email auto responders in our industry, where an email goes out to the prospective or the customer every single week or every two or three days. You can plan the whole thing in one shot for 60 days. You can plan the whole thing in one day and write it down and set it up, and it’ll take you 12-15 hours to plan the whole customer journey in your mind. But once you set it up, that robot will keep sending those emails at the right time to those people. You just have a robot working for you.
This software doesn’t cost very much, like $15 a month. You can have a robot working for you. Reach out to 10,000 of your prospective customers for the next 50 days, every alternate day, with a message from you. That’s really high-value stuff.
On most important days, instead of wasting your time on Saturday night, grabbing your beer, then being either dehydrated on Sunday or unrested on Sunday. It’s better that you keep some exercise schedule, 30 to 45 minutes. Get some sleep, get your relaxation in place, make sure you sleep and relax. Your hydration nutrition should be in place because that will add to your mental focus. With the right amount of focused effort, you can turn every hour into 10,000 rupees a year from now. So imagine if you’re working 20 hours a day, 10 hours in your current job, which you have to do because you have to pay the bills and ten more hours on yourself. In your new startup, that is a lacs of rupees added to your future network every single day, provided you could do it with 100% focus and consistency for a year or two years-long periods.
Hang out with smart people. So having the right mentors in your life, listening to the right information, reading the right audiobooks going to the right events learning from the right people is pretty important. Many times, you have to learn with the right people. There is a cost to that. So I told you that I’m taking some lessons from the world’s highest-paid consultant and there is a cost associated with that. I am taking many lessons from my mentor, Vick Strizheus, and he’s introducing me to marketplaces where I don’t need to create this content myself tomorrow.
There are marketplaces where this content is created for you and provided to your customers. If you have already built a community, they need the education. You just find out who else has this education, and then you collaborate with them. They’ll provide the content over, and you just sit back, and the whole thing is on autopilot. He’s teaching me the value of marketplaces where you can do this yourself. But once you set up the entire system, you understand how the customer behavior works. You understand how the money flows. You understand how value flows; then you can start outsourcing this stuff into marketplaces.
Then there licensing. Many people get down into the startup game and don’t understand how the money is going to work. So I recommend that you have to have a separate startup. You don’t have other partners than funding partners and all these guys that will interfere with the running of the business. You should have a self-funded startup, but you should know how much money will cost and have that money in question, then figure out how to use that money wisely. So, every dollar you spend in the market brings you three or four dollars.
Then keep your mind focused, just doing little 5, 10, 15 minutes of meditation every morning because that will train your brain. They will train your brain to work on long. Train your brain to work along with focused items.
Watch The Strangest Secret by Earl Nightingale. You need to listen to this audio for 30 minutes every single day. Why? Because that’s going to bring your mind to focus on the right things. So this achieves two things
- It’s like a meditative kind of a thing because the guys like talking, bringing you into one of the important things in life.
- How you can get to the next level.
Let’s go to the next one. Once you reach a high level, then negotiating major deals, hiring/firing key, team members will be like executive-level people in your company. Establishing the value and culture of your company and your customer community public speaking for a qualified crowd. So, there are people at this level; they come in front of a stage. There are 5000 people in a room, and the message is going out to 5000 people who have sacrificed time and money to be in that room. That’s a highly qualified audience. And if you speak to 5000 such people, you’re creating a huge impact, so that is really next-level stuff.
Then figuring out profit and loss in your business and then reflection and honest self-analysis. So, just about once in two weeks, just take four or five hours out of your cell phone, have your spouse take care of the kids. Shut yourself in a room or go to a coffee shop or something, or rent a small conference room in a hotel (You can do that for to 3000 to be and just sit alone). Just look at the different aspects of your business. You look at the different aspects of your life. Think, if what you’re doing is going to solve the problem.
There is some area of your life where you’re not getting the right results. That’s because you don’t know WGO. You don’t know what’s going on. So if you don’t know what’s going on, you need to learn, and you need to figure out where you can find that information. Wherever you find that information, chances are, it will be a premium. So, you will have to travel to attend a seminar. You may have to pay for a book or pay for a training course, but do not be cheap on your road to greatness.
If you don’t know what’s going on, you need to get the information. If you get the information, you have to pay in terms of the time, effort, and money that it took you to get that information.
Then fix repeating problems and errors in your business. So, that is a highly valuable activity. Once you have your business going in the cash flow, you reach a very high level.
Build an organization around your money. Most businessmen in India first try to build an organization. They don’t have the money, or they don’t have any money coming in, and then they expect their salespeople or their HR people to go out and get the money. That’s not how business is done. First, you get the money, and then you build an organization around your money.
My message to you is I lost my business in the 2008 market crash. I chose to give up my profession in the post-2001 slowdown. But every time, I was able to rebuild and reinvent because by using some of these principles I am sharing with you because I want to help you if you want to take advantage of this slowdown. I have many students to whom I taught these concepts to. Between February, March, and April, many of them have added six figures to their existing income.