Do you view your closeness or proximity to your customers as a strategic advantage? Or said differently, have you thought about that before? Our guest today is Mr. Sri Kaza, who shares with us his Underdog formula that he has found in small businesses.
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ABOUT OUR GUEST:
Sri Kaza is a business leader and small business advocate with a career spanning corporate strategy, entrepreneurial ventures, and dedicated support for small businesses. After earning degrees from the University of Michigan and Northwestern University, he began his career at McKinsey & Co., advising Fortune 500 companies. This was followed by executive roles focused on supporting small businesses, including serving as CEO of ForwardLine Financial, where he helped tens of thousands of small businesses achieve their goals. Through his extensive experience working with both large corporations and small businesses, Sri developed the Underdog Principles — a framework that helps small businesses leverage their inherent advantages to compete and thrive in any market.
Lisa Even (ee-ven) is a keynote speaker, bestselling author, and leadership coach who helps teams create what she calls a ‘Good Ripple Effect. With a background in healthcare operations and team leadership, she now works with companies like ESPN, SHRM, and Disney to teach leaders how to show up with presence, build trust fast, and shape stronger cultures. She’s also the host of the Have Good Ripple Effect podcast.
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TRANSCRIPT
[00:00:01] Tom DuFore: Welcome to the Multiply Your Success Podcast, where each week we help growth-minded entrepreneurs and franchise leaders take the next step in their expansion journey. I’m your host, Tom DuFore, CEO of Big Sky Franchise Team. As we open today, I’m wondering if you view your closeness or proximity to your customers as a strategic advantage, or maybe said another way, have you even thought about that as a strategic advantage before?
Well, our guest today is Sri Kaza, and he shares with us his underdog formula that he has found to help small businesses that talks about positioning, proximity, and purpose. Now, Sri is a seasoned business leader and small business advocate with a background in corporate strategy and entrepreneurship.
After earning degrees from the University of Michigan and Northwestern, he began his career at PricewaterhouseCoopers and Blue Martini Software before advising Fortune 500 companies at McKinsey & Company. He later transitioned to executive roles, founding a data analytics startup that helped small businesses assess job applicants and led the employment tax credit division to tax credit company, which is now part of Experian, which supported thousands of small businesses in securing government incentives.
Sri has recently finished his book, Unconvention, which draws on his extensive experience challenging conventional corporate thinking and empowering small businesses to succeed by staying true to their unique strengths. You’re going to love this interview, so let’s go ahead and jump right into it.
[00:01:34] Sri Kaza: Hi, Tom. My name is Sri Kaza. I’m the author of a new book out called Unconvention. I’ve had a few different titles in different companies in my past, but today I’m focusing on advocacy for small businesses.
[00:01:46] Tom: I love small businesses as well, and I love how you’re talking about advocacy for small businesses. That is music to my ears and to my heart. I love that. We have lots of founders, entrepreneurs, successful owners that tune into our podcast and other business leaders. I’d love for you just to talk a little bit here about your book and just at least give us an overview and what led you to want to write this book and put this down.
[00:02:14] Sri: Probably for me, it starts with a journey that I had prior to starting to focus on small businesses with McKinsey and large corporate consulting. Being effective at large corporate consulting involves being very quantitative, being very focused on a couple of things that you know everybody is going to agree on. As many of us know, that’s corporate profits, corporate growth. It’s very hard to get that done, but it’s easy to get people aligned on buying into this kind of corporate profitability.
As I kind of shifted away and began doing my own entrepreneurial endeavors and working for businesses or private health with a different committee, nuanced mission, yes, we want to earn money, yes, we want to grow, but we actually want to have an impact on the world in any shape or form impact, or even, “Hey, I’m here to leave a legacy behind or build something for my children.” These kind of different purposes for me were initially very challenging. How do you deal with if I know it’s profitable but doesn’t fit what the owner or the or the family that’s running business wants? How do I get this thing done? The challenge.
When I got into a business called a tax credit code and started working with small businesses to get them services that they needed, it really started to stand out to me. The small businesses out there, yes, they need to earn money, they need to make a living, they may want to grow, they may want to solve a problem, but the problems that they go after and the way they look at the world are very different.
In fact, because of the way they do that, one, they don’t get a lot of support because other people aren’t jumping on board to say, “Hey, let me help you make that happen,” and they don’t get a lot of time to go and explore all the ways to be more efficient and more profitable. Instead, they’re working day to day, fighting different battles to bring whatever product or service they really wanted to bring into the world. They’re working really hard to do that. Still part of my journey is I’m still not really grasping, like, “Hey, does this make sense?” because there’s a whole bunch of ways to make money that these guys aren’t going after.
As I started to start to go have an impact and see what they would do with the savings or the incremental income we brought to them by solving some tax credit problems or in other places later on in life I took on a role as the president and COO of a of a small business lender, even became CEO at that place, I realized when you get money in the hands of the small business who’s got a passion or is trying to make something happen, you see some amazing things. You would never see those things in a big corporation.
What you would see is a redeployment of capital to the most efficient, economic outcomes in a good, healthy corporation. What you would see with a small business is you would see investment in customers, investment in bringing something to a community or to a user base or to a group of people that actually valued the business itself. Take you along on my journey to now I realize that there’s a lot of benefits to helping these small businesses.
We set the mission at the small business lender I was at to focusing on America Small Businesses Financial Health. We know they need that help. As a lender, we had the opportunity to go and put money in the hands of small businesses that were investing in themselves, trying to grow, trying to solve problems.
We were really doing well, very excited about delivering on this mission all the way up until 2020, where we had put hundreds of millions of dollars in the hands of these small businesses in the form of loans. Here comes COVID shutting everybody down. Not only did it crush our business, it crushed the business of many of our customers.
That’s when I then got an opportunity to advocate for the first time. I got to go talk to members of Congress and, I guess, the lobbying groups around them to hear what they had to say about the PPP program that they were designing and share my own feedback with what I thought would make sense. That’s probably both one of the more exciting things I got to do with my career and also one of the most ineffective conversations I’d ever had. Not to pick on Congress here for being ineffective. Very controversial position. I know.
I go there and I say, “Look, this design makes sense. You want it to go fast. You want to get people like my business to have some marginal but not massively profitable motivation to go help.” Our whole job is to get money in the hands of all these businesses that need help. They built these cutoffs and this fantastic graduating scale. If it’s a very small business, you’ll earn 5% of commission on the loan amount. That’s enough to cover your expenses and processing all the details. You’re not going to make a big profit. We don’t want you to be making [unintelligible 00:06:54] We just want you to do it.
I buy that. We’re in. We want to help these small businesses. That scale is going to get smaller. If it’s more than $100,000, it’s only going to be about 3.5%. Then, f it’s even bigger than that, it’s only going to be 2%. All the way up to $10 million of lending, it’s only going to be 2%. Anybody who can do math would realize that, “Wait a minute. If I’m making $10 million loans to companies that may or may not even need them, I’m going to get 2% of every one of those $10 million.”
There’s more than enough companies out there who may or may not need them. How many healthcare providers and how many of these companies that didn’t even have to shut down anything? How many companies got these $10 million PPP loans? Then the banks were going to make a ton of money on doing these $10 million at no-risk, super easy loans, and then the government was going to run out of money before you got to anybody smaller than $10 million.
That was what I pointed out. It’s obvious in the math. You look at how easy it is, and then you’ve got to say, “What’s the motivation of every bank? Let’s get the $10 million ones first, and then we’ll work on the small ones.” You can’t blame them for being capitalists. That’s what they’re going to do. I could have had a nod or two, and people believed in it. They’re like, “Yes, that’s right, that’s right,” and then what came out? No meaningful changes there. Boom. What happened? All the money ran out, and in within months, all the money went to really, really big companies.
In time, probably take almost a year, they figured out how to fix it. They they they let in different types of lenders to come another round where a lot more small businesses got the
money. That’s where I realized more people have to be actually speaking up on behalf of these small businesses because I was in there. I’m sure they went and talked to the CEOs of the big banks, and the big banks were like, “No. This is a great process. We can get this out fast. We can do this. Just hit go. Just hit go.” Hitting go made sense, but it really made big dollars for those big banks and it didn’t do anything for the little guys.
You ask what’s my journey on advocacy, that tipped me off to say, “Hey, look, we got to do something different.” It’s when I started collecting a lot more stories about these small businesses that succeeded and didn’t from COVID.
[00:09:05] Tom: Any small business that tunes in or hears this will resonate whether it’s with that specific situation or something similar. I often think of the small business owner. Myself lumped into that category today, that oftentimes you’re just in the grind of the day-to-day of fulfilling the needs of your customers, just fulfilling the orders that have been placed and just trying to keep things going, and most owners trying to make sure they can hit payroll and whatever is on their docket.
[00:09:36] Sri: They want to they want to deliver something special to their community, to their customers. Everything else is something that gets in the way, [chuckles] and you got to solve for it. You can’t pretend it’s not there. That’s what I love about the stories that I collected and the people I talked to, the ones that survived, the big challenges.
COVID is not even the biggest of the challenges that many of these small businesses face. In fact, when I talk to any small business owner, there’s a certain amount of what you can see in just eye contact that they’ve been through worse. They’ve been through waking up not knowing if business is going to make to the end of the day. They’ve been through, “Is the bank coming to collect or am I not going to be able to make payroll?” It hasn’t happened just once either.
Going through that trauma and having that spirit to say, “I’m going to power through this because I believe in what I’m doing,” is what defines some of these most resilient small business owners. They care. It’s where I go back to in the big corporate world. You got to get everybody agreed on the profit thing, and you’re going to go after the thing that’s the most profitable, or the thing that’s going to give you the best net income or the growth, whatever your metrics are.
For the small business owner, it’s sometimes survival isn’t about saying, “Hey, I just need to go and make an extra 50,000 or add 20% more customers this year.” It’s about making sure people know that I’m there to offer them what they need and that I care about their survival just as much as I do about my own business.
What was amazing in my research for the book and talking to a lot of these businesses that that made it through COVID was that in that time period, their customers are the ones that said, either openly or subconsciously, “This is a business that I want to have in my life. This is a business that I need to patronize even more so today because of the challenges than I have before.” We were all there picking our favorite restaurants that we dine in at and saying, “You know what? Let’s just order takeout from this guy. I’m worried about them. Let’s order takeout twice this week, twice in a month, more.”
Just how do we do it? You’d hear from bookstores, “Oh, our customers did GoFundMe campaigns,” because they knew that we couldn’t survive COVID without the GoFundMe campaign.” People are just straight up writing checks to keep the businesses alive that they cared about.
I don’t know how many people you know that started doing video training with their personal trainers instead of going to a gym. That’s just not [unintelligible 00:11:57] but they knew that. They’re like, “You know what? Those personal trainers are important to me. They’ve helped me stay in shape. We’re going to keep this relationship going, even though I’m doing it through a tablet or a phone or a PC. I’m still going to commit to this business owner.”
That behavior doesn’t happen for Gold’s Gym. That behavior doesn’t happen to save a McDonald’s or a Barnes & Noble. It’s only because of the relationships and the care for the product and care for the experience that these small businesses put in.
[00:12:30] Tom: I think that’s great in terms of sharing that and talking through it. You mentioned McDonald’s. We’re in the franchising business, so franchising is top of mind. You can definitely, even in the franchise world, see the difference between the brands where there are active owner operators in that local franchise system that’s connected to the community versus those that are either company-owned units or are owned by large multiunit groups where that local owner feel just it’s not there.
[00:13:01] Sri: That’s right. One of the things that’s super critical about surviving as a small business is being differentiated. In my book, I call it positioning. I use the word positioning specifically because many small businesses have a retail location or have a physical nexus somewhere. That position where you are, if you’re a franchise owner, you have a particular location. That is an important piece of the definition of what makes you different. Lean into it. Recognize that the kind of people who come to you are the people from your community, the people who are your neighbors.
What do you do that’s different? Doesn’t have to be, “Hey, I’ve got a different sign out or a different flavor of burger or different choices on my menu.” It has to do with how you fit in and how are you important to the community. That can be different for any small business. You may have a virtual community where you’re mostly online, but leaning into who you are and leaning into what you’re positioning in is that way to keep loyalty, it’s the way to keep your customers satisfied, and seeing you as something important in the office.
[00:14:08] Tom: I love that you’ve been able to gather some of this and put it in one place and see that through. Maybe share one of those stories.
[00:14:16] Sri: I’ll pick one that I like about being unique and leaning into who they are. Some of my examples as part of the book were independent bookstores. They’re pretty classic for people thinking they shouldn’t even exist at this point. People are like, “You got Amazon, you got Burns & Noble, you got eBooks. What’s the point of the bookstore if you can get any book you want to within a day or hours, even, by just going to order on Amazon?”
I talked to the owner of this book, Jonathan, of Talking Leaves. It’s a bookstore in Buffalo. The reason I reached out is his bookstore doesn’t offer normal books. It’s a collection of the books that just don’t fit in. Very, very idiosyncratic. He’s out there trying to curate a set of books that you can’t easily find or you wouldn’t come across when you go to Amazon’s top seller list or you look at the displays on Barnes & Noble.
If you are some corporate consultant, that’s not a way to run a business. Go pick all the books that are unpopular and put them all in the same place? What’s that going to do for you? He’s been around for decades. Why? He’s created a spirit and a personality for his store that people are like, “Look, I want to go find something out of the mainstream. I want to go read something that’s not what other people are reading and learn something new and different. You create this ethos. Of course, people love you.
You’re you’re still going to have some challenges all the time. Business is going to go up and down, you’re going to have financial cycles, you’re going to have COVID hit you or something crazy like that, or just the street in front of you goes under construction, you lose all your foot traffic for two months. Whatever it is, you’re going to have this adversity. When there are people that you’ve affected in a way that they believe you should be around, they believe you add something, they may not even have to be repeat customers, they’ll refer people to you because the impact that you had on their lives.
That’s the spirit that when you have a business that can survive these things. The spirit is I’ve got something unique and I’ve got something that I think is important. If you find enough customers who agree with that or believe in that, they’ll sustain you.
[00:16:30] Tom: That’s a great story. I love how you share that. I’m sure others, when they hear this, will probably think in their own mind maybe their business is that business, something like that in their community, or, “Oh, I know a business that’s like that or has a similar type of,” I like how you describe that ethos there.
[00:16:46] Sri: I think every small business owner should ask themselves, “What makes me unique.” I don’t want to give you this really challenging, “Oh my gosh, I have to have this particular flavor or anything.” It could be as simple as where you’re located and who your customers are.” It’s really important to feel confident in knowing what your sweet spot is because every day, every decision that you make, you’ve got to go deal with making somebody happy and somebody unhappy. You’ve got to go deal with investing in one decision versus another decision.
If what you do is you know that, “Hey, look, the kinds of customers I serve are the ones that are in my neighborhood,” put your bets there. Instead of betting on this expansion further out or trying to get something new and that’s unfamiliar with the core base of people that you bring in, go work on delighting the ones that you’ve got, or go work on delighting ones that are a lot like the ones that you got, but don’t know you yet.
That’s not just a good way to have near-term impact, but it’s also a good way to deepen those relationships and have more confidence in who you are. A lot of that comes from your own personality. You may not have embraced it yet, but a lot of that comes from your own personality as an owner.
[00:17:58] Tom: I appreciate you talking about this unique piece, this positioning that you’re talking about, or these differentiators. I like the word positioning that you use to help describe it. Sometimes I think in the small business community, we hear the buzzwords of differentiation and uniqueness and unique identifiers and all these buzzwords that come along.
That idea of positions, how are you positioned in your community, literally within your community or amongst your peers that are closest to you, that your customers may also be customers of that are shopping or going to and from? How are you positioned to just showcase what your strongest assets are or your differences?
[00:18:43] Sri: I’d give you a simple example that illustrates how easy it is to think about your positioning. I don’t know if you go to sporting events. I love college football.
I go to a basketball game every once in a while. If you go to a football game and you park in the lot that’s assigned, in LA, that’s probably $40 or $50m and it’s ridiculous. You just park right by the stadium.
When you go to a basketball game, $50 to go park in, it used to be called Staple Center, or what they call it now, Crypto.com Arena. $50 to park in there. If you pack in a structure across the street, it’s only $35. If you park in some of the lots before you get to the structure that’s across the street, it’s $20 at one, $15 one. If you want to just park right under the expressway, it’s dingy, gross, but you may be able to park for $5. All right. Everyone knows that.
You just think about now each individual lot is a business, it’s a privately-owned business, and they are looking at their price and their physical position. They know their value. My value, if I’m the $15 guy versus the $35 guy who’s across the street, my value, I’ve got to be a lot cheaper because I don’t have the covered parking, I don’t have the lighting, I don’t have the safety and security that a garage offers. If I’m the garage versus the stadium, the stadium is closeness, don’t have to go outside, all that stuff. They each have some incremental value based on the position that they sit in.
Now, any small business, you got to think about your differentiation, you got to think about your value that you offer customers. In physical position, maybe a big piece, it may not be, but how are you relative to their other options? Who are you relative to their other options? Sometimes when people talk about pricing, my first question is, “Tell me what league you play in.”
You’re a lawyer and you got an hourly rate, great, but who are the other kinds of lawyers? Then you realize, “Wait a minute. I’m better than all these guys in my league.” Then why’d you put yourself in that league? [chuckles] Get out of that league. Price like you’re in the other league. Whatever it might be, you want to act like you’re in the league that you really are in, and you want to have value prop that’s tied to who you position yourself close to.
[00:21:09] Tom: That is a golden nugget here to have shared and talked through. I think that’s a great analogy and example that you shared there. One thing I’d love to ask here, how can someone find out more about what you’re doing, get in touch with you, connect with any of your resources here?
[00:21:25] Sri: My website is sri-kaza.com, S-R-I dash K-A-Z-A .com. You can find me just looking for my book. My book is called Unconvention: A Small Business Strategy Guide. You can get a hold of me that way. There’s a bunch of interesting material on the site and blog that you could download or read through. I’d recommend just checking out and downloading what I call the Underdog Principles, which includes positioning as well as proximity and purpose. Got a neat primer on that.
Like I said, it doesn’t take a lot of time to sit there and be a little bit more retrospective and say, “Hey, who am I? What am I trying to contribute?” That primer is great to just get your mind going on what could I do differently as a business to make it more fulfilling and deliver the value that I think I’m capable of.”
[00:22:10] Tom: I love the title, the Underdog Formula. It sounds great. The three were again?
[00:22:15] Sri: Positioning, proximity, which is really taking advantage of the fact that you’re really close to your customers, you know what they care about, what they want, and then purpose. This is where you say, “Look, I’m in it because I wanted to have a great lifestyle,” or, “I’m in it because I want to be my own boss,” or, “I’m in it because I wanted to bring a particular cuisine to the world.”
Whatever they might be, first of all, recognize what it is for you, embrace it, and then use it in your decisioning because if you’re sitting there saying, “I wanted to do this because I wanted to be my own boss and have a good lifestyle,” but then you’re out there chasing every last deal, trying to get everything done, you’re going to be miserable. Do it for what you were doing it for, or reset your expectations.
Bringing all three of those together means then you can deliver your uniqueness with the purpose that you signed up for, and represent the customers that you care about. Those three principles are behind how a lot of small businesses can still survive and execute against their bigger competitors. The bigger competitors don’t do those things. They don’t need to because they’ve got scale, they’ve got profits they’re focused on.
When it comes to executing simple business strategies, your pricing strategy, your operational strategy, your go-to-market strategy, all the things that these big guys do, it turns out small small businesses have to follow the same structures, but they have these advantages they can use in that strategic thinking.
[00:23:37] Tom: Sri, this is a great time in the show we make a transition and we ask every guest the same four questions before they go. The first question we ask is have you had a miss or two on your journey and something you learned from it?
[00:23:48] Sri: Yes, I had a big miss, I think, when I tried to build a startup where it was going to help small businesses with hiring. It’s pretty exciting for me. We built out a cool analytical platform back before, maybe even when AI was popular, but not popular enough, using AI to figure out if a candidate would actually stick around with a company before you hired him. I’ve got all your data on your payroll.
I’ve got all your data on your hiring. Every new guy who comes in, I have enough data to go and predict is this guy going to stick around six months like most guys, or is he going to be out in two months, or is he going to stick around for a year or whatever? We got a couple of those sold and kicked off. The challenge was it took us way too long to sell a very low-cost product, and we just couldn’t make money if we had to pay our salespeople, which is rough. It worked well when I was the only sales guy and I wasn’t getting paid for
it, [chuckles] but when you want to hire salespeople, you got to pay them.
We pivoted away to just building the features that they needed to get the information, which was neat and it was great. We built some features in with our applicant tracking system partners. The applicant tracking system is that somebody is doing hiring, they send them to collect a resume and collect information.
The extra information we built were things like getting reference checks. Awesome. We built this reference check tool, we dropped it into a bunch of ATSs, and we’re off to the races until they realized, “Hey, we could build it ourselves and sell it ourselves.” [chuckles] That was the big miss, is we found a really cool pivot. We thought we were going to do well, and then our partners, who we thought were our partners, were actually just companies that wanted to make a profit, so we got cut out.
Took them a couple of years to catch up and figure out that they can do it themselves. I didn’t have the foresight to realize my competitors wanted to eat my lunch. In retrospect, it’s pretty easy, but again, during the whole thing, you’re like, “Wait, what’s going on? Why do we lose those guys? Oh, they’ve got that feature for themselves. Oh, that’s not good.”
[00:25:45] Tom: The next question we like to talk about is the opposite end of that, a make or a highlight or two you’d like to share.
[00:25:51] Sri: Sure. Let’s go back to that business I was talking about where we hit COVID and I didn’t get Congress to go and listen to me. I know most people that you know, they ask Congress or something, they just get it, but I didn’t get what I was hoping for. We didn’t get help to the small businesses that we thought we could. We did everything we could on our end, and then six, eight months later, we were able to get back and start to bring them on board with the second round of the PPP.
My business was crushed. I became the CEO, and I was asked to scale it back up to something that we could sell on behalf of the owner to someone else, which is a daunting task for me. What was also daunting was looking at the customer base, saying, “How do we keep them alive so that we have customers in the future?”
The big win was I had a board and I had investors in my company who were fully supportive of just doing the right thing. Instead of saying, “Hey, let’s go save the company. Let’s go and pull every dollar we can in and keep ourselves alive a little bit longer, they were supportive of saying, “Hey, if you think the right way to do this is lay off the billing, bring the debt collection down, go and ask your borrowers to pay just a minimum amount to stay alive, that’s bad for the corporation. It’s great for its customers.
Can we figure out how to do this in the short term so that they can bounce back? Their life cycle is much shorter than ours. We can keep them alive for a little bit longer. Down the road, if we can stay alive ourselves, it’ll pay off.” I was really impressed with the leaders on my board who were able to say, “Yes, we get it. There’s some paint. You guys are going to go into default sooner on some of your credit facilities because of this, and you’re going to have to wind a lot of things down because of this, but the sacrifice, even if it doesn’t fully pay off, it at least aligns with your mission.” We made that sacrifice.
For me, the big win was not just that, “Hey, it actually worked and we bounced back and we were able to have customers that actually trusted us again,” but also that instead of having half of these guys go out of business, we saved a good 40%, 50% of them by working with them in the right way. To me, that was probably a huge win.
[00:28:09] Sri: Thank you for sharing. The next question we ask is have you used a multiplier to multiply yourself personally, professionally, or organizations you’ve run?
[00:28:17] Tom: Yes, I’ve scaled up a couple of different organizations. We talk about those. My current multiplier is this book that I’ve written. I would love to go and inspire and consult with and support as many entrepreneurs as possible. Don’t have nearly as much time as I have that desire to go and get people up and going and either take the leap or
commit to the differentiation that keeps them resilient and fulfilled with their businesses. I’m hoping getting the book out there is a way that I can have that impact and kindle or rekindle entrepreneurship in a lot of people
[00:28:55] Tom: The final question we ask every guest is what does success mean to you?
[00:29:01] Sri: What my mission is today is this advocacy. If I were to say what is success, what I would love to see is a stronger culture behind small business and entrepreneurship. I would love to see more celebration of the smaller, not unicorn/AI Silicon Valley entrepreneur, but more of the entrepreneur who left their day job to go and run a boutique services firm or to build a small contracting firm or somebody who just built some sort of a business from who they are.
I would love to see more of that because I really do think not only is that possible, I think that’s the trend for where our economy needs to go. We’ve got all these big scale companies and they’re doing what they do. Most of us in this country don’t have a place in those giant scale companies, and so what should our place be?
Do we want to be like an office worker that’s getting eliminated by AI right now, or do we want to be people who go and live out the things that we’ve learned and become passionate about and find a way to support a bunch of other people enough to go make a living and take care of your family? Success for me is that.
[00:30:14] Tom: Fantastic. As we bring this to a close, Sri, is there anything you’re hoping to share or get across that you haven’t had a chance to yet?
[00:30:21] Sri: Look, you give me a wonderful opportunity to talk about my book and what I’m passionate about. I think the one thing I just say to folks is if you are in a business or you have a business, you’ve been running it, it’s really valuable to take a step back and think strategically a bit.
I know your time is completely absorbed by running the business, but taking the time to say, “Hey, what do I really want to get out of this, and how do I want to be more me? How do I make this business more suited to who I want to be and what kind of person I am?” That can be a very productive exercise. It could be something that increases your fulfillment and also increases your growth and productivity.
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[00:31:01] Tom: Sri, thank you so much for a fantastic interview. Let’s go ahead and jump into today’s three key takeaways. Takeaway number 1 is when he talked about the difference from working with large companies and small businesses. He talked about when he was in large corporate consulting, he found it was easy to get people aligned on corporate revenue growth and corporate profitability.He found in small businesses, when he would lend to small businesses, what he found is that small business owners really invest in their community, in their staff, and in their area, much differently from what lending to large companies would look like.
Takeaway number 2 is to realize that as a small business, recognize that your difference might very well be just that you are part of the community with your customers. Sometimes that is the difference. Recognize that it doesn’t have to be some bullet list thing or sound great like you might see in some business class somewhere. Sometimes it’s just that you are part of the community.
Takeaway number 3 is the underdog formula or underdog principles that are on his website. It’s positioning, proximity, and purpose. Those are the three components, the underdog formula. Positioning; how are you positioning amongst your peers and competitors? Proximity; recognize that you are close to your customers, as we had talked to before. I really like that. Number three is purpose. Your purpose doesn’t have to just be how much money can I make, it can also be just finding purpose and having time to spend with your family or just even serving your community.Now it’s time for today’s win-win.
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[00:32:54] Tom: Today’s win-win comes through thinking about what makes your business unique. I thought that this was a really interesting conversation with Sri, where he talked about positioning. He said it could just be something as simple as your location. It could be the customers you serve, your personal interaction with those customers. That’s okay. I was even thinking, during the interview, that maybe it could be the happiness or the satisfaction customers feel when they buy something from you because they know that you are the proprietor or the owner or the leader or you’re ingrained in the community.
Hence, part of the reason why I love franchising, because you get the positive or the plus of having a brand that’s connected with others, even in a small franchise system, but you still have that local ownership. It just even reminds me, I saw, the other day, driving in my hometown McDonald’s had a new sign out front that said, “Locally owned and operated.” I thought it still matters, it still makes a difference because now as a customer, I know that that owner is likely living in my community. There’s a community connection.
That’s the episode today, folks. Please make sure you subscribe to the podcast and give us a review. Remember, if you or anyone you know might be ready to franchise their business or take their franchise company to the next level, please connect with us at bigskyfranchiseteam.com to schedule your free, no obligation consultation. Thanks for tuning in, and we look forward to having you back next week.
