520 Sri Kaza

[00:00:00] What if the very rules you've been taught about business are the reasons you feel stuck? Sri Kaza has built a career challenging convention, not from the sidelines, but from inside the arena. As a strategist, entrepreneur, and author of the Unconvention: Small Business Strategy Guide.

Sri questions the default playbook that so many founders follow without ever stopping to ask if it actually fits them. His work centers on a powerful idea. Small businesses do not win by copying large ones. They win by thinking differently, positioning boldly, and designing strategy around who they truly are rather than who the market expects them to be. Re's perspective is shaped by years of navigating the tension between growth and alignment, ambition and clarity. His writing has resonated founders who are tired of recycled advice and hungry for thinking that feels honest, practical, and quietly disruptive.

He speaks with the calm confidence of someone who's wrestled with doubt, [00:01:00] rebuilt from friction, and emerged with sharper insight. If you care about building a business that's both profitable and principled, Sri Kaza brings a perspective that feels rare and deeply needed.

Jeffrey Feldberg: And before we hop into the podcast, a quick word from our sponsor, Deep Wealth and the Deep Wealth Mastery Program. We have William, a graduate of Deep Both Mastery, and he says, I didn't have the time for Deep Both Mastery, but I made the time and I'm glad I did.

What I learned goes far beyond any other executive program or coach I've ever experienced. Or how about Bruce? Bruce says, before Deep Wealth Mastery, the challenge I had with most business programs, coaches, or blogs was that they were one dimensional. Through Deep Wealth Mastery, I'm part of a richer community of other successful business owners.

The idea shared forever changed the trajectory of the business and best of all, the experience was fun. And we'll round things out with Stacey. 

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Deep Wealth Nation. Welcome to another episode of the Deep Podcast. Well, Deep Wealth Nation, you know me, I love my rhetorical questions. Let me ask you this. Would you love to show up to a business that is not only thriving, but you feel comfortable in? Do you wanna take your business to the next level? If you're planning to get some investment, if you're looking to have an exit at one point, would you love to know what the other side may be looking at or not looking at what you should and shouldn't do?

We have an incredible guest in the House of Deep Wealth. He is not only one smart fellow, he's an author, a thought leader. He's been in the business world doing all kinds of incredible things. Sweet. Welcome to the Deep Wealth Podcast. An absolute pleasure to have you with us. There's always a story behind the story.

What's your story? 

Sri Kaza: Thanks for having me on, Jeffrey. story behind the story for me. A lot of people know me as a former McKinsey partner or as a CEO of a couple of different businesses having exited. And today kinda a growth and go to market expert. But [00:04:00] the story behind the story and why why I wanted to talk to you today comes from a really.

Odd failure I had around the COVID time. So during COVID my business was lending money to small businesses like restaurants and retailers. Exactly the ones that got shut down during the lockdowns. And, uh, while our business was flying high and doing really well, once that hit us, we were in trouble.

And they were in trouble. And and we had the good fortune of having a well connected ownership group. We even had the opportunity, I had the opportunity to get on a call with members of Congress to talk about what our small businesses needed to survive this potential. At the time, it was this potential lockdown. And they were already working on thinking about this paycheck protection program. If you're familiar with, this is a program during COVID where lots of money was lent out to small businesses as forgivable loans. So they keep paying their employees. So we like the program, but the feedback I [00:05:00] gave.

Was, Hey guys, you've got this pretty complicated set of rules to protect and size up the revenue and the documentation that's really hard for these small businesses to put together. Now, big businesses can click a couple buttons and have all that stuff printed out, but the small ones don't have this. And then you've also set this up where it's great. I'm a lender and I really like that you're gonna give me a small amount. And it should be a very small amount of money to help these small businesses, get access to the capital, right? 'cause I gotta pay my employees to prepare the paperwork and all that stuff.

I like that. But you've made it too lopsided because you're giving. 2% to loans that, that could be $10 million. And you're giving 5%, which is better to loans that could be $50,000, but who's gonna want to go help? The guy who needs 50,000 when all they get is 5% of that, when all they have to do is ask the guy on the other end of the phone who's running the a hundred million dollar business, you want 10 million?

Click two buttons, send it to me [00:06:00] and I'll send it in and I'll get my 2% of 10 million. Very receptive, very good discussion. Lots of people recognized that was the problem and then all of it felt like it was totally ignored when they rolled out the program. 'cause the program ran outta money within days and it ran out because it gave all these $10 million loans to many businesses that most people say probably didn't need the money. And that was really painful because like I had the opportunity and I just didn't have the influence to like explain to them like why it mattered. To set things up, set up the rules differently for the small guy. Over time a lot of that feedback did filter into the next round. The next round did make things a lot easier for fintechs like myself to go and help these small businesses.

We did help a lot of people, but it was like, a little bit late for a lot of the companies. A lot of the business owners had to shut things down. My business actually survived because we were able to get a lot of money back into the hands of the, businesses that we had lent to. We'd help them get back on their feet and they were pretty loyal customers and came [00:07:00] back to us a few more times so we could scale the business back up and get out.

But even in selling the business and getting to the exit that I had been looking for and getting excited about that, it was still hung on me that. We couldn't actually get the money to the small businesses when they needed it, even though that was our, number one mission as a company, which couldn't pull it off.

So that's what led me to, one after the sale led me to write this book and get, pretty excited about talking about the things I learned from small businesses, but also say, Hey, look I still play in the, corporates and the scale up world where I'm kinda scaling up big businesses, but. I wanna make sure that I give something and share something. What I learned in the experience of working with all these small businesses back to the small business community.

Jeffrey Feldberg: Wow. So much to unpack there. Firstly, thank you so much for what you've been doing and getting the word out there. Especially for the, when we say small business, it means all kinds of things to different people. We're really talking, literally small business, but the heart of our economy, it all starts somewhere.

I remember [00:08:00] when I first got going, it was a rounding error. Really wasn't even a business. It was a super small business. Nevermind small business, and by the way, default nation, as we're talking about this, please go to the show notes. All kinds of resources there. One of them is Re's Book Unconvention, a small business strategy guide, and I wanted to share with you, I wasn't even the first chapter into the book, and I love the title even before I was cracking it open and going through the book.

I loved what you said. Chapter one is not business. It's personal, and I've always said on the podcast anyone who says that business isn't personal is either never been in business or never run a business, has no idea what's going on. So I'll just share for deep both Nation, who hasn't yet listened to or read your book and Deep Both Nation, please pick up the book or pick up the audio book and listen to it.

Talk to us about it's not business, it's personal. I love that.

Sri Kaza: so for me when I was, I was a McKinsey consultant and I was doing big business consulting for a very long time, my career. Everything was business in my mind, right? Just structure, profit, [00:09:00] growth, whatever it was the metric. And in these big companies, when you focus on numbers that everybody can look at and agree with or, the shareholders want this, so you just do it.

It's actually easier to collaborate in some of these big meetings and getting things done in, in big companies, but. What I didn't recognize until I really started working closely with small businesses. the first company I led that dealt with small business was company called Tax Credit Co.

But I started working with people who seemed to put profit almost as a secondary thing or a, growth as a, an outcome of pursuing something else. that's not smart. this is a for-profit business. You gotta drive profit, you gotta focus on this.

And it didn't really click for me as to like, how could they survive? What's the deal? Like, why don't they just follow, you could get a book, there's a hundred books on how do you run a good business and how do you go and manage appropriately. But then, when we went through this COVID timeframe where so many small businesses collapsed.

I was really surprised when I started digging into, I was at FinTech, so I [00:10:00] started digging into the data on who survived and who didn't. And my hypothesis simply was if you had good business practices, you managed your cash flow priced, you know very high and you pursued growth, you should be okay.

And I saw like the exact opposite in our data. And there was these businesses that could see, the business cases, we saw how they were in their business. They would esue growth. They wouldn't price to a maximum profit. They were take making these choices that didn't make logical sense to me as to a business that's gonna survive.

So I had to go dig into some of the stories. And the stories are where it really stood out that this was much more personal. What you would find is. I'll give you the simple answer first. 'cause I know I'm going along with my story. What I found was the businesses that survived had customers that rallied to their cause.

We all did this. We all did this during COVID. Not all of us, but almost all of us did this. We started ordering takeout from a place that we would've never gotten takeout from [00:11:00] because we cared about the restaurant. We cared about them staying in business. We wanted to support them, and we wanted their great food. Some people went and they prepaid for. Hair care, right? They're like the salon's closed, but let me go buy my a hundred dollars, whatever blowout, and then I'll have a coupon for it when the time comes. There's people who went and who did video workouts. They had a personal trainer who they couldn't see in person, so they did this over zoom.

You all know how ridiculous that is. But they still did it because they went out of their way to support the small business. That was an important business in their life. So that's the punchline as to what kept a lot of these small businesses alive, what you to hear their stories. And to talk to individuals about their choices and why they ran the business they did.

It's because they put whatever it was that was their passion or whatever it was, was the purpose of their business. They put that first and they were putting that first before COVID. They're putting that first, after COVID, and [00:12:00] because of that, the customers that they served and the community that they were in rallied to keep them around.

In that first chapter, it's not business and personal. I think I focus in on three different bookstores. All of which have this personal spin to their existence. They're not there because of people who are sitting there saying, Hey, I want to go and get into a business that's gonna get crushed by Barnes and Noble, and then get crushed by Amazon and then get crushed by eBooks and audiobooks.

I didn't say, Hey, this is what I wanna do. Right? But somehow they brought their personality to bear. They brought the things that they love in the world to other people that love them, and they're still around and they're thriving. So it's not business as personal as that. If you wanna survive as a small business, you wanna survive as a business leader.

It's gotta be personal. You've gotta care. It's gotta be a part of you because you're gonna have to weather through some tough things. And whatever that part of you is that shines is what keeps your customers to rally around you when you do need them.

Jeffrey Feldberg: As you're speaking about that, [00:13:00] if we look around us today, it seems as though it's harder than ever. For starting a business and having a successful business with the internet, it's now more global than it was before, even when you and I started, which is not that long ago when we were running our own companies.

I compare that today, would I have succeeded in today's environment? I would hope. I would hope so, but I certainly know it'd be certainly a lot harder than it was back in the day because everyone is your competition. It's no longer just in your backyard or the next country over. It's the entire globe.

Throw in social media and you have all these big companies, these. Big ad budgets and they're going out there and they have this presence and now artificial intelligence. So as I'm setting up this question for you, in terms of the current business environment, back in the day when you're at McKinsey and you're gallivanting, probably globe trotting, all these different businesses, you're getting behind the scenes, maybe some really big ones, some that aren't so big.

But you're in the top of the top. It doesn't really get [00:14:00] much better or more elite than McKinsey and Company. What were you seeing in terms of patterns and trends that are as true today as it would've been back in the day when you're still part of McKinsey?

Sri Kaza: Oh, the pursuit of scale is, Kind of the number one goal for most of the businesses that we read about in the press we hear about that we buy our, day-to-day goods from. That's still obviously the case and scale makes so much of a difference in so many ways from being able to get your brand out there to having cheap product, having cheap supply, all that stuff.

But. It'll turn on you when you have mono, when you have monopolistic behavior. And I could have a whole segue into terrible behavior of businesses. I'll pick on Google for a minute. Google's a a fantastic company's done, great innovations for us and brought so many things into our lives.

But at the same time, they've gotten to such a scale and so dependent on their search engine revenue that what they do today. Is not helpful to either the [00:15:00] consumer who's out there searching, nor the businesses who want to be found. What they're doing it's extortion. They're extorting businesses to just pay money so that their name shows up at the top of the results for someone searching for them and this type of business practice. Only exists when you're beyond scale, right? So this pursuit of scale is, it, you know, today is, still as strong as it was many years ago, but there are some scary breakpoints where we just don't see checks on the monopolistic effects of some of these super scaled businesses.

But what I learned after chasing scale and I continued, that's my career, is helping companies to scale up their businesses in pursuing scale. You have to go find larger and larger pools of consumers. You have to have more, it doesn't have to be homogenous product, but more standardized ways to get to them.

And this is fine if you, if the main benefit you're gonna have is scale and [00:16:00] cost-effectiveness and bringing something kind of vanilla, and I'll use that term specifically, vanilla to the market. You can get to scale on this vanilla offering, but. what if people don't want vanilla?

I think actually the technology, social media and access allows you to run a business that's even smaller scale cost effectively. And it's possible to find the customers. The unique set of people that would really find joy in what you create and what you produce. It's even easier now given what social media has done for us.

what that means is you do have to say, I'm unique. You have to believe in that uniqueness. You have to really love and embody it, and then your customers have to see that and value that uniqueness too. And it's okay if there's only, let's say a thousand people, 10,000 people you know who were excited about this, Kevin Kelly, who said, you only need a thousand true fans.

You only need a subset of people who are really enthusiastic of what you do, but that means you've [00:17:00] gotta bring that enthusiasm, that you've gotta bring your personality and your character, and you have to be comfortable being unique. In fact, you have to avoid you chasing mainstream.

Jeffrey Feldberg: Yeah, you're exactly right. Actually, I agree with everything that you're saying. And on the one hand, sure, with the internet now and the. Long tail, you can say, and you're right, it's easier to start a business today because you have a long tail that you don't have to be everything to everybody and you can focus in and just show your passion and get out there, and you can be under budget held to the competition.

But that passion, that focus, that drive, differentiates you from the competition. The flip side of that though is. That's not what conventional wisdom is talking to most entrepreneurs today, and it's be bigger, be better, and do the exact opposite of that. So you're another me too, if I can use the analogy.

You're in that red ocean instead of being in that blue ocean. And that's really the challenge for so many entrepreneurs today. They have these grandiose schemes, but they're likely not gonna succeed because the [00:18:00] game is set up against 'em before they've even begun. Thoughts about that?

Sri Kaza: think it's, that's totally right. In fact, if you getting into the game thinking that you're gonna scale and that the way you're gonna make money is having lots and lots of people you're a decade late, maybe two decades late. In terms of trying to make that happen. Years ago you could have an idea that hadn't been done, or maybe only two others had done it, make some progress on it and find somebody who had money to help you actually climb the mountain.

But now the amount of money it takes to climb a mountain is unbelievable if you just, look around and see how much money these AI businesses are raising and are worth, and how much they're spending just to get there, right? They aren't there yet. Or another good case is take Uber and Lyft, like they were great, they were doing good things, but they were giving away the rides for free, basically, so they could acquire customers for years.

And there were so many other competitors who, tried to get in and fail or got bought up as these two were really kind of growing and scaling. And something happened in the last five years with oh, look around. There's no competition left. We can now [00:19:00] charge the real price and take a whole bunch of money.

And they're around. And if you weren't one of those two. You get crushed. So like today, trying to get in with some novel idea, you need to really hammer it out and prove it. And if it's not, if it's a global idea, but that everybody can use, you need billions. To get to scale. If it's a niche idea, you maybe need nothing to get to scale, and you maybe want something less narrow than a very niche idea.

But, you definitely the deck is stacked against you if you believe you're going worldwide.

Jeffrey Feldberg: And Deep Nation. I really hope you were listening because what SRI was sharing, it's not gold is platinum because you're right to go global. And how many entrepreneurs or founders we speak to? Oh yeah. Rei Jeffrey, I'm gonna be starting here, but yeah, I'm. Going global, I'm gonna create this market disruption.

I'm gonna be bigger than Google, or pick your name, not understanding how much money it takes and what they're gonna be up against. And I know what I love in Unconvention, you're all about the underdog. And as entrepreneurs, we usually are the [00:20:00] underdog. And you have your three Ps, the positioning, the proximity, and the purpose to help get us there.

And the other thing to add to that, would love your thoughts with ai, artificial intelligence. The dream of a one, two, or three business or three person company, it's just a few employees that can now scale and we're not talking, thousands or tens of thousands necessarily team members, but they can now scale to perhaps what would've taken 20, 30, maybe 40.

It's now possible. And so you actually could, with ai. Have like me or you back in the day? I know when I first began sharing offline, I was in the parents attic. There's an entrepreneur in the attic who has a relatively decent sized business, revenue wise, with maybe one or two team members because AI behind the scenes is doing everything.

So I'd love your thoughts on that, and then I'd love to get your thoughts on what you're seeing as you're advising some of the PE companies out there. But firstly, thoughts about that of AI and what we can now do that we couldn't before.

Sri Kaza: Yeah, [00:21:00] AI especially is. Giving a lot of entrepreneurs and a lot of smaller businesses shortcuts that they didn't have. you know, one of my favorite examples is work that I did when I was at McKinsey A lot of times it was, how do you get your call center to be more efficient? How do you get the people who are taking orders or doing customer service to do it better and cheaper and make customers happier?

Right? And we had all these different waves. We had a wave of. Offshoring and outsourcing. We had waves of they call it robotic process automation, self-serve, and IVR, all this technology come in and these big companies would keep buying the new technology, getting more efficient, spending less on customer service, maybe getting better outcomes. In the small business world, how many small business have a call center? Why would you ever think of having a call center? Well, No. I mean, Come on. I only have six employees. I can't hire like somebody to answer phones all day. Today you can have a call center. You just haven't thought about what you would do with that call center and why people would call it.

But you think about that now is I have access to the customer [00:22:00] service and the other tools that big businesses used to only have, and I could. Get it for a lot cheaper and pay by the drink. I don't have to pay for a big, location in India where all of my frequent flyers who are below the gold tier get to.

Right. And my, platinum tier gets the people in Arizona. 'cause they don't have the accents. No, No, none of that. I've got AI for anybody who wants to call and maybe I've got a product and I need somebody to do explanation or service or support. Like you could actually get that done. Now, are we there today where all this works?

Meh, probably not, but I know so many different five guys who are out there building this exact same product. Two or three of 'em be successful, get gobbled up by some other big software company. But that product is out there now and you can go and turn that on. Or you know how much of it's hate social media?

Not that Social media is a, terrible thing. It's just so hard for a lot of small businesses to go put the energy into, learn all the techniques and the tools, et cetera. It's fantastic tools now [00:23:00] that say, okay, just upload a bunch of pictures to your stuff. Gimme whatever marketing show you got, I'll spit out something that's good quality every week.

Two things, three things. and you can post them, or we can even have em all hooked up to the same place that posts to all of your social media for you. So you don't have to hire that, 17-year-old, neighbor of yours to go do this for you because he's off busy doing something else.

Anyway.

Jeffrey Feldberg: Yeah, it's sure been a game changer. And I'm wondering from that perspective, 'cause I've heard discussions at even venture capital, private equity, some are even questioning, is it going to exist the way that it has because we now have much smaller companies don't necessarily need the kind of capital that perhaps you would've before.

All thanks to ai. So behind the closed doors when you're advising private equity. What's the talk? What's the thinking? What are they seeing out there and what's changing?

Sri Kaza: So what's changing is everything has to go faster. have to get more out of the capital that you invest than ever before. And what that means is, when we added [00:24:00] software this is again years ago, you add software to the mix of all these capital investments, you can now get a lot more out of your capital investment.

I spent a million dollars on robots. But I could program them and I can be even more efficient. Now we've got ai and so you may not even need the software, right? But you've got AI to go make either your software or your brand or your other investments even more efficient. So what does that do?

One, it increases the competitive stakes 'cause everybody else can do it too. So you've gotta do this faster and. It requires some imagination and creativity. If you wanna go create value, it requires very little imagination and even less creativity. If what you wanna do is save cost. So the world has primarily been focusing on the cost saving opportunities.

'cause that takes no imagination at all. Oh, if AI can do this and I don't have to have a person, great. The question I ask when I'm with many of these private equity firms, we're talking about enhancing their ability to get to market and getting out and doing more. With the investment they've made, you've gotta get them more [00:25:00] productive, not just cost less to get more productive.

The question I ask is very similar to the idea. For a small business owner who, I would ask the question, what could you do if you had a call center? So now the question isn't, what could I do in terms of shrinking my, support staff or shrinking my ALP on calling people?

Because I now have a auto dialer and a AI system making all these calls. It is, how do I actually develop a deeper relationship with my customers and how do I get there quicker? It's not gonna be, oh, I'm gonna just do less without people. In fact, what I think of is business only gets done by people.

And there's not a single person that I know who says, yeah, I trust the AI to make the call for me, maybe one day. But really, the trust is with other people and taking the time to understand the people you're dealing with, taking the time to be creative and help solve their problems. That's still a human skill, that even if the AI became capable [00:26:00] of having that conversation and doing that dialogue, you still need the human relationship to really get someone to trust, to make a transaction, to go and invest in something. So my advice is always that, look, you just have to learn how to do more, but AI can unlock more, but you aren't asking the right Question if you're saying, what can I cut out of my approach? 

Jeffrey Feldberg: Exactly. As founders, entrepreneurs, business owners, we have the answers. We're usually not asking the right questions, and so. i'm listening into, the two of us have this fireside chat as a member of Deep Wealth Nation and I'm saying, okay, re Jeffrey, that's all fine and go what you're talking about. But hey, tune into my favorite radio station, w fm, the What's in it for me radio station.

And so there's lots of global trends that we're speaking about and big picture strategies that we're talking about, and that's all find and important and we need that. That said, for a listener in Deep Wealth Nation who's listening to us. What would be one action? A low hanging fruit, A [00:27:00] takeaway that if they tried this or maybe they stopped doing this, it could make a meaningful impact for them in their business.

Whether it's a big business or a small business, the strategies usually are the same. It's just how we apply them and the scale to that. What would you suggest? What would you say? If I can put you on the.

Sri Kaza: I'd say go figure out what Your core principles are number one is what is your positioning? You have to ask this question of yourself almost every three months, maybe once a year. If it's a, kind of tenured business, is my positioning reflects, how people see me, what I bring to the market, and what's unique about me.

If you know what that is, just taking once every three months to re-articulate it for yourself gives you this freedom and all the other decisions that you have to make. I'll pick the other three in a second, but I like to call these things principles because you don't have enough time to process all the information you're given out every day for every decision.

You go with your gut, and everybody does, but everyone would love to say they're data driven and they look at all the things. They just don't have time, [00:28:00] and there's too many decisions to make to be able to do that. But if you internalize a couple of principles, what is your priority? What is your position? You can make those decisions off of that internalization. So a simple example is, you pick a guy who is running business, he's made his positioning clear in his mind. He knows the kind of customer he wants, and the kind of customer that he's okay to lose, right? When he says, this is what people who buy my product value.

Now when he's gotta go juggle and there's something that's gonna fall, he quickly gravitates to catch the one that values his value proposition. Why? Because that's the one that's core to his business. The other one was, extra when you internalize that principle. So positioning is one. Proximity is the other one.

This is one where what you know about your customers really matters, how they go through their lives. You have to internalize that too, right? You have to learn how to see the world through their eyes. Again I say it's reflect text with these questions. But when you you bring their [00:29:00] perspective to your decisions. And then the last one is purpose. You have to be able to articulate this to yourself, and it may not be, Hey, I'm trying to go save the world or Could be as simple as saying, Hey, I got into this solo practice. 'cause I didn't wanna have a bunch of partners who were, drooling over my share of the business. It could be whatever, but come to terms with your purpose and keep your decisions and your business efforts aligned with that purpose that you've decided on.

It keeps you from going crazy. It also keeps you on the track of being personally satisfied.

Jeffrey Feldberg: And Sya love what you're sharing because you don't hear that a lot. And if I heard you correctly, and you can share Jeffrey OnBase or off base what you're saying, and to put this in my own words, my takeaway was, Hey, it's okay if you lose a customer. If that customer wasn't central to your purpose, to what you're doing, that's okay to do because we've been taught the otherwise.

The conventional wisdom is, hey, you keep your customers no matter what. And more times than not, especially for a smaller business. It's a good old Frito's law. It's probably [00:30:00] 20%. It's actually probably 10%, but Pre's Law is the 80 20. So 20% of your customers are likely 80% of your profits, but it might be 5% or 10% of your customers are.

90% of your profits not great if you're looking for investors or an exit, but we'll put that off to the side for just a moment. But who are your customers and Sri, to your point of proximity to know what your customers, what they want, because you're interacting with 'em. You're not just throwing it blindly to ai.

You're not just abdicating to a bunch of people, okay? Just have those conversations. I don't need to know about it. I don't need to hear about it. You actually care and you keep tabs on what's going on with your clients. Part of the deal from my exit deal was that this big deal came down to ensuring that one of the team members had to stay on board for a certain period of time because this client would walk away.

If that team member wasn't there, and by the way, when I say team member, I'm not talking myself. I'm not talking my co-founders. I'm talking a frontline team member. And that was baked [00:31:00] into the deal. And so going back to your point of proximity, you better know what your customers want, what they don't want, and how you fit into that because that is everything, especially today when there's so much choice.

Would love your thoughts about that.

Sri Kaza: Oh, completely. That those relationships are what is your business. A lot of times, back in my McKinsey days, you do an assessment of, Hey, what are your assets? What are your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities? You've heard of SWOT analysis before. What often. People forget, especially small business owners, is their relationships are fundamentally some of the most important assets in the company. this is, again, and you talk to private equity and many of the deals that I've seen and I've had to go into to help fix, or the deals I've seen that just didn't go well was, you go buy a founder's company and you let the founder go, or, disconnect the founder. That whole business was built on his relationships, not just the IDIP and the assets that you saw on the balance sheet, et cetera.

It was relationships that you need and you need to [00:32:00] foster to grow.

Jeffrey Feldberg: Yeah, and I'm wondering, so as we're talking about this, and by the way, deep Nation, I always say don't be the smartest person in the room. And I'm very happy to say I'm not the smartest person in the room. It's great being in that position. I absolutely love that. So when you look at where you've been, what you've been doing, and also where you're heading now, when you're looking to the marketplace now, and you're speaking with business owners or founders or entrepreneurs, and let's just imagine.

Both as a founder yourself, you've also exited. You're speaking with private equity. Just imagine how you're going to invest or look to purchase a company to put you on the spot, very high level. Generally speaking, what has you running as fast as you can in the other direction of, Hey, this is not for me because A, B, C, and D, or running as fast as you can in that direction.

I better lock up this deal because of A, B, C, and D. I would love to hear both sides of the coin on that one.

Sri Kaza: what makes me wanna not invest in something and what would make me want to kinda run to it? it's how [00:33:00] I have to take the founder out of it. And this is, a challenge 'cause a lot of small businesses you can't, so I wouldn't say I've run away from a company where the founder's really close and be part of why their customers love the company.

customer a better word than love. So I'm gonna call it love, customer. Love for the product is what gets me excited. So you'll hear this when someone's like, look, I couldn't have done it without this product or with this company, or, I couldn't have done the things that I wanted to do, or I couldn't have gotten to blah, blah, blah without this company.

That gets me excited because it's a real value add, right? It's something that customers really want, and oftentimes you wouldn't get love if it's a commodity product. Oh, I can get this anywhere. I just got it from this guy. That's not that exciting, but there saying, without the help of those advisors, or without them coming in to solve this problem for me, without them giving me these opportunity to do blah, blah, blah. That's what gets me excited about any, business. personally, I like also team. I wanna be able to grow. I like the [00:34:00] concept and kind of growth opportunities and I look at space. Is there space to go adjacent and grow into other parts and facets of your customers need space.

But you know, Now flip it around and say, what would make me run would be. If the numbers are good because they're cheap, people are like, yeah, this is a low cost guy. But it was really just because it was run efficiently. This is okay, right? It's a good company. I wouldn't want to go and try and take that, make it better because it's a profit focus business.

It's trying to just make a buck being, profitable as opposed to somebody trying to solve a problem or create something that other people value.

I'll just give you one example. We, I worked recently with a company where, they failed that test when I was conversing with a couple of their employees. I said, Hey, so look, what do you think of the value you create for your customers? And, what do you think of this product?

Would you be a user? I'm like, no, I really don't see the value. Literally, I dunno why customers. Using our product. If you get that in your company, you gotta run for the hills.

Jeffrey Feldberg: And deep Walt nation. Again, [00:35:00] you know Sri, you're never a prophet in your hometown, and I. Share these same things, but it's coming from you, so it has a lot more weight. People nation, are you hearing that your culture, which doesn't directly show up on your profit and loss, but it actually does directly show up on your profit and loss?

How's your culture? Do you have raving fans? Not only for your customers? How about your team? Do they love what you do? Are they there? Not because necessarily your're paying the most amount. But it's your leadership, it's your vision, it's your culture, it's the team. It's an incredible service or product.

And what I'm hearing you say, sir, my walkaway is, wow, my team better love what we're doing, what we're putting out there as much or more than what our customers are doing. And when you heard the opposite of that, yeah, no. Wouldn't wanna use this product or service. Wow. Talk about running the opposite direction as fast as you can.

So wearing all of your hats. Back in the day from McKinsey being that founder, that post exit entrepreneur, now even from private equity, how do we in the [00:36:00] spirit of Unconvention, create that culture? That's what I like to say, that rich and thriving culture internally in the company where at Deep Wealth, we call it step two X-Factors culture's an X-Factor when you do it right, because it can take the company in so many further directions than we could with the toxic culture.

How do we get that culture?

Sri Kaza: Oh, he's role model, role model. Role model. Role model. So one of the things that yeah, I'll tell a story in a second about a PE owner just mentioned to me what he did, and I thought it was fantastic. I go back to, okay, know your principles, know what is your position, what makes you unique and why you create value.

Know how your customers think and can. Be close to them and celebrate your purpose. if you do those things, you need to do that in a way that you can role model for the rest of your team to see as well. They have to also believe in those things. They have to see it, they have to understand.

So I'll go back to the guy a bookstore I talked to I said, Hey, so what's going on with your, pricing and how do you think about making money on, [00:37:00] differentiated access? Because you have certain books that aren't even on Amazon. He's like, look, I don't, discount don't worry about pricing.

If somebody wants to come into my bookstore, see a book that they like, scan it. And then find it on Amazon for cheaper and buy it fine. That's not my customer. I'm not worried about them. It's okay to have customers that are cheap. I'm not gonna go and, fight for them. I'm not gonna go and chase them, but I'm gonna run my business and this is what I care about That.

Behavior that role modeling trickles down. People see that, look, we're not gonna go on pipe board. In fact, if someone's really desperate to get low cost, we'll point the names out we have to. Right? Or that's where the cost is cheaper. Now, I was talking to a owner from a PE firm. He was telling me, look, I had to go step in.

I was the interim CEO for a lawn care like a corporate lawn care service. And when he stepped in. He said, look, one of the problems that I saw right away was, look, if you were out there taking care of people's not just lawn, but their lobbies and all these other parts of their buildings how can you have a truck [00:38:00] that's dirty and messy and disorganized?

How can you have, in your own service station, garbage on the floor? So wherever I went, if I visiting at a client site or if I was visiting my own site or seeing somebody out in the field. I would always stop, pick up the trash, clean things up around me make sure that people know that look, we're being hired to keep things clean and looking good.

It's not below the CEO to pick this stuff up off the ground. It better not be below anybody else.

Jeffrey Feldberg: Absolutely, and I completely resonate with that. I know for myself as a founder. Business owner, it doesn't matter what the title is. There will be times where I'm a janitor, I'm picking things up. Be the change that you wanna see in your team members and the other people. And sri, one thing I'll share, it's interesting.

I'm very fortunate. We have people from the military, from the services who come on and they say, Jeffrey, just because I'm the commanding officer over the team. They don't have to respect me. I've gotta earn that respect. I have gotta be there for 'em. I need to take a [00:39:00] personal interest in them. What's going on in their life.

I need to get curious. How are they? What's their family members up to? What's their life situation like? And I've gotta be there for them. Only then can I earn their trust. And I've seen so many entrepreneurs, business owners, founders take the opposite. I'm the owner of the business. I signed the paycheck.

They're gonna do what I say because I say so and so Deep Wealth Nation, what are you doing? To earn that trust and are you doing the quote-unquote jobs you don't wanna be doing that you shouldn't be doing, but you're doing 'em anyway, so you know what it's all about. So you can relate to the people so they can't pull one over you, and you can help get the business be even better and scale it even more.

I'm not gonna name the names. It's a well-known story out there. When they started the business, they did everything that they knew Sri, that it wasn't scalable, but they did it anyways because they needed to know the ebbs and flows of the business so that they could improve it. And so when they went to market and they're now very high valuation out there, everyone knows 'em.

Very popular company. Part of their success, my own data point of one looking from the outside in, inside out is because they did [00:40:00] those things in the beginning that most wouldn't do.

Sri Kaza: Yep.

Jeffrey Feldberg: Speaking with the very early customers, being the ones to show up, speak with the client, put them through the whole process and see where the business worked, where it didn't work, and make improvements along the way.

Would love your thoughts on that, especially from the whole unconventional side of things and that the whole mindset of thinking, where are you on that?

Sri Kaza: Entrepreneurial mindset. I think of an entrepreneur as somebody who is gonna fill whatever gap it takes so that he can be successful, he or she can be successful. So they're gonna come with a set of skills and a couple beliefs of this is how it should work. And at the moment, anything breaks down, a real entrepreneur.

Throw themselves into those cracks and fill whatever gaps are out there to go do it now, to go a step further and say, Hey, look, I'm gonna live the life of my crew. I think that's fantastic for any leader to go do. Yeah I've done that. So, you know, Go into a call center, take calls, go listen.

Right? You join, take on a lead of Salesforce. Go do ride-alongs. Go listen to what they're doing. Go talk to customers. Like you have to kinda get close to it. I don't wanna make that [00:41:00] a requirement for good leadership. I think empathy, patience, understanding, and listening.

If you can be doing all of those things, maybe you don't have to go and throw yourself into the middle of everything else, But geez, it's a faster to me it's faster to go get your hands dirty. And it gives me a sense of freedom and it gives me a sense of accomplishment to go and help somebody close a deal when maybe they didn't need me, but me being involved gets me to learn something.

game for that.

Jeffrey Feldberg: It is all part of the entrepreneurial journey. It has its twists and turns and it's willing to do what others perhaps aren't. If it was easy, everyone would be doing it. And I'm wondering before we go into a wrap up mode. Is there a question, an important question that we haven't yet covered that you wanna get out there?

Sri Kaza: A question of me. Maybe not, but a question of kind all the entrepreneurs who are listening Yeah. Can the people around you. Tell you or tell each other why you're doing this business. Like what it is that got you to do it. One of the things that's really just fantastic for me [00:42:00] is when in both of the two businesses where we're dealing directly with small businesses, trying to help them either with their tax credits or getting 'em financing that was a question I always ask that I embodied that as the CEO at, the Forline Financial.

Anybody who talked to customers, Hey, what are they trying to do with their business? No, no, No. I don't need to know what they wanna spend the money on. What are they trying to do with the business? Are they trying to grow it? Are they trying to get to more people? Are they trying to make 'em efficient, make it pretty?

What is it they're trying to do? And understanding kind of the essence of why somebody is in the business. What they're doing. A lot of times, especially the founders who struggle, they'll get stuck in a rut 'cause they're chasing a few things that they probably know they need to chase.

Or maybe they read that they need to chase or they feel for some reason they need to chase, but they've lost sight of that purpose of why they were doing this to begin with. And if you come back, you can realign and say, Hey, this is actually why I'm doing it. It actually changes the way you solve problems.

You're not trying to go to get the profit maximizing answer. You're trying to get the purpose [00:43:00] maximizing answer. So question for everybody is, Hey, do you know what yours is? And do the people around you know what that is?

Jeffrey Feldberg: De Nation, you'll see why Sri is such a smart guy. What an incredible question. You have the answer to Depa Nation. You probably weren't asking that question, so ask that question, take it back to you and your team. I suspect you'll be pleasantly surprised and the answer will take you to some better places in your business.

So I absolutely love that question. So that said, it's our tradition here on the Deepal Podcast. It's my privilege, my honor, where each guest I ask the same question and it's a really fun question. Let me set this up for you. When you think of the movie Back to the Future, you have that fabulous DeLorean car that will take you to any point in time.

So I want you to imagine, this is the fun part. It's tomorrow morning, you look outside your window. Not only is the DeLorean car curbside, the door's open and you're gonna hop on in, you're now gonna go to any point in your life, Sri, as a young child, a teenager, whatever point in time it would [00:44:00] be. What would you tell your younger self in terms of life lessons or life wisdom, or, Hey Sri, do this, but don't do that.

What would it sound

Sri Kaza: Hmm. All right. So I have to admit to you that I didn't learn from people telling me, and even the future me showing up to tell me something probably wouldn't have been how I would've learned anything and I'm sure this resonates with almost all of your entrepreneurs. I learned from doing so what I would do and where I would go back, I'd go back probably to like college days. Is, I would tell Youngme about myself in that you are very entrepreneurial. You don't know it yet. But, and you don't like listening to lectures. That's why you're sleeping in class or not showing up. But you figured out yourself, so that's why you're doing okay. But really what happens for you is you learn by trying and sticking your neck out there and taking risks. So as you get better, and be comfortable with yourself as to how you learn and grow, right? Knowing that, being aware of that is how I would advise you to [00:45:00] go take risks and go do the things that you want to do and maybe sooner, right? So take riskier paths earlier would be the guess.

But it's, I don't learn from other people. I didn't, especially when I was young, did not take any advice. Well, So I doubt I would listen to future me, 

Jeffrey Feldberg: i'm right there with you, and so often I think, yeah, Jeffrey, if you only would've known this back in the day, and I think would I have listened? Probably not. Sadly. Sadly, probably not. But I like what you're saying. Hey, take the riskier paths earlier, which is also another way of saying believe in yourself.

Maybe it'll work out like you plan, maybe it won't, but it'll work out even better than you planned. But believe in yourself and take the risk. I love that. And so that said, someone in Deep Nation, they wanna reach out to you, have you come in, do a workshop, or have a fireside chat, or speak to the company or give a keynote or just ask you a question.

They wanna have a conversation with you. Where would be the best place online to reach you?

Sri Kaza: Oh you can find me on my website. It's ri kaza.com. SRI dash KAZ [00:46:00] a.com. occasionally I'll do speaking event. Really to me what I get excited about is if I can. Can interact with and inspire entrepreneurs of any kind, so early startup or 30 years in the business. If I can connect with people like that and help them do more like that, those kind of events, I'm happy to get involved.

I'll do some the corporate stuff, but I've been typically that's all for fees and expensive. And I have fun with working with entrepreneurs.

Jeffrey Feldberg: I love that entrepreneurial spirit and paying it forward. That's really where it all begins as entrepreneurs and founders, business owners. We solve those painful problems. We make the world go round, and I'm hearing that through and through in everything that you're doing. Well, It's official.

Congratulations. This is a wrap. And sri, as we love to say here at Deep Wealth, may you continue to thrive and prosper while you remain healthy and safe. Thank you so much.

Sri Kaza: Thank you.

Jeffrey Feldberg: So there you have it, Deep Wealth Nation. 

What did you think? 

So with all that said and as we wrap it up, I have another question for you.

Actually, it's more of a personal favor. 

Did you find this episode helpful? 

Have you found other [00:47:00] episodes of the Deep Wealth Podcast empowering and a game changer for your journey? 

And if you said yes, and I really hope you did, I have a small but really meaningful way that you can actually help us out and keep these episodes coming to you.

Are you ready for it? 

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So all that said. Thank you so much for listening. And remember your wealth isn't just about the money in the bank. It's about the depth of your journey and the impact that you're creating. So let's continue this journey together. And from the bottom of my heart, thank you so much for listening to this episode.

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Thank you so much. 

God bless.