Siddharth Rajsekar: The Six Areas Of Business Growth

Siddharth Rajsekar Public Speaking Expert Joins Us On The Join Up Dots Podcast

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Introducing Siddharth Rajsekar

How The Dots Joined Up For Sidz

Show Highlights

During the show we discussed such weighty subjects with Siddharth Rajsekar such as:

Be fixed on the goal, but not how you are going to get there. Be flexible with your approach and enjoy the journey.

Be very clear on what you want to be known, mission statement, community around it, elevator pitch

Why you should always look for the best mentorship you can on the way to greatness.

and lastly……..

There are six areas of need that a business can be created: Business Growth, Career Growth, Health & Wellness, Make Money, Relationships, Arts and Crafts. 

Passion, Problem (The passion has to be able to solve a problem that someone will pay for), the Persona, Potential in the market, people need to pay you for it.

How To Connect With Siddharth Rajsekar

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Full Transcription For Siddharth Rajsekar Interview

Intro [0:00]
When we’re young, we have an amazing positive outlook about how great life is going to be. But somewhere along the line we forget to dream and end up settling. Join Up Dots features amazing people who refuse to give up and chose to go after their dreams. This is your blueprint for greatness. So here’s your host live from the back of his garden in the UK, David Ralph.

David Ralph [0:25]
Yes, hi there. Good morning world. Good morning, and welcome to another edition of Join Up Dots. This is an interview. So this time we’ve got a guest coming from Chennai in India to connect with us this morning and join up the dots of his life. And he’s got a fascinating story that has taken him across the world to where he is now and back again, easy tips all over the place. And he’s on a mission to create 1 million digital leaders. He’s the founder of the freedom business model. And for the last seven years I’ve been running a digital agency that has represented clients like Robert Kiyosaki jack Canfield, Tony Robbins, and many more. He currently nurtures one of India’s largest tribe coaches and experts who are building their own digital ecosystems too. But like most of the stories in Join Up Dots where the guest is ended up is often nowhere near where they started. And the same is true with today’s guest. And as he says, I was an outstanding student in school, always standing outside class, see what you did there? That’s a good joke. I was truly passionate about music and cricket and played right through my schooling years. I could never remember a time when I would sit in one place. I could not sit in boring classrooms. And that’s why I ended up dropping out of college I flunked my top grade score to just 28% in mathematics. However, this didn’t stop him. So he started to re educate himself on things that he was interested in. He pawned his wife’s gold jewellery and started to invest in many internet marketing courses. He spent around 10 grand causes and by the end of that year, it was able to set up a small little digital agency along with his cousin and business partner, which is where we should start today’s episode of Join Up Dots. So where do people get hung up in starting their business investing in themselves, or simply coming up with the right idea? And with the world in turmoil at the moment? Is this the right time to start a business or should we all hold off? Well, let’s find out as we bring them to the show to start joining up dots with the one and only Mr Siddharth Rajsekar.

Siddharth Rajsekar [2:35]
doing great doing really David, great to be here.

David Ralph [2:37]
It’s lovely to have you and you are as I said, before we connected. You’re my favourite ethnic guests. You turned up early. You sounded good, you were prepared. I find more and more now with entrepreneurs because it’s a kind of lifestyle when you can make up what you do on the spot. But people are so not asking. prepared, do you find that Oh, so it’s just something that I’m going into?

Siddharth Rajsekar [3:03]
No, I mean, that’s how I like life to be as well. And that’s how life has been for me, you know, completely spontaneous. And whatever plans that I make sometimes does not go as per the plan. So I just love this idea of not knowing what’s coming up.

David Ralph [3:18]
Now, when you do that, how do you make sure that things occur, especially as a new entrepreneur, we’re cut right to the chase, because so many people from the moment that they start going to school, they have to be there at nine o’clock, I have to be leaving at half past three, they have to do this, I have to do that. And then once that suddenly is taken away, and they almost haven’t got a routine, how do people get anything done?

Siddharth Rajsekar [3:44]
So you know, what I’ve learned from one of my earlier mentors is the concept of being fixed on a goal, or in other words, knowing what you want to do, but being flexible on how you get there. It’s like Google Maps, like you set the destination and you get on the road and then you hit a roadblock and then Google is gonna read out and find another way to go get there. So I think the important point for an entrepreneur is to know where they want to go. It can be like a revenue goal, it could be like, what do they want to achieve? What’s the mission? What’s the purpose of their business? If that is clear, then the methods can keep changing. And the problem what happens in today’s teenagers, entrepreneurs are very fixed on their methods, and they’re very flexible on the goal and division. And that’s where things get topsy turvy. So yeah, that’s my view on this. It’s I’m, personally I’m very flexible on the methods because especially today, adaptability is the name of the game. I think the adaptability quotient is one of the most important factors for an entrepreneur to survive, especially in the day and age that we are in today. So that those are my thoughts today.

David Ralph [4:43]
Now, what I have found more often than not over the last few years is what you said is absolutely right. be fixed on the goal, but not how you’re going to get there spot on. button. So many people don’t know what the gold is, especially when they’re starting. And they’re looking around and they’re trying to come up with a business idea. And I find I don’t know if you find this it, but more often than not the business idea is actually in them already, but they’re already living it. They just can’t see it because it’s too close to them and they need somebody else to say, Look, you’ve got this issue, you can solve this issue, and you can solve it for other people. And you’re actually in that environment already. Why don’t you do that? And it’s kind of like, Well, I didn’t know that I could do what I’m already doing and get paid more for it. Do you find that?

Siddharth Rajsekar [5:34]
Yeah, absolutely. In fact, I have a very, like a nice system for helping people get clear on their positioning, because that’s where the problem is, people are still not clear about, you know, who they want to serve, how do they want to serve them and what’s the bigger vision and purpose? So like, I have like a four or five point in a process for this. So the first is, is like, you’d be very clear on what do you want to be known for? Like for example, in my opinion, I want to be known as the guy who’s creating more digital teachers. And then based on that, the second step is I want to do I created a mission statement around it. So I tell even my students to create a mission around it in the mission can be as simple as to help 100,000 people achieve dash goal, what will may be the goal. So my case is to help 100,000 people become digital readers. And then the third step is to create a community around it. In my case, I have like the Internet Lifestyle hub. So anyone you can call it whatever, like in your case, you have Join Up Dots. It’s the it’s a community that’s tuned in to this particular podcast, and then and then no, link it back to the way that you have to craft an elevator pitch for yourself. So I would say okay, Hi, I’m Sarah shaker. I’m a I’m a lifestyle entrepreneur and coach and I’m on a mission to help 100,000 people become digital teachers. And that’s why I’ve created the community called the Internet Lifestyle hub. So this is just an example of, you know, of a template. But I get all my entrepreneurs, students, today’s digital entrepreneur students to create something so concise, that even if I wake them up at 3am In the morning and ask them, ask them this, what is your mission? They should be able to bring this out in 15 seconds. And when this clarity is there in anyone’s business or in their positioning, everything else starts to follow. So that’s my view on this, David.

David Ralph [7:13]
Well, I think he’s a very good use. It’s because that’s clarity, as you say, of knowing what you want to be known as well, I think I struggled with that. At the beginning, I was a podcaster. And I bought back was gonna be my whole business we’re talking seven years ago. And little by little other income streams kind of crept up on me, I don’t think I was looking for many of them. But little by little people would come to me and say, you know, do you do this? I am interested in this. And I started thinking, Well, actually, I do know that so I could do there, or I don’t know it. I’m sure I could learn it and find out. Do you think that people as you did invest in yourself are too Grand. Do you think people are reluctant to pay for quality and think that they can just pick up the stuff on YouTube and Scrabble around? Do you think that’s the fast track is actually paying for good, solid mentorship?

Siddharth Rajsekar [8:17]
Absolutely, David, and I think for a good three to four years, I was playing this game of, you know, looking for the cheaper alternatives. Looking on YouTube, looking on other places, free information, but what ended up happening was, I was getting even more overwhelmed and confused. And until I, you know, got mentored by by a person who told me a beautiful phrase, he said, you cannot afford to be cheap on your journey towards greatness. If you want to be great. You cannot be cheap. And I’ll tell you how cheap I was before I used to download cracked software’s I used to download oriented courses. Nothing overly smart.

David Ralph [8:57]
Yeah, I’ve been there may have done that kind of stuff. Yeah.

Siddharth Rajsekar [9:01]
And the day that I that this went deep into my system, and I started to pay for courses, I start to pay for consulting pay for tools. And even when I, you know, get music for my videos, I pay for that music because I know that somebody else on the other side has put in that effort to create something amazing. And there has to be a value exchange, you know, it’s like, What goes around comes around and the day that I realised this, that it there has to be a value exchange for me to value the knowledge or the information for me to move forward. That’s when my business actually started to grow. And that’s when I even when I was not having much money, I in fact, I found my wife’s gold gold jewellery to invest in my own learning, which was much beyond my capacity at that point of time. And that was a tipping point because my skin was in the game, and I had to make it happen. But the problem today is there’s so much of information that people get overwhelmed. See, and I tell my students, it’s people don’t lack information today. Information is like anyone can go and swim in YouTube for for a whole day and they’re still going to get confused. What people lack is direction, that and the focus and that you can only get from mentors who have the formula and you have the results, and you have a system that can actually help them take it forward. Yes.

David Ralph [10:12]
I was talking to my wife the other day, she was talking to one of her friends who is in the process of starting a business. And I said to them, I said to her, I said, Look, what we’ve just said, they’ve got to find somebody that has done what they want to do, and then paid for it. I said, they can find everything free. But you don’t realise but it’s actually sensible advice until you’ve gone past the point of actually needing that advice. And then you look back on it, and you think, Oh, I can see what I was saying on YouTube. Yeah, it was right. But I couldn’t join up the dots at that time. I didn’t have the number pieces. And that is where mentorship and coaching is really powerful. I feel. It doesn’t give you just the thing that you want. To know, it gives you how that connects up with the other bits. And there’s always going to be a deep dive obsession that has to be within you. You can’t have any coach or mentor that tells you every single nuance of what you need to do you need to be able to jump into it. But a lot of the information out there is absolutely factually correct. It’s brilliant information, but you just can’t join up the dots. Can you?

Unknown Speaker [11:26]
Yes, yes, absolutely. In fact that there’s a nice concept that I learned a few years ago, which is called the Golden Triangle. You know, it’s it’s to learn, do and teach simultaneously. And that’s the only way one can learn at at a much faster pace than than anything before. And especially in the training and coaching space. I’ve noticed that a lot of coaches trainers who just do the Learning and Teaching straight off now and they miss the doing part because when the doing is missing, it really brings it completely removes that entire dimension of it. experience and, you know, the failures and all the possibilities of that game, it’s still just a head knowledge it is not coming from, you know, it’s not coming from the court. And it’s absolutely like what you’re saying, I mean, for this to really work, one has to be living and breathing, what they’re saying. And when you’re able to connect with those kind of mentors, they may not give you all the nuances of the game, but they just tell you what is the most essential that has to be done for you to move from point A to point B. And that’s what makes a huge difference. It’s not about the, you know, the encyclopaedic knowledge It is about what are those two, three buttons to push to really create and make a difference in that particular situation?

David Ralph [12:41]
Let’s listen to Jim Carrey and then we’ll be back with Siddharth Rajeskar.

Jim Carrey [12:44]
My father could have been a great comedian, but he didn’t believe that that was possible for him. And so he made a conservative choice. Instead, he got a safe job as an accountant. And when I was 12 years old, he was let go from that safe job. And our family had to do whatever we could survive. I learned many great lessons from my father, not the least of which was that you can fail at what you don’t want. So you might as well take a chance on doing what you love.

David Ralph [13:11]
Now, if I go back over your story, and we won’t people can go over to your website and sort of delve in. It’s been quite eclectic. You’ve moved through music production, you’ve moved through a load of different areas, not the sort of travelling around the world. Are you now in the thing that you love like Jim Carrey? Or are you still on the journey to find the thing that you really love?

Unknown Speaker [13:35]
I’m absolutely loving every single day of my life, currently, because now with so many people in my community, every day I get messages of people transforming getting results, then being able to help others so that the ripple effect is starting to be felt all over. And yeah, it has taken me a good decade, I should say, to come to this position. And there’s always a next level. There’s no doubt about it. But to answer your question as simple What? Absolutely, totally congruent with

Unknown Speaker [14:05]
now what I what

David Ralph [14:06]
decade, a decade, that seems a long time. You know, a lot of people go, I haven’t got a decade, I want to buy something that teaches me in three weeks, and then I’ll be up and running. Why a decade, give us an overview of your journey.

Siddharth Rajsekar [14:24]
So it was, it was 2001 when I when I feel my 12th grade, and most of my family members, like very well educated with their degrees and doctorates and things like that, and I was like the black sheep of the family. And the only talent that I had at that point was music. So I’ve been playing keyboards since age of 10. So I did of course, a diploma in sound engineering in 2001. And it is a one year diploma, I scored 92% that was actually a very good student and I’ve been teaching since the age of 19. So I’m not a graduate even to this day. I don’t have any degree next to my name. But that was my first phase of the journey where I got I really loved. I started to pick things what I loved And I started get good at it because of the passion that I had in that topic. So good three years teaching music production. And I would say that was one of those formative years where I was, you know, learning all the nuances of the creative arts and blending creativity with technology and all of those, you know, mindset skill sets started to get into my system. And I went to Dubai for a few years, I was making ringtones for mobile phones, and some people may remember the olden days or the polyphonic ring tones, the middle ring tones, I was the guy making those ringtone sitting in studios in internet city. And we were supplying them to all over so that was a good face of two years, I came back to India, I was managing the App Store for some big mobile operators here. So from the creative zone, slowly, my whole journey evolved into the managerial role, you know, the corporate role, the corporate job of having teams working under me, and even though I was not a graduate, you know, I was able to move my way up the corporate ladder and it started to get a little bit more monotonous after some point and I was not able to feel the juice have the passion and the creativity on a daily basis. Like before, when I was making the music, and I lost my job in 2011, I got a pink slip. And that was a time where I had to decide, you know, whether I had to move back into a job, or can should I start something of my own and I did not want to go back to a job at that point. Because Yeah, I did not have a degree. I was lucky that I got this job, you know, which really moved me up but then now did not exist. And that was the moment where I had to pawn my wife’s gold jewellery and I, it took us six months to deep dive into internet marketing. In fact, a year before I lost my job, my wife and I launched our own music album. She’s a singer too. She was an Indian Idol finalist in 2006. So she’s a singer. I’m a musician. I’m a sound engineer. We sat at home and recorded a 12 song album, sitting in our bedroom studio. And to our surprise, we had more than 800 people who downloaded that album at $10 each back then on iTunes, and we did not make a single copy of a CD. And that was like an aha moment for me. I was like, wow It is amazing. But I was still in a job. So I did not focus on that side. And when I lost my job, I decided, Okay, let me get back to this internet thing. Let me start learning about how how it really works. And by the end of those six months, yeah, set up an agency in 2000, early 2012, and ran it for a good five to six years. So like the regular client work. But the interesting thing about the agency business is, you know, I quit, not quit, I lost my job. And I thought I’d start my own business thinking that I can be my own boss. But the factor was that the fact was, I had more than 25 bosses as an agency to report to. So it started to get again, get into my space where I was, again, not creative. I was not it started to become monotonous. The initial phase of building agency was creative. But then later on, it became a lot more monotonous people challenges there was a churn in clients churn and people profitability, that thing started to move in that direction. And that’s when in 2018, the last two years was when the actual pivot happened in my life. After those eight years of grinding it and trying to discover myself in the last two years 2018 I made a decision that Okay, let me not let me stay away from the services model of a business. Let me move on to the product based business. And then I started to create my own courses, my own information products. And then I started to develop my own systems on how I can coach people and help them get the results without me being physically there in any form of physical workshops or seminars. Though I’ve done my share of you know, speaking on the stages and things like that, so I started to digitise and develop a model around the digital coaching system. And in two years, again, thanks to God, thanks to my mentors. They have grown a community of over 7000 people are following the system right now. And many of them have hundreds of success stories of people, normal people who have been able to take their knowledge, find their niche. They’ve been able to package that into coaching courses and consulting products, and now they’re able to impact the world with their knowledge. So it took me a good decade to actually Understand what Is that real?

You know, what is the what is real fulfilment as a business because it gives us the six years was not as fulfilling as I expected it to be, it is more of just doing it, because I’d started it. But now it’s the congruence has happened only after going through that grind. And I just want to mention that, you know, sometimes we need to go through those phases to really discover that area where we can truly contribute to the world. It is not like an overnight thing, and it’s okay. And it’s okay to go through that grind. And, and again, one of my mentors says, you know, it’s not about the destination. It’s about falling in love with the process of what you become as you’re going towards the destination. And that has really inspired me a lot, David. Yeah.

David Ralph [19:44]
I think that is an amazing story in so many ways, because I think there’s so much resonance with so many people out there and I was sitting there listening to that, reflecting on that back but you said and I want to sort of Delve back into that, but you went from one boss 25 bosses, because I remember probably three years ago, I went from like one boss to like 100 bosses, and hundred bosses, probably 8090 of them weren’t paying me anything, but we’re just asking for help and sucking me dry and sending emails and stuff. And I made a huge mistake of not being clear and defined enough with my boundaries and my time, but I just allowed people to suck me dry now, but it’s gonna be something that does everybody have to go through? Because at the beginning, you are thinking, Oh, my God, I need clients. I need clients, you know, I need these people. Is it better to actually say, No, I don’t need the bad clients. I need the good clients.

Siddharth Rajsekar [20:51]
Yes, you know, my view about this is I mean, I would say it’s twofold I would say yes and no. The yes part of it is with come later. But see initially unless I knew or unless I have a personal unless I had a personal experience of what was a bad client, I would not be able to decide on what or decipher oh no differentiate between what is a bad and a good client. So I think it’s, it’s great to go through that experience of the grantor if you’re someone listening to this, and if you’re going to rebrand, just just be thankful, but just don’t do the same thing again, you know, don’t be like, be a one mistake learner, you know, don’t do the same mistake multiple times. So yes, I think it is very important when those have been those moments have given me some, some very, very priceless lessons that I would have not learned. Even if I’d gone through a mentor, like a mentor can tell me what to do. But unless I’ve, you know, burned my hands and have experienced that myself, you know, it won’t have gone to the core level as as what I felt like now. So the answer is yes, I think I mean, people should go through that grind. But on the other side, you can you don’t have to go through such a long learning curve. People can cut short learning curve. And I’ll tell you one of the best ways to cut short your learning curve is to is to have as many, you know, one to one conversations with your ideal target market. And I’ll give you an example. Like, in my case before, as I was developing my products, I was having one to one conversation, I’ve had more than 401 to one conversations with my potential audience, I would ask them, what are your problems? What are your challenges, and I would help them you know, give them the right strategy. And this is all free one to ones like I did it for you know, I did it completely for free when they would buy any of my products, but it was a complimentary session. And that gave me so much of insight on how to re engineer and develop my products. So the grind is very, very important, but it’s about how you can pick the grind that you want. Because through that grind, if you’re able to develop something if you’re able to pick up patterns, you can use those patterns to become more free calls when we’ve got to jump back.

David Ralph [22:57]
Yeah, we got to jump back and say that the key So what you’re saying is, once again, be very clear on what you want to be known for. That’s the key thing to everything, isn’t it first because otherwise, you’re asking the wrong questions, you’re speaking to the wrong people. And you’re just in murky territory yourself.

Siddharth Rajsekar [23:19]
Absolutely, it’s it’s a completely different trajectory if you’re not sure about what you want, because and there’s a beautiful quote, right? If you don’t know where you want to go, you can go anywhere, and anywhere is not a destination. And that’s a big problem. Yes.

David Ralph [23:32]
Now, with that, we jump on to this, how do you get very clear on what you want to be known with? Or known as, as a starting point where you just don’t know you know, how does somebody make that decision on like, Okay, I’m going to be this because they may not actually like being back as they move into it might be something that we see time and time again, people see somebody else doing it and going Ah, Successful I’m gonna do, but actually, once they move into it, they don’t actually like it because they’ve only seen one side of it.

Siddharth Rajsekar [24:09]
It’s a billion question, David. And I have a very powerful model that I want to share. Like there are two models I’m going to share the first model is how do you identify your niche? Or how do you identify what is that area you want to serve in and contribute? And when I was doing an analysis on this, over the last couple of years, it comes down to six areas, there are only six areas where people have problems. And you start off by picking one of these six areas. The first area is business growth. Businesses are going through challenges and if you can help a business or an entrepreneur grow in their business in what about different verticals, whether in sales and marketing, in digital marketing in, you know, the team efficiency in your productivity, if you can solve a business owners problem, that’s a great niche to be in. The second is carrier growth. A lot of people in the workforce, they want to upskill themselves, they want to get better jobs. They want to Be more secure in their jobs. So if you can help them either in their soft skills or hard skills, you want to create any kind of coaching consulting as or even services around this, that that’s a huge opportunity. So can you go to the second one, the third is health and wellness people are going through various kinds of health issues. And you can, you can, you know, look at health in two areas. One is you can either focus on a problem focused approach, that you want to focus on fixing a problem like say diabetes or stress or, you know, weight loss, you know, obesity and these are the different problems that people have in the health space. The second approach to health is a method focus. There are so many different ways that one can get healthy, like yoga is one of those methods, intermittent fasting nutrition, no crystal healing, there are so many different ways people can get healthy. So that’s the third niche which is health and wellness. The fourth area that people struggle with is to make money so make money is a huge niche and there are so many different subcategories under under that like how to make money to stock markets. To forex trading. How to make money through drop shipping, through podcasting through blogging, affiliate marketing, there are so many different subcategories under that. Number five is relationships. No, people are struggling with relationships and you want to help people say parenting, or you want to help couple couples come together and enhance relationships, you can go deeper into that area. And number six is arts and crafts. I see especially now, in the current situation of the world, a lot of people they want to enhance their creativity in the form of music and painting. In fact, my my eight year old son learns Taekwondo, he learns martial arts through zoom, and that’s also one area so everything is moving online. So it can be any of these different art forms. So the first step of the first module that I want to recap on is to pick one of these six areas in which you want to serve and you cannot pick multiple you need to pick one track at a business growth or carrier growth, health and wellness make money or relationships or arts and crafts like in which area Do you want to build your business around and the second model is Want to share is how do you validate this niche and I have a five p model for this. If these five P’s aligned, then you can be sure that it is a business. And it is not just a hobby. The first P is you need to have a passion in the topic. Yeah. And because if you don’t love what you’re doing, after a time, after some point of time, you’ll get bored. So you need to really love what you’re doing. That’s the first p, the second P is problem, the passion should be able to solve a problem. If your passion does not solve a problem, then it continues to remain as a hobby. Like, for example, I love music. But I’m not there to do make music for solving a problem. I just want to do it because I love music. So it’s still coming on to the hobby category here. So if your passion can solve a problem, then you’re on track. The third P is the persona. Your Passion should solve a problem to a very specific persona. Like in this case, you are really helping join the dots and really helping the entrepreneurs discover themselves and to get more clarity to have them move in the direction that they really want the path Little least resistance. So that persona needs to be very clear. The fourth P is there has to be potential in the market. And number five is they need to be ready to pay you for it. So when all these five P’s aligned when your passion can solve a problem for a particular persona, whether there’s a potential market, but there’s hunger, and they’re ready to pay you for it, when all these five align, whichever of these those six niches that you pick, or the micro niches that you pick, if these five align, then you can call it a business. And business is all about solving problems. And if I mean, these two models have really helped my students get so much clarity and go much faster than than anyone else. And I

David Ralph [28:43]
think that’s great says I really been that’s great because I get a lot of people. One of the one of the things I do is I teach people how to create an online business, and we’ve been very successful and the businesses are sort of flourishing and they are all about solving a problem. have the highest pain. So if somebody can’t do something themselves, they’re likely to pay for it. If it’s an emergency situation, they don’t think, Oh, I save up for this, but they won’t pay for it. And a lot of people will come through to me and say, my big interest is soccer. And I go, Well, that’s great. But where’s the pain in there? Where’s the problem? How you can actually monetize this? Well, I thought I would do. I would sell scarfs I would say no, that’s a like, that’s not really something that people desperately need. Let’s find something. And yeah, I find more often than not, people will come to me with a kind of hobby business. And I say to them, that’s gonna stay as a hobby business. And that’s almost better to retain this something you love, and not get involved in a business. You know, because we see that don’t wait. Somebody loves something, I think. And then when they have to do it every single day, they say, Oh, I really don’t want to play the piano. Again, I loved playing it when I could just sit there and pretend I’m elton john for a half hour. But now I’m teaching kids every hour to try to be able to john. I just don’t like it anymore.

Siddharth Rajsekar [30:12]
Yes, absolutely. Totally with you, David. Yes. Otherwise, yeah, the hobby business is, you know, there’s a, again, something I learned a few years ago is, when your passion does not pay you. It can also become into poison over a period of time. So it’s it’s always good to keep the hobby, the hobby, if if you don’t have these business elements into it.

David Ralph [30:37]
Yeah, because that screws us back to the Jim Carrey speech. And I play the every day really, because I think it’s a very powerful statement to me, you might as well go for what you love. But I kind of think now is it better to go for what you love or create a life you love? And be quite pragmatic or there’s going to be some things in that life but I don’t like doing really By earns money, you know, it gives me the lifestyle that I can then love more than working in a business by law. Does that make sense to you soon?

Siddharth Rajsekar [31:10]
Absolutely. David, I mean, business is something where you have to do things which you don’t love as well, you know, it’s the fact that because if you’re only doing what you love, and yes, that is one of the one of the dimensions of business, but you need to also be willing to do other things which are not so pleasing, because that’s what’s going to really help you move forward. And there are so many aspects to business. Like if you look at the online business, I mean, you’ve got traffic generation, you’ve got like tribe building, you have copywriting, you have the funnels, you’ve got so many different aspects to this. And some people even when they come to my community, you know, they said, Can I just outsource all of this and there’s no, I tell them, please get hands on first. You know, I know it’s a pain for you to learn these systems and build your funnels, but only once you are able to go through that pain of building it yourself. You’ll understand what it really takes and then you can Later on, you can. So the key here is most people they’re not willing to do that the painful part, which is actually a very critical part of the of the piece. Yes.

David Ralph [32:09]
Yeah, I had a final I tell this story a lot, because I think it’s quite important and he emphasises the point that you just made, but I had a funnel made. It cost me thousands. And it worked like a dream. There was leads coming in left, right and centre, but I didn’t understand how it was working. And it was like having something in front of me, but I wasn’t under control. And I actually ripped it to pieces so that I could see, Ah, that’s what that’s doing. And that’s what I’m at work. And so people say to me, why don’t you just leave it running, you know, you paid all that money. I said, I gained more from it by actually understanding how it operated more than actually, you know, making it work because now I can replicate it myself. But it was a complete pain. So I do totally agree with you. You know, it’s great to have a driver driving you everywhere. But when that driver suddenly sick and you’ve got to jump into the wheel, how you’re going to do it, you know, it’s best to know your own business.

Siddharth Rajsekar [33:07]
Absolutely.

David Ralph [33:08]
Yes. So with you then, so What don’t you like about your business? Because, you know, it sounds like it’s a dream life. You wake up every morning and you love it. But what are the things that you go? Okay, oh, I’m going to do this today. But I can’t wait till tomorrow when I don’t have to do it.

Siddharth Rajsekar [33:27]
Yeah, for me right now, it’s, you know, with more than 7000 people in my community, I get stoned by messages all over the place. So I mean, that’s one part of the business, which is really, you know, taxing. And I’ve also started to create different systems and processes that can actually overcome that. So I recently created a chat bot, and loaded it with more than 300 questions, and whatever questions that people have in their head, you know, I just took a Google form and asked them to type their questions. And I just streamlined and brought it down to 300 questions and I set that up as a process so that no one He didn’t need to reach out to me personally. So that muscle Connect used to be that initially when I was growing the community, but now as the community is growing, I mean, those are the pains that I’m facing right now. And yet, because I’m teaching people to build a business that can run without them, you know, have that freedom. But then as I’m building it, I realise that more and more, I’m not also having freedom. So looking at these different ways to plug in those holes to streamline that. So yeah, that the whole people management and the messaging part is one part of the game where it is, it’s a painful area, but I do it anyway, I’ve actually got a community manager right now who handles all the communication, training them looking at their communication, that’s just seeing if they’re able to communicate the way that I do all of that. The second piece of the whole game is that the traffic generation game, you know, constantly looking at the numbers, cost per lead cost per acquisition. It’s a painful thing, looking at data looking at ad sets, looking at which is performing which is not performing. And it’s it’s a geeky job and now I’m actually investing in other you know, advanced tools to do all this Tracking a huge learning curve going on over there, the pixels the tracking the or in the whole process of how to really make this business work. So that’s a painful area, which, which I go through on a daily basis, but I’m willing to go through it because that’s what’s gonna keep the engine running. And I would say, there’s a third area where, which is a pain area for me right now is, you know, the, I would say the the whole product development piece, because I developed products, two years back, and which is, which is doing pretty well, in terms of the flow. But now it’s time for me to re engineer all of them, because I’ve also grown in the process. And I and it’s time for me to start revamping every single course every single curriculum of mine based on the new learnings and insights that I’ve got. So now that is a painful area, the painful process that’s going to start off from this month onwards where I’m recording and reshooting every single piece of the puzzle, every single piece of my content. And yeah, I’m willing to go through that pain. So yes, it is not rosy picture, it is something which I think every entrepreneur can relate with. Is it this game? Never. It never ends. It’s a constant game of reinvention. And I guess those entrepreneurs who are super, super successful they, they like the process. Yeah, they and they willing to go t

David Ralph [36:18]
rough it is that Yeah, it’s a process. What I I made a big mistake on a few years back was I allowed it allowed people to communicate with me on Facebook. And when Facebook is just like, you know, a brain fart, people just go, oh, text message, send a message. And I was getting bombarded left, right and centre, and I just couldn’t keep up with it. So now I’ve just got two ways of communicating with me if somebody wants to actually send me an email. Ban restricts majority of people because people can’t be bothered. They’re happy to send a one line question but they don’t actually want to do an email. So I get about 30 a day from people and I send a video I record it on a thing called bom bom video, I look into my webcam, I answer it, bang, and I send it back. And I spend about an hour and 10 minutes each morning responding. And then when their clients and they’ve effectively paid me, they can communicate with a private messenger. And then they had the ability to send it through to me. And that that’s the way that I kept it under control. Because, yeah, people were just sending messages on this Facebook group, and that Facebook group and private base and private bar, and it was just a killer, you got to restrict, but you’ve also got to provide value to the people that pay you. And I think Matt is the people that deserve to be able to get instant acce

Unknown Speaker [37:42]
s to

Siddharth Rajsekar [37:42]
me. Yes, absolutely. So one of the process that I’ve actually set up is totally with your format of email. So any communication, there’s no numbers, no WhatsApp, not even Facebook. It’s only email. And for my core customers, who am I high paying customers. I have a telegram group. So you know if there’s anything that they post, I also said the code over there, so they cannot just message me for anything and everything. I post out voice notes and videos inside the telegram group on a continual basis. So that really no keeps a communication. So I think it’s also important to make it clear or set the context of how the communication should happen with the community. And I do this on a weekly basis. When I do my weekly calls. I tell them, this is how you can reach out to me and I keep educating them so that, you know, it frees me of

Unknown Speaker [38:28]
my time. Ye

Siddharth Rajsekar [38:30]
, David, when I go off on vacation, I just put an hour’s up, it says you won’t get a response within a month. And I just ignore it totally. And as long as you tell people that the ones that wind me up SIDS is the one who then send another email two days later to say just want to check but you’ve seen that either. They’re adding to it you know, you’ve already sent a message don’t send another message chasing up the message before you know I’m more likely to Just delete it and move on to something else. Because that is that I think it’s the dark side of entrepreneurship in mountain communication that comes through to you. And you do have to be focused on restricting it somehow. So but it’s the right commuication.

David Ralph [39:19]
With yourself as well getting into your life, you’re in Chennai, India at the moment. What sort of hours do you operate? Are you the sort of entrepreneur that runs 24 hours a day? Or do you work mix business time so that you can go home to your wife in your family? What do you act

ally do? Yeah, in my case, I work from home and I have two kiddos, and a wife is a musician and, you know, it’s a it’s a home based business. And I have just three employees working for me right now and they’re all freelancers you know, that are sitting in different places. So my work hours are right now what I did was I first when you Some I like to keep three days in a week. absolutely free. And what do I mean by that? Yeah, and entrepreneurs always thinking and I’m always working in my head, but I like to keep my Wednesdays, completely free. That means there are no appointments, no meetings, nothing. And I like to use that day for thinking and thinking about new ideas. And I just like pen and paper, I don’t even have my laptop on most of the time, I just open up a book pen and paper and just try to put together some new ideas to you know, to grow the business. In some cases. Now, if not the logged on situation, I would drive out of town, I would have, just go stay in stay in some hotel just on my own just for thinking. So that’s, that’s a ritual that I’ve been following for, I think for more than 18 months now. So it’s really really helped me so Wednesdays is a completely free day. Saturday. I normally keep it for the family, like spending more time with the kids and others don’t be all living at home, but still giving more time to the family and Sunday’s the spiritual day. Normally I would take the family out to the temple or we You know, visit some some spiritual places and stuff and just keep the culture cultural element into the family. And the actual work week is a four day workweek. So the on Thursdays I do my community calls on on Monday and Tuesday I do my sales webinars. And of course, Friday as well. I do my sales webinars, I’ve actually structured it in that way. And the core day, I like to start my day with with meditation. I also do affirmations in the morning, I write my gratitude notes. Even I have a book book where I write my goals. I like to start the day with that kind of, you know, that tone. And then my core hours, I would say is that the 10am to 1pm. And I don’t do too many meetings these days. I don’t accept any meetings unless it’s like super important. But yeah, the co workers for me is more about content creation, content development, looking at numbers and statistics. And like the evening part, I usually keep it a little bit more free. And I do webinars in the evenings like in Their time like after 8pm 9pm. So that’s like the core working hours mostly for my sales webinars that I met people in. So the daytime is more focused on the the core activities of the business and the sales and marketing happen in the evening. So that’s pretty much the structure. Yes, there is a lot of ad hoc that happens. But by by keeping three days, three, it’s actually helped me, you know, grow the business much faster. In the last 24 months. I’ve seen like tremendous growth because of having that breathing space to to recreate myself and that’s what recreation is all about, like to recreate and come back.

Yeah, I agree. I agree with that. Totally. I take Mondays and Tuesdays off. I don’t do anything on that. Wednesdays, I prepare for my guests turning up on birthdays to record shows. And I might do some sort of pre coaching clients chats and connection. birthdays is my podcasting day. Friday is my coaching day, and Ben and I just started doing Sunday evenings as well because I wasn’t doing anything on Sunday. And it works well for people in America and stuff. But they, they can have some coaching. So yeah, so pretty much I have Saturday, Monday, Tuesday and all of Sunday off really, by keeping is when I switch off my business, that’s it, you know, I don’t keep on checking in, I literally just disappear and I’ll be gone for four or five weeks, and then I come back and open it up. never had that before. But now I’ve got it. Ah, it’s so powerful. But let’s listen to the words now from a guy who created a business in his former took him a while to get there. But when he did, he became a legend Steve Jobs.

Steve Jobs [43:37]
Of course, it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards. 10 years later. Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something, your gut, destiny life, karma, whatever. Because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well worn path. And that will make all the diference.

David Ralph [44:12]
Those words apply to you sits when you look back on your life.

Siddharth Rajsekar [44:16]
Absolutely, absolutely every single one, but I love that commencement speech by Steve Jobs, Stanford speech. And every every single piece, you know, like from music, I learned all the skills where now I’m using those skills to edit my own music, edit my own videos, you know, I can add whatever I want. I’m so much more hands on with the kind of content work that I’m doing right now because of that, that I had done in 2001. And then that whole phase of, you know, managing my numbers when I was in my corporate job now I’m using all those skills right now to manage my numbers in my own business. And of course, running the agency, the people management, all the mistakes that I’ve done over there, I’m able to now keep my team really lean and mean and you know, really focus Based on objectives and looking at how I can get the best out of each person without having to micromanage anyone, so all absolutely my entire journey has been based on Steve Jobs up whatever he just said, connecting

David Ralph [45:12]
the dots backwards and your journey gives you the skills this is the thing that really emphasises what Join Up Dots is all about. It’s not about running away from your past is about looking at your past and thinking, what things did I do that I was really good at what things any in may not be relevant in that environment. You know, I used to stand up and do training courses. I used to speak for a living, I used to break down really complicated subjects into learnable chunks. I do exactly the same now. But I just earn a lot more and and have my own time. So it’s not about reinventing yourself. It’s about looking at yourself and finding the gold that’s already wi

Unknown Speaker [45:54]
hin you. Absolutely. It’s about the integration of all those experiences, and it continues, journey continues and these experiences are going to be, you know, adding new dimensions to what’s going to be coming in the future. And that’s the, that’s the beauty of, of being human. I think we got to just keep reinventing ourselves and, and be open and flexible, and keep setting the next goal. I think that’s, that’s wha

David Ralph [46:19]
drives. Yeah, I don’t know how you’re gonna get there, but just set a go and then be flexible with your approach. Now I knew that I was going to get to this point of the show, because I know because I do it every single day. And this is a part of the show called a sermon on the mic when we’re going to send you back in time to have a one on one with your younger self. And if you could go into a room and see the young said sitting there. What advice would you give him? Well, we’re going to find out because I’m going to play the music and when it’s fate, it’s your time to talk. This is the Sermon on the mic

Siddharth Rajsekar [47:18]
I’m here to tell you that you can do whatever you want. There’s nobody here to judge you. There’s no one here to tell you what you have to do. I want you to enhance your awareness of this world. I want you to explore as much as you can. I want you to be as creative as you can. And don’t worry about making mistakes. Because mistakes are just there to guide you and make you get more aligned to what you really want. So I’m here to tell you said that you are on this planet for a much bigger purpose. Just be free to explore. Be free to enhance your creatiity. And yes, you’ll find the place that you want to go. Everybody always does little seats. Everybody always does.

David Ralph [48:04]
So Sidd. What’s the number one best way for our audience who’ve been listening today can connect with you?

Siddharth Rajsekar [48:16]
Yeah, people can connect with me on my website. They can look me up on Siddharth logic.com. I bought a YouTube channel with a lot of in depth content if you want to dig into, like most of my videos are 30 minutes, 40 minutes long, where I go deep, a deep dive into concepts. So yeah, subscribe to me on my YouTube channel and stay connected. That’s the best way

David Ralph [48:35]
Sidds thank you so much for spending time with us today joining up those dots. And please come back again when you’ve got more dots to join up because I do believe that by joining up the dots and connecting our past is actually the best way to build our futures set up.

Siddharth Rajsekar [48:35]
Thank you so much. Thank you, David.

David Ralph [49:08]
Siddhart Rajeskar. Now that was interesting, wasn’t it. I really like that. So So the six areas of business that you can look at, you can look at business growth, career growth, health, wellness, making money, relationships, and arts and crafts. And as he was saying that I thought to myself, yeah, it’s true all businesses or within that. Now for me, I kind of fall within business growth and career growth. Okay. Now, you could also argue I could spin it onto health and wellness, because the more you’re in a business that you love, the better you feel. So you can take elements of that and sort of like a pick and mix like a sweetie shop or candy. As they say, in America. When you choose a little bit bit and a little bit of that, you can sort of make a very powerful business, but you’ve got to know what you want to do at the very beginning. If you don’t, then you’ve really got to go back to the drawing board because once you’ve got that fixed decision, you can start thinking about who is going to be your ideal client, where are they how much you want to charge and you can start moving forward. If you got that right at the very beginning is very, very difficult. But until next time, I will be here waiting for you. And if you’re interested in starting your own business or just sort of having a chat in running through a few business ideas, just drop us a line. I’ll be here waiting for you. And we’ll see you again. See ya.