- [Announcer] How do you break out of your comfort zone
so you can take the right action?
The CEO of Kingston Lane
and a sought-after keynote speaker, Sharran Srivatsaa.
Sharran has taken his company, Teles Properties,
to 3.4 billion dollars in five years.
Today, Dan Lok interviews Sharran
on the science of breaking out of your comfort zone.
(upbeat music)
- Credentials-wise, took a company from 300 million
to over 3.4 billion dollars in less than five years.
- Yeah.
- How many people on the planet have done that?
So I'm very very excited.
Welcome to the show, Sharran.
I appreciate it.
Share with us a little bit about your background
for our audience who doesn't know you.
- You will love this story.
I may not even have shared with you.
So the first job that I got,
I was really embarrassed to have a job
because I came from a decent middle class family
and the only job I could get was a janitorial job.
So I was mopping floors
and I didn't want my classmates to see me mopping floors.
So I took the midnight to 6:00 a.m. shift.
And I'm mopping floors and this older janitor tells me,
"Sharran, your English is not that great.
"I suggest you go get some
"language tapes." - English, yeah.
- Language tapes. - Language tapes, yeah.
- So I go to the library,
I ask for a language tape.
She says, "Well I have Mandarin, I have German,
"I have Japanese but I don't have English."
But she hands me an audiobook.
She's like, "Try the audiobook.
"This will at least get you going."
The audiobook was Unlimited Power by Tony Robbins.
- [Dan] Oh, wow.
- So the only way I know how to speak
is yelling and screaming because I heard Tony,
mopping floors six hours a day.
So my introduction,
learning English was from Tony Robbins.
- Still that exposed you to the personal development,
self-growth world, right? - Right.
It was not all rosy.
I remember my early days
and as international students I showed up on day one.
I went to financial services,
I handed them my one check that my father gave me.
I was so proud.
And she hands me my dorm room key.
She's like, "Sharran, welcome."
And then she tells me, "Hey, it's an international check.
"It's gonna take 10 to 14 days to clear.
"So come back and see me in 14 days."
So I had no money for 14 days.
I didn't have money to buy food for 14 days.
I remember this day vividly.
Two days in, I had not eaten for a while
and I was walking down campus.
I saw this dumpster
and I saw a couple people throw a couple of pizza boxes
into this dumpster.
I mustered the courage.
I jumped in.
I grabbed the pizza boxes and I ran to my room.
I was like, wow.
I made it, this is good.
I had a couple slices of pizza.
Next day, I was still hungry.
And this is a true story,
it was late at night and I saw two guys
throw Subway sandwiches into this dumpster.
I said, today's a bonanza.
This is amazing.
This is better than yesterday.
Then I jump in,
I grabbed the Subway sandwiches,
I grab a box of Pop-Tarts.
Then suddenly something whacks me in the face
and I start bleeding.
There was a raccoon. - Oh, wow.
- In the dumpster with me.
Like an eight by 10 dumpster.
And fight or flight kicks in.
- Yes.
- I grab the box of Pop-Tarts,
I grab the Subway sandwich,
I kick the raccoon,
and I run.
I just jump out and I run.
And that's when I realized
if this is rock bottom,
if this is the baseline,
I can take a lot of risk in my life.
And a lot of times I think we all,
I just talked about this before the show came on,
is that we work in this band of safety
and knowing that I can expand the band,
knowing that I can take more risk,
allows us to do more, be more.
- Sometimes I say to people,
when you hit rock bottom,
you can't fall any,
you can't do any worse.
You already hit rock bottom. - Right.
- It's like, sometimes I notice people,
they say they're struggling financially.
They say, "I've got no money.
"I've got only a few hundred bucks, a thousand bucks.
"I don't want to invest in myself.
"I don't wanna make a change."
I'm like, you already hit rock bottom.
What difference does it make?
Seriously, what difference does it make.
Right? - Yeah.
- Invest that $1,000, 2,000.
Whatever it is.
Buy that book.
You can't fall under this.
So it's something very interesting.
So what was the turning point?
From that point on,
how did you get into business?
- So what I didn't have was,
all I knew I had was this ticket,
this one check for the one year of school.
I had to come up with three more years of university.
And so I needed to do something
and the funniest story was,
I walk into my dorm room on day one.
And this was old school.
We didn't have Wi-Fi back then.
They just wired the dorm rooms.
And I realized that the plug to the internet
and the bed, I'm sorry,
the desk was 13 feet long.
So I said,
"Everybody in these dorm rooms
"are gonna need 13 foot long cables."
So I drove to Minnesota.
I bought as much cable as my roommate's credit card
would actually--
- Other people's money? - Other people's money.
- OPM. - Zero investment.
- I love it, I love it.
- And we bought so much cable.
I didn't have clothes.
So I put all the cable in my closet.
We sold cable at $3.00 a foot.
We made $57,000 in three weeks.
- Wow.
- And that, even before school started,
that paid for the school for the next year.
So me and my roommate split 50/50.
His parents were like,
why did you charge $20,000 at this credit card?
And we paid it all back.
But we made $57,000 in three weeks
and that was the beginning of,
oh my goodness.
We have such a-- - Closing in
on entrepreneurship.
- We could,
if I can sell Ethernet cable,
I can do anything.
- So you saw a need, a marketplace,
you just went for it.
Combined that with some skills,
some closing skill.
Not much closing skill.
It's just, "Hey, you wanna buy this?"
Right? - Yeah.
- And then, boom.
Right? - Yeah.
- But you made money out of thin air.
- Yes.
- It's simply an idea into that.
So what was it like,
it's kinda the first taste of entrepreneurship
or were you just thinking of,
I can make some money doing this,
to accumulate some tuition money.
- I was thinking,
as the first.
I thought I'd give myself a year to make money
but as soon as I made that upfront
it just gave me this bug
that--
- Wow. - Wow!
I didn't even,
not that I didn't work hard.
I worked hard on the idea,
I recognize.
I think you've talked about this a lot.
It's not about making the best burger,
but having the hungry crowd.
Right? - Yes.
- If you can have the hungry crowd,
I just found a hungry crowd. - Yes.
- And that became everything.
I got into, I got excited
about creating something from nothing
and that was just-- - Did you finish
the entire university or did you?
- I stayed, I finished all the way through
'cause I thought it was a responsibility
to my parents. - Yeah.
And in between you just start other things?
Do other things to make money?
- I had a lot of jobs in between, in school.
I didn't do paper routes.
I actually had a network of other people doing paper routes,
so that I would get paid. - Yes.
- So I did a lot of jobs.
- Entrepreneurial activities.
- Totally.
And then I started my first software company
out of my dorm room.
And during the technology boom,
I was able to take my software
and go to another software company in the Silicon Valley
and then we grew that and that was our first exit
and we sold that during the technology boom.
- I see.
And in between, as an entrepreneur,
what are some of the lessons you've learned?
We were talking about skill,
right? - Yeah.
- Talk to us a little bit about that.
How do you view skill?
How do you view growing a company very rapidly?
- Yeah.
I think we've been doing this all very naturally
but the hardest part for me has been,
just like you've been very humble to say,
"Hey, I started 11, 12 ventures
"and they didn't go very well."
And you've been so gracious to talk about that.
I had many of those
and I think the only ones that didn't succeed
were the ones that didn't have a promise.
I promise that,
the promise is,
when you buy X you get Y. - Yes.
- And now, people are trading you for the promise.
Now you can just scale Y.
I think a lot of times what people think is--
- They sell the product.
This is what this is. - Right.
- Versus what is it gonna do for me.
- Exactly.
And I think, as soon as I started figuring out the promise,
things started really,
so the biggest thing now I tell my team is,
there are two things that we always do
before we start any initiative.
What is the promise? - Yes.
- And then, what are the non-negotiables?
- [Dan] Yes.
- People always think,
well what is the offer,
what is the benefit?
All that's secondary.
What is the promise?
The promise is it's gonna save Dan or an engineer
or a salesperson.
- Like a one liner. - Yeah.
It's gonna save you 30 hours a week.
That's an amazing promise.
- Mmm.
- And now you're buying the promise.
You're not buying that product.
- Yeah.
- And so I have to deliver on that promise.
Anytime,
the hardest part was coming up with a promise.
And I think in everything that I've done,
the hardest part was, "Hey, what is the promise?"
We recently had,
our real estate company that we grew.
I'll give you the promise.
The promise was,
whenever I talk to anybody I would say,
a real estate agent who would come work with us.
- Yeah.
- I would say, if you take seven or more listings a year,
our platform can save you one day a week.
What would you do with the next 52 days a year?
So my promise was delivering them back--
- The time. - 52 days a year.
And everything that we invested and created
was centered around delivering that promise.