Ep505: Kamal Krishna – Let Building Partnerships Be Your Focus

Andrew Stotz 00:02
Hello fellow risk takers and welcome to my worst investment ever stories of loss to keep you winning. In our community. We know that to win in investing, you must take risks but to win big, you've got to reduce it. Ladies and gentlemen, I'm on a mission to help 1 million people reduce risk in their lives. Just go to my worst investment ever.com today and take the risk reduction assessment I created from a lessons I've learned from more than 470 guests. It's time you start building wealth the easy way by reducing risk. Fellow risk takers this is your worst podcast host Andrew Stotz from a Stotz Academy, and I'm here with featured guests, Kamal Krishna, Kamal, are you ready to join our mission?

Kamal Krishna 00:47
I entered? Yes. I think I had the drumroll. And thank you for having me. It's very interesting. I think it's really interesting how you've dropped together and created so many interesting stories over the years. I had a really great time going through your podcast episodes.

Andrew Stotz 01:02
Thank you. Well, it's great to have you in the mission. And you know that that's what life's about, particularly as we get older is how do we share what we know and how do we help others to share what they know and they can share? Let me introduce you to the audience. Kamal Krishna is the founder and CEO of mobilize Bangalore's fastest growing advertising and B to B marketing agency. He has worked with major advertising conglomerates for nearly 15 years before jumping into and starting his own company. Even though he did not initially invest anything, he kicked off mobilized with hardwork, creativity, and client advances, which made it profitable from day one. My goodness, that is such a great kickoff story. Why don't you take a minute and tell us a bit about the value you bring to the world?

Kamal Krishna 01:57
Accenture? Sure, so like you said, I'm an advertising professional. And I run a very specialized b2b marketing and advertising agency that has a nonprofit to see this, it has set benchmarks in our space been profitable since day one. And it has won the trust of global brands across Asia, Pacific, India, and European markets. Now, I come with a simple goal. I am here to create professional opportunities for 10,000 people something similar to what you were talking about earlier, when it comes to your goals and dreams. And I also realized that I can't do that. Just with me just by doing one thing or with one company. It requires me to succeed, I have to push myself to do so I have to succeed. And without success, I have to create more and more opportunities, new ventures that not only others could tap into. I also intend to build partners who work along with me and pick what they like, very much what they like. And in the process, we end up building opportunities all around us. So that's a goal that I am that I work with. I live and work in Bangalore, India, with my family, although my work has taken me across most parts of the world. And here's a little trivia about me if I may. Yeah. I'm a motorist. I'm a motorcyclist, motorcycling enthusiast. And one thing that I have come to realize is that motorcycling equals meditation. I don't have to say I don't mean to say that I ride with my eyes closed or anything. It is just that when you are riding the highways, you have to be super attentive to everything and constantly be on guard. It's a time when really know the thoughts getting on whatever troubles you may have or anything you're stressing over. The mind is just blank and focused. Now tiring as these rights may be, they certainly end up clearing your head. So yeah, I highly recommend motorcycling especially in Northern Thailand, Chiang Mai area. This is a wonderful fun, fun place to ride. And the other thing I love and enjoy, and I highly recommend, again, our dogs. We have a rescue boy at home and another one. And I can't tell you just how much joy into our lives. I'm grateful every day for both Pepe and pixel allow me to wave a big hi to our boys. So yeah, that's about me.

Andrew Stotz 04:14
Exciting. When I came to Thailand, I didn't have much money or much anything. And I had energy and all that. But I did start to make good money pretty fast. And I bought a Harley Davidson Road King in 1998 when the bond devalued and I just there was a great opportunity for a brand new Road King and I basically rode that all over Thailand and just would pack up my bags, you know and just say I'm just driving. I had no plan. I never ever set a plan of where I was going or you know where I'd end up or where I would sleep for the night I would just ride and I know the feeling of meditation. You know when you're riding a motorcycle also, what's kind of interesting is, which I never really understood until I did it, you know long distances is like that. The average can always remember the changes in temperature as you go through different areas and just go a little dip and all of a sudden it's cool air, and then it's warm. And then it's hot. In Thailand, of course, this is not a bugs that come out at certain times a day, which, you know, you end up kind of saying, I don't think I'm gonna go out at that time. But yeah, and it's, it's funny, when you think about the roads in India and the roads in Thailand, it's not something you would, you would typically say you're meditating. But I think what you're saying is that you're totally focused, and you just can't bring other things in. So you just stay right in there. And you got to see grandma over there all the way over the side, she starts running, you know, how fast do I have to stop? So you know, that type of thing? I know that feeling. Let me just ask you a question about marketing and advertising and this type of stuff. What does it mean? I mean, for finance guy like me, I always thought, you know, the way you do business is that you come up with an idea. And, you know, people just knock on your door, and they come and buy it. And, you know, I didn't realize that you really need to do marketing and advertising and that type of stuff. I just thought those were things were, you know, just kind of fluff. But I've learned that, you know, there's so much so what is it that you do or your agency does, you know, in the space?

Kamal Krishna 06:24
So, it's a good question, Andrew, you see, we all entrepreneurs, or companies for that matter, we, we truly believe the right ones for us truly believe that we have something really good to offer consumers customers and such like. And yet truth is, we know it. The point, the whole point of, you know, building something really great or you know, a product or an offering or a solution or service is that you annoying that you know people needed is to refine those people and have a conversation with them. I mentioned b2b marketing earlier, because typically, advertising is looked upon as, as a lot of noise. And sometimes, you know, full of not so true elements. But here's the thing about business to business, or b2b marketing, every single day, I have to create an opportunity, or create content, that is, that will be read by a decision maker or CEO. Because it's business to business. And decision makers and CEOs have one thing in common, they typically do not like advertising, or they are immune to it, so to speak. So unless and until you know, your marketing communication has a lot of value, and absolute amount of truth, and actionable ideas. You listen to it, and you have something to do. That's what I mean by actionable ideas, it is not going to fly in the b2b marketing space. Now, it is so hard that if you do truly Well, it really, you know, makes you a really great professional. And what I love, love love about advertising is that it allows me to, you know, one day look at a generator and electricity generator on the other day, an airline or an aircraft or CD set CD scanner, and you know, you learn so much about different things. And if you're curious, so and you have the ability to understand content, if you have the empathy to talk to seniors, or senior leaders, and, you know, understand the need, and you believe in the product that you're pitching. I think, you know, it deserves to be heard. And that's what, in a nutshell, marketing slash advertising is for me. And that's what I recommend to

Andrew Stotz 08:41
everyone. Fantastic. And what's the best way for people to find you?

Kamal Krishna 08:47
I'm accessible, readily accessible on LinkedIn. That's, that's probably the

Andrew Stotz 08:55
best. LinkedIn. Good, then we'll have links to all that in the show notes. So people can if you're listening in and you want to learn more, just go to the show notes and click and ask them all and any question. So now it's time to share your worst investment ever. And since no one goes into their worst investment thinking it will be tell us a bit about the circumstances leading up to them. Tell us your story.

Kamal Krishna 09:19
Sure, my worst investment Andrew, my worst investment ever was actually accepting an investment that I shouldn't have, at the time. Allowed expand. A few years ago, during the time when I just started out I had I brought in capital from someone who had the brains, but unfortunately not the attitude. And the lesson I picked from it all was that, you know, and the lesson that I picked from it ended up defining an entirely new approach to business and workplace partnership that I continue to follow to this day. So here's what happened. About six years ago, I just started off my advertising business and while the business and prospects appeared good, there remained a fair bit of early apprehension Around continuity, scale, capital, etc, you know, things that all of us deal with in our initial years. Now in any business, it's typically good practice to diversify. That's another insight that comes to mind right. Now, diversification has its advantages. And the thing with diversification is that it typically works out really well once you're settled in, and you can afford to, to do so. So again, to summarize, I've just started off, you know, everything was looking good, I had an opportunity that I looked upon, which was to diversify. And I probably should have known that it was too early to do so. And this is where I made my mistake. So as an advertising agency, during those early days, I found myself looking at an opportunity to diversify a creative and design services by bringing in a partner along with a then very substantial investment. And I looked at it as a small risk that could potentially turn rewarding in terms of enhanced business. Now, what had happened was that an old colleague had turned over the office and he was quite excited about venture, you know, he was keen to explore if he could come in as an equity partner to bring in data and analytics capability to pair up our creative and design capability. On the face of it, I'll be honest, he sounded great. Creative, combined with data has the ability to superpower market performance. So I signed him up, took his money, but luckily decided to park it for the thought that I will only touch it after a few months. Now, I am telling you the story of my worst investment and this one decision, marking that money in a bank account later, it turned out to be a really great. So back to the story.

Andrew Stotz 11:34
To do that, you know, when you're starting to do this, you need that money so badly.

Kamal Krishna 11:39
I couldn't agree more. And luckily, you know, it's this, this whole episode did not not last long. So that worked in my favor. But I'm hoping that this story, you know, wants people or at least alert them to consequences of you know, jumping into associations that are not thought through. My mistake, should help others back to the story. So once we started working together, this person and I as soon realized something very important. You see, talent or individual ability alone isn't and never should be a dealmaker, whether you're hiring employees or signing on partners for them. Through this, it takes so much more than just talent to succeed. For example, a person can be supremely talented, and yet carry a very negative attitude towards work. And if you choose to work with such a person know that he, the only one accompany anything, would be that person alone, I figured out quickly that my new partner wasn't really keen on getting his hands dirty, something that's required for any new venture, it doesn't really matter how senior or up the pecking order you may have been in a typical job. Entrepreneurship requires, you know, back to brass tacks attitude, to bring about your vision and plan to life so that you can bring in people get customers or employees who can then put their trust in you and your venture. Now, this person, I think, was expecting entrepreneurship to be something of a comfort zone. Once money had been brought to the table, not realizing that as a as a data and analytics subject matter expert, I, you know, the least that I expected of him was to walk the path together with me combined his ability to mine, and importantly, work really hard to not only convince, but actually deliver a promise to have new customers. So we're only just get into us. So fairly soon, I found myself in situation where I would be making promises, I would end up making promises I didn't think we could keep or deliver alongside a person who trusted his talent, all right, but consistently blamed failures on either the customers lack of understanding or their lack of appreciation of a startup. So luckily, like I mentioned that it was early days, and I was yet to touch it because this person's investment. So I found myself faced with a choice, I could either keep and use this capital, and find a way to work with someone who clearly wasn't passionate about this whole thing. Or I could trust myself and my original plan, stay solo, and cut any losses early on. I took the decision to go solo and return this person's money. You see, I realized what I was going to lose access to say $100, then someone with the wrong attitude, easily cost me way more in the future. In hindsight, that was the worst investment of my time different money. And yet, it was probably one of the better decision that had become a profitable growing business.

Andrew Stotz 14:23
So let's review the lessons that you learned.

Kamal Krishna 14:24
So the primary lesson because like I said, was to never rely on talent alone. But there is another good thing that came out of this experience. I continue to believe in both things, finding the right partners finding ways to diversify. What changed for me was that ever since then, I began hiring professionals, really talented professionals on a simple premise or additional premise, if I may say so. An additional you know, that goes beyond salaries. I told these people, everyone and I tell them now, that if you really are as talented as you claim to be When we first meet, and you can work as hard or harder than it, we can be partners once we have worked together, and one together over a set amount of time, it sounds very simple. But trust me, if this isn't very common, it is definitely not common in the sense that, you know, be offered to equity in the business to these people as again, stock options alone, more complicated instruments. The only investment we seek from them is their time, hardwork, commitment, and shared successes. This approach, Andrew helped me departments on the basis of demonstrable formance and integrity they're there. And I'm proud to say that over the last six years, we have already made for partners and grown both our business value and the diversity in our service offerings exponentially. Now my past experience may have been a rocky one, Andrew, but I'm grateful for it, considering it pushed me to consider putting up really a much better plan in place.

Andrew Stotz 15:54
Well, let me summarize what I took away from it. I mean, the first thing I want to think about is for the listeners out there, you know, what do you How are you giving your top employees a piece of the action, I mean, obviously one way is through a good bonus and things like that, but aligning them as shareholders that type of thing. You know, this is a great Kemal really giving us a wake up call to say what are you doing there. And I think that that's interesting, in the second thing is thinking about, I wrote down about like roles, when someone comes into a company, it's gotta be kind of clear what what they're going to do what they're going to bring. My best friend came from Ohio, now I was in Thailand the first year or so. And he said, Let's start a coffee factory in Thailand. And so in 1995, we started a coffee factory. The idea was, I was working in investment banks, making good money, and getting to know people in the financial industry, and we made a decision that it would be better for me to keep my job and let him run the business. So we made a very conscious decision that we could finance the cash flow, and, you know, both focused on our areas. And even during times that I lost my job, or in the difficult times, I still just wasn't ready to go work in the company. And Dale and I, you know, talked all the time about what was going on. And I tried to do the accounting and finance stuff that I knew, as best I could, I could only work on evenings or weekends. But he knew that and we had an agreement. And now we're almost 27 years into it. In that partnership has worked. And part of what we kind of came to the conclusion is like he is the C CEO, he's the MD he's running the business. If I'm a sounding board, I'm trying to help I try to help on the finance and accounting side. But ultimately, we have a very clear role, I think you could probably say I'm a little bit more like a chairman, not involved in the daily business. And he's more like the managing director. And so you can make it work, it just said both parties got to want to contribute, you know, and what both parties want to contribute can add value to the overall. So that's my little story, when you told me about it. Before we turn on the microphone, I was thinking oh, the speaker, the recorder, I was just thinking about that story, too. So anything you'd add to that.

Kamal Krishna 18:29
I'm sure the coffee that you guys make tastes and smells great. And I couldn't be more, you know, they say business partnerships, like manage, it's something that must be cast in stone for it to work. Now, that's a very hard place. And our choices, as entrepreneurs must reflect that. My singular advice to even our listeners is, you know, if it is to consider building partners, like the way you and your partner did, as against bringing in someone who only has capital or wanting to offer, the commitment is so much more important than than any capital you can imagine. And now I also understand that it's not an easy decision or path. You know, sometimes you need the money, sometimes you just want to get on with it. But again, but then again, no great thing comes easy. We must find those who align and not to expect. And that's I think, true, true to your story. Because that builds value that I believe is mutually valued between partners.

Andrew Stotz 19:30
Yeah. It's interesting about the commitment because Dale and I have known each other for 35 years since we were about 14 years old back in Ohio. And I just know him very, very well. And during the crisis, he's managed the business pretty well considering most of our customers have been shut down, cashflow all the difficult times and he's been able to do it but there was one time when he asked me to come see him and our accounting person and I could see that, you know, he needs cash for sure. And I left that meeting literally left that meeting and was on the phone with the financial people that I know. And I said, How do we pull this together to make sure we get the funding that we need, you know, to get over this short period of time, and then basically was able to really support him in that area. So it's the commitment to say when times are tough, I got to do my part, I'm not doing a lot, you know, I'm outside doing my own thing in my own business. When it comes time to step up. Frickin step up, ladies and gentlemen, that's the challenge. Tuesday, yeah. So let me ask you what's, what's some resource that you'd recommend for listener.

Kamal Krishna 20:40
At this stage, I do not have a direct resource to offer. But I love talking to people. And I love new problems. So if you want a consultancy, you have to for free, I have a very patient here. And I have a curiosity and inherent curiosity to hear new problems, which I believe marketing could solve in such a way, which I think marketing itself in one way or the other. It could be any industry, it could be any, you know, sort of work that any sort of product that's out there, I would love to hear a problem statement and take a stab at it. Think of me as someone who, who just likes to take on challenges and sort of, you know, find really new innovative ways of doing that. That has been our secret sauce in the first place. You know, we have this policy get mobilized. We don't pitch necessarily, we when we actually do pitch, but when we go to go to a pitch we you know, we end the conversation by saying that look, I'm here to prove myself, not pitch myself. Because pitching is great. Everyone versus versus suit and, you know, shows up in the final data, proving takes guts, yeah, yeah, I'm putting myself out there. I'm literally putting myself out there. And if I don't show you that I love your brand, as much as you do, probably more than you do. Then then, you know, I've not proven myself and my pitch is useless to begin with. So yeah, if there is a resource, I would say, let's talk, it is talk, let's hear let's discuss problems and take it from there.

Andrew Stotz 22:15
That's a great offer. For the listeners out there. Just go to the show notes, you can click on his LinkedIn or you can just go to Kamal Krishna, on LinkedIn, just tell him that you met from the show. And say, I got this challenge. What do you think? And try to spend some time and you never know what it will lead to. Alright, last question, what's your number one goal for the next 12 months.

Kamal Krishna 22:42
So Andrew, over the last few years, we have grown exponentially, so much so that I have actually I'm about thankful, we have ensured a 50% growth in 2020 alone during the COVID 19 pandemic, when I remember losing 70% of our billings overnight. During the time, you know, these very special homebrewed partners that I have stood by me, for they are equally Hellbenders. I was then and continue to be today, they were equally helping to ensure that our investment would not fall apart. And thanks to them, and our teams we persevere. Now we have continued to power through 2021 With this entire year with over 100% model non performance. And now we are not only looking, I say we are practically ready for and we are all set to diversify further into brand new marketing communication specializations with new clients renewed confidence. And I'm really excited for 2022 today. That's one thing that I can tell you, as far as my goals for the next 12 months.

Andrew Stotz 23:39
exciting, exciting, like your style. Well listeners, there you have it another story of laws to keep you winning. If you haven't taken the risk reduction assessment yet, I challenge you to go to my worst investment ever.com right now and start building wealth the easy way by reducing risk. As we conclude, Kamal, I want to thank you again for joining our mission. And on behalf of a Stotz Academy, I hereby award you alumni status for turning your worst investment ever into your best teaching moment. Do you have any parting words for the audience?

Kamal Krishna 24:12
Thank you so much, Andrew. That's quite an honor. Well to do entrepreneurs looking to set sail, you know, people who are about to take risks that, you know, Andrew here, listeners is just here to help us. If you're looking to succeed, I would say partners are your best investment, and they are way more valuable than any capital you raise. You must therefore you must make it your business to either choose or build the right ones you do spective of the effort that requires I promise you it's entirely worth it. Now the only days as a small business whenever we pitched and we're going to talk about the pitching but earlier it we were in competition with bigger more established in Philly global advertising agency. And I would say one thing I would always add this one into our presentation. We tell our prospective clients that once we get your business and later there is a time when you bring us remember that you will always speak to a partner, someone was not just keen or interested in your business as an employee, they are instead, they would instead find every time, you know, find everything that you when you call us, you will find that all each one of us are partners, and we are entirely invested in your success and truest is this simple thought has always won us business and appreciations later on. So if there is one thing I would say is, choose your partners really pretty well. Spend time put in effort? And I assure you, it's all it's all.

Andrew Stotz 25:44
Such great advice. Well, that's a wrap on another great story to help us create, grow and protect our wealth. Remember, ladies and gentlemen, this podcast is about one guest one story one mission to help 1 million people reduce risk in their lives. Fellow risk takers this is your worst podcast hose Andrew Stotz saying. I'll see you on the upside.