GAURAV GURBAXANI on #AskAviArya show

Most important questions. How are your doggies doing?

Doggies are awesome. You are going to hear them in the middle of the interview.

Lovely. Lovely, lovely. Perfect. Let's get. Let's get right into it. I've been doing this back to back, back to back since 2:00'.

Clock. Wow.

That's Anish, by the way. Hey, Anish.

How's it going? How you doing?

I'm pre.

I was in your mind.

Searching for ls. Searching for truth. I couldn't let you go without a request or even the task. Okay. So Gaurav, welcome to the Askavi Arya show where we search, we take flights, planes, travel by road and search the best Internet moguls in the world. People who define. And this is. Here's how we define an Internet mogul. Somebody who understands the true power of the Internet that allows them to scale their revenues more, bigger than ever thought possible. Be able to make an impact on as many people as possible but still stay connected to family and home. You can do it today because all these three aspects of the triangle meet because of Internet marketing. So you're one such Internet mogul. And I remember the first time I met you when you were giving a talk on stage and your subject was how to McDonald your digital agency. And that was such a well thought of subject line. Because everybody who's got going crazy running an agency has to have listened to that talk and your blog and all of that about that. So Gaurav, before we get started, let us know who you are behind the scenes. Gaurav. Your first crush. Your first, you know, your craziest fantasies.

So thanks a lot for having me on the Ask Avi show. Real honor to be here. And I too vividly remember the first time meeting you, Avi, at the high traffic summit in Delhi. It was super awesome meeting you. And I remember your trademark jacket.

Race car jacket.

Yeah, yeah. Really awesome stuff. And again, thanks for having me here. A little bit about me. I really like the. I like the qualification of being an Internet mogul where you get to use the Internet but you really choose to use your time with family, friends, things that matter well beyond actual day to day business.

Absolutely. And you don't compromise on your big dreams. You can still make it 100 times more impactful as possible but still stay connected to your family through your laptop.

Absolutely. You can stay connected. So I run this company which is called online business. And a few people know that I started my digital marketing probably maybe at the same time as you. It was back in 2000 when the Internet was still fairly a new thing. And I learned how to make money online with affiliate marketing and post making just a small amount of money. It was really enough to give me a sniff of how addictive digital marketing can really be and post that. We went to scale an online agency where we were doing lot of agency work, back office work rather for international companies doing SEO and usual outsourcing kind of projects, which has been a lot of fun. Also it's given us the ability to grow our own dreams, our own passions, our own visions, which is teaching people how to use the Internet and really build the Internet lifestyle in terms of crashes. Well, I think my crushes started at the age of seven or eight. I had a lot of crushes and these days I think crushes still pretty much happen. But now with different websites and different software and tools, any tools that can, you know, hack your business, give you shortcuts, save time, same effort. Wow. Your customers basically make life a lot easier.

Lovely, lovely. And tell us about your dogs.

Dogs? My dog has his own e commerce store. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

Actually, tell us about it.

So we had an office, you know, we had an office back in the day where we would have maybe about like 25 to 30 full time employees. And as soon as I got married, the first thing I told my wife, actually this was before we got married, is like, see, we are getting a dog. And my wife loves dog life, she loves dogs as well. And one of the promises was that I'll take the dog to the office every day so that she doesn't have any kind of hassle. So if you take a dog to digital marketing office, you can imagine there going to be crazy things that happen. So we started an e commerce store, we made like jingles, we did a lot of fun things. And then my dog found his own wife and they had a little bit of a family brewing together. So now we have two dogs. You'll probably hear them in the next few minutes once they're back from their walk. But again, nowadays I work 95% from home, so it's, it's fantastic to be able to really do exactly what I've been doing at home as compared to going to an office.

That is so amazing. So you know, like, in fact I just enrolled to go to Bali for the remote conference. Have you heard of it?

Oh fantastic. I'm going to be seeing you there.

Yeah. So you know, it just, the whole idea seems so fascinating. And so we at Internet moguls are a huge army of people who come under one roof. Every day, which is a lot of fun as well. But going forward, building the personal branding side of Internet moguls, I don't think we want. So we've just got a few people in Philippines now and some in Vancouver. And we're loving this remote working, but it's still got its own. There's some friction happening right now. So tell me how you are working with remote workers from. And not having to go to a physical location every day.

Sure. So this is actually something that I'm super passionate about. So even when I heard about the running remote conference, which was, you know, gathering people who work remotely, you know, there's a niche, there's a community of people who work remotely, and you still want to be connected, right? You still want to have. You still want to fit in. Even if you're not going to work, you want to meet people. So we saw this as an opportunity, saying, like, wow, let's go ahead and meet, you know, hundreds, actually 500 people who are already running remote. So one thing that we learned really early on working with actually a US agency, was that you really need to be 100% transparent. Typically, like, at least in India, you have this kind of mentality of trying to cover things up, whether it's for a client or whether something's not done or whether it's for someone who's working. There's always this excuse making like, oh, there's this festival, or this one's going here or this one's going there. It's just like in our culture, which is not really the most professional way to scale. So we are working with this US Agency, and I knew the owner. We kind of had a personal relationship. And he's like, see, I love you guys, but I want complete, complete transparency. And. And I think that was the biggest blessing for us because we had to build a system ground up, which is completely transparent. So we started using software today. You've got time, doctor. Before that, we were using Hubstaff. You've always been using software, which essentially tracks what our freelancers are doing.

Right.

So we have the saying that transparency trumps trust. Of course we want you to trust us 100%. There's no way we can be doing business if you don't trust us and we don't trust you. But transparency completely trumps that. And using the software, whether it's internally, whether it's with our own employees, whether it's with customers, one thing we tell all our customers is you're going to be able to literally spy on the People who are working on your projects. So there's no way people are going to slack off. There's no way that your work is not going to get done. There's proof, there's documentation literally of every single thing that we do. So that kind of help us stand out from a lot of competitors as well, because people are not willing to offer that kind of transparency to customers. But when you start giving that to people as an option, saying that this is what you're going to get, then they became like, you know, long term, like our relationships really scale until date. You know, we get paid per hour and we feel that, you know, if we aren't giving our customer exactly 60 minutes to an hour, then essentially we are ripping them off, we are cheating them. Time is money, so you've got to really be able to commit 100% exactly to what you're going to get. And that's when we see like relationships super scaling.

But how do you hire the right people when you're running a remote office?

So we started off actually in house. Like we have this really amazing team, young people doing all our work. But then, you know, life happened with a lot of us. People get married, people have kids, women move on, all that stuff kind of happened. So this team that we started with running remotely was an in house red team. So we knew them, we trusted them, things were working well. And once we started to scale, we started introducing like these exams, Quizzes. Exams, tests that you really need to pass before you can start working with us. So not only are we tracking your time, but actually when you do enroll with us as a freelancer, you do need to pass tests. And these tests of course have evolved over a period of time. Yeah, once you do that, we know you're the right fit. And something that we like to do is make everything into a micro job, make everything into a very small tasks. Like for example, in search engine optimization, we're not telling one freelancer like, hey, there's this project, go and do SEO for it. We are likely telling 50 different freelancers, hey, there's this project, there's this URL, here's a keyword, this is what you need to do. You need to build a backlink, you need to put in the title tag, you need to label the images. So they're very small jobs like literally that hopefully people can't necessarily screw up. And I'll just give me a second, I'm just going to allow the doggies.

And yeah, please do that. Yep, they are back in. Lovely, lovely. So so but when it comes to, you know, so a lot of people who are running agencies have fixed costs and agency is a great model, but the fixed cost will sometimes crush an agency. So how do you. So when you get a project, do you outsource it to project managers who are freelancers? And when, God forbid, you lose the project, you tell them that you're not paying them for that time. So that way you don't have a fixed cost. Is that how you run it? On what are the other better ways of running it?

Yeah, so we have this core team. Initially our team was about 40 to 45 full time on our payroll, rain or shine, we just have like four actually we got five full time people right now who basically manage the entire operations. They are on a full time payroll rest. Everybody else is task based. So whenever there's work we have a platform. We have a platform called quickie where we go and list this work and people come and they qualify, they pick up the work and they do it. We encourage that. They already have jobs, you know, if they have a job, they can still pick up extra work. If they want to freelance with someone else, they are more than welcome to do. So this, we've told them it's part time micro jobs, this is what you kind of need to do. And of course the people who have been around longer, people who do well, they get priority like any other business, but we don't have any.

What are the challenges in this? So you know, so far it sounds, you know, it's obviously a good plan, it's better. But every, every process, every system has its share of challenges. What are the challenges here?

Yeah, okay, so you're right, you know, this isn't, this isn't the magic bulletin. Like any business, you're gonna have screw ups, you're definitely gonna have screw ups. And I think it's just redundancy, just having like redundancy, having other people being able to do the job. Something maybe not on record, I'll tell you, but something that happened fairly recently is we were, we're really good at optimizing websites for speed. So the faster your website loads, the better it is. For that we have a team of people who go and they clean up your stuff, reduce your image size, compress it, all the technical stuff. And your website is faster, you know, five seconds faster, six seconds faster, one second faster. Yeah, it could depend. Sometimes even one second is like really huge. But it does involve messing around with the clients hosting site, which means the website can go down and just really recently, we had this client whose website we were like, yeah, yeah, yeah, we can do it. We make it 30% faster, and someone is doing the job. They screwed up. Website goes down, and he bails and he's like, dude, I can't do it. I just cannot do it. I'm sorry. And this guy's website is done. And it's a E commerce website which literally makes sales every couple of minutes. So that, dude, you can imagine, like, any business owner is gonna be freaking pissed off.

Oh, my God. Yeah.

And I'm not like, see, this is one. One project. Maybe that project is worth $50, which means we probably profit 10, 10, $12 off the entire gig. But for that, on a Sunday, I have to be pulled out. You know, I'm the guy in charge of this. I had to find somebody else to be able to fix what the other guy did, and then to find somebody else who could fix the original problem of the website, so. Which is redundancy. But you don't have that much control, you know, like, this guy said he could do it, he couldn't do it. He screwed up the website, he screwed up the client's website. Shit happens, you know, like, what do you do? So, yeah, and it just happened, like, really recently. Less than, like, two to three weeks ago. So it got me, like, you know, like in an agency, like, especially when you start an agency, it's, like, pretty intimidating working with angry clients. So I'd actually forgotten about that, but when this happened, I'm, like.

Running an agency. So tell me about your McDonald. Is your agency system. Are you teaching? Are there workshops around it?

Yeah. So this again happened maybe about two, two and a half years ago where I was asked to speak at this event in the US they actually invited me to Vegas to speak on outsourcing. Like, how should, you know, digital marketers outsource stuff? And since we are in the outsourcing space, they said, like, come on over. Come on over and give us a talk. And I don't know whether it was timing or whether it was fate, but I just watched the movie, the Founder. I checked out the movie as I found. I'm like, man, this guy is, like, just brilliant. This is how every business should kind of operate with standard operating procedures. And I started doing more research. I watched the movie again, started reading about books. There's other book called E Myth as well, which talks about a similar concept about really having things processified. So we took that to the next level. We really wanted to be able to relate to our International customers. So we knew what best would work for them. They understand that McDonald's is a process and you're always going to get exactly what you ordered. And that's kind of been the philosophy with digital marketing as well, is that you'll always get like what you ordered. You're going to have the right quality, you're going to have the right consistency and a similar experience, an exact same experience. If we could deliver on a month, on month basis. So that did create a little bit of interest and post that we took the concept, this was a concept initially, like McDonald ize or digital marketing was a concept. But then we started to apply that to every single thing that we actually did. So for example, with search engine optimization, we have certain packages. It's like literally the small, medium and large or jumbo combo, Happy Meal, whatever you want to call it. All right. And each of those has a specific ingredient.

Love it, love it.

Each of those has a specific ingredient. And at the end of the month, it's kind of like giving your client a report card saying like, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. These are the 10 things that we committed and pay us and we're going to do the same thing for you again next month.

Lovely, lovely. So tell us, Gaurav, what's next store? You've McDonald's, the agency, you've done a lot of outsourcing work and you know, you, you figured out both models and so, and now, and you know, your, you know, the very few of us in digital marketing who know what they want, you know, what you want, you know, family comes first, staying close to home. I call it things close to the router. The closer all of us are devices, we stay close to the router, all of that. So you've got that figured out now with all of these learnings and experiences, what is next? What is next? How do you plan to scale?

So I think like something that I'm really super passionate about and I think this happens to people, you know, who are in a specific industry for a long time. I feel like teaching people, teaching business owners, teaching entrepreneurs, teaching the small and medium business owner how to really exploit the Internet, how to be an Internet mogul, as you said, is where we really have the most fire making processes, teaching people, making it simple. You know, unfortunately, I feel a lot of digital marketing courses or digital marketing experts, the first thing they try to do is they try to confuse the customer. They try to make it like overly complicated or, you know, SEO is this magic sauce and you need to do PPC and you want to lose money initially and it takes you like so much time, which is pretty much false. You know, it's not true. And today, like an entrepreneur can get set up, like literally invest in what, 10,000 rupees, a decent job, get their message out there, at least to begin. So helping entrepreneurs take these steps, helping them grow online, helping them, you know, automate, processify things so that they can do what they're supposed to do, which is grow their business. Perfect, Perfect.

So tell us what is, what is the. When it comes to online coaching and online training, obviously what you're saying can be done on in person. And again then you, you know, in fact, I am doing the very thing in person, flying all over the world. It's good fun for the last two years, but it's taking a toll on me and I'm trying to do more online coaching now. So what is your take on online versus offline coaching and all of that?

So like, for me it's always been simple. If you're looking at running an online business, do online coaching. If you're looking at doing offline business, know, do offline coaching. But if you're really looking at scaling online, you know, if you have an e commerce store, if you've got a blog, if you're doing affiliate marketing, then you already know that the Internet can do everything for you. So cost wise, expertise wise, scale wise, I definitely put my thumbs up for online training because the reach is just like, you know, it's, it's infinite. It's literally infinite. You can never have too many people on a webinar you could run.

I love that, I love that.

And it's true. It's really true. We've had people from all across the, at least all across India, north, south, east, west. And the reality is like, dude, you have an Internet connection, you have equal power, you have equal opportunity to be successful. And never ever has there been a time where everyone has an equal opportunity with the Internet. Everyone has an equal opportunity, especially with.

The Hindi and Hindlish and all the vernaculars coming into the scene. You don't need to have necessarily gone to a great school and, you know, have English as your first language. I mean, growing up, you know, people like you and I did have some, we did have an edge above, you know, better schools, better, you know, command over your language. But doesn't matter anymore. You can, you can be an Internet mogul in Hindi or Malayalam or whatever language you choose to. And I was telling my kids, you know, my chauffeur My driver has been with us for the last 14 years. And his kid, his daughter is called Preeti. My daughter is called Raya. And I was telling him, I said, your daughter and my daughter, we have the same opportunities now.

No doubt, no doubt. And it's empowering. It's really empowering. And it's changed everything. It's literally changed everything. Things that happened 10 years ago because of, you know, going to a better school. Like you said today, sorry, it doesn't make a difference. Yeah, you have YouTube. I have YouTube. Now it's a question of who works harder.

Let's make it happen. Exactly.

Many times you're gonna see the people from the Ivy League kind of sites, they suddenly now have competition, you know, they now have competition. Things that were kind of out of other people's reach today. You can't say that anymore.

100%. Gaurav, give us a few, you know, you always leave us with some insights on how to. So give us some how to guides which are the tools to go to how to find your right niche or what's happening on the Internet. Give us a few tools, some hacks, something which are like, you know, immediate shortcuts that we can. Which digital marketer watching this in India and Canada can implement and say, you know what? Hey, I didn't know this, this tool or this website helped me. I know you're a man full of those kind of ideas.

I honestly, I love tools, man. I just. And I don't need to think so much because they're like, in my face all the time. If you like, I can quickly share screens and give you, like a few, few things that I'm using right now. Should I do that?

Yeah, please.

Alrighty. So here I am at my favorite Chrome inbox and one tool, which is super cool. A lot of people have heard about this, but it's something that I keep running 24 7, which is keywords everywhere. Keywords Everywhere is going to tell you the right keywords. And we're super strong believers that keywords are everything on the Internet. If you're looking at growing a successful digital marketing practice, you need to understand keywords. So this tool does an incredible amount of stuff for you. This tool, which I'm going to show you, is a little black hat. It's a little maybe unethical, ish. But I'm going to show you exactly what it does, and it's more from an educational perspective. And let me just open up Facebook and log into your group. Can I log into your group?

Yeah, Please learn social media with aviation.

Just a second. So Internet, like Internet marketing is, you know, a lot about competition as well. You know, we teach this a lot about, you know, if you find the right competitors, will make it a lot easier for you because you can essentially tap into their market. You can find the right customers. You don't need to reinvent the wheel. So this is a very cool tool, which is a Facebook tool. And let's say I'm in your group. I decided that I really wanted to kind of go after your audience. What I would do is I'd come to this tool and look at the members over here and here. I can see that you've got about 1409 members. What I do is that then I just click on this button, which is called the Facebook extractor. And what this is going to do. Let me just show you real quick.

No way.

What this little naughty tool is going to do is that it's going to go through your entire page. I'm going to hit auto scroll. Just open the door for my dog because she's whining.

Yeah, please. I've just seen pictures of your dogs already.

And can you see my screen over here? It's picked up like 119 addresses and it's going to go through and it's going to pick up like all 1400 people in your entire group. And the next thing I do is I just like, stop. I pick this up and I would put it into the custom audience and now just show my message only to your people.

Crazy. Crazy.

And you could do it for any group. This was slightly before the massive Facebook Analytica scam that happened. So this was like a gaping entry point. You could just go and pick up the hungriest buyers possible, create a custom audience, and boom, you're golden. So that's one tool that we kind of did use. And then we. Then we got Buffer, which a lot of people are familiar with. Grammarly. You know, Grammarly, I think is a great tool for at least people in India whose grammar is not that good. And it's something that we insist all our employees, all our freelancers use because it just, like, makes stuff a lot more professional. And what else do we have here? This is another LinkedIn tool. It's called a web scraper, which will go and pick up, like, every single person on LinkedIn's email address. Yeah, I could just put in, like, are you avi Arya on LinkedIn or are you Abhijit?

I could be Abhijit. Avi Jit.

Yeah. So, yeah, you can see that it's just going to go pick up like email addresses or whether you are connected, whether you're not connected. So if you're looking at reaching people, this is like a really cool web scraper which is integrated with.

What's it called?

This is called the People Finder. Okay. Then you got Signal Hire, which does something very similar, finds people. You got Word Tracker. This is another cool one. So there's just so many different chrome extensions that keep coming up and each one does something specific in its own way, which essentially saves time. Lovely.

Gaurav, are you losing battery on your laptop? I used to be.

Good now.

Okay.

Well, that's so. That's weird. No problem.

Nobody take it.

This is just so random.

You know, craziest things happen. I'll tell you one. I was. I don't want to name the person, but I was interviewing a humongous Internet celebrity, like the biggest of the biggest of the biggest. And after the 45 minute interview, I realized that I couldn't save the recording.

Oh, God.

And something happened. And I said, you know what? I was like, obviously, I have to be transparent. I said, I'm sorry this happened. It's okay. Internet issues and all of that. But then I never heard from them again.

Yeah, man.

That.

It can be pretty embarrassing. Yeah.

But what I'm saying is that I'm now so, you know, something or the other keeps happening and nobody's expecting a perfect show. This is fun. I love these last two tools. I'm just going to pass this link on to especially the LinkedIn tool.

Awesome. What I could do is I'll be really happy to share, like, an entire list of tools that we use on.

That would be awesome because my team would love it. You know, everybody's not here today speaking Saturday, but I'm sure they would love it.

Absolutely. And are you still checking on my screen?

Yeah, I'm looking at all your emails. You're sending me an invoice for this show. Oh, wow. Is this what you were giving away at that event as well? Wow, that's a lot of stuff. This is really good stuff. How to start a company and do anything here. Audio sites. Wow. I can't hear you, but I'm following everything here.

Avi, can you hear me now?

I can hear.

Okay, that's weird. So you can hear me all the same. No, I couldn't. Are you serious?

Yeah. Yeah.

Okay, cool. I was talking to myself then. This is good, right?

It's perfect. Yeah.

Cool. So, yeah, this is an SEO workbook. So if you're looking at doing SEO, literally go and build like a backlink from each of these websites and you should be golden. Wow. Find your keywords, digital marketing tasks. You know, these are all the tools again here as well. So for every single tool or every single thing you do in digital marketing, here's a relevant tool as well as the feature and benefit. Like why should I do keyword research? Because of this, why should I do SEO is because of this specific reason. So whether you're a newbie, whether you're a got it, it's, it's good. And some content formats, like different types of content, a content headline generator. Because we really found out like what are the pain points of what people have is when you tell someone that hey, you need to do content. People understand that content is really important, but what are you supposed to do with that content next? So how do you come up with a headline? How do you get clicks, all that kind of stuff.

Really good stuff. Really good stuff.

Awesome. Really happy I could share this with you and yeah, look, look forward to talking to you. Happy to share. Anything else?

Well, thank you for your time, Gaurav. Thank you for this interview. Just one, one thing before we log off. What is that one thing? What's that one place where people can find you and what's that one service that you want to be known for?

So people can find me on the Internet, Googling me. I'm available on Twitter, on Facebook, email, ggonlinebusiness.org should be fairly accessible as a digital marketer. And that one service or that one thing is that if you are looking at scaling an online business, whether you're looking at training a team or whether you're looking at doing it yourself, definitely check us out. Always happy to have a one on one consulting. Talk to you guys and see whether we'd be a right fit. Perfect.

That's lovely, Gaurav. We're going to link it up. You know, I hope we're going to pick up pictures from your Facebook which are meant to be public, I guess. Yeah. Put a nice show around this and broadcast it to our audience in India and overseas and our groups. It's going to be real fun. So maybe because I've already done about five since two o'. Clock. So yeah, so there's going to be a lot of backlog and a lot of work for my editing team that comes back from attending a friend's marriage. He's coming back on Monday and I'm, I hope he knows the kind of work that's waiting for him in the next 10 to 12 days. We'll send you a link. If you're okay with it, we publish everything online.

Let's do it.

Perfect.

Perfect.

Thanks a lot. Say hi to the dogs and my regards to your wife and everybody at home.

Avi, thank you so much. Always a pleasure and look forward to meeting you in person really soon again. Look forward to it.

See you tomorrow. Bye.