Episode 185: #1 Most Valuable Thing for Business Success with Tech Guru Vignesh Kumar

Welcome to this episode of the Million Dollar Mastermind. I'm Larry Weddell. And before we get started, if you want to know exactly how to win again and again, go to Wydell on winning.com webinar now to watch something I've put together for you. Now let's get going into this episode of Million Dollar Mastermind. I'm here with Vignesh Kumar, and we're going to talk about numbers and targeting and getting the right priorities. So welcome Vignesh.

Thank you, Larry. Thank you for having me.

Yes. And you know when we talked last time, you were talking about at the end of the week, you look back and you're amazed at how much marketing you've got done. How did you get yourself to the point that you're tracking yourself, you know, the where? How long have you been tracking yourself using these same numbers and same game plan audit? And how does that inform where you put your energy and effort and basically where you spend your time and how you keep your yourself on track to get the most out of your time?

Okay, so first thing, Larry, to kind of explain that, I'll be really brief about how I even got there to be begin with. So first thing I noticed, Larry, at this five year journey to figure out what actually matters in the world that's based on reality, you know, some of the things I noticed was, Larry, the smartest people in the world, this is how it kind of came to this. I guess the smartest, most successful people in the world, they were not doing what I expected them to do. For example, if you look at say, the Google guys, right, they're arguably some of the smartest few people like in the world, right? But instead of like going in and like, like learning science or kind of doing that type of stuff, they were like, oh, I'm gonna build a company. You know what I mean? I want to build a company. That is what I'm gonna focus on, that is gonna focus on for the rest of my life. This is what I'm gonna devote all of my time to. And that was like, at first it was really confusing to me. It's like, why, like, why would you being the smartest person in the world, not do something else and do this, right? One thing I figured out was, Larry, like if you run a company most of the time, like, apart from you doing anything else, right, like anything else except for like building a company or staying in business, you literally have to do everything you were to see, like, you know, if you're like a Nobel laureate, like A, you know, like Nobel Prize winner or whatnot, who's like a scientist or whatever the case may be. What they do is they do all the work themselves. Most of the time they have a little bit of funding and that's about it, right? Like, but instead they have to do, like, spend all their life time doing it, right? But when you build a company, it's not like that. You have tremendous leverage. Like, for example, Google now has 100,000 people that work with them. And they're like, again, they've assembled the smartest people on the entire planet to work with them and do everything that needs to be done and can make have a. They have, they can have a much bigger impact than them just doing it all by themselves, right? That's like the power of business and power of capitalism, which is you can multiply your results, you know, tens of thousands of times and multiply your power, influence, reach and the level of control you have over reality to a certain extent in, in, you know, in hundreds of thousands of times. Like I said, right? That's kind of the first thought about why I'm doing what I'm doing. So now that I figured out, okay, this is what works. Because there are a lot of things that people talk about that sounds really great, but then when you actually go try to do it, business itself is something that works. They had it 500 years ago, they had it thousands of years ago when someone started trading one thing for another thing. That's how business started and someone had a profit and it was good. So it's something that has worked for thousands of years. And I kind of figured that part out. Okay, this is what I should spend my time on. Because this is what the people who I want to be like are spending their time on, right? So number one, number two is then I figured out, okay, what is the most valuable thing in business, right? Like, so now that we figured out, business is super valuable. And that's the thing you need to focus on. What is the most valuable thing that you could do from a dollars and cents perspective in business, right? It is marketing. Marketing is the only place where you do not increase your cost. Like, you don't get like, you know, five or six new things. You don't get fighting new staff members. Usually it's just a way that you explain the product can make a huge difference in terms of how effective the marketing is. For example, I've gone into companies where literally I do two or three things and that company grows by 10 million, 20 million, $30 million, right? Now that may not sound like a lot. Maybe it does for you if you are, if you're just getting started. But there are some people who be like, oh yeah, $30 million is not that much money. Yeah, but think about it like this. That 30 million compounded over 30 years, that's a lot of money. That business lives for 30 more years and you know, same revenues generated over a 30 year time frame, that is a lot of money that, you know. And business value that's been generated that would not happen otherwise. Right? So that's like how powerful marketing is. Right. You didn't have to increase the cost three times to get to that increasing the revenue three times situation. Right. So I figured that part out. Okay, so marketing is the most valuable thing you can do in business because that is what allows you to grow your revenue in a visceral level. Right. There aren't other things like you can go and study MBAs for 12 years, 13 years, even 20 years. There isn't something else you go do that increases revenue. Like accounting, for example, can decrease cost, but it's not increasing quote, unquote revenue. So this was the primary insight which was marketing equals throughput, equals profit and revenue. That's kind of what I would focus on. So my entire calendar, because calendar is a really fickle thing because I use my calendar for a lot of things. But the thing is I, I track my time religiously because if you do not, what ends up happening is you might spend six hours doing something that doesn't turn into anything. You know what I mean? You might spend like three days doing something that doesn't turn into anything. Right. So what ends up happening is I devote my calendar to doing marketing activities because those activities then turn into marketing, which we've just established is the most valuable thing you can do in business. Right? So that is what most of my time, Larry, is focused on. Now I do have like, you know, there are client targets. For example, a client will say, hey, I want to reach this goal by Christmas. I want to reach this goal by X. I want to reach this goal by Y.

Hey, listen, there's a lot of information online, but there aren't a lot of people who have actually done something. In my case, I've actually built a successful business as accrued over 5 billion in assets under management and has done well even during trying times. Now, if you want to know exactly how I've done this, go to Whiteellawinning.com webinar Now, I've compressed a decade of learning into five short weeks. Just for those of you who want to give yourself an incredible advantage and are tired of waiting and watching others.

Move up, that's fine. But the thing is the devotion that you give, and devotion is a really interesting term, you know, when you say that. But it's like the devotion that you put in, the reverence that you have for marketing, being this super valuable activity is what delivers those results in the first place. So if you give it enough time, you give it enough effort, you give it enough, you know, forethought and insights and like, you put the customer first, you know, I don't, I know that's like a cliche to say, oh, put the customers first. If you trust in the customers and you put in the time, you take good care of them, they will not fail you. Everyone else might fail you, but they will never fail you. You give them the right time, you give them the right product, you give them the right marketing message, they will never fail to give you, you know, revenue in return. Right? So that's why kind of focus majority of my time to building marketing campaigns, working on marketing activities. And I look at every week, I'm like, okay, how much marketing did I put in, like that week? That is like my, like on Saturday, like Saturday morning, I kind of look at my calendar, like, okay, how much marketing did I execute last week, right? Was it one campaign? Was it two campaigns? Was it 21 or 15 or how many? Because I know, like, not all of them are going to be million dollar campaigns, but if I keep putting in the effort, right, Some of them are going to be million dollar campaigns. Right? That's kind of how I see that, Larry.

And, and to be, to be precise, marketing is new business. New customers are more business from existing customers. Marketing is not a general term. You go to school. I've got a degree in mark marketing. The purpose of marketing is to get more business. And that's how you judge whether or not you're doing enough marketing or the right kind of marketing is are you getting enough new business through the door? Is that safe to say?

Yes. Larry. Getting customers equals someone giving you money. Yes, someone's giving you money. That means everything's going to work out one way, shape or form. But if you don't have enough customers, that's when businesses fail. You know, if you look, if you look at. They did a study, Larry, like an SBA study. And also like other business studies, the reason why most businesses fail is not because they didn't have funding, not because they didn't have the Right idea. Not because they didn't have this, that or the other. They just did not have enough customers to justify continuing the business. That's it. Like, so when you're getting started in business, the main thing you should focus on is getting customers. That's the name of the game, getting customers. If you're not doing activities that equate to you getting customers, then you're not doing real business marketing work. You're just kind of like you're doing weird things, you know, so just saying.

Yeah. And I just wanted us to get real precise about what marketing meant because there's. There's so much talk about marketing. Marketing. Marketing is like, people don't really understand that's like the efforts you spend to make your revenue increase. You know, that's. Marketing is looking for new business. And so if you're focused, you have a. We used to have a phrase in our business and that is, you know, you had your home office, that process. We had a big sales force. It was like, we all get paid to prospect. We all get paid to market. Because if we're not getting new business in the door, none of the rest of it matters anyway. You know, we're just. We're just sweeping the decks on a sinking ship, you know, so everybody has got to be focused on new revenue and look at their job as playing a role in making that happen. Even if you're in customer service or you're doing the, you know, know, you know, the whole thing for product development is to get something, a refinement or a new thing that people can get excited about so you can make more sales. And so it's all part for. For your company to hum. You got to be focused on your marketing, which is your growth of revenue. So thank you, Victoria. And you know, I know what I'm going to ask you about next time, and next time I'm going to ask you about how Facebook did that piece. Right. And what separated them from all the herd of other. There's a lot of companies out there kind of like Ford and General Motors. You know, early on in the birth of the automobile industry, there was a car company in every garage in America, just about. But somehow out of that, with automation and everything, Henry Ford built Ford Motors and General Motors emerged. Just a few emerge. Well, that's kind of parallel to what happened with Facebook. And we're going to talk next time I want to ask you about what they did. Right. So thanks so much. Vignash.

Thank you, Larry. Thank you for having me.

If you enjoyed what you've heard and are dead serious about finding out for yourself exactly how this works. If in the real world, I've taken the most valuable business lessons I've learned over 40 years and put them into something for you to watch, go to whiteellawinning.com webinar now in order to move up as fast as possible, I'm Larry Wydell, and I run the Million Dollar Mastermind. Go, go, go.