Achieve More Through Writing & Do Less - Speaking with Shivani Gupta. Storytelling is a must-skill

I think as CEOs, that's what we do most of our days, right? We come in, what's the problem now? The client, the employee, the contract, there's always a problem. If you enjoy problem solving, you become this Lego guy, life becomes a bit like a game. And I think my biggest learning in life was that when you're up, try and extend it as much as you can and shorten the downtime. And that's allowed me to fail faster, I think, in a sense, or we don't really look at it as a fail in the sense of I failed, I'll never do it again. I failed, I'll pick it up, I'll understand. Do I want to keep going in this direction or something else? If so, what's the learnings? Write them and keep going. We started to have, which is odd to say, a very interesting conversation with my subconscious where everything's written and I have that dialogue. Again, after writing 2 novels, I know how to talk to that character. I feel that character is sometimes a bit, ah, one more, and one more becomes 5. It was being Kind to myself in one aspect, saying, what do I want to feel? For example, I've had a problem in my shoulder. I said, all I need to do is call the physiotherapist. I don't need to run. I need to put on my sneakers. That's the win. Maybe after all these 20 years of traveling, doing, trying, and building, I'm in the right place. And that took me on a different journey, a different path.

Yeah, beautiful. That is Hi, my name is Shivani Gupta and welcome to Grow Your Business Podcast. I am super excited about this gentleman I'm about to introduce. I had an opportunity to meet him through EO, Entrepreneurs Organization that I'm very closely linked to. He was so helpful to me in the conversations we had about getting my book out. His CV is about 17 pages long, but I'm gonna give you the short version. So Nir Zavaro is a thought leader. He's an entrepreneur, he's an author and speaker. His work is focused on helping brands implement storytelling techniques and how they do that into their businesses. He's got 3 books that have already been published and the global reach is 30, that's right, 3-0 countries. He collaborates with founders and CEOs worldwide and with over 20 years experience in sales, marketing, brand management and a decade of teaching, he advises major brands and serves on startup advisory boards. He is a serial entrepreneur and hopefully we'll find out more about this in a moment, venturing into F&B, into SaaS and founding Streetwise, his marketing agency. On a constant world tour, Nir is dedicated to empowering individuals as storytellers. Welcome, Nir. It's so lovely to have you.

Thank you. Thank you for having me.

And that's the short version, right? I'm like, wow, like when I looked at some of the things that you've done, it's amazing. So I'm always curious about how— tell us about the hard stuff. Tell us about the adversity and the challenges that you faced and how that transformed into who you are. Like, really interested in that journey and those ups and downs of life.

I think when I was young, my main mistake was that an up would take a certain amount of time, but the down would be the same amount of time. And I think my biggest learning in life was that when you're up trying to Extend it as much as you can and shorten the downtime. And that's allowed me to fail faster, I think, in a sense, or we don't really look at it as a fail in the sense of I failed, I'll never do it again. But I failed, I'll pick it up, I'll understand, do I want to keep going in this direction or something else? If so, what's the learnings? Write them and keep going.

Yeah, take us through a couple of those. Take us through when there was a really, you know, challenge or adversity that you faced and You know, how did you get through it and how did that help you become who you are today?

I think, um, 2009, someone convinced me to open a bar where I live in Tel Aviv. This is the city I was born at. I know everyone. I know the nightlife very well. And I thought it would be a nice thing. And I was working for the government nonetheless. I thought I'd left marketing. I was done with branding. I'm gonna do a, a real job. My parents were happy about it. And we open a bar, and the bar is crazy. Like, I'll walk around outside on the street and pick up pints. Celebrities were in the newspaper. It looks amazing. The revenue is good. But just as it went up, it started to go down and very fast. The problem was I brought in some of the investors, key friends, and I said, don't worry, it's gonna be fine. And we have this saying in Israel, don't worry, it's gonna be fine. Guess what? It wasn't very good. It wasn't going well and wasn't fun. I said, you know what, I need to take some ownership and some responsibility and some accountability. I went back to the government and I said, listen, I'm sorry, I'm gonna take a leave of absence. I have to fix this. The main problem was I knew nothing about how to run a bar. I knew how to drink and bring people, and I was very good at those 2 things. And being such a people's person, and I love meeting I think it's one of the best things on the planet to hear their stories and to get connected and to help and support. I started to call other entrepreneurs who had F&B businesses. I said, listen, I screwed up. I need help. One by one, some of the best entrepreneurs in the bar industry started to come in with their books and teach me. And I managed to go from a $100,000 debt for the business and we have personal debts and stuff to actually fixing the business and then selling the debt. So I still had my own personal debt, which was about $100,000, but everything else was passed on and I kind of saved the investors and stuff. The interesting thing was that I realized that most people do things a certain way. This is how they run the businesses. If it works, it works. If not, they close, they do something else. And I quickly learned that it's completely okay to go into a new industry. It's okay to fail, but there's always a gap. And I think that became my thing out of that. Funny enough, when we finished everything, I had probably 3 credit cards that I couldn't swipe because I had no money in the bank. I had a motorcycle I had to sell because I didn't have any money for gas. So I had to sell it and I would sleep on my friends' couches. So if, let's say, you and I wanted to meet, I will tell you upfront, I'd love to meet anything you want, just so you know, you're paying for coffee because I couldn't afford anything. It was such a freedom feeling for the first few months. Now, when you have nothing to do, nowhere to live, no money in your hometown, you start looking at things again a bit differently. And that's how I started the first novel, actually. And that took me on a completely different journey. So Finding the gap for me has been consistently in the last 15 years a way of building the businesses, which is how I started to consult later in F&B and became one of the best. That's how I went back to connecting F&B marketing. That's how I went into building the agency. There was always a gap. And it means that there are no problems. A problem is a good thing. And I think as CEOs, that's what we do most of our days, right? We come in, what's the problem now? The client, the employee, the contract, there's always a problem. But if you enjoy problem solving and you become this Lego guy, life becomes a bit like a game. I think it took me a long time to realize that.

Yeah, yeah. Um, that is beautiful. Thank you for sharing that. I can, you know, I could feel that you were there sleeping on a couch and how difficult that is. But now knowing that you're a serial entrepreneur and always finding those gaps, in terms of where you are, where you want to go and how to fix that is, you know, one of the reasons that you're so successful. And so you've, you know, you've done so many things with different businesses and I think both of us have similar backgrounds. Like I failed pretty monumental ways in a couple of businesses and have been really successful in others. And if you had like a golden nugget, like if you said, look, in terms of growing the business, like you just talked about the gap, Like, is there another golden nugget or that you go, that's the golden nugget that you, if you wanna grow your business, that's the one thing that people that are listening now that would say, yeah, focus on that, or at least that's been your experience around how you've grown your businesses.

I think it might surprise you about what I'm gonna say. If you don't write, you will never get to the level you can, you think or you should or you might achieve. Funny enough, most of the work I now do sits on a very simple concept. When you look at a website, when you look at a company, when you look at everything and you have questions, the questions are usually an array of things. We, we do this and this, right? We accommodate these and these and these clients. It's like you go into a meeting. Who's your client? Everyone, 18 to 67. If they're male, female, all over the world. What I've learned over the years is when I started to write for my clients, that meant that everything that isn't a yes immediately became a no. Focused clarity became simple. And for many years I did a lot of things. I would take this client and that type of— I did, when I go to my clients, I've already done 15 years of mistakes.

Yeah.

The success, it's been Part of life. But at the end, people remember you didn't read all the failures I had when you read my bio. You only read the success. You know, where are the 50 companies I met and said no? Where are the failed projects? Where's this? And we would go back and write them at the office and say, okay, this is not good. This could have been better. This could have been different. And I think especially in the last, let's say, 18 or 20 months of traveling around the world and meeting, I learned that people all over the world are the same. It's even in the book. They're all the same. There's difference in cultures, but that you can teach. When I went to Australia, they taught me how you guys, Australians, would do a business and how Israelis do business. I go to the US, they teach me, and it's the same. There's differences. That's easy. But when I write, I made a commitment. I think for many years I was afraid to make that commitment.

That's beautiful. And you're right, we don't read out people's failures because, you know, the list is big. You know, it's often 10 or 20 times bigger than the ones that we've been successful at because you've got to fail at so many things before getting to that thing. You just hit the nail on something around people are the same. So people are the same irrespective of where you go around the world. Yes, their culture is different, which you can teach, as you said, Nir. But talk to me about, like, you know, what are some of the great tips of dealing with people? So if they're the same, like, what are the things that work? What are people looking for? How do we, you know, everybody's talking about how difficult it is to keep key talent and have great people working in them. What's been some of the things that have worked for you and your businesses?

I think I've been very lucky. I started to teach in college Roughly 10 years ago. And the first class I taught was brand management. It's a 13-week course. And I thought, it's very odd. People love teaching, but they go into the class and sometimes they're a bit boring. I thought, who am I to go into a class with 32— it's a workshop with 32 students or 35 students and waste 90 minutes of their life? So no, that can't happen. And that became a thing. And I became a bit obsessed. And we'll talk about that obsession in a second in other contexts. But what if I can give them an epic 90 minutes?

Hmm.

And that became a story. And every class was a brand and something. So I would teach how to scale a business through Happy Socks, and I'll teach how to create a logo through Ferrari. And we'll always find a brand and we'll go through it. The almost fail of Lego, what happened to Nike with their logo, They didn't even like it, became the number one logo in terms of value. So I think $7 billion. So that became a thing where I wanted to make sure I can bring you value, I can teach you something. But on the other aspect, I came in with a learning mindset and we would present every session in the, every course that I taught. I probably did 20 classes over the years. We would show them something that we're working on with our clients. Now for them, freshman year in college, mind blown to see that name, that client. And I remember a student the first year I taught, she stood up and said, uh, sorry, I know, I know I'm a freshman, but why aren't you doing this like that? And I look, I'm like, wow, we've been working on this for 6 weeks. She saw something different. So at the end of that semester, I said, listen guys, I really enjoy this. I think you're all amazing people. Whenever you want, anytime now, in 5 years, in 10 years, you call me, you get an hour free for anything you want. The semester ends, a guy comes up to me and says, listen, I want to come work for you. I said, I don't, I'm a small agency, I do freelance and I do consulting for restaurants and bars. And he said, no, I'm gonna come work for you. That took me on a journey. Over the years, I had employees became from young students to they stayed after they graduated. Some came back after they did their MBAs. So for me, it was a lot about I want to find the right people and they will come if they think they're at the right place. Most of these employees, by the way, the average was over 3 years. And you might say the young people, they don't care, they're not invested. I've been so fortunate. And if you see where they work today, Unbelievable, you know, and I can say I taught them, but today I can call them and learn from them. I think that back and forth is really crucial.

And just this art of storytelling, as you said, that, you know, people, what do they say, don't remember who you are, but they'll remember what you told them and how you made them feel. So that art of storytelling, and I've seen you do this, you know, this is not the first time I've seen you do that. I've seen some of the footage of the work that you do and You know, you do that really well. I wanna just switch conversations for a minute, Nir. I wanna just talk a little bit about, you know, when challenges come your way, some people have a process, some people have a system when they deal with that. What do you do? Like when, whether it's your personal life or business life and, you know, there's so many challenges we all face all the time, how do you go about it? Do you have your own methodology or a ritual or a system that you use?

You're asking about a ritual to handle the day-to-day, or—

Yeah, like when a challenge comes your way. So like when, when, you know, like people deal with challenges differently. Some people put their head in the sand, uh, some people like, like, let's bring it on. Some people use a ritual, some people use a process. I'm always curious when people, when you have a challenge come your way or challenges come your way, what do you do? Like, how do you go about Fixing them, solving them, addressing them.

So I think for many years I did what a lot of people do and panic. I had, I had, you know, the agency was small with like 8 or 10 employees. We had like 5 or 6 freelancers. Things were going really well and I was highly profitable. And we did a lot of clients in the crypto industry where marketing was remarkable. I enjoy, I couldn't go to sleep. You'd send 50,000 emails and get 96% opening rate within the first 24. It was like, Going back in time and I loved it. And then I don't think I ever told you this. In 2018, I went to travel EO chapters around Europe and I traveled 18 chapters in about a month.

Wow.

And the first chapter I talk is Amsterdam. I finished the first conversation, the session, I come off stage and they tell me, listen, the crypto is collapsing. And within the next 72 hours, I lost everything. Like clients disappeared, they vaporized on the table. And, uh, there was a discussion, do we keep traveling with the camera guy? Everything's paid for, the speaking gigs in all the chapters. What do we do now? And I said, we keep going. But I couldn't sleep. I would sweat in the middle of the night. I didn't know when I got back home and I needed to restructure almost everything. We went down in revenue about 80% within like 72 hours.

Yeah.

And I said, okay, I can probably pay salaries for the next 3 months and figure it out. I can cut down. I don't know. And that was the first time I started to think, and I met some other people who have done this and consulted, which is also important. Find people who've been through that path. What was really happening? And that was the first time I sat down and said, okay, what's happening is we lost clients. The industry is shaking. We have employees, but I had amazing employees. So how can we shift? And I think that was the beginning of a long journey of, how would you say, a bit of a cheat sheet where your brain thinks one thing and you say, no, no, no, wait, wait, let's talk about it. You and I, let's sit alone in a room and talk about it. And understanding that maybe what's really happening is not as horrible or you have a way out. And I've gotten really good at this since 2018. And that goes back to, I'll think about it, but I write it. What is really happening? What are the options? The problem, I know, I understand. If I panic an hour or 2 hours, maybe that's fine. If I panic for 5 days, I lost 5 days of work. But I needed to train that way of thinking.

Yeah.

It's hard and I still need to do it. And I assume you know what I'm talking about.

I do. I do. Because, you know, it's that when you said it's the training, it's almost like, okay, this is gonna keep happening. It's not a once-off thing, but how do I almost train the way that I address it? And when you were speaking there, I mean, I call that meditation, right? When you're almost sitting down with yourself and having a conversation and observing your own thinking and observing your own behavior. But that's amazing. Now, you started telling me what you're obsessed about at the moment, and we said, let's do that later. I'm interested in knowing what are you obsessed about? And how does that link into your future aspirations? What are some of the things that you want to do still?

You mentioned earlier that people don't remember what you said or the data. They remember how you made them feel. The problem is we don't really understand how we want to make someone else feel. In the book, Fuck the Slides, I explained that methodology that everything sits on emotions first. Now, if I don't write, I want to make you happy. I want to make you inspired. I want to make What are the emotions I want to convey? Then we'll define what are the experiences, how do we want to write it? Then we will define which data will enable you to convince yourself. That was the premise of the book. And then I went back to saying, okay, how can I do this and other things? Now, without going into a lot of things, the last year and a half of traveling, the war happening, of businesses, so much has changed. Then all of a sudden, one day I wake up, it's April, I'm back in my hometown, business isn't the same. The business I was planning on building is changing. And I said, this is not going very well, huh? So I opened a file and I said, this is what's happening in my personal life and my business and every aspect. By the way, there's a war and how's your day going? And I opened that file. 50 people over the course of the next couple of weeks. And I said, what if I can change my life in 90 days? What do I want to achieve? How would it look like? From which bank I use, what company I own, what are the names, to how much I run every day, to what I eat. And I started to take a look, but documenting everything, how much I drink, how much I smoke, how many coffees, everything. And people started to react to the file. Now there's one thing about understanding that we always think we need to do more. And what I learned in the course of— this is day 66 or 67— is we actually need to do less, not more. So for me, the less was, hey, how many coffees do I have? I have 6 coffees. Can I have 5? Why do I even drink 6? Guess what? It went down, down, down to the point where I even skipped the first cappuccino in the morning. Suddenly I was doing intermediate fasting. So Lunch, you don't wanna eat the fries, you'll have something else. So I lost 8 kilograms and then I started to run faster and that created a tilting point where I said, wait, wait, there's something here. I'm actually doing less things and getting better and better. And I took that and I said, you know what, I wanna reimagine my business and, and the one I've been working on for the last 18 months. And it's not just the speaking, which is, is great. Standing on stage is nice, but that's not the way I do it. I do it to go back to that. for a student. I want to teach. And the understanding was, what if I write my marketing plan from scratch, but there are no KPIs and numbers?

Hmm.

And the name of the marketing plan is Obsessed. If I'm not obsessed about these things, then I'm out. Now, you don't know this, we haven't had time to speak, but I have fever. I've been in bed for like the last 12 hours. This was important for me because this is part of my journey. And I woke up and I said, No, of course I'm doing it. And I felt so good waking up and dressing up and taking my motorcycle, coming to the office and organizing the cameras. And I'm obsessed about it. I'm having fun now. And one of the main goals of that obsessed marketing plan is reasons to win. Why am I doing this? I can do a bit of consulting and I'll be fine. I can travel the world. Everything's gonna be fine. So I think for me, That created that tilting point, that created that obsession. And now I'm trying to do, and again, going back to writing, I have less meetings with people I don't think are relevant and I'm doing different things and I'm more focused and I'm writing very specific things. And suddenly my newsletters came and suddenly, and it started to attract, if you wanna talk a bit about karma, even though I'm not posting a lot on social at the moment because I'm creating every, thing, it's time to get the right clients. And it's easy. Someone told me about you. Where can we sign? We want to pay. Suddenly they— there's no long negotiation. So it goes back to writing, but writing the emotion. We're so used to writing KPIs. I'll get 1,000 followers. I'll do this. I'll do this. Yeah, maybe. But what if you wake up every morning and you say, I'm obsessed about this? And we all know what it means when we start a business. We can't sleep, we can't do, we don't wanna talk about anything else. We don't. And this will become at the end, the Business Catcher, which is, Fuck the Slides is the one piece which is about sales and raising capital. But the Business Catcher is about why we're building brands the wrong way. It's a whole methodology about how we can use storytelling techniques to improve our marketing, our messaging, our customer journey, the marketing aspect, which means that if the brands are built the right way, you actually save money and then fuck the slides, support the sales. And it feels like building this now makes me wanna wake up in the morning and makes me wanna do small things. By the way, the first 65 or 60 days enabled me to instill somewhere around 17 habits at the moment, which in 60 days, I think that the best people have stuff about maybe 12 a year.

That's amazing. 17 habits in 60 days that you're now consistently doing each day.

That I've done at least 30 days.

At least 30 days. Amazing.

By the way, they're funny. Some of them are funny things. Some of them are things you wouldn't think about, you know, like releasing my neck for 2 minutes every morning and it became a thing. And I feel so— look at me. I'm now with fever and look at me.

Like, you know, when you said I've been in fever, I went, oh my God, like, as you said, but I'm obsessed about talking about it. So you wanted to be able to do that. You talked about sleep a minute ago, Nir. And so are there part of these 17 things, like, what do you do for your mental wellness? Do you have rituals? Obviously, maybe moving that neck for 2 minutes is part of that ritual. How do you manage your mental wellness when you're doing so much and helping so many people around the world?

So The beginning of this concept, which by the way will become a new book that's gonna be titled Painting the Windows Black: How to Change Your Life with Very Little Effort. I always write books because I have no time.

So let's just cover that. So currently the work that you've been taking around, it's called Fuck the Slides.

Yeah.

And the new book is gonna be called Paint the Windows Black.

Yeah. And the Business Catcher is in the making for the last couple of months, which is again, That's about the branding aspect, which I've been doing as a methodology and a workshop. I've been doing this for over 3 years now around the world. Now I'm crafting that. And there's a version of Fuck the Slides for doctors, which is titled Slides Don't Save Lives.

Oh, I love that.

So I'm taking that.

Maybe we need to take that message out into not just the doctors, right?

Maybe into the world. So that's Fuck the Slides about. But when they came to me and said, we want to do something for doctors and can't use the word F and we want to do something else. And I said, great, but I can't write a book if I don't have a title. And they said, okay, can you— let's have a meeting next week. I said, no, no, no, it doesn't work like that. And one day I think I was in Thailand and I called the guy and I'm like, sit down, I nailed it. And I say, slides don't save lives. And he's like, okay, I'm gonna call everyone.

So Yeah.

So the title sometimes is the guiding light.

Yeah.

Going back to the Painting the Windows Black about commitment, about doing less things, about finding your tilting point and things enabled me by writing to rethink a lot of my rituals. Now, the biggest thing about the writing was that I have to write how I feel. and then correct it. And most of us have a tendency to talk to ourselves not in a very nice way. And we all know this. I'm so stupid. Why did I do this? I should have done— why did I drink so much? Right? And I said, listen, hey, we're cool, you and I, but if we go out tonight, let's have fun. Let's have one less drink, one less smoke.

Good.

And you know what? We can skip the 4:00 PM espresso.

We're good.

So we started to have, which is odd to say, a very interesting conversation with my subconscious where everything's written and I have that dialogue. And again, after writing 2 novels, I know how to talk to that character. And I feel that character is sometimes a bit, ah, one more, and one more becomes 5. So it was being kinder to myself in one aspect, saying, what do I want to feel? For example, I've had a problem in my shoulder. I said, all I need to do is call the physiotherapist. I don't need to run. I need to put on my sneakers. That's the win. And it's been a crazy journey. I'm now doing stuff. So personal, the business, I just finished the first live cohort for entrepreneurs and CEOs, which is Online and international. And I don't exactly know how to say it, but I don't recall doing something as a business that made me feel so emotional seeing the change that these entrepreneurs, all of them very successful, have gone. And I would get excited before the call. After the 1 hour, I was like, wow. And I had to write down what we did and look at the recording and Suddenly I said, you know what, I wanna teach, right? Yeah. It's a business. I can make money and it supports my passion. Maybe after all these 20 years of traveling and doing and trying and building, I'm in the right place. And that took me on a different journey, a different path.

Yeah. Beautiful. That is, um, we can be talking about this for so many hours, uh, which we need to at some point. We're gonna catch up in person and do that. Now tell our audience what's the best way they wanna follow your work. They wanna read your books. Where's the best place to find you?

Yeah, I think the best way is either LinkedIn, Nir Zavaro, um, Instagram, cuz I cover the kind of the traveling and I'm gonna start traveling again, uh, Asia, Europe, and the US. Um, and the story letter is where I talk about how to improve your business and personal through writing. And it's also where I talk the most intimate things about my life. So it's called Story Letter, and we'll put— probably put the link here.

All the links and stuff in there as well. That is beautiful. Yeah, I am so grateful that, uh, you are on this particular podcast. I'm also very grateful the fact that you got out of bed after being very ill and drove, took to your office and did this podcast. Thank you, my friend.

Thank you.

I'm Shivani Gupta, and you've been listening to the Grow Your Business Podcast. I hope you've got one idea that you can think about or perhaps even implement straight away in your business. Thank you for listening. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn under Ask Shivani. Remember, I call it Ask Shivani, so please send me your questions that I can address in this podcast for you. And I would also so appreciate if you went to the Apple Podcast to rate and review this podcast.