SPEAKER_00: 0:01

Welcome to the Multiply Your Success podcast, where each week we help growth-minded entrepreneurs and franchise leaders take the next step in their expansion journey. I'm your host, Tom Dufour, CEO of Big Sky Franchise Team. And as we open today, I'm wondering if you view your closeness or proximity to your customers as a strategic advantage. Or maybe said another way, have you even thought about that as a strategic advantage before? Well, our guest today is Shree Casa, and he shares with us his underdog formula that he has found to help small businesses that talks about positioning, proximity, and purpose. Now, Shri is a seasoned business leader and small business advocate with a background in corporate strategy and entrepreneurship. After earning degrees from the University of Michigan and Northwestern, he began his career at Pricewaterhouse Cooper's and Blue Martini Software before advising Fortune 500 companies at McKinsey Company. He later transitioned to executive roles, founding a data analytics startup that helped small businesses assess job applicants and led the employment tax credit division to tax credit company, which is now part of Experian, which supported thousands of small businesses in securing government incentives. Tree has recently finished his book, Unconvention, which draws on his extensive experience challenging conventional corporate thinking and empowering small businesses to succeed by staying true to their unique strengths. You're going to love this interview, so let's go ahead and jump right into it.

SPEAKER_01: 1:34

Hi, Tom. My name is Tree Casa. I'm the author of a new book out called Unconvention. And I've had a few different titles in different companies in my past, but today I'm kind of focusing on advocacy for small businesses.

SPEAKER_00: 1:46

I love small businesses as well. And I love how you're talking about advocacy for small businesses. That is music to my ears and to my heart. I love that. And we have lots of founders, entrepreneurs, successful owners that tune into our podcast and other business leaders. I'd love for you just to talk a little bit here about your book and just at least give us an overview and what led you to want to write this book and put this down.

SPEAKER_01: 2:14

Probably for me, it starts with a journey that I had prior to starting to focus on small businesses with McKinsey and large corporate consulting. Being effective at large corporate consulting involves being very quantitative, being very focused on a couple of things that you know everybody's going to agree on. And as many of us know, that's corporate profits, corporate growth. It's very hard to get that done, but it's easy to get people aligned on buying into this kind of corporate profitability. But as I kind of shifted away and began doing my own entrepreneurial endeavors and working for businesses or private health, but with a different committee, nuanced mission. Yes, we want to earn money. Yes, we want to grow, but we actually want to have an impact on the world. In any shape or form, impact, or, or even, hey, I'm here to leave a legacy behind or build something for my children. These kind of different purposes for me were initially very challenging. How do you deal with, you know, if I know it's profitable but doesn't fit what like the owner or the or the or or the family that's running business wants, how do I get this thing done? You know the challenge. But, you know, when I got into a business called a tax credit code and started working with small businesses to get them services that they needed, it really started to kind of stand out to me. The small businesses out there for yes, they need to earn money, they need to make a living, they may want to grow, they may want to solve a problem. But the problems that they go after and the way they look at the world are very different. And in fact, because of the way they do that, one, you know, they don't get a lot of support because other people aren't jumping on board to say, hey, let me help you make that happen. And they don't get a lot of time to go and explore all the ways to be more efficient and more profitable. Instead, they're working day to day, fighting different battles to bring whatever product or service they really wanted to bring into the world, they're working really hard to do that. And, you know, still part of my journey is I'm still not really grasping, like, hey, does this make sense? Because there's a whole bunch of ways to make money that these guys aren't going after. But as I started to start to go have an impact and see what would make it, what would they do with the savings or the incremental income we brought to them by solving some tax credit problems or in other places later on in life? I took on a role as the president and COO of a of a small business lender, even became CEO at that place. I realized when you get money in the hands of the small business who's got a passion or is trying to make something happen, you see some amazing things. And you would never see those things in a big corporation. What you would see is a redeployment of capital to the most efficient, you know, economic outcomes in a good, kind of healthy corporation. But what you would see with a small business is you would see investment in customers, investment in bringing something to a community or to a user base or to a group of people that actually valued the business itself. And so take you along on my kind of journey to now I realize that there's a lot of benefits to helping these small businesses. We set the mission at the Small Business Lender Overs Act to focusing on America Small Businesses Financial Health. We know they need that help. And as a lender, we we had the opportunity to go and put money in the hands of small businesses that were investing in themselves, trying to grow, trying to solve problems. And we were really doing well, very excited about delivering on this mission all the way up until 2020, where we had put hundreds of millions of dollars in the hands of these small businesses in the form of loans. And here comes COVID shutting everybody down. Not only did it crush our business, it crushed the business of many of our customers. That's when I then got an opportunity to advocate for the first time. I got to go talk to members of Congress and their, I guess, the lobbying groups around them to hear what they had to say about the PPP program that they were designing and share my own feedback with what I thought would make sense. Probably both one of the more exciting things I got to do with my career and also one of the most ineffective conversations I'd ever had. Not to pick on Congress here for being ineffective, very controversial position, I know. But I go there and I say, look, this design makes sense. You want it to go fast. You want to get people like my business to have some marginal, but you know, not massively profitable motivation to go help, right? And our whole job is to get money in the hands of all these businesses that need help. But they built these cutoffs and this fantastic graduating scale. If it's a very small business, you'll earn 5% of commission on the loan amount. That's enough to cover your expenses and like you know, process all the details. You're not gonna make a big profit. We don't want you to be making a big problem. We just want you to do it. I buy that. We're in, we want to help these small businesses. And that scale is gonna get smaller. Like if it's if it's more than$100,000, it's only gonna be about, you know, three and a half percent. And and then, you know, if it's even bigger than that, you know, it's only gonna be 2%. All the way up to$10 million of lending, it's only gonna be 2%. And anybody who can do math would would realize that wait a minute. So if I'm making$10 million loans to companies that may not may or may not even need them, I'm gonna get 2% of every one of those$10 million. And there's more than enough companies out there who may or may not need them. Like, you know, how many healthcare providers and how many of these companies that you know didn't even have to shut down anything? They were able to get this 10 million. How many companies got these$10 million PPP loans? And then the banks were gonna make a ton of money on doing these$10 million, no-risk, super easy loans. And then the government was going to run out of money before you got to anybody smaller than$10 million. That was what I pointed out. It's obvious in the math. You know, you look at how easy it is, and then you've got to say, well, what's the motivation of every bank? Let's get the$10 million ones first, right? And then we'll work on the small ones. You can't blame them for being capitalists. That's what they're gonna do. So I kind of could have had a nod or two, and people believed in it. And they're like, Yeah, that's right, that's right. And then what came out? No meaningful changes there. And boom, what happened? All the money ran out, and like in within months, and all the money went to really, really big companies. In time, like probably take almost a year, they figured out how to fix it. They they they let in different types of lenders to come another round where a lot more small businesses got the money. But that's where I realized, you know, too many more people have to be actually speaking up on behalf of these small businesses because, you know, I was in there and I'm sure they went and talked to the CEOs of the big banks. And the big banks were like, no, this is a great process. We can get this out fast, we can do this, just hit go, just hit go. And, you know, hitting go made sense, but it really made big dollars for those big banks and it and it didn't do anything for the little guys. So you ask my kind of what's my journey on advocacy, that kind of tipped me off to say, hey, look, we gotta do something different. It's when I started collecting a lot more stories about these small businesses that succeeded and and didn't from COVID.

SPEAKER_00: 9:05

Any small business that tunes in or hears this will resonate, whether it's with that specific situation or something similar, right? I often think of the small business owner. Myself lumped into that category today, that oftentimes you're just in the grind of the day-to-day of fulfilling the needs of your customers, just fulfilling the orders that have been placed and just trying to keep things going. And most owners, right, trying to make sure they can hit payroll and whatever is on their docket.

SPEAKER_01: 9:34

Yeah. No, they wanna they want to deliver something special to their community, to their customers. And everything else is something that gets in the way, right? And you gotta solve for it. You can't pretend it's not there. But, you know, that's what I love about the stories that I collected and the people I talked to, the ones that survived, you know, the big challenges. COVID's not even the biggest of the challenges that most many of these small businesses face. In fact, when I talk to any small business owner, you know, there's a certain certain amount of, you know, what you can see in just eye contact that they've been through worse. All right. They've been through waking up, not knowing if business is gonna make to the end of the day. They've been through, okay, is the bank coming to collect or am I not gonna be able to make payroll? Like it, it hasn't happened just once either. So, you know, going through that trauma and having that spirit to say, I'm gonna power through this because I believe in what I'm doing is what defines some of these most resilient small business owners. They they care. And it's where I go back to in the in the big corporate world, you know, you got to get everybody agreed on the profit thing, and you're gonna go after the thing that's the most profitable, or the thing that's gonna give you the best, you know, net income or the growth, whatever your metrics are. For the small business owner, it's sometimes survival isn't about saying, hey, I just need to go and make, you know, an extra 50 grand or add, you know, 20% more customers this year. It's about making sure people know that I'm there to offer them what they need and that I care about their survival just as much as I do about my own business. What was amazing in my research for the book and talking to a lot of these businesses that that kind of made it through COVID was that in that time period, their customers are the ones that said, either openly or subconsciously, this is a business that I want to have in my life. This is a business that I need to patronize even more so today because of the challenges than I have before. We were all there, you know, picking our favorite restaurants that we dine in at and saying, you know what, let's just order takeout from this guy. I'm worried about them. Let's order takeout twice this week, you know, twice in a month, you know, more. Just how do we do it? Like and you would you'd hear from bookstores, oh, our customers did GoFundMe campaigns because they knew that we couldn't survive COVID without the GoFundMe campaign. So people are just straight up writing checks to keep the businesses alive that they cared about. I don't know how many people you know that started doing video training with their personal trainers instead of going to a gym. I mean, that's just not going. But they knew that. They're like, you know what, those personal trainers are important to me. They've helped me stay in shape. We're gonna keep this relationship going, even though I'm doing it through like a tablet or a, or a, or a phone, or a PC. I'm still gonna commit to this business owner. That behavior doesn't happen for Gold's gym. That behavior doesn't happen to save a McDonald's or a Barnes and Noble. It's only because of the relationships and the care for the product and care for the experience that these small businesses put in.

SPEAKER_00: 12:30

I think that's great in terms of sharing that and talking through it. And you mentioned McDonald's. We're in the franchising business, so franchising's top of mind. And you can definitely, even in the franchise world, see the difference between the brands where there are active owner operators in that local franchise system that's connected to the community versus those that are either company-owned units or are owned by large multi-unit groups where that local owner feel just it's not there.

SPEAKER_01: 13:01

That's right. One of the things that's super critical about surviving as a small business is being differentiated. You know, in my book, I call it positioning. I use the word positioning specifically because many small businesses have a retail location or have a physical nexus somewhere. That position where you are, if you're a franchise owner, you have a particular location. That is an important piece of the definition of what makes you different. Lean into it. Recognize that the kind of people who come to you are the people from your community, the people who are your neighbors, right? What do you do that's different? Doesn't have to be, hey, I've got a different sign out or a different flavor of burger or, you know, different choices on my menu. It has to do with how you fit in and how are you important to the community. And that can be different for any small business. You may have a virtual community where you're mostly online, but leaning into who you are and leaning into what you're positioning in is that way to keep loyalty. That it's the way to keep your customers satisfied and, you know, seeing you as something important in the office.

SPEAKER_00: 14:08

I love that you've been able to gather some of this and put it in one place and see that through. Maybe share one of those stories.

SPEAKER_01: 14:16

I'll pick one that I like about being unique and leaning into who they are. Some of my examples as part of the book were independent bookstores. They're pretty classic for people thinking they shouldn't even exist at this point, right? People are like, well, you got Amazon, you got Burns and Noble, you got ebooks. Like, what's the point of the bookstore? If you can get any book you want to within a day or hours, even by just going to order on Amazon. So I talked to the owner of this book, Jonathan, of Talking Leads, it's a bookstore in in um Buffalo. When I connected with him, the reason I'd reached out is his bookstore doesn't offer normal books. It's a collection of the books that just don't fit in. Very, very idiosyncratic. So he's out there trying to curate a set of books that you can't easily find or you wouldn't come across when you go to Amazon's top seller list or you go to look at the displays on Barnes ⁇ Noble. And, you know, that's not a way if you are some corporate consultant. That's not a way to run a business. Go pick all the books that are unpopular and put them all in the same place. What's that? What's that gonna do for you? Well, he's been around for like decades. Why? Because he's created a spirit and a personality for his store that people are like, look, I want to go find something out of the mainstream. I want to go read something that's not what other people are reading and learn something new and different. And you create this ethos. And of course, people love you. And you're you're still gonna have some challenges all the time. You know, business is gonna go up and down, you're gonna have financial cycles, you're gonna have COVID hit you or something crazy like that, or just the street in front of you goes under construction, you lose all your foot traffic for two months. Like whatever it is, you're gonna have this adversity. But when there are people that you've affected in a way that they believe you should be around, they believe you add something. They may not even have to be repeat customers, they'll refer people to you because the impact that you had on their lives, that's the spirit that, you know, when you have a business that can survive these things, that the spirit is I've got something unique and I've got something that I think is important. And if you find enough customers who agree with that or believe in that, they'll sustain you.

SPEAKER_00: 16:29

Well, that's a great story. I love how you share that. And I'm sure others, when they hear this, will probably think in their own mind, maybe their business is that business, something like that in their community, or oh, I know a business that's like that or has a similar type of, I like how you describe that ethos there.

SPEAKER_01: 16:46

And I think every small business owner should ask themselves what makes me unique. And I don't want to give you this like really challenging, oh my gosh, I have to have this particular flavor or this or anything. Like it could be as simple as where you're located and who your customers are. But it's really important to feel confident in knowing what your what your sweet spot is, because every day, every decision that you make, you've got to go deal with making somebody happy and somebody unhappy. You've got to go deal with investing in one decision versus another decision. And if what you do is you know that, hey, look, the kinds of customers I serve are the ones that are in my neighborhood, put your bets there, right? And instead of betting on this expansion further out or trying to get, you know, something new and that's unfamiliar with the core base of people that you bring in, go work on delighting the ones that you've got, right? Or go work on delighting ones that are a lot like the ones that you got, but don't know you yet. That's not just a good way to kind of have near-term impact, but it's also a good way to deepen those relationships and have more confidence in who you are. A lot of that comes from your own personality. You may not have embraced it yet, but a lot of that comes from your own personality as an owner.

SPEAKER_00: 17:58

I appreciate you talking about this unique piece, this positioning that you're talking about, or these differentiators. And I like the word positioning that you use to help describe it. Sometimes I think in the small business community, we hear the buzzwords of differentiation and uniqueness and unique identifiers and all these buzzwords that come along. And that idea of positions, how are you positioned in your community, literally within your community or amongst your peers that are closest to you, that your customers may also be customers of that are shopping or going to and from? How are you positioned to just showcase what your strongest assets are or your differences?

SPEAKER_01: 18:42

Yeah, and I'd give you a simple example that illustrates how easy it is to think about beer positioning. I don't know if you go to sporting events. I I like to go to, I love college football, go to a basketball game every once in a while. You go to the football game and you park in the lot that's assigned, you know, in LA, that's probably like 40 bucks or 50 bucks. I mean it's ridiculous. You just park right by the stadium. You go to a basketball game, yeah, you're 50 bucks to go park in it, used to be called Staple Center, or what they call it now, crypto.com arena. But if you park in the structure across the street, it's only 35 bucks. But if you park in some of the lots before you get to the structure that's across the street, it's 20 bucks at one, 15 bucks at one. If you want to just park right under the expressway, it's kind of dingy, gross, but you may be able to park for five bucks. All right. So that's everyone knows that. But you just think about now, each individual lot is a business. It's a privately owned business, and they are looking at their price and their physical position, right? And and they know their value. My value, if I'm the$15 guy versus the$35 guy who's across the street, my value, I've got to be a lot cheaper because I don't have the covered parking, right? I don't have the lighting, I don't have the you know, safety and security that a garage offers. But if I'm the if I'm the garage versus the stadium, well, the stadium is like, you know, closeness, you know, don't have to go outside, you know, all that stuff. They each have some incremental value based on the position that they sit in. So now, any small business, you gotta think about your differentiation, you got to think about your value that you offer customers in physical position, maybe a big piece. It may not be, but how are you relative to their other options? You know, who are you relative to their other options? Sometimes when people talk about pricing, my first question is, well, tell me what league you play in, right? Like you're a lawyer and you got an hourly rate, great, but who are the other kinds of lawyers, you know. Yeah, and then you realize, you know, wait a minute, I'm better than all these guys in my league. Well, then why'd you put yourself in that league? Right, right? Get out of that league. Price like you're in the other league, right? Whatever it might be, you want to act like you're in the league that you really are in, and you want to have value prop that's tied to who you position yourself close to.

SPEAKER_00: 21:09

That is a golden nugget here to uh have shared and talked through. I think that's a great analogy and example that you shared there. One thing I'd love to ask here, how can someone find out more about what you're doing, get in touch with you, connect with any of your resources here?

SPEAKER_01: 21:25

So my website is three-casa.com, Sri-K-A-Z-A.com. And you know, you can find me just looking for my book. My book is called Unconvention, a small business strategy guide. So you can get a hold of me that way. There's a bunch of interesting material on the site and blog that you could kind of download or read through. I'd recommend, you know, just checking out and downloading what I call the underdog principles, which includes positioning as well as proximity and purpose. Got a neat primer on that. And like I said, it doesn't take a lot of time to sit there and be a little bit more retrospective and say, hey, who am I? Like, what am I trying to contribute? So that primer is great to just get your mind going on, you know, what could I do differently as a business to kind of make it more fulfilling and deliver the value that I think I'm capable of.

SPEAKER_00: 22:10

I love the title, the underdog formula. It sounds great.

SPEAKER_01: 22:13

So the three were again positioning, proximity, which is really taking advantage of the fact that you're really close to your customers. You know what they what they care about, what they want. And then purpose. This is where you say, look, I'm in it because I wanted to have a great lifestyle, or I'm in it because I want to be my own boss, or I'm in it because I wanted to bring a particular cuisine to the world, right? Whatever they might be, like, first of all, recognize what it is for you, embrace it, and then use it in your decisioning. Because if you're sitting there saying, I wanted to do this because I wanted to be my own boss and have a good lifestyle, but then you're out there chasing every last deal, trying to get everything done, like you're gonna be miserable. Like, do it for what you were doing it for, or reset your expectations. Bringing all three of those together means then you can deliver your uniqueness with the purpose that you signed up for, right? And represent the customers that you care about. So those three, those three principles are behind how a lot of small businesses can still survive and execute against their bigger competitors. The bigger competitors don't do those things. They don't need to because they've got scale, they've got profits they're focused on. But when it comes to executing simple business strategies, your pricing strategy, your operational strategy, your go-to-market strategy, all the things that these big guys do, it turns out small small businesses have to follow the same structures, but they have these advantages they can they can use in that in that strategic thinking.

SPEAKER_00: 23:36

Sure, this is a great time in the show, and we make a transition and we ask every guest the same four questions before they go. And the first question we ask is have you had a miss or two on your journey and something you learned from it?

SPEAKER_01: 23:48

Yeah, I had a big miss, I think, when uh I was trying to do it. I tried to build a startup where it was going to help small businesses with hiring. It's pretty exciting for me. We we built out a cool analytical platform back before, maybe even when AI was popular, but not popular enough, uh, using AI to figure out if a candidate would actually stick around with a company before you hired him. It's like, you know, I've got all your data on your payroll, I've got all your data on your hiring. Every new guy who comes in, I have enough data to go and predict is this guy going to stick around six months like most guys, or is he gonna be out in two months, or is he gonna stick around for a year or whatever? You know, as we got a couple of those sold and kicked off, the challenge was it took us way too long to sell a very low-cost product, and we just couldn't make money if we had to pay our salespeople, which is which is rough. It worked well when I was the only sales guy and I wasn't getting paid for it. But when you want to hire salespeople, you got to pay them. So we pivoted away to just building the features that they needed to get the information, which was neat and it was great. We built it, built some features in with our applicant tracking system partners. The applicant tracking system is that somebody's doing hiring, they they use a, you know, send them to collect a resume and collect information. And the extra information we we built was were things like getting reference checks. Awesome. We built this reference check tool, dropped it into a bunch of ATSs, and we're off to the races until they realized, hey, we could build it ourselves and sell it ourselves. So that was the big miss, is like we found a really cool pivot. We thought we were gonna do well. And then our partners, who we thought were our partners, were actually just companies that wanted to make a profit. So we got cut out pretty took them a couple of years to catch up and figure out that that uh they can do it themselves. And you know, I didn't have the foresight to realize my competitors wanted to eat my lunch. In retrospect, it's pretty easy, right? But again, during during during the whole thing, you're like, wait, what's going on? Like, why do we lose those guys? Oh, they've got that feature uh for themselves. Like, oh, that's not good.

SPEAKER_00: 25:44

The next question we like to talk about is the opposite end of that. A make or a highlight or two you'd like to share.

SPEAKER_01: 25:51

Sure. I mean, let's go back to that business I was talking about where we hit COVID and I didn't get Congress to go and listen to me. I know most people that you know, they ask Congress or something, they just get it. But I didn't get what I was hoping for. We didn't get help to the small businesses that we thought we could. We did everything we could on our end. And then, you know, six, eight months later, we were able to get back and start to bring them on board with the second ver second round of the PPP. The win for me, you know, my business was crushed. I came, I uh became the CEO, and we were, I was asked to kind of scale it back up to something that we could sell uh on behalf of the owner to someone else, which is a daunting task for me. But what was also daunting was looking at the customer base, saying, how do we keep them alive so that we have customers in the future? And the big win was I had a board and I had investors in my company who were fully supportive of just doing the right thing. And instead of saying, hey, let's go save the company, let's go and you know, pull every dollar we can in and keep ourselves alive a little bit longer, they were supportive of saying, hey, if you think the right way to do this is lay off the billing, bring the debt collection down, go and ask your borrowers to pay just a minimum amount to stay alive. That's bad for the corporation. It's great for its customers. Can we figure out how to do this in the short term so that they can bounce back? Their life cycle is much shorter than ours. We can keep them alive for a little bit longer. Down the road, if we can stay alive ourselves, it'll pay off. I was really impressed with the leaders on my board who were able to say, yes, we get it. There's some paint. You guys are gonna go into default sooner on some of your credit facilities because of this, and you're gonna have to wind a lot of things down because of this. But the sacrifice, even if it doesn't fully pay off, it at least aligns with your mission. So we made that sacrifice. And for me, the big win was not just that, hey, it actually worked and we we bounced back and we were able to have customers that that actually trusted us again, but also that instead of having, you know, half of these guys go out of business, we saved a good 40, 50% of them by working with them in the right way. So to me, that was that was probably a huge win.

SPEAKER_00: 28:08

Thank you for sharing. And the next question we ask is Have you used a multiplier to multiply yourself personally, professionally, or organizations you've run?

SPEAKER_01: 28:17

Yeah, I've scaled up a couple of different organizations. So, you know, we talk about those, but my current multiplier is this book that I've written. I would love to go and inspire and consult with and support as many entrepreneurs as possible. Don't have nearly as much time as I have that desire to go and get people up and going and either take the leap or commit to the kind of differentiation that keeps them resilient and and and fulfilled with their businesses. So I'm hoping getting the book out there is a way that I can kind of have that impact and kind of kindle or rekindle entrepreneurship in a lot of people.

SPEAKER_00: 28:55

And the final question we ask every guest is what does success mean to you?

SPEAKER_01: 29:01

You know, what I'm what my mission is today is this advocacy. And so if I were to say, what is success? What I would love to see is, you know, a stronger culture behind small business and entrepreneurship. I would love to see more celebration of the smaller, not unicorn slash AI, Silicon Valley entrepreneur, but more of the entrepreneur who left their day job to go and run a boutique services firm or to build a small contracting firm or somebody who's built some sort of a business from who they are. And I would love to see more of that because I really do think not only is that possible, I think that's the trend for where our economy needs to go. We've got all these big scale companies and they're doing what they do. Most of us in this country don't have a place in those giant scale companies. And so what should our place be? Do we want to be like an office worker that's getting eliminated by AI? Right now, or do we want to be people who go and live out the things that we've learned and grow uh you know become passionate about and find a way to support a bunch of other people enough to go make a living and take care of your family? And so success for me is that.

SPEAKER_00: 30:14

Fantastic. And as we bring this to a close, Sri, is there anything you're hoping to share or get across that you haven't had a chance to yet?

SPEAKER_01: 30:21

Look, you give me a wonderful opportunity to talk about my book and kind of what I'm passionate about. And I think the one thing I just say to folks is if you are in a business or you have a business, you've been running it, you know, it's really valuable to take a step back and think strategically a bit. I know your time is completely absorbed by running the business, but you know, taking the time to say, hey, what do I really want to get out of this? And how do I want to be more me? Uh how do I make this business more suited to who I want to be and what what kind of person I am? And that can be a very productive exercise. And it could be something that's very increases your fulfillment and also increases your growth and productivity.

SPEAKER_00: 31:01

Shree, thank you so much for a fantastic interview. And let's go ahead and jump into today's three key takeaways. So, takeaway number one is when he talked about the difference from working with large companies and small businesses. And he talked about when he was in large corporate consulting, he found it was easy to get people aligned on corporate revenue growth and corporate profitability. But he found in small businesses, when he would lend to small businesses, what he found is that small business owners really invest in their community, in their staff, and in their area, much differently from what lending to large companies would look like. Takeaway number two is to realize that as a small business, recognize that your difference might very well be just that you are part of the community with your customers. Sometimes that is the difference. So recognize that it doesn't have to be some bullet list thing or sound great like you might see in some business class somewhere. Sometimes it's just that you are part of the community. And takeaway number three is the underdog formula or underdog principles that are on his website. And it's positioning, proximity, and purpose. Those are the three components, the underdog formula. Positioning, how are you positioning amongst your peers and competitors? Proximity, recognize that you are close to your customers, as we had talked to before. And I really like that. And number three is purpose. And your purpose doesn't have to just be how much money can I make, it can also be just finding purpose and having time to spend with your family or just even serving your community. And now it's time for today's win-win. So today's win-win comes through thinking about what makes your business unique. And I thought that this was a really interesting conversation with Sri, where he talked about positioning. He said it could just be something as simple as your location. It could be the customers you serve, your personal interaction with those customers. And that's okay. I was even thinking during the interview that maybe it could be the happiness or the satisfaction customers feel when they buy something from you, because they know that you are the proprietor or the owner or the leader or you're ingrained in the community. Hence, part of the reason why I love franchising, because you get the positive or the plus of having a brand that's connected with others, even in a small franchise system, but you still have that local ownership. And it just even reminds me, I saw the other day driving in my hometown, uh, McDonald's had a new sign out front that said locally owned and operated. And I thought it still matters, it still makes a difference because now as a customer, I know that that owner is likely living in my community. There's a community connection. And so that's the episode today, folks. Please make sure you subscribe to the podcast and give us a review. And remember, if you or anyone you know might be ready to franchise their business or take their franchise company to the next level, please connect with us at BigSkyFranchise Team.com to schedule your free, no obligation consultation. Thanks for tuning in, and we look forward to having you back next week.