How to Build a Successful Business?

​Sarathi Karmkar grew up in New Delhi (India) and moved to the US for his first job out of engineering college with a large multinational in the late 1980s. He spent 17 years in the same company before moving out to start his entrepreneurial journey by setting-up his own business, Freedom Systems Inc, a cyber-security company based out of US. He recently started another technology company as a co-founder and investor, Gyan Inc. He is an angel investor in 8 other start-ups, is an Advisor & Mentor to the Founder CEOs of these firms, besides contributing through charitable work. What drive him are joyous and productive conversations.
​

Carefully Designed Business Model - What you do is not as important as why you do it?

Freedom Systems has been in business for nearly 9 years, employs only 20 people and posted USD 16 million as turnover in 2017. The company has grown organically and has never sought external funding. The gross margins are hugely attractive and much higher than the industry. This is a function of the business model that Sarathi has crafted with careful thought and conscious deliberation –

• Focus on Fortune 50 clients
• Products and services with built-in recurring revenue characteristics
• Older and more experienced employees with a stable outlook
• Conscious decision to keep the company small, simple and personalized; rather than big, complex and depersonalized.
• Structure of the company is such that it serves the employees first. The jobs are structured such that their lives are compatible with their roles, rather than forcing it the other way around.
• Less is more
• Do the right thing

​

Fundamental Principles

For Sarathi, business is more a vehicle to design a lifestyle to be fulfilled, experience freedom and have fun; rather than it being a profit-generating machine. Even his new business that he co-founded this year is because it is with talented people he has been friends with for long, at a stage where they all could take on another venture.
 
There are couple of fundamental principles that have supported him to create success, professionally and personally –
 
1. Why are we doing it?

If you are going to include something in your life; it is extremely important to make sure you know why it is there.   

Especially, for a company in a growth mode, one is looking for any and all opportunities to grow one’s business. In contrast to this way of growing his business, Sarathi believes in making business decisions; whether regarding which business line to add, which clients to take on, which industry segment to work in or whom to meet or whether to network; based on having a kind of life that he has chosen. He prefers what he calls a directed way of living, an active way of thinking about what you are putting into your life. What to say No to is a key principle that supports him to live a life that he has chosen to live.

 
2. “Pay myself first, not necessarily in terms of money.

Taking care of my needs first allows me to carry the day through without giving in to the daily stress.”, he says. 
He has time carved out before starting work at 10 am to take care of things that he considers personally important. He meditates, runs 3 miles with his dog and drops his 2 boys - 16 and 12 years old - to school to get into a tranquil state of mind to bring that energy to the rest of his day.

 
3. Build the structure of the company to cater to the people who are in it, first and foremost. 

Sarathi takes a long time to understand what a person considers important before hiring them. Much like his business model is an expression of the lifestyle that he wants, he is committed that each of his employees’ role supports them to create the lifestyle that they want. To an extent, that limits the size to which he can grow his firm.
 
His observation is that in a larger firm, things become depersonalized, things tend to fail and people don’t feel fulfilled. Every person who is in his firm today has their employment structured in a way that is compatible with their life. The employment contracts are structured to support the employees to live the life they want to live.
 
 
4. He believes in slow organic growth, with an intense focus on building authentic relationships and deep connections. 

He doesn’t add employees, customers, business lines or service lines without a lot of careful thought.
 
The deliberate decision to engage few larger companies as customers rather than many smaller customers has not only helped him to scale faster but also given him a much more stable way of operating, The choice of staying with larger customers has been an important one because it is always difficult for a smaller company to grow sales which leads to a lot of uncertainty in the business structure. So, there is a deliberate choice to engage with a very large customer and spread footprint within that customer as opposed to going and acquiring 50 other smaller customers for the same amount of revenue.
 
Another deliberate choice is to provide technologies and services that have a built-in recurring revenue characteristic to allow for long-term relationship with the clients.
 
 
5. Mentor to expand one’s own mindset 

He has invested in 8 start-ups. His principle here is also to find like-minded people to work with, who have similar energy so that the conversations are more productive and joyous. Though he expects them to be profitable in the future, he is aware of a large amount of risk associated with investing in start-ups.
 
He gets a lot of gratification from helping the Founder CEOs. For him, advising and mentoring typically younger people with all their chips on the table, full of infectious enthusiasm, borrowing money from everybody they can for their start-up, chasing a dream, is very rewarding in itself and much more gratifying than the financial returns through investing in their businesses that may or may not happen.
 
In his words, “Involvement with the start-ups helps me engage on many other dimensions than just working on the business that I own. Expanding my mindset in this fashion has been extremely helpful and energizing.”
 
He further shares, “Couple of years ago, I started engaging with seeding companies with capital. I have more than we need just because of the way we live. It is very interesting to involve with other companies right at the inception for two reasons. One is to broaden my own interests, it gives me momentum, allows me to have varied conversations with different types of people about completely different kind of things.
 
The second reason is to build their way of working with what I am trying to do. You meet people who are looking for capital, you have two or three conversations. You proceed forward with only those people that you connect with on that level. They get a real sense of you and you want to be around them. I have been lucky to have found a few. I have spoken to several others where the real connection wasn’t just there.”
 
 
6. Good physical, emotional, mental and spiritual health is very critical for business success.  

They are symbiotic and each feeds off the other. Based on his experience, you have to watch what you let inside your circle (physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually) because that’s your life.
 
He is really careful about the choices he makes about work, people etc. as the type of energy that is around you is what becomes your life. He is very careful of just not inviting something in, which he is not entirely sure of.

 
7. What you say No to has a greater impact on your life, professionally and personally, than what you say Yes to.  

This is the principle that I love the most, in his own words:
 
“I’ve learnt that the things I say yes to are less relevant than the things that I say no to. That actually defines the space that I live in. It’s more pushing out the world and creating a circle with only the things you want in there. That applies not just to business but every other place in life.”
 
Professionally, that means saying no to many lucrative business opportunities just because they would disrupt the structure and culture of his organization.
 
Personally, that means being careful about managing the time in his day because he doesn’t want to spend an evening away from his kids. That automatically implies keeping certain things out.
 
In his words, “There are always endless opportunities from a family standpoint, friends, social network and professional network. There are over 30 professional events that happen over a month that I get invited to. It is very easy to say no because I don’t want to spend an evening away from my kids. That’s not even a discussion. It would have to be something important, very specifically an active choice to actually to go there. Am I missing out on something? Probably, but unlikely. It’s more a question of fetching from the world what you need as opposed to just connecting to anything and everything.”
 
 
8. Doing what you love and what you are passionate about is far more important than earning money. 

He tells his older kid about to leave for college in a few years, “I would be very disappointed if you are working on some boring job somewhere because at this point, financially, you don’t have to do that. So, there’s really no excuse to not pursue something that drives you, something that you are passionate about, whatever it might be. Pursuit of happiness, first. What drives you, what makes you passionate, what brings you happiness; do that. You will figure out some way of eating, having a house and a car later.”

​ 
9. Actively create your Life 

He works from home as often as he can though he has quite a few offices around the country. In fact, he needs a reason to be at the office. It’s not something that he does every morning. His default state is to be at home. After the kids and wife leaves, it’s him and his dog at home. He’s very happy to be on the conference call for 30-40 minutes, while playing tennis ball with his dog outside the house. His home is his base. He drops and picks up the children from school. That anchors and lends structure to his day.
 
Everything else fits in around it. His work, home and social life is sort of a continuum. Priorities come and go, and go hand in hand. There’s no fixed amount of time he spends here or a fixed amount of time he spends there. It’s all very fungible. He moves from one thing to the other in a flow. There’s no time-off, in a sense. He doesn’t feel as if he needs a time-off.
 
A key tenet of his life is doing things that are important to you and letting them be the things that you prioritize. It is important to actively create one’s work-life, which is in harmony with rest of one’s life instead of it being dissonant with it.
 
He observes, “If I want to take a nap in the middle of the day, I naturally should. Why not live a life that you are basically biologically designed for? There’s a contentment in having a sense of control over your own time that’s hard to explain to someone who hasn’t experienced it.”
 
He refers to what his sister, a psychiatrist, told him earlier, “Joy for most people is something that escapes them for most of their life. But, what they don’t realize is they actually know what the joy is for them and how easy it is to reach for it. You just haven’t done it, so you don’t know.” He adds, “Once you have experienced that joy, you realize how easy it is to access it, if you so choose to. It’s hard to be around people who haven’t.”
 
In response to how does he access this joy, he says, “Just waking up and realizing everything that is in my day is because I choose it to be there, I feel very free. If there’s a day I don’t want to work, I won’t. It is just to achieve that. It is not the money. It is about just waking up and having the choice to spend your day the way you want.”

​Success Habits

​1. Nurturing your Employees 

Sarathi has built his business to be a loose confederation of like-minded individuals with the role designed to suit the employees’ lifestyle and their needs based on their phase in life, just like the business model is built to suit his lifestyle and his needs. The roles are structured to fit their lives unlike elsewhere in the corporate world where the employees have to structure their lives to fit the needs of the role.
 

2. Relationship of Equals 

Sarathi has a relationship of equals with his employees, instead of an employer-employee equation. He doesn’t see his organization in a traditional sense, he sees it as multiple one-to-one relationships. Predictably, attrition isn’t an issue he has to deal with. He has never placed a job posting. All his hires are senior experienced professionals either whom he had known personally or came through referrals. Employment contracts are also more like welcome letters written by him to them.
 
At the end of the year, they all get together to check if it is working for everyone. It is important for him that it does. Everyone in the company has a general sense of actively choosing their life, with an experience of control over their lives.
 

3. Recognizing and living from the consciousness, moment by moment, that Profit is the Output that can only get created by focusing on the Input; which is building a culture of deep trust, authentic connection, freedom and transparency in your organization 

There are no worries about quarterly revenue goals. The company grew by 30% in the last quarter. This is more an observation rather than a stated goal chased. It does go on to show that growth is an outcome of focusing on your people inside your organisation rather than focusing on creating growth on the outside. The first automatically leads to the second.
 
There is deep trust in the organization where interestingly, everyone knows each other’s compensation and there isn’t any argument about it. Sarathi has created a culture of deep trust, authentic connection, freedom and transparency. He has given each of his employees the ability to actively choose to be who they want to be. Counter-intuitively, this has resulted in greater growth and higher margins than the industry.
 
Employees are by design older people, who have intellectual depth and are fun to be around.
 
They don’t have giant enormous conference calls in their organisation with everybody present and taking a roll call. It all flows from people basically having ownership of their work.
 
Every arrangement for the employees, compensation etc. is structured in a way that they know it is fair to them. They know they are fairly treated. There is zero conversation around money amongst his employees; it is never a source of argument of any kind. Unlike big corporates, compensation strategy is not even part of his organizational culture.
 
As per Sarathi, this is an outcome of the people being there for the reasons that work for them. Money isn’t the driver; it is their exercise of freedom that is facilitated by being a part of this business. That is much more value than another X dollars per hour. There’s as much transparency as anyone needs.
 
People being spiteful to each other just doesn’t happen. People know each other’s compensation. There’s a culture of deep trust. It is not just the money that they are working for; it is the ability to exist in a way that they choose to exist, as a person. That’s why people generally don’t leave.
 
He says he depends on people truly representing their actual needs. It doesn’t work if you misrepresent what you want. It shouldn’t be like I want this because I should want this. The question is do you actually really want this. So, typically people who are part of his firm are a little bit older. They have moved further along in life and are able to think that way. As per him, people have to have some life experience before they can realize who they are and what they truly want.
 
 
4. Giving priority to being of service to his employee & customer communities over making money  

If wealth creation were the tail of the dog, most businesses spend their time moving the tail from left to right and right to left or beat the dog to get it to wag its tail. The most effortless way to get the tail to wag would be to feed the dog, live your values and be of service to your people and your customers through your business.
 
That is the reason building his business has been a fun, easy, joyous, hugely profitable ride for Sarathi unlike most of his peers who may be lit up working on their business in the beginning of the journey but usually crumble and fall apart along the way giving in to the stress of forcing the dog to wag its tail.
 
 
5. Choosing to be a Peaceful Warrior instead of a Fighter 

Another observation I have about Sarathi is that there is no desire to dominate or any need for external power, whatsoever. This is an attribute that shows up consistently in my work with authentically successful leaders, who I call Peaceful Warriors or Gear 5 Leaders. This is an attribute that is consistently missing in Leaders on an unsustainable success run. I call these leaders Fighters. They are High Performers but pay a huge cost for it and ultimately crash out.
 
The ups and downs of business does not impact Sarathi because in his own words, “Stress only comes from standing in the way of what naturally needs to flow and not if you preserve the harmony of what needs to occur.” This graceful acceptance of all that comes his way gives him the secret power of being stress-free, calm, efficient and highly productive in the face of anything.
 
He says, “Why not work with what’s naturally going to occur? I want to do things that kind of make sense to me. I don’t ever want to be in a situation where I don’t know what I am doing there.”
 
Losing a client because an employee suddenly has to leave on account of a life-event would not at all stress him and all his attention is actually focused on supporting the employee through their life journey. For example, an employee lost his spouse. For him, what to do with the client is almost insignificant to what the employee is going through.
 

6. A deep connection with your own self and people around you 

For me, that’s what spirituality means. I believe that is the where the next revolution in the business world will take place as Business Owners and CEOs realize their leadership ability to lead their organisations from good to great lies in consciously evolving to connect deeply and vulnerably with their own true selves and with people in their organisations.
 
He inherently needs less from the world. Being picky about what he gets from the world is very natural for him. In response to how he ended up being like this, he laughs and says that’s not how he was 10 years ago.
 
It is amazing to be in a conversation with him that flows along almost effortlessly. He seems to have gone past the chattering monkey in the head, judging self and others, to directly connect with his authentic inner voice.
 
 
7. Seeking peace, fulfillment and freedom instead of chasing wealth and success 

A perfect day for him is a day that he has time for himself, he is not rushed, is not part of any conversations that he doesn’t belong in or know the reason for. That’s really all that he wants. None of these things have anything to do with money. He says, “Can I pick up my kid from school? Can I spend the next 45 minutes in a conversation with him without getting disturbed? I put my phone on ‘Do not disturb’ to make it happen. I have zero problem doing that because that’s what I want. If something prevents me from doing this, I would become unhappy. Then, there’ll be something I would need to remove from my life.”
 
Most people choose to chase wealth and success. There’s no guarantee that they will find peace, fulfillment, freedom; neither is there a guarantee that they will find wealth and success. Sarathi has chosen peace, fulfillment and freedom as his goal; and built his life around it, including his business. My observation is that wealth and success always ends up chasing such people.
 
He doesn’t wake up worried about a quarterly revenue goal. He and his team have some planning in place, though it is never like we have to grow by 30%. It is more an observation that we grew by 30%. This definitely turns Sales on its head and the enormous pressure that businesses put on their sales people to sell to match up to a concocted number.
 
How much more evolutionary it is to focus on the input side of things - fulfill the needs of the clients and employees, do whatever for that – and let the output organically follow through from there; instead of stressing yourself with the output.
 
The created stress reduces productivity, performance, creativity, innovation that would in turn reduce the effectiveness of the input anyway; resulting in less than optimum output.
 

8. Living the Mission rather than talk about it 

He holds the loose confederation (as he calls it) of his people by giving them the freedom to be who they are. In his words, “The company doesn’t have a mission statement. It doesn’t have stated principles and values. The organisation is almost an amorphous thing that exists because of people who are connected to each other. Yes, it is a legal entity but not much more than that.
 
The company is what is inside it. We are not pushing out a sense of how it should be. It is because of what’s in it. You just make sure that what’s in it are people who are alike in a lot of ways and it kind of attracts a lot of people like that.
 
There are no non-compete clauses in the employment contract. Infact, the employment contracts are not even given to the lawyers for review. The contracts are more like writing a letter based on the discussion we have had.”
 
Though there are no mission statements, principles, values that are explicitly pushed outwards to his people and made a noise about; the organization does have a very strong sense of a mission, a living set of meaningful principles and values that holds the organization together because Sarathi breathes, thinks, talks and acts from there, though almost unconsciously.
 
Yes, whether we accept it or not, organizations always mirror the leader at the helm. If you are grappling with employee disengagement, profitability issues, quality concerns, attrition; it would be far more effective as the CEO to look at the mirror for the source of the malaise rather than waging the battle on the outside.
 

9. Playing the game of low revenue, high margin, top-of-the-pyramid, high-end niche player 

Sarathi has made a conscious choice not to be a high revenue, low margin, volume player. His game is to be a low revenue, high margin, high-end niche player because it is intellectually fun to do and you are around people who are intellectually and otherwise fun to be around. His business is structured to give the people the freedom to be who they are and do what they want to do. He says, “These are the people who don’t need to work for you, they want the freedom to work on things they work on.”
 
He didn’t choose Cyber-security as the domain of his business because he was an expert on it prior to starting the business. He became knowledgeable as an outcome of running the business. He chose the domain based on observing secularly which market was growing, which was high technology, somewhat esoteric, of high value, requires intelligent capable people that you would like to talk to.
 
You can’t run a business like this by taking on a lot of capital and fixed assets and having to produce a specific amount of return every year for an x amount of growth. That doesn’t sound like fun at all to him to do something like that.
 
So, all Sarathi has really done is chasing his heart, to do stuff that is fun and intellectually engaging, which is the right way of running a business.
 

10. The end goal is for the business to become self-sustaining 

He doesn’t have a revenue or a size goal. The next goal for him is to have his business become self-sustaining so that he doesn’t have to be here. He wants to institutionalize the way he runs his business; put in place some sort of a charter or constitution, some rules for self-governance.
 

11. A goal is a place to come from and not a place to go to 

He shares, “The business books, Jack Welch, Peter Drucker and the likes of them never made any sense to me. The purpose isn’t to build the company. The company takes the shape it takes because you want to live a certain way.
 
I think I am going to get to some good place if we manage doing things every day that make sense, that flow naturally from your life, with your life.”
 
What kind of future to build is not his main consideration, it is all about the journey and the quality of it. Most people get so caught up with the goal; it becomes the place to go to. There’s always a gap between where I am and that is where I want to go to; that most of us end up living the life of scarcity and yearning all the time.
 
There is so much unfulfillment in the world because one is always looking at somewhere else to go to from where one is right now, as if where you are right now is somehow inadequate.
 
The way Sarathi runs his business is fundamentally how businesses will eventually evolve to in the future because no other way is sustainable.
 
 
12. Meditation for connection with self 

Towards the end of the conversation, I finally get to know the secret to Sarathi’s deep stillness within that allows him to run a business with a natural rhythm.
 
He shares that he has taught Transcendental Meditation to each one of the Founder CEOs of the companies he has invested in. He explains that it is a way of managing stress; bringing balance in your habits and clarity to your thoughts. The results from doing Transcendental Meditation twice daily have been almost miraculous for him. He shares that it is funny that people remember his coaching them Transcendental Meditation and thank him for it more than anything else.
 
I could totally resonate with him with my own daily practice of Vipassana Meditation, which is my way of centering and grounding myself. Interestingly, my most creative and productivity-enhancing ideas come to me while I am meditating. 

A few more Questions

1. Which Places, Habits, People who fill you with energy? 

Nature fills Sarathi with energy. Couple of times in a week, he wanders about in the museums, gardens and sanctuaries in his city. In fact, he takes people to the museum of fine arts for a meeting instead of a busy noisy coffee shop. He laughs that even if the conversation goes nowhere, he at least gets something out of it.
 
Every business trip that he takes, he plugs in another day to the itinerary to do something nature related nearby. On one trip, he drove a scenic 40 miles to have a meal by himself at a famous 1930s restaurant and spent some time on the beach before driving back to fly back home.
 
It’s his way of refreshing and re-generating in the midst of the tedium of almost similar kind of business meetings. He laughs that he used to be a kind of person who would have gone to the airport earlier instead of spending time with nature to rejuvenate, so that he could sit in the lounge and work more.
 
People who fill him up with energy are those who are open in many ways, with whom he finds resonance with, who are empathetic.
 
Habits that energize him are meditation, his daily run that creates the momentum for his day which he would miss otherwise, time spent with his kids that he values more than anything else, great meal once in a while, his sojourns in sanctuaries to breathe in nature, museums.
 
 
2. Which Places, Habits, People drain your energy? 

If he had to sit in the office the whole day, he would be miserable. People who can’t see past themselves drain him of energy. People who are subdued by their circumstances and become negative sap his energy; as do people with whom he can’t find a way to talk to.
 
If he can’t sleep properly, that gets him off-balance. So, he would cancel his meetings, take a half-day off to catch up with sleep to get back his balance.
 
 
3. What makes you forget about time? 

Foremost is spending time with his kids. He has no sense of time when he is with his kids. Also when he is out in nature, time gets suspended. Sometimes watching a movie that he is enjoying or being with friends gets him to lose his sense of time.
 
 
4. What’s working? What’s not working? 

What’s working for him is that he does the things that fill him up with energy every day as part of his active practice. There are things that don’t work. He simply stops doing them.
 
On being asked what is not working for him, he responds, “Nothing really. Sure, there are daily challenges but they don’t bother me. I don’t really carry them in my mind. I have a sense that not everything is perfect because it never is. It’s a matter of whether there’s anything that I can do about that.”
 
His 84 years old mother is going through an early stage of dementia. He is not depressed or upset about it because he simply accepts life and whatever life throws up for him. He doesn’t experience unhappiness about anything, just recognition of how things are and how does one make the most of that. He makes sure he calls her every morning.
 
Even from a business perspective, he simply accepts what there is. Giving an example of how at the client negotiation earlier in the day, the outcome was inconclusive and the conversation would need to be carried forward as the client was being aggressive. His response to that situation is that he doesn’t really think about these things very much.
 
He simply says, “We are going to make the best decision we can. We’ll hope for the best outcome, just so long we are clear about what we need. We’ll try to get as close to that as possible. When it stops being something that sustains us from a profitability standpoint, we’ll just stop doing it. We’ll do something else. I don’t get bent out of shape about these things. There’s no one else in the company also, who gets too fired about these things.”
 
He doesn’t have a sense of anything missing for him, any sense of scarcity. He will go do whatever it is, if there’s something missing.
 
He has recently co-founded another company and is totally cool about one of the other co-founders being the CEO. The reasons for founding the new company are mostly because of the people involved and the technology that would be fun. There’s a sense of curiosity, the venture being another interesting experiment. I notice how he has zero pressure around making the new venture successful; what he has is a refreshing sense of joyful playfulness about starting a new company, almost like a fun game he is playing with zero stress that one usually sees in a start-up environment. What an incredible energy to bring in!
 
As an aside, he doesn’t understand the energy around new years. He says, “If it is a good idea, do it right now. Why are you calendar-driven? Then, you are setting yourself up for failure because you don’t know why you are not doing it. Why do you need a date to do it? That is surely not the missing component.” Makes perfect sense, Sarathi 😊
 
 
5. Where do you hold back? 

He responds, “I have observed that I hold back in providing any kind of criticism that may seem harsh. It is not interesting for me to do that. I am not here to change the world. That’s not my sense of it. I am not here to solve the world’s problems. Just flowing from a sense of what you consider important, relevant, things that are coherent, not dissonant, more a passive way of being. There were things that used to irritate me, many years ago. Politics in this country, for most part, doesn’t make any sense for most people. Those kinds of things would bother me. People who are extremely negative would bother me. I don’t really think about that so much now. It’s funny just learning that you have a choice not to do certain things. That’s more difficult for people who are employed, work in an office, are part of an org structure. That limits you in some ways. Leaving that structure frees you in many ways. You do pay a price for that in terms of not having a fixed monthly income.
 
I don’t think people, who have a desire for something better, realize how small a gap there is between what they think they need and what they really need. Just get out there and live the way you want to live. There’s a sense of this elusive thing called joy. You don’t realize how well you know what that joy looks like and how small of a reach you have to make to actually get it. The hesitation is there but the distance is very very small. Just being aware of that. A part of it involves shedding off of all the other stuff, so that all that remains are a lot of things that give you joy. You can still make a living. You are just not as invested in all those kinds of things emotionally.
 
Maintenance of life takes up a certain amount of time. I think 90% of what we do in a business falls into that category. There are things you have to do so that you can get to the good part. Energy, thoughts, emotions are directed towards things that you actually want. If you knew you were going on a vacation at the end of the day, you would work differently, won’t you? That’s what it takes.
 
Where is the highest return of investment? It is clearly my children. There really isn’t another place. Where is even the discussion or argument on how you should spend your time? Even if you want to look at from business terms on how you should prioritize things, you look at where is your greater return. Where is your personal higher rate of return? Is it at work? I seriously doubt that. No matter who you are, in many ways. I don’t know, maybe I am fortunate that I think in that way.
 
I don’t consider us living in an opulent way. There is adequacy in terms of resources that most people are not fortunate enough to get there and I am completely aware of that. You are starving to death. You live in a slum. Then, life looks different. This is after you have crossed a certain threshold, then you don’t have any limitations other than those you choose to recognize. What do you do with yourself in the world? You have a college degree, you are a professional, you are an engineer, an MBA from a fine place; if you are miserable then, you need to change something. There’s nothing inherently stopping you from being completely at peace with yourself and the world.”
 
 
6. What’s your real gift?  

“Good Gosh, I haven’t thought about it. I don’t know. I don’t really know. Oh, it’s funny. I do kind of have an answer for that. I was having a conversation with my financial advisor, who I mentor. He has had a difficult upbringing, grew up without parents because of which he has a skewed way of being. He is involved with a lot of my businesses. He said that he wanted to drop that and do something else. And, I told him, “If it makes you happy, I am all for it.”
 
If you think about it, the only real gift you can give to someone is to be invested in their happiness; otherwise it involves you and what you want out of it. It’s not actually a gift unless it costs you something. Most people impose their own expectations. Usually, we gift things that we want to gift. Giving joy to someone has to be the joy that they actually wish to receive. That doesn’t have anything coming back to you, it’s all for them. It’s even better if it keeps you from benefitting.”
 
 
7. What people miss most about you when you leave a room?  

“I want to be the least interesting person. What I hear from people is that they get a boost of positivity talking to me. They tell me – I need an hour with you, I need a reset.”
 
 
8. What’s your biggest impact?  

“I hope my kids when they start off in their life. I just wish they have all of the things that I wasn’t aware of when I started - find your passion, find your joy. Let that be a joyous centering approach to how you construct your life. Everything else isn’t going to matter. Just find your joy, what drives you, what gives you passion. I also encourage and support them with those kinds of activities now. You have an interest in it, you want to explore it, just go for it. I am fortunate enough to have resources to expend though most of these things aren’t resource-driven; they are more an investment of your time, in the sense of exploring it with them. I just want to make sure I don’t leave them deprived of anything that I know now. It’s the luxury of time to engage with them, that’s a big deal for me.
 
One of the challenges that I see having people growing their companies is that they bring the negativity and the stress, the draining parts of their job back to their home, to their lives. The direction has to be completely the other way around. You project the strength of your support system out into the world, and do that in a way that doesn’t drain you.”
 

9. How is your relationship with your wife?  

“Good. We are both fiercely independent people. We have known each other for 25 years, married for 21 years. I am 51, that means half my life. She has great interest in art and history. She is away this week and has taken the kids for a trip around art.
 
We have learnt to find which parts of us work together and there are certainly other parts of us that don’t overlap at all. And, that’s ok. Just because you are married doesn’t mean you are completely coupled and tied to the hip. That sort of is our relationship. It just seems to work. There are parts we do together and we have a common investment in our children.
 
We have gone through our own phases in the relationship. One thing I have always had a sense of is that you are responsible as a person for your own happiness. That’s not something that you outsource to somebody. Nobody is obligated to provide you with happiness. You have that responsibility as a complete human being to find your happiness. If you are not happy, it’s your fault. You are not doing what’s necessary.
 
It’s not that I am in a relationship and I need that other person to make me happy. It just doesn’t work that way. There’s a fundamental misunderstanding about happiness if you are expecting it to come from somewhere other than yourself. I see that as the trap.
 
We have had a few years in the middle where we were unbalanced around that part of the equation. Then, eventually you get connected to something that nourishes you personally, emotionally, mentally. Find that happiness and the relationship starts to work better. Marriage works because you are responsible for your happiness individually, it’s not the marriage has to work and therefore, you are happy.” 

​Running Business in alignment with the Natural Law

​​Sarathi and business leaders like him is the reason why I am interviewing CEOs and business owners around the world to bring to notice that there is a fundamental way to run business in alignment with the natural laws which results in greater sustainable profitability on the outside and peace, fulfillment, joy on the inside.
 
Business, as anything else in our life, is about managing the input side; essentially what energy you put in, the purpose why you are doing what you are doing, creating an organizational structure where the lifestyle of the individual people who make the organization determines the role instead of the other way around, the business strategy to have long-term mutually beneficial relationships with clients with the focus to make a difference, nurturing your employee and customer communities to support their growth; instead of the mad running from pillar to post stressing about the results and in that rush, forgetting that the basic reason a business exists is to be of service to its people and customers.
 
Given that input, profit is a guarantee. This concept is intellectually understood and splashed around on the walls as mission statements and values. That makes zero difference.
 
What would make a difference is to focus leadership development and evolution on coaching people to

1. Be connected with who they authentically are as human beings
2. Be authentically connected with each other without masks and defenses
3. Discover their purpose, link that purpose to their work so that they can bring the joy of that purposefulness and the resultant ownership to their job
4. Discover the exhilaration of craft mastery and play the game to be the best in their domain
5. Be on the journey of personal mastery by transforming across all the 4 bodies of their Being (physical, intellectual, emotional, spiritual) by letting go of limiting habits and taking on growth habits

For this, the business owner / CEO has to first walk this path.
 
The right way of doing business does not get any media attention because Level 5 leaders (who, as per Jim Collins, lead their organizations from good to great) running these kind of businesses go about their work quietly, preferring to spend time with family rather than get caught up with unnecessary media attention. This is unfortunate because the world ends up seeing the wrong kind of role models – the aggressive Level 4 Leaders who are out there chasing goals with no time for personal nourishment or family.

​As we end our conversation

​​On being asked about sharing his message with the wider world by writing a book, he responds that he does that in a limited way by mentoring and coaching Founder CEOs; though he protects his time, which is another fundamental principle of his way of life. Spreading things out in the world invites a lot more encroachment of his time which would totally ruin his lifestyle and that doesn’t work for him.
 
The irony is that people who haven’t gotten the joy and fulfillment, professionally and personally, end up writing so much more, talking so much more, making a lot more noise, attracting a lot more media attention. People who understand and live the secret of having it all – deeply fulfilling successful profitable businesses, loving harmonious relationships at home and at work, happy responsible kids, lots of nourishing nurturing me-time, while making a difference in the world - are not inspired to attract attention to themselves in any way by writing about themselves or telling the world about themselves and are content to live their lives quietly away from the glare of the limelight; so the world just ends up not getting the right message.
 
This article is in a way an attempt to bring to light Gear 5 role model Leaders, or Level 5 Leaders as Jim Collins calls them.
 
I have no doubt in my mind that this is the direction businesses will eventually evolve towards because what is the highest and the best is the only thing that sustains in the long run, as Charles Darwin has beautifully made the world understand.
 
I am looking forward to witnessing the transformation of our species from fear-based Survival of the Fittest to the love-sourced Transformation to our Highest Self, led by businesses who will evolve their leadership model from being fear-based to the leadership model sourced in love, gratefulness, reverence, integrity, personal mastery, joy, gentleness, connection creating abundance, prosperity, fun, freedom and fulfillment for all.

---

Pseudonyms have been used for the serial entrepreneur interviewed and for his businesses to protect his privacy. In his words, “Other than discomfort about privacy, it’s a concern about upsetting the balance in the company by me standing in the spotlight so to speak. That runs counter to the basic thesis of this not being about a single person but a community of equals. I would be fine with publishing it anonymously - both my name and the company.” 

---