November 17, 2025 • 34 mins
Do you view your closeness or proximity to your customers as a strategic advantage? Or said differently, have you thought about that before? Our guest today is Mr. Sri Kaza, who shares with us his Underdog formula that he has found in small businesses.
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What makes your business unique?
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- https://linkedin.com/in/srikaza
ABOUT OUR GUEST:
Sri Kaza is a business leader and small business advocate with a career spanning corporate strategy, entrepreneurial ventures, and dedicated support for small businesses. After earning degrees from the University of Michigan and Northwestern University, he began his career at McKinsey & Co., advising Fortune 500 companies. This was followed by executive roles focused on supporting small businesses, including serving as CEO of ForwardLine Financial, where he helped tens of thousands of small businesses achieve their goals. Through his extensive experience working with both large corporations and small businesses, Sri developed the Underdog Principles — a framework that helps small businesses leverage their inherent advantages to compete and thrive in any market.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
SPEAKER_00 (00:01):
Welcome to the Multiply Your Success podcast,
where each week we helpgrowth-minded entrepreneurs and
franchise leaders take the nextstep in their expansion journey.
I'm your host, Tom Dufour, CEOof Big Sky Franchise Team.
And as we open today, I'mwondering if you view your
closeness or proximity to yourcustomers as a strategic
(00:22):
advantage.
Or maybe said another way, haveyou even thought about that as a
strategic advantage before?
Well, our guest today is ShreeCasa, and he shares with us his
underdog formula that he hasfound to help small businesses
that talks about positioning,proximity, and purpose.
(00:42):
Now, Shri is a seasoned businessleader and small business
advocate with a background incorporate strategy and
entrepreneurship.
After earning degrees from theUniversity of Michigan and
Northwestern, he began hiscareer at Pricewaterhouse
Cooper's and Blue MartiniSoftware before advising Fortune
500 companies at McKinseyCompany.
He later transitioned toexecutive roles, founding a data
(01:04):
analytics startup that helpedsmall businesses assess job
applicants and led theemployment tax credit division
to tax credit company, which isnow part of Experian, which
supported thousands of smallbusinesses in securing
government incentives.
Tree has recently finished hisbook, Unconvention, which draws
on his extensive experiencechallenging conventional
(01:25):
corporate thinking andempowering small businesses to
succeed by staying true to theirunique strengths.
You're going to love thisinterview, so let's go ahead and
jump right into it.
SPEAKER_01 (01:34):
Hi, Tom.
My name is Tree Casa.
I'm the author of a new book outcalled Unconvention.
And I've had a few differenttitles in different companies in
my past, but today I'm kind offocusing on advocacy for small
businesses.
SPEAKER_00 (01:46):
I love small businesses as well.
And I love how you're talkingabout advocacy for small
businesses.
That is music to my ears and tomy heart.
I love that.
And we have lots of founders,entrepreneurs, successful owners
that tune into our podcast andother business leaders.
I'd love for you just to talk alittle bit here about your book
(02:09):
and just at least give us anoverview and what led you to
want to write this book and putthis down.
SPEAKER_01 (02:14):
Probably for me, it starts with a journey that I had
prior to starting to focus onsmall businesses with McKinsey
and large corporate consulting.
Being effective at largecorporate consulting involves
being very quantitative, beingvery focused on a couple of
things that you know everybody'sgoing to agree on.
And as many of us know, that'scorporate profits, corporate
(02:36):
growth.
It's very hard to get that done,but it's easy to get people
aligned on buying into this kindof corporate profitability.
But as I kind of shifted awayand began doing my own
entrepreneurial endeavors andworking for businesses or
private health, but with adifferent committee, nuanced
mission.
Yes, we want to earn money.
Yes, we want to grow, but weactually want to have an impact
(02:58):
on the world.
In any shape or form, impact,or, or even, hey, I'm here to
leave a legacy behind or buildsomething for my children.
These kind of different purposesfor 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 owneror the or the or or the family
that's running business wants,how do I get this thing done?
(03:19):
You know the challenge.
But, you know, when I got into abusiness called a tax credit
code and started working withsmall businesses to get them
services that they needed, itreally started to kind of stand
out to me.
The small businesses out therefor yes, they need to earn
money, they need to make aliving, they may want to grow,
they may want to solve aproblem.
But the problems that they goafter and the way they look at
(03:40):
the world are very different.
And in fact, because of the waythey do that, one, you know,
they don't get a lot of supportbecause 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 timeto go and explore all the ways
to be more efficient and moreprofitable.
Instead, they're working day today, fighting different battles
to bring whatever product orservice they really wanted to
(04:02):
bring into the world, they'reworking really hard to do that.
And, you know, still part of myjourney is I'm still not really
grasping, like, hey, does thismake sense?
Because there's a whole bunch ofways to make money that these
guys aren't going after.
But as I started to start to gohave an impact and see what
would make it, what would theydo with the savings or the
incremental income we brought tothem by solving some tax credit
(04:22):
problems or in other placeslater on in life?
I took on a role as thepresident and COO of a of a
small business lender, evenbecame CEO at that place.
I realized when you get money inthe hands of the small business
who's got a passion or is tryingto make something happen, you
see some amazing things.
And you would never see thosethings in a big corporation.
What you would see is aredeployment of capital to the
(04:44):
most efficient, you know,economic outcomes in a good,
kind of healthy corporation.
But what you would see with asmall business is you would see
investment in customers,investment in bringing something
to a community or to a user baseor to a group of people that
actually valued the businessitself.
(05:05):
And so take you along on my kindof journey to now I realize that
there's a lot of benefits tohelping these small businesses.
We set the mission at the SmallBusiness Lender Overs Act to
focusing on America SmallBusinesses Financial Health.
We know they need that help.
And as a lender, we we had theopportunity to go and put money
in the hands of small businessesthat were investing in
(05:28):
themselves, trying to grow,trying to solve problems.
And we were really doing well,very excited about delivering on
this mission all the way upuntil 2020, where we had put
hundreds of millions of dollarsin the hands of these small
businesses in the form of loans.
And here comes COVID shuttingeverybody down.
Not only did it crush ourbusiness, it crushed the
(05:49):
business of many of ourcustomers.
That's when I then got anopportunity to advocate for the
first time.
I got to go talk to members ofCongress and their, I guess, the
lobbying groups around them tohear what they had to say about
the PPP program that they weredesigning and share my own
feedback with what I thoughtwould make sense.
(06:10):
Probably both one of the moreexciting things I got to do with
my career and also one of themost ineffective conversations
I'd ever had.
Not to pick on Congress here forbeing 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 mybusiness to have some marginal,
(06:32):
but you know, not massivelyprofitable motivation to go
help, right?
And our whole job is to getmoney in the hands of all these
businesses that need help.
But they built these cutoffs andthis 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 yourexpenses and like you know,
process all the details.
You're not gonna make a bigprofit.
(06:53):
We don't want you to be making abig problem.
We just want you to do it.
I buy that.
We're in, we want to help thesesmall businesses.
And that scale is gonna getsmaller.
Like if it's if it's more than$100,000, it's only gonna be
about, you know, three and ahalf percent.
And and then, you know, if it'seven bigger than that, you know,
it's only gonna be 2%.
All the way up to$10 million oflending, it's only gonna be 2%.
(07:13):
And anybody who can do mathwould would realize that wait a
minute.
So if I'm making$10 millionloans 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 enoughcompanies out there who may or
may not need them.
Like, you know, how manyhealthcare providers and how
many of these companies that youknow didn't even have to shut
down anything?
They were able to get this 10million.
(07:34):
How many companies got these$10million PPP loans?
And then the banks were gonnamake a ton of money on doing
these$10 million, no-risk, supereasy loans.
And then the government wasgoing 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.
(07:54):
You know, you look at how easyit is, and then you've got to
say, well, what's the motivationof every bank?
Let's get the$10 million onesfirst, right?
And then we'll work on the smallones.
You can't blame them for beingcapitalists.
That's what they're gonna do.
So I kind of could have had anod or two, and people believed
in it.
And they're like, Yeah, that'sright, that's right.
And then what came out?
No meaningful changes there.
And boom, what happened?
All the money ran out, and likein within months, and all the
(08:17):
money went to really, really bigcompanies.
In time, like probably takealmost a year, they figured out
how to fix it.
They they they let in differenttypes of lenders to come another
round where a lot more smallbusinesses got the money.
But that's where I realized, youknow, too many more people have
to be actually speaking up onbehalf of these small businesses
because, you know, I was inthere and I'm sure they went and
(08:37):
talked to the CEOs of the bigbanks.
And the big banks were like, no,this is a great process.
We can get this out fast, we cando this, just hit go, just hit
go.
And, you know, hitting go madesense, but it really made big
dollars for those big banks andit and it didn't do anything for
the little guys.
So you ask my kind of what's myjourney on advocacy, that kind
of tipped me off to say, hey,look, we gotta do something
(08:58):
different.
It's when I started collecting alot more stories about these
small businesses that succeededand and didn't from COVID.
SPEAKER_00 (09:05):
Any small business that tunes in or hears this will
resonate, whether it's with thatspecific situation or something
similar, right?
I often think of the smallbusiness owner.
Myself lumped into that categorytoday, that oftentimes you're
just in the grind of theday-to-day of fulfilling the
needs of your customers, justfulfilling the orders that have
(09:26):
been placed and just trying tokeep things going.
And most owners, right, tryingto make sure they can hit
payroll and whatever is on theirdocket.
SPEAKER_01 (09:34):
Yeah.
No, they wanna they want todeliver something special to
their community, to theircustomers.
And everything else is somethingthat gets in the way, right?
And you gotta solve for it.
You can't pretend it's notthere.
But, you know, that's what Ilove about the stories that I
collected and the people Italked to, the ones that
survived, you know, the bigchallenges.
COVID's not even the biggest ofthe challenges that most many of
(09:57):
these small businesses face.
In fact, when I talk to anysmall business owner, you know,
there's a certain certain amountof, you know, what you can see
in just eye contact that they'vebeen 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, isthe bank coming to collect or am
I not gonna be able to makepayroll?
(10:18):
Like it, it hasn't happened justonce either.
So, you know, going through thattrauma and having that spirit to
say, I'm gonna power throughthis because I believe in what
I'm doing is what defines someof these most resilient small
business owners.
They they care.
And it's where I go back to inthe in the big corporate world,
you know, you got to geteverybody agreed on the profit
thing, and you're gonna go afterthe thing that's the most
profitable, or the thing that'sgonna give you the best, you
(10:39):
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 needto go and make, you know, an
extra 50 grand or add, you know,20% more customers this year.
It's about making sure peopleknow that I'm there to offer
them what they need and that Icare about their survival just
as much as I do about my ownbusiness.
(11:01):
What was amazing in my researchfor the book and talking to a
lot of these businesses thatthat kind of made it through
COVID was that in that timeperiod, their customers are the
ones that said, either openly orsubconsciously, this is a
business that I want to have inmy life.
This is a business that I needto patronize even more so today
(11:21):
because of the challenges than Ihave 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 thisweek, you know, twice in a
month, you know, more.
Just how do we do it?
Like and you would you'd hearfrom bookstores, oh, our
customers did GoFundMe campaignsbecause they knew that we
(11:43):
couldn't survive COVID withoutthe GoFundMe campaign.
So people are just straight upwriting checks to keep the
businesses alive that they caredabout.
I don't know how many people youknow that started doing video
training with their personaltrainers 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.
(12:04):
We're gonna keep thisrelationship going, even though
I'm doing it through like atablet or a, or a, or a phone,
or a PC.
I'm still gonna commit to thisbusiness owner.
That behavior doesn't happen forGold's gym.
That behavior doesn't happen tosave a McDonald's or a Barnes
and Noble.
It's only because of therelationships and the care for
(12:26):
the product and care for theexperience 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 franchisingbusiness, so franchising's top
of mind.
And you can definitely, even inthe franchise world, see the
difference between the brandswhere there are active owner
operators in that localfranchise system that's
(12:50):
connected to the communityversus those that are either
company-owned units or are ownedby large multi-unit groups where
that local owner feel just it'snot there.
SPEAKER_01 (13:01):
That's right.
One of the things that's supercritical about surviving as a
small business is beingdifferentiated.
You know, in my book, I call itpositioning.
I use the word positioningspecifically because many small
businesses have a retaillocation or have a physical
nexus somewhere.
That position where you are, ifyou're a franchise owner, you
(13:23):
have a particular location.
That is an important piece ofthe definition of what makes you
different.
Lean into it.
Recognize that the kind ofpeople who come to you are the
people from your community, thepeople who are your neighbors,
right?
What do you do that's different?
Doesn't have to be, hey, I'vegot a different sign out or a
different flavor of burger or,you know, different choices on
(13:43):
my menu.
It has to do with how you fit inand how are you important to the
community.
And that can be different forany small business.
You may have a virtual communitywhere you're mostly online, but
leaning into who you are andleaning into what you're
positioning in is that way tokeep loyalty.
That it's the way to keep yourcustomers satisfied and, you
(14:05):
know, seeing you as somethingimportant 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 seethat through.
Maybe share one of thosestories.
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 ofthe book were independent
bookstores.
They're pretty classic forpeople thinking they shouldn't
even exist at this point, right?
People are like, well, you gotAmazon, you got Burns and Noble,
you got ebooks.
Like, what's the point of thebookstore?
If you can get any book you wantto within a day or hours, even
(14:38):
by just going to order onAmazon.
So I talked to the owner of thisbook, Jonathan, of Talking
Leads, it's a bookstore in in umBuffalo.
When I connected with him, thereason I'd reached out is his
bookstore doesn't offer normalbooks.
It's a collection of the booksthat just don't fit in.
Very, very idiosyncratic.
(14:59):
So he's out there trying tocurate a set of books that you
can't easily find or youwouldn't come across when you go
to Amazon's top seller list oryou go to look at the displays
on Barnes ⁇ Noble.
And, you know, that's not a wayif you are some corporate
consultant.
That's not a way to run abusiness.
Go pick all the books that areunpopular and put them all in
(15:19):
the same place.
What's that?
What's that gonna do for you?
Well, he's been around for likedecades.
Why?
Because he's created a spiritand a personality for his store
that people are like, look, Iwant to go find something out of
the mainstream.
I want to go read somethingthat's not what other people are
reading and learn something newand different.
(15:40):
And you create this ethos.
And of course, people love you.
And you're you're still gonnahave some challenges all the
time.
You know, business is gonna goup and down, you're gonna have
financial cycles, you're gonnahave COVID hit you or something
crazy like that, or just thestreet in front of you goes
under construction, you lose allyour foot traffic for two
months.
Like whatever it is, you'regonna have this adversity.
(16:03):
But when there are people thatyou've affected in a way that
they believe you should bearound, they believe you add
something.
They may not even have to berepeat customers, they'll refer
people to you because the impactthat you had on their lives,
that's the spirit that, youknow, when you have a business
that can survive these things,that the spirit is I've got
something unique and I've gotsomething that I think is
(16:23):
important.
And if you find enough customerswho 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 theyhear this, will probably think
in their own mind, maybe theirbusiness is that business,
something like that in theircommunity, or oh, I know a
business that's like that or hasa 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 youthis like really challenging, oh
my gosh, I have to have thisparticular flavor or this or
anything.
Like it could be as simple aswhere you're located and who
your customers are.
But it's really important tofeel confident in knowing what
(17:07):
your what your sweet spot is,because every day, every
decision that you make, you'vegot to go deal with making
somebody happy and somebodyunhappy.
You've got to go deal withinvesting in one decision versus
another decision.
And if what you do is you knowthat, hey, look, the kinds of
customers I serve are the onesthat are in my neighborhood, put
your bets there, right?
(17:28):
And instead of betting on thisexpansion further out or trying
to get, you know, something newand that's unfamiliar with the
core base of people that youbring in, go work on delighting
the ones that you've got, right?
Or go work on delighting onesthat are a lot like the ones
that you got, but don't know youyet.
That's not just a good way tokind of have near-term impact,
but it's also a good way todeepen those relationships and
(17:51):
have more confidence in who youare.
A lot of that comes from yourown personality.
You may not have embraced ityet, but a lot of that comes
from your own personality as anowner.
SPEAKER_00 (17:58):
I appreciate you talking about this unique piece,
this positioning that you'retalking about, or these
differentiators.
And I like the word positioningthat you use to help describe
it.
Sometimes I think in the smallbusiness community, we hear the
buzzwords of differentiation anduniqueness and unique
identifiers and all thesebuzzwords that come along.
(18:21):
And that idea of positions, howare you positioned in your
community, literally within yourcommunity or amongst your peers
that are closest to you, thatyour customers may also be
customers of that are shoppingor going to and from?
How are you positioned to justshowcase 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 tothink about beer positioning.
I don't know if you go tosporting events.
I I like to go to, I lovecollege football, go to a
basketball game every once in awhile.
You go to the football game andyou park in the lot that's
assigned, you know, in LA,that's probably like 40 bucks or
50 bucks.
(19:03):
I mean it's ridiculous.
You just park right by thestadium.
You go to a basketball game,yeah, you're 50 bucks to go park
in it, used to be called StapleCenter, or what they call it
now, crypto.com arena.
But if you park in the structureacross the street, it's only 35
bucks.
But if you park in some of thelots before you get to the
structure that's across thestreet, it's 20 bucks at one, 15
(19:25):
bucks at one.
If you want to just park rightunder the expressway, it's kind
of dingy, gross, but you may beable 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
(19:46):
price and their physicalposition, right?
And and they know their value.
My value, if I'm the$15 guyversus the$35 guy who's across
the street, my value, I've gotto be a lot cheaper because I
don't have the covered parking,right?
I don't have the lighting, Idon't have the you know, safety
and security that a garageoffers.
(20:08):
But if I'm the if I'm the garageversus the stadium, well, the
stadium is like, you know,closeness, you know, don't have
to go outside, you know, allthat stuff.
They each have some incrementalvalue based on the position that
they sit in.
So now, any small business, yougotta think about your
(20:28):
differentiation, you got tothink about your value that you
offer customers in physicalposition, maybe a big piece.
It may not be, but how are yourelative to their other options?
You know, who are you relativeto their other options?
Sometimes when people talk aboutpricing, my first question is,
well, tell me what league youplay in, right?
Like you're a lawyer and you gotan hourly rate, great, but who
are the other kinds of lawyers,you know.
(20:49):
Yeah, and then you realize, youknow, wait a minute, I'm better
than all these guys in myleague.
Well, then why'd you putyourself in that league?
Right, right?
Get out of that league.
Price like you're in the otherleague, right?
Whatever it might be, you wantto act like you're in the league
that you really are in, and youwant to have value prop that's
tied to who you positionyourself 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 analogyand 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 intouch 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 mejust looking for my book.
My book is called Unconvention,a small business strategy guide.
So you can get a hold of me thatway.
There's a bunch of interestingmaterial on the site and blog
that you could kind of downloador read through.
I'd recommend, you know, justchecking out and downloading
(21:46):
what I call the underdogprinciples, which includes
positioning as well as proximityand purpose.
Got a neat primer on that.
And like I said, it doesn't takea lot of time to sit there and
be a little bit moreretrospective and say, hey, who
am I?
Like, what am I trying tocontribute?
So that primer is great to justget your mind going on, you
know, what could I dodifferently as a business to
(22:06):
kind of make it more fulfillingand 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 advantageof the fact that you're really
close to your customers.
You know what they what theycare about, what they want.
And then purpose.
This is where you say, look, I'min it because I wanted to have a
great lifestyle, or I'm in itbecause I want to be my own
boss, or I'm in it because Iwanted to bring a particular
cuisine to the world, right?
(22:34):
Whatever they might be, like,first of all, recognize what it
is for you, embrace it, and thenuse it in your decisioning.
Because if you're sitting theresaying, I wanted to do this
because I wanted to be my ownboss and have a good lifestyle,
but then you're out therechasing every last deal, trying
to get everything done, likeyou're gonna be miserable.
Like, do it for what you weredoing it for, or reset your
expectations.
(22:55):
Bringing all three of thosetogether means then you can
deliver your uniqueness with thepurpose that you signed up for,
right?
And represent the customers thatyou care about.
So those three, those threeprinciples are behind how a lot
of small businesses can stillsurvive and execute against
their bigger competitors.
(23:15):
The bigger competitors don't dothose things.
They don't need to becausethey've got scale, they've got
profits they're focused on.
But when it comes to executingsimple business strategies, your
pricing strategy, youroperational strategy, your
go-to-market strategy, all thethings that these big guys do,
it turns out small smallbusinesses have to follow the
same structures, but they havethese advantages they can they
can use in that in thatstrategic thinking.
SPEAKER_00 (23:36):
Sure, this is a great time in the show, and we
make a transition and we askevery guest the same four
questions before they go.
And the first question we ask ishave you had a miss or two on
your journey and something youlearned 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 whereit was going to help small
businesses with hiring.
It's pretty exciting for me.
We we built out a coolanalytical platform back before,
maybe even when AI was popular,but not popular enough, uh,
using AI to figure out if acandidate would actually stick
around with a company before youhired him.
(24:10):
It's like, you know, I've gotall your data on your payroll,
I've got all your data on yourhiring.
Every new guy who comes in, Ihave enough data to go and
predict is this guy going tostick around six months like
most guys, or is he gonna be outin two months, or is he gonna
stick around for a year orwhatever?
You know, as we got a couple ofthose sold and kicked off, the
challenge was it took us way toolong to sell a very low-cost
(24:30):
product, and we just couldn'tmake money if we had to pay our
salespeople, which is which isrough.
It worked well when I was theonly sales guy and I wasn't
getting paid for it.
But when you want to hiresalespeople, you got to pay
them.
So we pivoted away to justbuilding the features that they
needed to get the information,which was neat and it was great.
We built it, built some featuresin with our applicant tracking
(24:52):
system partners.
The applicant tracking system isthat somebody's doing hiring,
they they use a, you know, sendthem to collect a resume and
collect information.
And the extra information we webuilt was were things like
getting reference checks.
Awesome.
We built this reference checktool, dropped it into a bunch of
ATSs, and we're off to the racesuntil they realized, hey, we
could build it ourselves andsell it ourselves.
(25:12):
So that was the big miss, islike we found a really cool
pivot.
We thought we were gonna dowell.
And then our partners, who wethought were our partners, were
actually just companies thatwanted to make a profit.
So we got cut out pretty tookthem a couple of years to catch
up and figure out that that uhthey can do it themselves.
And you know, I didn't have theforesight to realize my
competitors wanted to eat mylunch.
(25:33):
In retrospect, it's pretty easy,right?
But again, during during duringthe whole thing, you're like,
wait, what's going on?
Like, why do we lose those guys?
Oh, they've got that feature uhfor 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 twoyou'd like to share.
SPEAKER_01 (25:51):
Sure.
I mean, let's go back to thatbusiness I was talking about
where we hit COVID and I didn'tget Congress to go and listen to
me.
I know most people that youknow, they ask Congress or
something, they just get it.
But I didn't get what I washoping for.
We didn't get help to the smallbusinesses that we thought we
could.
We did everything we could onour end.
And then, you know, six, eightmonths later, we were able to
(26:11):
get back and start to bring themon board with the second ver
second round of the PPP.
The win for me, you know, mybusiness was crushed.
I came, I uh became the CEO, andwe were, I was asked to kind of
scale it back up to somethingthat we could sell uh on behalf
of the owner to someone else,which is a daunting task for me.
But what was also daunting waslooking at the customer base,
(26:32):
saying, how do we keep themalive so that we have customers
in the future?
And the big win was I had aboard and I had investors in my
company who were fullysupportive of just doing the
right thing.
And instead of saying, hey,let's go save the company, let's
go and you know, pull everydollar we can in and keep
ourselves alive a little bitlonger, they were supportive of
(26:55):
saying, hey, if you think theright way to do this is lay off
the billing, bring the debtcollection down, go and ask your
borrowers to pay just a minimumamount to stay alive.
That's bad for the corporation.
It's great for its customers.
Can we figure out how to do thisin the short term so that they
(27:17):
can bounce back?
Their life cycle is much shorterthan ours.
We can keep them alive for alittle bit longer.
Down the road, if we can stayalive ourselves, it'll pay off.
I was really impressed with theleaders on my board who were
able to say, yes, we get it.
There's some paint.
You guys are gonna go intodefault sooner on some of your
credit facilities because ofthis, and you're gonna have to
(27:38):
wind a lot of things downbecause of this.
But the sacrifice, even if itdoesn't fully pay off, it at
least aligns with your mission.
So we made that sacrifice.
And for me, the big win was notjust that, hey, it actually
worked and we we bounced backand we were able to have
customers that that actuallytrusted us again, but also that
instead of having, you know,half of these guys go out of
(27:59):
business, we saved a good 40,50% of them by working with them
in the right way.
So to me, that was that wasprobably a huge win.
SPEAKER_00 (28:08):
Thank you for sharing.
And the next question we ask isHave 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 aboutthose, but my current multiplier
is this book that I've written.
I would love to go and inspireand consult with and support as
many entrepreneurs as possible.
Don't have nearly as much timeas I have that desire to go and
get people up and going andeither take the leap or commit
(28:40):
to the kind of differentiationthat keeps them resilient and
and and fulfilled with theirbusinesses.
So I'm hoping getting the bookout there is a way that I can
kind of have that impact andkind of kindle or rekindle
entrepreneurship in a lot ofpeople.
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 issuccess?
What I would love to see is, youknow, a stronger culture behind
small business andentrepreneurship.
I would love to see morecelebration of the smaller, not
unicorn slash AI, Silicon Valleyentrepreneur, but more of the
(29:25):
entrepreneur who left their dayjob to go and run a boutique
services firm or to build asmall contracting firm or
somebody who's built some sortof a business from who they are.
And I would love to see more ofthat because I really do think
not only is that possible, Ithink that's the trend for where
(29:45):
our economy needs to go.
We've got all these big scalecompanies and they're doing what
they do.
Most of us in this country don'thave a place in those giant
scale companies.
And so what should our place be?
Do we want to be like an officeworker that's getting eliminated
by AI?
Right now, or do we want to bepeople who go and live out the
things that we've learned andgrow uh you know become
passionate about and find a wayto support a bunch of other
(30:08):
people enough to go make aliving 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 acrossthat 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 whatI'm passionate about.
And I think the one thing I justsay 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 totake a step back and think
strategically a bit.
I know your time is completelyabsorbed by running the
(30:42):
business, but you know, takingthe 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 businessmore suited to who I want to be
and what what kind of person Iam?
And that can be a veryproductive exercise.
And it could be something that'svery increases your fulfillment
and also increases your growthand productivity.
SPEAKER_00 (31:01):
Shree, thank you so much for a fantastic interview.
And let's go ahead and jump intotoday's three key takeaways.
So, takeaway number one is whenhe talked about the difference
from working with largecompanies and small businesses.
And he talked about when he wasin large corporate consulting,
he found it was easy to getpeople aligned on corporate
(31:23):
revenue growth and corporateprofitability.
But he found in smallbusinesses, when he would lend
to small businesses, what hefound is that small business
owners really invest in theircommunity, in their staff, and
in their area, much differentlyfrom what lending to large
(31:44):
companies would look like.
Takeaway number two is torealize that as a small
business, recognize that yourdifference might very well be
just that you are part of thecommunity with your customers.
Sometimes that is thedifference.
So recognize that it doesn'thave to be some bullet list
(32:04):
thing or sound great like youmight see in some business class
somewhere.
Sometimes it's just that you arepart of the community.
And takeaway number three is theunderdog formula or underdog
principles that are on hiswebsite.
And it's positioning, proximity,and purpose.
Those are the three components,the underdog formula.
Positioning, how are youpositioning amongst your peers
(32:26):
and competitors?
Proximity, recognize that youare 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 tojust be how much money can I
make, it can also be justfinding purpose and having time
to spend with your family orjust even serving your
community.
(32:47):
And now it's time for today'swin-win.
So today's win-win comes throughthinking about what makes your
business unique.
And I thought that this was areally interesting conversation
with Sri, where he talked aboutpositioning.
(33:08):
He said it could just besomething as simple as your
location.
It could be the customers youserve, your personal interaction
with those customers.
And that's okay.
I was even thinking during theinterview that maybe it could be
the happiness or thesatisfaction customers feel when
(33:29):
they buy something from you,because they know that you are
the proprietor or the owner orthe leader or you're ingrained
in the community.
Hence, part of the reason why Ilove franchising, because you
get the positive or the plus ofhaving a brand that's connected
with others, even in a smallfranchise system, but you still
(33:49):
have that local ownership.
And it just even reminds me, Isaw the other day driving in my
hometown, uh, McDonald's had anew 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, Iknow that that owner is likely
(34:10):
living in my community.
There's a community connection.
And so that's the episode today,folks.
Please make sure you subscribeto the podcast and give us a
review.
And remember, if you or anyoneyou know might be ready to
franchise their business or taketheir franchise company to the
next level, please connect withus at BigSkyFranchise Team.com
to schedule your free, noobligation consultation.
Thanks for tuning in, and welook forward to having you back
(34:32):
next week.
Welcome to the Multiply Your Success podcast,
where each week we helpgrowth-minded entrepreneurs and
franchise leaders take the nextstep in their expansion journey.
I'm your host, Tom Dufour, CEOof Big Sky Franchise Team.
And as we open today, I'mwondering if you view your
closeness or proximity to yourcustomers as a strategic
(00:22):
advantage.
Or maybe said another way, haveyou even thought about that as a
strategic advantage before?
Well, our guest today is ShreeCasa, and he shares with us his
underdog formula that he hasfound to help small businesses
that talks about positioning,proximity, and purpose.
(00:42):
Now, Shri is a seasoned businessleader and small business
advocate with a background incorporate strategy and
entrepreneurship.
After earning degrees from theUniversity of Michigan and
Northwestern, he began hiscareer at Pricewaterhouse
Cooper's and Blue MartiniSoftware before advising Fortune
500 companies at McKinseyCompany.
He later transitioned toexecutive roles, founding a data
(01:04):
analytics startup that helpedsmall businesses assess job
applicants and led theemployment tax credit division
to tax credit company, which isnow part of Experian, which
supported thousands of smallbusinesses in securing
government incentives.
Tree has recently finished hisbook, Unconvention, which draws
on his extensive experiencechallenging conventional
(01:25):
corporate thinking andempowering small businesses to
succeed by staying true to theirunique strengths.
You're going to love thisinterview, so let's go ahead and
jump right into it.
SPEAKER_01 (01:34):
Hi, Tom.
My name is Tree Casa.
I'm the author of a new book outcalled Unconvention.
And I've had a few differenttitles in different companies in
my past, but today I'm kind offocusing on advocacy for small
businesses.
SPEAKER_00 (01:46):
I love small businesses as well.
And I love how you're talkingabout advocacy for small
businesses.
That is music to my ears and tomy heart.
I love that.
And we have lots of founders,entrepreneurs, successful owners
that tune into our podcast andother business leaders.
I'd love for you just to talk alittle bit here about your book
(02:09):
and just at least give us anoverview and what led you to
want to write this book and putthis down.
SPEAKER_01 (02:14):
Probably for me, it starts with a journey that I had
prior to starting to focus onsmall businesses with McKinsey
and large corporate consulting.
Being effective at largecorporate consulting involves
being very quantitative, beingvery focused on a couple of
things that you know everybody'sgoing to agree on.
And as many of us know, that'scorporate profits, corporate
(02:36):
growth.
It's very hard to get that done,but it's easy to get people
aligned on buying into this kindof corporate profitability.
But as I kind of shifted awayand began doing my own
entrepreneurial endeavors andworking for businesses or
private health, but with adifferent committee, nuanced
mission.
Yes, we want to earn money.
Yes, we want to grow, but weactually want to have an impact
(02:58):
on the world.
In any shape or form, impact,or, or even, hey, I'm here to
leave a legacy behind or buildsomething for my children.
These kind of different purposesfor 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 owneror the or the or or the family
that's running business wants,how do I get this thing done?
(03:19):
You know the challenge.
But, you know, when I got into abusiness called a tax credit
code and started working withsmall businesses to get them
services that they needed, itreally started to kind of stand
out to me.
The small businesses out therefor yes, they need to earn
money, they need to make aliving, they may want to grow,
they may want to solve aproblem.
But the problems that they goafter and the way they look at
(03:40):
the world are very different.
And in fact, because of the waythey do that, one, you know,
they don't get a lot of supportbecause 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 timeto go and explore all the ways
to be more efficient and moreprofitable.
Instead, they're working day today, fighting different battles
to bring whatever product orservice they really wanted to
(04:02):
bring into the world, they'reworking really hard to do that.
And, you know, still part of myjourney is I'm still not really
grasping, like, hey, does thismake sense?
Because there's a whole bunch ofways to make money that these
guys aren't going after.
But as I started to start to gohave an impact and see what
would make it, what would theydo with the savings or the
incremental income we brought tothem by solving some tax credit
(04:22):
problems or in other placeslater on in life?
I took on a role as thepresident and COO of a of a
small business lender, evenbecame CEO at that place.
I realized when you get money inthe hands of the small business
who's got a passion or is tryingto make something happen, you
see some amazing things.
And you would never see thosethings in a big corporation.
What you would see is aredeployment of capital to the
(04:44):
most efficient, you know,economic outcomes in a good,
kind of healthy corporation.
But what you would see with asmall business is you would see
investment in customers,investment in bringing something
to a community or to a user baseor to a group of people that
actually valued the businessitself.
(05:05):
And so take you along on my kindof journey to now I realize that
there's a lot of benefits tohelping these small businesses.
We set the mission at the SmallBusiness Lender Overs Act to
focusing on America SmallBusinesses Financial Health.
We know they need that help.
And as a lender, we we had theopportunity to go and put money
in the hands of small businessesthat were investing in
(05:28):
themselves, trying to grow,trying to solve problems.
And we were really doing well,very excited about delivering on
this mission all the way upuntil 2020, where we had put
hundreds of millions of dollarsin the hands of these small
businesses in the form of loans.
And here comes COVID shuttingeverybody down.
Not only did it crush ourbusiness, it crushed the
(05:49):
business of many of ourcustomers.
That's when I then got anopportunity to advocate for the
first time.
I got to go talk to members ofCongress and their, I guess, the
lobbying groups around them tohear what they had to say about
the PPP program that they weredesigning and share my own
feedback with what I thoughtwould make sense.
(06:10):
Probably both one of the moreexciting things I got to do with
my career and also one of themost ineffective conversations
I'd ever had.
Not to pick on Congress here forbeing 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 mybusiness to have some marginal,
(06:32):
but you know, not massivelyprofitable motivation to go
help, right?
And our whole job is to getmoney in the hands of all these
businesses that need help.
But they built these cutoffs andthis 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 yourexpenses and like you know,
process all the details.
You're not gonna make a bigprofit.
(06:53):
We don't want you to be making abig problem.
We just want you to do it.
I buy that.
We're in, we want to help thesesmall businesses.
And that scale is gonna getsmaller.
Like if it's if it's more than$100,000, it's only gonna be
about, you know, three and ahalf percent.
And and then, you know, if it'seven bigger than that, you know,
it's only gonna be 2%.
All the way up to$10 million oflending, it's only gonna be 2%.
(07:13):
And anybody who can do mathwould would realize that wait a
minute.
So if I'm making$10 millionloans 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 enoughcompanies out there who may or
may not need them.
Like, you know, how manyhealthcare providers and how
many of these companies that youknow didn't even have to shut
down anything?
They were able to get this 10million.
(07:34):
How many companies got these$10million PPP loans?
And then the banks were gonnamake a ton of money on doing
these$10 million, no-risk, supereasy loans.
And then the government wasgoing 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.
(07:54):
You know, you look at how easyit is, and then you've got to
say, well, what's the motivationof every bank?
Let's get the$10 million onesfirst, right?
And then we'll work on the smallones.
You can't blame them for beingcapitalists.
That's what they're gonna do.
So I kind of could have had anod or two, and people believed
in it.
And they're like, Yeah, that'sright, that's right.
And then what came out?
No meaningful changes there.
And boom, what happened?
All the money ran out, and likein within months, and all the
(08:17):
money went to really, really bigcompanies.
In time, like probably takealmost a year, they figured out
how to fix it.
They they they let in differenttypes of lenders to come another
round where a lot more smallbusinesses got the money.
But that's where I realized, youknow, too many more people have
to be actually speaking up onbehalf of these small businesses
because, you know, I was inthere and I'm sure they went and
(08:37):
talked to the CEOs of the bigbanks.
And the big banks were like, no,this is a great process.
We can get this out fast, we cando this, just hit go, just hit
go.
And, you know, hitting go madesense, but it really made big
dollars for those big banks andit and it didn't do anything for
the little guys.
So you ask my kind of what's myjourney on advocacy, that kind
of tipped me off to say, hey,look, we gotta do something
(08:58):
different.
It's when I started collecting alot more stories about these
small businesses that succeededand and didn't from COVID.
SPEAKER_00 (09:05):
Any small business that tunes in or hears this will
resonate, whether it's with thatspecific situation or something
similar, right?
I often think of the smallbusiness owner.
Myself lumped into that categorytoday, that oftentimes you're
just in the grind of theday-to-day of fulfilling the
needs of your customers, justfulfilling the orders that have
(09:26):
been placed and just trying tokeep things going.
And most owners, right, tryingto make sure they can hit
payroll and whatever is on theirdocket.
SPEAKER_01 (09:34):
Yeah.
No, they wanna they want todeliver something special to
their community, to theircustomers.
And everything else is somethingthat gets in the way, right?
And you gotta solve for it.
You can't pretend it's notthere.
But, you know, that's what Ilove about the stories that I
collected and the people Italked to, the ones that
survived, you know, the bigchallenges.
COVID's not even the biggest ofthe challenges that most many of
(09:57):
these small businesses face.
In fact, when I talk to anysmall business owner, you know,
there's a certain certain amountof, you know, what you can see
in just eye contact that they'vebeen 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, isthe bank coming to collect or am
I not gonna be able to makepayroll?
(10:18):
Like it, it hasn't happened justonce either.
So, you know, going through thattrauma and having that spirit to
say, I'm gonna power throughthis because I believe in what
I'm doing is what defines someof these most resilient small
business owners.
They they care.
And it's where I go back to inthe in the big corporate world,
you know, you got to geteverybody agreed on the profit
thing, and you're gonna go afterthe thing that's the most
profitable, or the thing that'sgonna give you the best, you
(10:39):
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 needto go and make, you know, an
extra 50 grand or add, you know,20% more customers this year.
It's about making sure peopleknow that I'm there to offer
them what they need and that Icare about their survival just
as much as I do about my ownbusiness.
(11:01):
What was amazing in my researchfor the book and talking to a
lot of these businesses thatthat kind of made it through
COVID was that in that timeperiod, their customers are the
ones that said, either openly orsubconsciously, this is a
business that I want to have inmy life.
This is a business that I needto patronize even more so today
(11:21):
because of the challenges than Ihave 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 thisweek, you know, twice in a
month, you know, more.
Just how do we do it?
Like and you would you'd hearfrom bookstores, oh, our
customers did GoFundMe campaignsbecause they knew that we
(11:43):
couldn't survive COVID withoutthe GoFundMe campaign.
So people are just straight upwriting checks to keep the
businesses alive that they caredabout.
I don't know how many people youknow that started doing video
training with their personaltrainers 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.
(12:04):
We're gonna keep thisrelationship going, even though
I'm doing it through like atablet or a, or a, or a phone,
or a PC.
I'm still gonna commit to thisbusiness owner.
That behavior doesn't happen forGold's gym.
That behavior doesn't happen tosave a McDonald's or a Barnes
and Noble.
It's only because of therelationships and the care for
(12:26):
the product and care for theexperience 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 franchisingbusiness, so franchising's top
of mind.
And you can definitely, even inthe franchise world, see the
difference between the brandswhere there are active owner
operators in that localfranchise system that's
(12:50):
connected to the communityversus those that are either
company-owned units or are ownedby large multi-unit groups where
that local owner feel just it'snot there.
SPEAKER_01 (13:01):
That's right.
One of the things that's supercritical about surviving as a
small business is beingdifferentiated.
You know, in my book, I call itpositioning.
I use the word positioningspecifically because many small
businesses have a retaillocation or have a physical
nexus somewhere.
That position where you are, ifyou're a franchise owner, you
(13:23):
have a particular location.
That is an important piece ofthe definition of what makes you
different.
Lean into it.
Recognize that the kind ofpeople who come to you are the
people from your community, thepeople who are your neighbors,
right?
What do you do that's different?
Doesn't have to be, hey, I'vegot a different sign out or a
different flavor of burger or,you know, different choices on
(13:43):
my menu.
It has to do with how you fit inand how are you important to the
community.
And that can be different forany small business.
You may have a virtual communitywhere you're mostly online, but
leaning into who you are andleaning into what you're
positioning in is that way tokeep loyalty.
That it's the way to keep yourcustomers satisfied and, you
(14:05):
know, seeing you as somethingimportant 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 seethat through.
Maybe share one of thosestories.
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 ofthe book were independent
bookstores.
They're pretty classic forpeople thinking they shouldn't
even exist at this point, right?
People are like, well, you gotAmazon, you got Burns and Noble,
you got ebooks.
Like, what's the point of thebookstore?
If you can get any book you wantto within a day or hours, even
(14:38):
by just going to order onAmazon.
So I talked to the owner of thisbook, Jonathan, of Talking
Leads, it's a bookstore in in umBuffalo.
When I connected with him, thereason I'd reached out is his
bookstore doesn't offer normalbooks.
It's a collection of the booksthat just don't fit in.
Very, very idiosyncratic.
(14:59):
So he's out there trying tocurate a set of books that you
can't easily find or youwouldn't come across when you go
to Amazon's top seller list oryou go to look at the displays
on Barnes ⁇ Noble.
And, you know, that's not a wayif you are some corporate
consultant.
That's not a way to run abusiness.
Go pick all the books that areunpopular and put them all in
(15:19):
the same place.
What's that?
What's that gonna do for you?
Well, he's been around for likedecades.
Why?
Because he's created a spiritand a personality for his store
that people are like, look, Iwant to go find something out of
the mainstream.
I want to go read somethingthat's not what other people are
reading and learn something newand different.
(15:40):
And you create this ethos.
And of course, people love you.
And you're you're still gonnahave some challenges all the
time.
You know, business is gonna goup and down, you're gonna have
financial cycles, you're gonnahave COVID hit you or something
crazy like that, or just thestreet in front of you goes
under construction, you lose allyour foot traffic for two
months.
Like whatever it is, you'regonna have this adversity.
(16:03):
But when there are people thatyou've affected in a way that
they believe you should bearound, they believe you add
something.
They may not even have to berepeat customers, they'll refer
people to you because the impactthat you had on their lives,
that's the spirit that, youknow, when you have a business
that can survive these things,that the spirit is I've got
something unique and I've gotsomething that I think is
(16:23):
important.
And if you find enough customerswho 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 theyhear this, will probably think
in their own mind, maybe theirbusiness is that business,
something like that in theircommunity, or oh, I know a
business that's like that or hasa 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 youthis like really challenging, oh
my gosh, I have to have thisparticular flavor or this or
anything.
Like it could be as simple aswhere you're located and who
your customers are.
But it's really important tofeel confident in knowing what
(17:07):
your what your sweet spot is,because every day, every
decision that you make, you'vegot to go deal with making
somebody happy and somebodyunhappy.
You've got to go deal withinvesting in one decision versus
another decision.
And if what you do is you knowthat, hey, look, the kinds of
customers I serve are the onesthat are in my neighborhood, put
your bets there, right?
(17:28):
And instead of betting on thisexpansion further out or trying
to get, you know, something newand that's unfamiliar with the
core base of people that youbring in, go work on delighting
the ones that you've got, right?
Or go work on delighting onesthat are a lot like the ones
that you got, but don't know youyet.
That's not just a good way tokind of have near-term impact,
but it's also a good way todeepen those relationships and
(17:51):
have more confidence in who youare.
A lot of that comes from yourown personality.
You may not have embraced ityet, but a lot of that comes
from your own personality as anowner.
SPEAKER_00 (17:58):
I appreciate you talking about this unique piece,
this positioning that you'retalking about, or these
differentiators.
And I like the word positioningthat you use to help describe
it.
Sometimes I think in the smallbusiness community, we hear the
buzzwords of differentiation anduniqueness and unique
identifiers and all thesebuzzwords that come along.
(18:21):
And that idea of positions, howare you positioned in your
community, literally within yourcommunity or amongst your peers
that are closest to you, thatyour customers may also be
customers of that are shoppingor going to and from?
How are you positioned to justshowcase 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 tothink about beer positioning.
I don't know if you go tosporting events.
I I like to go to, I lovecollege football, go to a
basketball game every once in awhile.
You go to the football game andyou park in the lot that's
assigned, you know, in LA,that's probably like 40 bucks or
50 bucks.
(19:03):
I mean it's ridiculous.
You just park right by thestadium.
You go to a basketball game,yeah, you're 50 bucks to go park
in it, used to be called StapleCenter, or what they call it
now, crypto.com arena.
But if you park in the structureacross the street, it's only 35
bucks.
But if you park in some of thelots before you get to the
structure that's across thestreet, it's 20 bucks at one, 15
(19:25):
bucks at one.
If you want to just park rightunder the expressway, it's kind
of dingy, gross, but you may beable 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
(19:46):
price and their physicalposition, right?
And and they know their value.
My value, if I'm the$15 guyversus the$35 guy who's across
the street, my value, I've gotto be a lot cheaper because I
don't have the covered parking,right?
I don't have the lighting, Idon't have the you know, safety
and security that a garageoffers.
(20:08):
But if I'm the if I'm the garageversus the stadium, well, the
stadium is like, you know,closeness, you know, don't have
to go outside, you know, allthat stuff.
They each have some incrementalvalue based on the position that
they sit in.
So now, any small business, yougotta think about your
(20:28):
differentiation, you got tothink about your value that you
offer customers in physicalposition, maybe a big piece.
It may not be, but how are yourelative to their other options?
You know, who are you relativeto their other options?
Sometimes when people talk aboutpricing, my first question is,
well, tell me what league youplay in, right?
Like you're a lawyer and you gotan hourly rate, great, but who
are the other kinds of lawyers,you know.
(20:49):
Yeah, and then you realize, youknow, wait a minute, I'm better
than all these guys in myleague.
Well, then why'd you putyourself in that league?
Right, right?
Get out of that league.
Price like you're in the otherleague, right?
Whatever it might be, you wantto act like you're in the league
that you really are in, and youwant to have value prop that's
tied to who you positionyourself 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 analogyand 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 intouch 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 mejust looking for my book.
My book is called Unconvention,a small business strategy guide.
So you can get a hold of me thatway.
There's a bunch of interestingmaterial on the site and blog
that you could kind of downloador read through.
I'd recommend, you know, justchecking out and downloading
(21:46):
what I call the underdogprinciples, which includes
positioning as well as proximityand purpose.
Got a neat primer on that.
And like I said, it doesn't takea lot of time to sit there and
be a little bit moreretrospective and say, hey, who
am I?
Like, what am I trying tocontribute?
So that primer is great to justget your mind going on, you
know, what could I dodifferently as a business to
(22:06):
kind of make it more fulfillingand 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 advantageof the fact that you're really
close to your customers.
You know what they what theycare about, what they want.
And then purpose.
This is where you say, look, I'min it because I wanted to have a
great lifestyle, or I'm in itbecause I want to be my own
boss, or I'm in it because Iwanted to bring a particular
cuisine to the world, right?
(22:34):
Whatever they might be, like,first of all, recognize what it
is for you, embrace it, and thenuse it in your decisioning.
Because if you're sitting theresaying, I wanted to do this
because I wanted to be my ownboss and have a good lifestyle,
but then you're out therechasing every last deal, trying
to get everything done, likeyou're gonna be miserable.
Like, do it for what you weredoing it for, or reset your
expectations.
(22:55):
Bringing all three of thosetogether means then you can
deliver your uniqueness with thepurpose that you signed up for,
right?
And represent the customers thatyou care about.
So those three, those threeprinciples are behind how a lot
of small businesses can stillsurvive and execute against
their bigger competitors.
(23:15):
The bigger competitors don't dothose things.
They don't need to becausethey've got scale, they've got
profits they're focused on.
But when it comes to executingsimple business strategies, your
pricing strategy, youroperational strategy, your
go-to-market strategy, all thethings that these big guys do,
it turns out small smallbusinesses have to follow the
same structures, but they havethese advantages they can they
can use in that in thatstrategic thinking.
SPEAKER_00 (23:36):
Sure, this is a great time in the show, and we
make a transition and we askevery guest the same four
questions before they go.
And the first question we ask ishave you had a miss or two on
your journey and something youlearned 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 whereit was going to help small
businesses with hiring.
It's pretty exciting for me.
We we built out a coolanalytical platform back before,
maybe even when AI was popular,but not popular enough, uh,
using AI to figure out if acandidate would actually stick
around with a company before youhired him.
(24:10):
It's like, you know, I've gotall your data on your payroll,
I've got all your data on yourhiring.
Every new guy who comes in, Ihave enough data to go and
predict is this guy going tostick around six months like
most guys, or is he gonna be outin two months, or is he gonna
stick around for a year orwhatever?
You know, as we got a couple ofthose sold and kicked off, the
challenge was it took us way toolong to sell a very low-cost
(24:30):
product, and we just couldn'tmake money if we had to pay our
salespeople, which is which isrough.
It worked well when I was theonly sales guy and I wasn't
getting paid for it.
But when you want to hiresalespeople, you got to pay
them.
So we pivoted away to justbuilding the features that they
needed to get the information,which was neat and it was great.
We built it, built some featuresin with our applicant tracking
(24:52):
system partners.
The applicant tracking system isthat somebody's doing hiring,
they they use a, you know, sendthem to collect a resume and
collect information.
And the extra information we webuilt was were things like
getting reference checks.
Awesome.
We built this reference checktool, dropped it into a bunch of
ATSs, and we're off to the racesuntil they realized, hey, we
could build it ourselves andsell it ourselves.
(25:12):
So that was the big miss, islike we found a really cool
pivot.
We thought we were gonna dowell.
And then our partners, who wethought were our partners, were
actually just companies thatwanted to make a profit.
So we got cut out pretty tookthem a couple of years to catch
up and figure out that that uhthey can do it themselves.
And you know, I didn't have theforesight to realize my
competitors wanted to eat mylunch.
(25:33):
In retrospect, it's pretty easy,right?
But again, during during duringthe whole thing, you're like,
wait, what's going on?
Like, why do we lose those guys?
Oh, they've got that feature uhfor 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 twoyou'd like to share.
SPEAKER_01 (25:51):
Sure.
I mean, let's go back to thatbusiness I was talking about
where we hit COVID and I didn'tget Congress to go and listen to
me.
I know most people that youknow, they ask Congress or
something, they just get it.
But I didn't get what I washoping for.
We didn't get help to the smallbusinesses that we thought we
could.
We did everything we could onour end.
And then, you know, six, eightmonths later, we were able to
(26:11):
get back and start to bring themon board with the second ver
second round of the PPP.
The win for me, you know, mybusiness was crushed.
I came, I uh became the CEO, andwe were, I was asked to kind of
scale it back up to somethingthat we could sell uh on behalf
of the owner to someone else,which is a daunting task for me.
But what was also daunting waslooking at the customer base,
(26:32):
saying, how do we keep themalive so that we have customers
in the future?
And the big win was I had aboard and I had investors in my
company who were fullysupportive of just doing the
right thing.
And instead of saying, hey,let's go save the company, let's
go and you know, pull everydollar we can in and keep
ourselves alive a little bitlonger, they were supportive of
(26:55):
saying, hey, if you think theright way to do this is lay off
the billing, bring the debtcollection down, go and ask your
borrowers to pay just a minimumamount to stay alive.
That's bad for the corporation.
It's great for its customers.
Can we figure out how to do thisin the short term so that they
(27:17):
can bounce back?
Their life cycle is much shorterthan ours.
We can keep them alive for alittle bit longer.
Down the road, if we can stayalive ourselves, it'll pay off.
I was really impressed with theleaders on my board who were
able to say, yes, we get it.
There's some paint.
You guys are gonna go intodefault sooner on some of your
credit facilities because ofthis, and you're gonna have to
(27:38):
wind a lot of things downbecause of this.
But the sacrifice, even if itdoesn't fully pay off, it at
least aligns with your mission.
So we made that sacrifice.
And for me, the big win was notjust that, hey, it actually
worked and we we bounced backand we were able to have
customers that that actuallytrusted us again, but also that
instead of having, you know,half of these guys go out of
(27:59):
business, we saved a good 40,50% of them by working with them
in the right way.
So to me, that was that wasprobably a huge win.
SPEAKER_00 (28:08):
Thank you for sharing.
And the next question we ask isHave 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 aboutthose, but my current multiplier
is this book that I've written.
I would love to go and inspireand consult with and support as
many entrepreneurs as possible.
Don't have nearly as much timeas I have that desire to go and
get people up and going andeither take the leap or commit
(28:40):
to the kind of differentiationthat keeps them resilient and
and and fulfilled with theirbusinesses.
So I'm hoping getting the bookout there is a way that I can
kind of have that impact andkind of kindle or rekindle
entrepreneurship in a lot ofpeople.
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 issuccess?
What I would love to see is, youknow, a stronger culture behind
small business andentrepreneurship.
I would love to see morecelebration of the smaller, not
unicorn slash AI, Silicon Valleyentrepreneur, but more of the
(29:25):
entrepreneur who left their dayjob to go and run a boutique
services firm or to build asmall contracting firm or
somebody who's built some sortof a business from who they are.
And I would love to see more ofthat because I really do think
not only is that possible, Ithink that's the trend for where
(29:45):
our economy needs to go.
We've got all these big scalecompanies and they're doing what
they do.
Most of us in this country don'thave a place in those giant
scale companies.
And so what should our place be?
Do we want to be like an officeworker that's getting eliminated
by AI?
Right now, or do we want to bepeople who go and live out the
things that we've learned andgrow uh you know become
passionate about and find a wayto support a bunch of other
(30:08):
people enough to go make aliving 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 acrossthat 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 whatI'm passionate about.
And I think the one thing I justsay 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 totake a step back and think
strategically a bit.
I know your time is completelyabsorbed by running the
(30:42):
business, but you know, takingthe 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 businessmore suited to who I want to be
and what what kind of person Iam?
And that can be a veryproductive exercise.
And it could be something that'svery increases your fulfillment
and also increases your growthand productivity.
SPEAKER_00 (31:01):
Shree, thank you so much for a fantastic interview.
And let's go ahead and jump intotoday's three key takeaways.
So, takeaway number one is whenhe talked about the difference
from working with largecompanies and small businesses.
And he talked about when he wasin large corporate consulting,
he found it was easy to getpeople aligned on corporate
(31:23):
revenue growth and corporateprofitability.
But he found in smallbusinesses, when he would lend
to small businesses, what hefound is that small business
owners really invest in theircommunity, in their staff, and
in their area, much differentlyfrom what lending to large
(31:44):
companies would look like.
Takeaway number two is torealize that as a small
business, recognize that yourdifference might very well be
just that you are part of thecommunity with your customers.
Sometimes that is thedifference.
So recognize that it doesn'thave to be some bullet list
(32:04):
thing or sound great like youmight see in some business class
somewhere.
Sometimes it's just that you arepart of the community.
And takeaway number three is theunderdog formula or underdog
principles that are on hiswebsite.
And it's positioning, proximity,and purpose.
Those are the three components,the underdog formula.
Positioning, how are youpositioning amongst your peers
(32:26):
and competitors?
Proximity, recognize that youare 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 tojust be how much money can I
make, it can also be justfinding purpose and having time
to spend with your family orjust even serving your
community.
(32:47):
And now it's time for today'swin-win.
So today's win-win comes throughthinking about what makes your
business unique.
And I thought that this was areally interesting conversation
with Sri, where he talked aboutpositioning.
(33:08):
He said it could just besomething as simple as your
location.
It could be the customers youserve, your personal interaction
with those customers.
And that's okay.
I was even thinking during theinterview that maybe it could be
the happiness or thesatisfaction customers feel when
(33:29):
they buy something from you,because they know that you are
the proprietor or the owner orthe leader or you're ingrained
in the community.
Hence, part of the reason why Ilove franchising, because you
get the positive or the plus ofhaving a brand that's connected
with others, even in a smallfranchise system, but you still
(33:49):
have that local ownership.
And it just even reminds me, Isaw the other day driving in my
hometown, uh, McDonald's had anew 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, Iknow that that owner is likely
(34:10):
living in my community.
There's a community connection.
And so that's the episode today,folks.
Please make sure you subscribeto the podcast and give us a
review.
And remember, if you or anyoneyou know might be ready to
franchise their business or taketheir franchise company to the
next level, please connect withus at BigSkyFranchise Team.com
to schedule your free, noobligation consultation.
Thanks for tuning in, and welook forward to having you back
(34:32):
next week.
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