This is a transcript from the Business Secrets Podcast With Robert Kanaat. Click here to view and subscribe on iTunes.
Hello and welcome to another episode of Business Secrets. My name is Robert Kanaat – founder of wanderlustworker.com, the premier online destination for all things inspirational and transformational.
I hope that you guys are having a good day or morning or night or whatever it is. Wherever you’re listening to this from or when. Today I wanted to talk to you about something that could really revolutionize your business. In fact this one key concept is at the core of any business. If you have this in place, then everything else kind of falls to the wayside. Everything else kind of just happens, it just flows.
Yesterday I talked to you about gratitude. Obviously gratitude is the path. It’s the path. It’s the personal path. Once you are grateful, a lot of great things can happen. You can achieve a lot of wonderful things. But the key to business growth is one concept. If you have this one concept in place, you can literally scale to the moon. It’s the concept that Facebook used to reach the masses. It’s the concept that YouTube and Google and every other company has used to really scale. Uber has used this. Every single great company that has launched, and every single great company that will launch and scale to the moon – the unicorns, have all wielded this strategy.
I don’t know if want to really call it a strategy. It’s just a fundamental component that has to be in place. Let’s take a look at what Facebook did. In the very beginning, Facebook was free, and Facebook wasn’t making any money. How did Facebook grow into a behemoth? It helped connect the entire world. Everybody that was on Facebook, they’re all connected. You hop on there, you’re like, “Oh my God I haven’t heard from this guy in like 10 or 20 years or 30 years.” Like, “How the heck are you doing?” Everybody is there. Their core mission is to connect the entire world, in a mission that literally they are on the way to fulfilling. I think most of the world that has internet is on Facebook.
What did that do? That added value. The core concept of Facebook was connect the world. By connecting the world, Mark Zuckerberg added a lot of value. Microsoft, for example. They brought incredible innovation into software in the operating system. It added massive value, massive value. Uber, for example. I mean I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been frustrated by taxis. Having Uber has been the best thing ever. You’re travelling somewhere and you don’t want to rent a car, you just take an Uber. It’s so good. It adds so much value, and so that’s the thing.
It’s also the thing that I was asking myself, before when we were talking about this idea of Kribbz. How can we build a business that just adds so much value that it just blows the mind? Not many people have addressed real estate. Not many people have tackled real estate. It’s a behemoth. How can we get a person and take the pain out of selling their house? How can we remove that big fee that they have to pay?
So we came up with Kribbz. If you’re in the United States and you sell your house and you sell it through Kribbz, it’s free. You don’t have to do it all yourself, the system is automated, it’s super cool. You could sell it for cash. It’s just, we remove the friction in real estate. I’m not saying that Kribbz is going to be a unicorn – I hope. But what I am saying is, if you take the underlying mission as your desire to add a lot of value – if that’s what you do, then you can change the world. You can alter the trajectory of your life. It doesn’t have to be on the billion dollar scale, it can be on a different scale. A scale that’s right for you.
But the point is, to make sure you add a lot of value. I’d like for you to ask yourself a question. How much value are you adding in your business? How much value are you adding in life? For example – as an employee, somebody goes out there and they exchange their time for money. The value that they’re adding is the time invested. But the entrepreneurial pursuit doesn’t quite work that way. There’s a lot of investment on the front end of time, and it doesn’t pay off right away. There’s a delayed gratification, a massive delayed gratification.
To really delay that gratification, you have to have a passionate pursuit. You have to have the passionate pursuit of adding a lot of value. If what you’re doing in business today is not adding a lot of value – I’m not saying like you have to connect the world, or you have to make the next Uber. I’m saying the products and the services or the information that you’re offering – is it adding a lot of value? Is it changing lives? Is it altering mindsets? Is it really; improving somebody’s day to day?
That is at the heart of a successful business. You cannot have a successful business without adding a lot of value. For example, on my blog. I go on there, and I just drop my best ideas. I drop in long form. An article takes me hours and hours to write. But I pour my heart and my soul into it, and I’ve been doing it for years. It’s only recently that has really paid off and people have noticed. Traffic and sales and like multiple streams of income and all that stuff – that’s all terrific to have now, but it took so long.
I approached it with the underlying desire to add value. I wanted people to understand that the core pursuit was – it’s okay to fail, and how to fail the right way, I guess you should say. What to do when you fail. Examples of people that failed. Failure stories. Those just inspired me so much. I knew that people out there had pain. It’s the kind of pain that we hide. It’s not the pain that we portray on social media, like, “Hey my business just failed. I’m destroyed.” You won’t see that many vulnerable posts. Yes, people do that from time to time, but most of the vulnerability is shut behind a closed door. I knew if I struggled with it, there’s a lot of people struggling with it. I failed numerous times.
I wanted to figure out a way that I could document that journey, and help explain to others how it was okay to fail, and how failure was going to help you grow. It’s not the end of the road. The most successful people on the planet have failed the most times. If you take the overall approach of adding a lot of value, if you are sincere in your pursuits – people understand, people see it. People know when it’s fake value. I mean we’re not stupid. You’re not stupid. You know when a business is adding real value, and when a business is just trying to bamboozle you.
Really take this approach of adding value. This is the key to business growth. The way that I talk about it in SEO, it’s like you need to do the most amount of work for the least initial return. Okay, initial return. Not for the least overall return forever. Saying the least initial return. Find ways you can add just crazy amounts of value. Just like blow people’s minds with value. If you’re a service provider, go out of your way to add value.
That is how you succeed in business, my friends. You do not succeed in business by trying to do the least amount of work for the greatest return, it never works. Don’t try to take the shortcut. There is no shortcut to success. There is no elevator. You’ve got to take the stairs. I’ve got to tell you this, you’ve got to take the stairs, and sometimes those stairs just keep going, and sometimes they twist, and sometimes they turn. Sometimes it feels never-ending, but you’ve got to take the stairs. It’s just one step at a time.
I think it was Lao Tzu that said, “The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” You’ve just got to step. Just keep stepping. But go back, I challenge you. Go back to your business. Figure out what you are selling. Figure out what you can do to add more value. If you’re an employee, add more value. If you’re in school, add more value. Find ways you can just add more value to everything and everyone around you.
This is not about trying to get short term gains. Short term gains are not going to give you the life that you want. It’s long term pursuits. Why do I do this podcast? Am I getting paid to do this podcast? No I’m not getting paid to do this podcast today, but it’s another format for me to add value. It’s another way for me to reach you, to reach people.
Different mediums for different people. Some people appreciate the long form copy. Some people appreciate speaking. Some people appreciate YouTube. That’s a platform that I’m not on yet. It’s like find ways to add value. If you are not adding value in your business, you are really wasting your time. Because that is where the money is. That is where the pot of gold is. It’s just not right around the next bend. It’s around the mountain and around the turn. It’s kind of like driving from LA to Vegas. Sometimes it feels like forever. You see one mountain range and you think like Vegas is around the corner, and it’s not – and another mountain range, another mountain range. Sometimes it feels never-ending.
But don’t give up. Don’t give up because you got deterred. Because something kind of veered you off track. It really is just a matter of keep going. Keep going. If you’ve seen those graphics of like the people who are digging. Like the one person who turns around who was like just near hitting, like striking it rich – and the other person who just keeps on going. That’s just a really, really interesting thing.
Because a lot of people do give up. They do give up. When they’re so close, they don’t even know it. You could be close, you could be so darn close. Just keep your head up. Keep adding value. Don’t let things deter you. Don’t get sidetracked, just keep pushing. Don’t listen to what other people say, just go. Just go, just keep going. Put your head down and work. That is the key to business growth, my friend. On the biggest scale, grandest scale you would ever know.
I hope this is added a lot of value for you. I hope that you took away a very important lesson from this. Please like, share, comment, subscribe on iTunes. I greatly appreciate it. Read all the comments. Until next time, until tomorrow – I will speak to you guys soon.