Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Sunil Bhaskaran. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Hi Sunil, thanks for joining us today. Let’s start with a story that highlights an important way in which your brand diverges from the industry standard.
I REPRESENT YOU & INTRODUCE YOU TO A GREATER COMMUNITY OF CONNECTIONS: Having been in the expert and consulting industry for three decades, I have amassed connections and approaches to finding opportunities that I like to expose my clients to. So not only do I teach and guide and help strategize. I also find you opportunities to speak, gain more audiences, gain more publicity, gain more joint venture partners and much more.
I just took on a client in the consulting industry – who was brand new but extremely competent. He had no audience. I helped him get his first speaking event in front of 40 odd business owners and he converted 5 of those owners into a free consulting session and two of those owners converted into a $800 per month (each) consulting package.
. I BRING MY 200,000 PLUS AUDIENCE TO YOU: Having grown and understood my own audience of entrepreneurs, I have a ready made audience for you to speak to, educate and gain clients from.
I just did a webinar promotional for a couple who do relationships courses. We maxed out on the online audience of 100 people and we had standing room only for the in person audience (about 50 people). They managed to get 10 follow up business calls, of which they converted four into business (each business sale averaging $2500.) All this done within 4 weeks and at a very low cost of about $300 a year to them.
. A GROUNDED WAY TO MAKE VISIONS REAL AND CONCRETE: I help make people’s visions for the world and themselves more expansive, concrete and achievable. My vision is to have 100 million joyful and successful entrepreneurs globally by 2050. I have measures for what joyful and successful means. This may seem like a huge goal, but it is what wakes me up in the morning alive and ready – ready to engage fully with my day – even when challenges hit. Most people who train entrepreneurs do not take their own visions very seriously. I take my seriously. I teach entrepreneurs how to start with a bold, unabashed vision and then what practices, tools and strategies to adopt to make that real.
I took an in home care company about 20 years ago from having 12 employees to having 300 plus employees. The driving force apart from the trainings in business and leadership that I gave them, was the vision that they initially created “To save a million lives”.
. HOW TO CONVERT THIS BIG VISION INTO PRACTICAL STRATEGIES AND BIGGER INCOME: What are the stages, strategies, tactics, distinctions and tools to convert this vision into concrete results and a healthy experience.
. CUSTOMIZED APPROACH: How do you customize this process to each different personality and style.
. A DEMOCRATIZED & MORE AFFORDABLE APPROACH TO MARKETING: Most people adopt very expensive marketing strategies that are complicated to learn and practice. I start with fundamentals using my engineering and design experience – what is intended and what is needed to be done – starting with these objectives enables me to design better systems, sales funnels and approaches to marketing that fit the entrepreneur and their market better. This also reduces costs and time.
AND MUCH MORE!
Sunil, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
How did I get into the industry? I started out as an engineer/software designer. I had a side business of writing software for engineering companies in the Irvine area. My marketing was very difficult to do. I door knocked the companies in the area asking for work. It was tough! But then, I met my mentor who taught me how to market more effectively – using mailers and a workshop approach that attracted engineering managers around the city to one venue. There was no internet then, so this was done by phone calls and mailers (stamp and envelope – remember that?)
My mentor taught me how to think better and more expansively. The big lesson was that it was easier in the long run to have a bigger vision than to play small.
I had a huge financial income breakthrough at the age of 33 and that reinforced the lesson.
My mentor also quickly picked up that I loved to mentor others, so he taught me how to mentor and coach by giving me people to mentor and coach. I was thrown into the deep end metaphorically and learned how to coach by real experience.
Then later, he taught me how to do workshops and speak more effectively.
As I grew emotionally, mentally and financially – I hit greater challenges. I was shy for one thing and learned the value of working on myself first, before trying to fix things strategically. I learned to distinguish quickly what was going on inside myself that stopped me (e.g. beliefs, thoughts, judgements etc.) and then how to ‘disappear” these obstacles with grounded and practical tools and distinctions.
My experience growing through these stages taught me how to gracefully guide people with different styles through becoming joyful and successful in their own right.
I learned to always innovate and look to see what people really need and how to stand out from the rest of the crowd of people who provided for the markets I served.
How did you build your audience on social media?
In around 2007 or earlier, I explored the platform meetup . com . This platform was mostly used by hobbyists (e.g. game players, chess players, dog lovers, dancers, romance groups etc.) at that time. But what I discovered was that there was a healthy business owner population in the meetup membership.
I used a lot of my background and education in software to figure out how to leverage meetup to help me build my business marketing to entrepreneurs.
The groups kept growing and the engagement in the events (mini workshops and networking events primarily) kept growing as well to the point that I had a monopoly over the meetup events for business in the Bay Area.
Right before the pandemic hit, I could already see the writing on the wall – all events needed to go online instead of in person. I met the CEO of Meetup – David Siegel at an event and his jaw dropped when he heard what I was doing to gather business people on his platform. I urged him to have his platform go fully online and he agreed of course.
He brought me into do a worldwide webinar to the meetup population on how to do online events in meetup.
In the meantime, I had built strategic partnerships with other platforms. One in particular Alignable.com came into my view at around 2010 or so. I met the President of Alignable, Venkat and we also strategized on how to make his platform more amenable to entrepreneurs.
But in working with all these platforms, I figured out how to “combine” the use of these platforms (e.g. Meetup, Alignable, Linkedin) to make marketing a. more affordable for the common business person and b. more effective with time and patience.
I discovered that there were pros and cons of my methodology compared to Facebook and other kinds of Digital marketing, but that my methodology could be very effective with people who wanted to speak, and start building an audience or other more well established audience builders who wanted an additional channel to use to build their business community and pipelines for sales.
I realized within the last year that all of this development and innovation was providing part of a platform for me to represent and promote people who are visionaries and want to speak and get the word out on their vision and objectives.
So I created a special program – to enable entrepreneurs, speakers, experts and visionaries of course, a means to gain opportunities to be more visible.
ADVICE FOR YOU TO BUILD YOUR AUDIENCE:
1. Don’t get to tied up or married to only social media or what everyone else says to do. (Don’t ignore those options either – but be open to all valid options.)
2. Think strategically – what objectives, who are you serving or targeting, when should you do what (good timing) – before you pick a platform or media to use. Don’t just follow the herd.
3. Test the experience rather than do reading research only. Reading about other’s experiences is insufficient. You may need to invest time and money and energy and actually try out a few options at a time and go deep rather than wide to learn which options would work best for you.
4. Most good business occurs because you show a high level of integrity (i.e. you keep or manage your promises) AND that you build relationships smartly i.e. by asking yourself what other people (including CEOs of new platforms you want to get on) really want or need to solve. Show that you are not only a problem solver but that you can think big and understand their world. This needs practice – thinking bigger. So start imagining how you (no matter how inexperienced you may think yourself to be) can solve problems for bigger entities than your business.
5. Understand that you are less likely (far less likely) to hit big results if you do not invest some if not a lot of money. Nowadays, there is competition everywhere you look – not just from your direct competitors but from larger organizations that have a larger marketing budget who can easily distract customer’s eyes from looking at your business.
Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
I came from a really good family but I had two instances where I experienced severe psychological trauma.
1. I was molested /abused sexually as a young child by a distant relative.
2. I was tortured and watched friends being tortured by others when I was in prison due to a white collar crime (mistake) when I was 18 years old.
I became very isolated and depressed and keeping both of these incidents a secret was wearing me thin.
It was in 1985 when I was 22 years old that I had my first therapist and she was the first person I told about my traumatic experiences. It was cathartic for me and I left a huge dollop of tears and snot on her carpet from just relating my experience.
I climbed every inch of the pathway back to not feeling normal again, but also rising above the trauma … and then creating a much greater context or future that not only healed me, but enabled me to think of a much bigger exciting vision for myself and for the world of human beings.
There were hypnotherapy sessions that left me weak and exhausted, but clearer about my past and even more clear about where I could go in the future.
It was in completing my past trauma and putting it rightfully back into the past, which left an open and blank slate on which I could paint how my future could look like.
Resilience comes from resolving the past and to do it with full integrity – ie. with nothing left unturned and nothing left unsaid.
This may seem hard and for most of us, it will be hard. Hard mostly because the truth can be difficult to see when you are so close to it.
But this process is easier … infinitely easier .. when you confront the truth directly.
“The truth will set you free, but first it will p*ss you off” – Gloria Steinem
I figured out that I would rather have freedom, then to be stuck comfortably in not facing the truths.
This process of facing truths and building resilience is great training to become an entrepreneur, because as an entrepreneur, you must face truths quickly and frequently (numbers, dollars made, profits, costs, losses, etc.)
Building resilience builds
1. Compassion (necessary to lead and sell)
2. A relationship to reality, so you as the captain of your ship-business can navigate effectively without hitting avoidable rocks and storms.
3. An inner discipline to go past beyond where most people stop.
AND MORE.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.sunilbhaskaran.com/
- Instagram: sunil_bhaskaran123
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sunil.bhaskaran
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sunilbhaskaranspeaker/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/cahayamind
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/SunilBhaskaranSpeakerMentorAuthor
- Other: http://www.webinaraudiencedoneforyou.com/ http://joyfulcalendar.com/ https://www.globalsmallbusinessschool.com/
Image Credits
Abigayle Tarsches Photography