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An elevator pitch is not an announcement. Neither is it a sales call.

It does not end with the 30 seconds of self-immersive diarrhoea that you might be blurting out.

It also isn’t about who you are or what you are doing.

An elevator pitch is all about being a conversation. What you are going to do, what you are building, what your vision is. A conversation that should be interesting enough to be taken outside the elevator.

An elevator pitch will never land you a job or a partnership or a client in the time the elevator takes to reach the ground floor. But it should augment the interest and curiosity in the other person to be able to carry the conversation forth after the doors of the elevator open.

Elevator Pitch
Consider it like a pick-up line someone uses on Tinder (minus the cheesiness). It does not directly land you in a relationship, but rather leads to the first date to begin with.

Instead of rambling a few sentences in a single breath, mould your elevator pitch as a genuine conversation which peaks the curiosity of the listener.

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Price is what you pay; value is what you get.

Warren Buffet

Read it again.

And now let the meaning sink in.

How many times have you thought of the difference between value and price? How many times have you considered them to be the same?

If I sell you a new iPhone for $2000, you’ll never say yes to the deal. Why? Because you see the price to be much higher compared to the value you feel you’d get out of it.

But let’s say I am ready to pay you $2000 for your present phone which you’re using, without you being able to keep a backup of the files in it. Would you agree?

Again no.

Why? Because in this case, the perceived value of your phone (along with all the information and memories in it in the form of digital data) is seen as much higher than the price am willing to pay for it.

And these basics apply to every transaction in life – whether you’re buying something from your local grocery shop, whether it’s the new tuxedo you saw on offer or even if you’re negotiating the salary for your new job.

What the organization pays you is the price they’re “buying” you for, with the goal of extracting more value from you. And from your end, the price you agree on is the price you believe you’re worth, for the value addition you’re giving to them.Continue reading

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Take a minute. Think about the success you have had in your professional or personal life in the past one month.

 

It can be anything. You got a new job, your project received appreciation from the client, you won the lottery, you proposed to that person you have had a crush for long, your kid secured full marks in Maths, you repaired the lawn mower or maybe you just made the best toast you have ever made.

 

Do you define them as success?

 

Yes? Good.

 

No? You should.

 

Allow me to explain.

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Short Story

I sold off my company and have now shifted to Australia for my Masters.

 

Long Story

Things started changing in May 2016. My company IZE Creative had reached a level of optimal stagnancy and I didn’t have the skills enough to scale it up to the next level. Moreover, I was dying for a change of atmosphere and felt the urge to uproot myself.

It was then that my friend Ajin and couple of my mentors – Suresh Sir and Mini Ma’am, coaxed me to try for pursuing my Masters abroad. For someone who took nearly 5 years to complete his engineering, higher studies was never on my list. But the thought of exploring a pristine culture and surrounding myself with the new and unexpected did feel like a challenge I wanted to face.

Thus began my journey of finding what exactly I wanted to study, “if” I actually would decide to pursue my higher studies. It took me almost 3 months to actually decide that and another 3 weeks to decide on the preference of colleges. For some reason, maybe intuition, I didn’t focus on US and instead started exploring Universities in Australia, especially Melbourne, which has been the top city in the world for students, for 6 years straight.

As this research was going on, I received a couple of offers for buying off my stake from the company. IZE Creative had been doing great for the past 5 years and was generating absolutely wonderful content and we had a client retention rate of over 90%.

By November 2nd Week I had decided on the buyer, who would be a friend of my existing partner and by December 2nd Week, I had received my offers from 3 Universities in Melbourne. As the last week of 2016 closed by, I decided on pursuing my Masters of Communication and Media Studies with Monash University, ranked 17th globally for the subject, and the procedures of clearing the financials of selling off my stake were also done with.

So, without taking a penny of loan from the bank or from home,  I paid off the First Semester fees of my University and confirmed my admission. Needless to say, from September 2011 when I started the company with just a laptop and internet connection, I was myself proud of having come a good deal of a way. Maybe not the best achievement you would see around you, but definitely an awesome one for me. And my dad’s smile said it all.

Yes, it did hurt like hell selling off my stake and disassociating myself with IZE Creative. It’s like giving up your own child for adoption. But one has to move on to move ahead and that’s all I have done, in the long run.

From our first office in the Store Room of a Dental Clinic to starting off offices in two cities. From best friends backstabbing to strangers acting like guardian angels. From the verge of bankruptcy to YoY profit of 285% at one time. From starting off as a lone man army to reaching our maximum strength of 8 at one time. From being expelled from my own home for not getting “a job” to seeing my dad’s eyes proud with happiness, I have seen it all.

And now, as I start off on my new innings, I request your wishes. Wishes not to make things easy for me; they never have been. But wishes that I maybe able to survive through the storm and come out unscathed.

As I have always said –

“Yesterday, I was tested. Today, I’ll rise. Tomorrow, I build my legacy.”

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It’s funny when I come to think of it. I never thought of becoming an entrepreneur until my startup was into it’s fourth month.

I actually never thought of becoming an entrepreneur. Steve Jobs wasn’t someone I idolized, Richard Branson wasn’t an icon I wanted to worship and Larry Page was just another hot-shot name I had heard somewhere.

For the sake of writing, it would be inspiring to say that the entrepreneurship bug bit me when I was 7 and then it never let me go. Bullshit. I can’t even imagine how a kid born in the 1990 era in a middle class Indian family could even think of the term entrepreneur other than the fact that it was difficult to spell it right.

Starting off IZE Creative in 2011 was purely a leap of faith. I knew not what I was doing but I was as carefree as any person could be. Having lived 21 years of my life with my decisions being taken by my parents, it was enriching to finally take a big step on my own. I didn’t care about failure or success. I just wanted to try.Continue reading