5 Secrets to Entrepreneurial Success

Sean: How do you know if you have it though?

Naresh: I’ll give you some signs. When other people want you, that’s leverage when other people are recruiting. Hey, I need you to do this project. I’m on this tight deadline. I’ll give you an example because my wife is a doctor here in the United States. And as I mentioned earlier, they just don’t really understand these concepts of leverage and focus and all these different things. During the pandemic, the peak of the pandemic, the doctors who were working on SARS-CoV-2 patients, held a lot of leverage and they didn’t utilize it. I think a business guy who was a doctor would have gone in and said, Hey, yeah, I’ll work on these patients, I’ll treat these patients, but you’re going to have to pay me two times more at three times more or, you know, start your own practice immediately and say, Hey, I’m just going to go out on my own and I’ll be able to service all these patients through this practice, right as an independent contractor or whatever. And this is a deal that we’re going to do. And they could do that because they needed medical care. They needed as many workers as possible, at least here in the United States. They were flying in nurses and doctors and all sorts of people because there were so short-staffed.

So in any environment where there’s short staffing, that’s an opportunity for leverage because it’s like, Oh, now I’m valuable because they need me to work. And none of these people went to their bosses and said, give me a raise or I’ll work. I’ll put in this much time right now and see all these patients, but give me an entire month off later this year or sometime next year, this to me, is like a frequent negotiation with my clients. It’s okay. Yeah, we’ll do this. It’s not just pay, but if you want us to visit you on-site, you got to fly us on this airline. You got to put us up in this hotel and you know, you’ve got to pay for all these different things. There was no leverage. There was no negotiation because you have to feel valued yourself. If you don’t value yourself if you don’t take yourself seriously if you don’t respect yourself, then why should anyone else?

So leverage first is going to come from you. And the way that you build that leverage up in your own head is by simply knowing that you’re doing good work, that you offer good service, and that your work, your service, your product is actually of great value, and that the other party won’t be able to survive without it.

Sean: Yeah, that’s when you got full leverage.