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What if you could follow a real-time playbook of a billion-dollar business being built from the ground up? In this episode, Sharran opens the curtain on his journey to building his next billion-dollar company, and he’s bringing you along for the ride!
He’s documenting every step of the journey so you can learn alongside him. From his first billion-dollar success to the lessons learned in the trenches, Sharran shares what’s different this time—how he’s openly sharing the playbook, the wins, the mistakes, and everything in between.
He emphasizes the importance of building with A-players, keeping your vision clear, and focusing on the metrics that matter. With Sharran’s raw and unfiltered insights, you’ll get an inside look at what it really takes to grow and scale a business to unprecedented heights.
If you want to learn the strategies behind building a billion-dollar company, then this is the book for you. Tune in now and get an exclusive look at The Next Billion!
“If you want to really scale, if you want to really grow, if you want to really have everyone charged behind your success, I would offer this: you’ve got to pick a metric, you’ve got to rally behind it, and you cannot shut up about it.”
– Sharran Srivatsaa
Timestamps:
01:33 – Why Sharran is building his next billion-dollar company in public
02:25 – Lessons from building a $3.4 billion company
06:51 – The importance of hiring A-players for success
08:05 – The infinite game of hiring and building teams
09:31 – The CEO’s three main jobs: vision, people, and cash
10:32 – Why every team member must know the vision
12:01 – What you measure is what you build
13:20 – Why focus is key for business growth
14:13 – Recap: The Next Billion
Resources:
– The Next Billion by Sharran Srivatsaa
– Moody’s Ratings Downgrades United States Ratings
– Join the Future Proof Community
– Join the 10K Wisdom Private Partner Podcast, now available to you for free
– Join Sharran’s VIP Community
– ARC Multifamily Real Estate Investing
– Sharran’s Partnership Program
– Grab Sharran’s 4-Week MBA for Free
Connect with Sharran:
– X
– YouTube
Transcript:
[00:00:00] Hey, this is Sharran Srivatsaa. Welcome back to the Business School Podcast. And let me ask you a question. What if you could follow every move of someone building a billion dollar business in real time? Not after the fact. Uh, not on some podcast episode, not just the highlight reel. The billion dollar business, the playbook.
[00:00:15] I’m building my next, our next billion dollar company, and this time I’m bringing you with me if you would like the wins, the mistakes that I’m guaranteed to make the exact playbook. This is the next billion and it’s all happening in public. I’m gonna break down exactly what this means and how you are gonna get.
[00:00:31] Everything along the way. Starting right now.
[00:00:40] One thing is for certain, just because it’s tried and true doesn’t mean it’s working right now. So the big question is this. Where can you learn what is working right now? The strategies, the tactics, the psychology, and the exact how to. How to grow your business, how to blow up your personal brand and supercharge your personal growth.
[00:01:02] That is the question, and this podcast will give you the answer. My name is Sharran Srivatsaa and Welcome to Business School.
[00:01:15] Okay, let’s get right to it because today I’m gonna be extremely honest with you, direct with you, because I made some big commitments for myself in the next chapter, especially over the next 12, 24, 36 months. And it’s not just in my business, but it’s in how I share what I’m doing right here and why. And because here is the truth.
[00:01:34] I’m on the path to building the next billion dollar business. Uh, but this time. The third time around, you get to come along with me. I am building everything in public. I’m gonna document everything so you can ride along if you would like. You will get all the wins. You will see all the mistakes. You will learn with me, you will grow with me and hopefully celebrate with me without having to go through all the pain yourself.
[00:01:58] Right? That’s why I’m creating something new called the next billion very. Fancy name The Next Billion on Substack. It is a public log documentation of everything that I’m building in public on everything that I’ve learned. It is of course, as always 100% free. You can check it out on Sharran substack.com.
[00:02:18] Well just look for the next billion on Substack. But first I wanna tell you where this idea came from. So this is the backstory. When we built Telus, we took the company from the ground up to, you know, 3.4 billion in sales volume, growing on annual run rate of over 5 billion. We did 10 x growth in five years, so it was 10 x in five years.
[00:02:40] And then we sold that business to Douglas Elliman, which was. A Cinderella transaction in the real estate industry at that time. Then I had a five year non-compete where I got to do a lot of, you know, investing in private equity. But when we did that, you know, when we built and grew and sold Telus, we had a playbook.
[00:02:56] Now was that playbook designed during or after, or before? We don’t know, but we had a playbook. It worked and. But I barely got to share any of that. I probably did a couple of podcast episodes here and there to try and conceptualize and capture all the lessons, but that doesn’t even scratch the surface of what it takes to build something big.
[00:03:16] Hundreds of people across, you know, tons of offices, across all the operations, across all the money, on all the strategy and all the drama. That’s what happens. And by the way, we did it again later. You know, I got a chance to use a similar playbook that I. Stated and conceptualized in public this time at Real, which was publicly traded on the nasdaq, and I called it the idea of operationalizing generosity.
[00:03:40] So in under three years, we grew the business from 6,800 agents to 28,000 agents. As of recording this podcast, all organic growth now in the worst real estate market in 30 years. Now, we not only did that in public, so you saw it happen from a numbers perspective. From a valuation perspective, we went from a kind of 200 milish million dollar valuation to over a billion dollar valuation, and it was insane.
[00:04:05] And the truth is that. I was too slammed to see my family. I was too drained to work out. I had no off switch and definitely had zero time to stop and write any of it down so that you can benefit from it, so that I can benefit from it so that I don’t forget the lessons that I’ve learned myself. And you shouldn’t have to go through the pain yourself.
[00:04:27] And that’s what different this time. So think about the next billion starting now. Uh, this time I am writing, I am breaking down the lessons. I am sharing. I’m building in public everything that I know, everything that I’m figuring out, the wins, the strategies, the mistakes, the pain, all of it. You get to see it so that you don’t have to go through it, and it’s going inside the next billion, and it’s going to live on, on the internet so that you can benefit from it and you get to see it live there.
[00:04:54] Here’s the best part. It’s a hundred percent free. Like everything else that you have been with me in my world and there’s no catch to it, of course, it is just the best stuff that I’ve, that you’ll get straight from the strength trenches because the one thing that the world has not seen is the world has not seen my love for being an operator as to build and grow a business from the ground up.
[00:05:11] The world has. Partly seeing, Hey, you can jump on stage, you can do some videos, you can do some webinars, you can create some content that is probably under 5% of everything that happens, and I wanna show you how operators build empires because the, the deal is this building a billion dollar business, maybe from a sales perspective or a valuation perspective or a capital allocation perspective, is no joke.
[00:05:35] It just doesn’t happen. It is super hard and now. There are a couple of companies that happen, like, you know, Instagram sold to Facebook for a billion dollars, Zappo sold, they’re all flukes. That is the anomaly, right? For everyone else. It takes a ton of vision, a ton of belief, and a lot of pain, and that that’s what you need to understand in this process.
[00:05:52] So if you’re building something big and big, could be. A million dollar business for yourself. It could be a $10 million business. It could be a hundred million dollar business. It could be another billion dollar business. It could be significantly bigger than what I’m building for a 10 billion. I totally get it.
[00:06:05] But this is probably for you because you can scale the lessons up and down and adapt it to yourself because I get to go through the pain and I get to get the wins, and I get to get the lessons, and I get to get the framework so that you don’t have to. So, uh, today I wanna give you an introduction to that.
[00:06:18] I wanna give you three quick lessons that I’ve learned building $2 billion businesses back to back. One in private and one in public. And I wanna say this before every, everybody, everybody who’s involved in this gets all uppity about this. Nobody builds a billion dollar business alone, right? Uh, I say I, I, I, I like to say we, but if we is greater than me, and it is a, you cannot build something that big alone because A players will drive everything.
[00:06:42] So I say this from a perspective of I’m capturing the lessons and it is a monstrous team that delivers on all of this, but let me give you the learnings. All right? So lesson number one, you hire a players. Or you are going to get destroyed. So let me explain what this means. A players are everything. A players are 10 x more impactful than B players.
[00:07:02] And here’s the crazy part. A players are 10 x more impactful than B players and maybe will cost you 10 to 30% more. Would you take that trade? They cost you 10 to 30% more, but they’re 10 x more impactful. And most people will just not make that trade. They’re like, oh man, I, I, I was willing to pay a hundred thousand dollars for this position.
[00:07:20] This is act, this person wants 130,000. Well, I can’t take home that 30,000, so I’m not gonna do this. I’ll go with the B player. But their, their value. Their value is 10 times that. That’s the crazy part. That is the best ROI you will ever get. You want to be a professional recruiter of A-players, and it does not matter if you’re looking for an A-player or not.
[00:07:40] If you find an A-player, you gotta find a way to recruit them, to connect with them, to collaborate with them, to consult with them, to put them on your board, to have them coach you, to meet with them, to mentor with them. It does not matter. Every time you meet an A-player, you want to bear hug them so hard that they never leave your side.
[00:07:57] You want to be, you are in the business of, of collecting a players and you gotta put them in your orbit in some way. So let me explain the cycle to you. You hire A players, you build a model that is challenging and lucrative because if it’s not challenging and not lucrative, it’s not interesting to the A players that gives you margin.
[00:08:14] So you make money. Then you use those margins to hire more A players. That is the game and it never ends. That is the infinite game. You keep playing and you’re growing. I’ll say it again. You hire A players since they’re really talented, you build a model that is challenging so they can work hard and is lucrative.
[00:08:29] That gives you margins. You then use those margins to hire more A players, and that is the game that never ends. Alright. That is the game. I don’t know, like, I don’t know what else to tell you. That is the only game. You cannot hire a players in a low margin business because that is not challenge too. If it’s challenging and not lucrative, the A players will bounce because they’ll work really hard and they’ll get tired and they won’t get rewarded.
[00:08:51] If it’s not challenging and lucrative, they’ll leave because it’s not challenging and they, they, they feel like they’re wasting their potential. So I’ll say this again. This is the cycle. You should memorize this. You hire A players, you build a model that is challenging and lucrative. That gives you margins.
[00:09:07] You use those margins, which is, which is profit to hire more A-players, and that is the game and it never ends. And it is the infinite game and you keep playing and you keep growing. You don’t win with average people, you win with A-players. And let’s be honest, dumb, don’t build enter empires, right? It just does not work.
[00:09:23] You have never found a dumb asset to build an empire. It just does not work. So that’s number one. A players are bust. Here’s lesson number two. If you’re the CEO founder operator of your business, I met with, uh, this venture capitalist. His name is Fred Wilson in New York City many, many years ago, and he told me something which I’ve really expanded and tried to tie out.
[00:09:41] I’ve written, I’ve written a lot about this. I’ve recorded podcast about this. All you have to do is think about these three things, which is as the CEO has three jobs, vision, people, and cash. That’s it. Now. You. If you’re a CEO listening to this and you disagree, I don’t care. I’m just telling you, if you have not built $2 billion businesses, you are probably, you probably don’t see the light.
[00:10:03] I, I don’t know what else to tell you on this one, right? If your team, it’s vision, people in cash. Now lemme explain. If your team doesn’t, can’t articulate the vision like you, you have failed. If you, that’s vision. If you let B players stick around, you have failed. That’s people. And if there’s not enough cash to fund the vision and pay the A players, you have failed.
[00:10:25] That’s it. It’s vision, meaning every single person on the team knows, knows the vision. If like the, the value of a leader, the quality of a leader is not their visionary status. It is not their, whatever they think their vision is. I. If everyone in the organization cannot restate it the same way and cannot have their vision fit into that, then they are missing the point.
[00:10:47] So anytime someone tells me, oh, that person is visionary, I literally will ask someone else in the organization, Hey, what do you think the vision of the company is? And if that doesn’t match with what the quote CEO founder, business owner says, I know that that visionary is a dumb ass. That’s the problem, right?
[00:11:02] Your, if your team doesn’t know the vision, if every person in your organization doesn’t know the vision, you as a leader have failed. And if you let B players stick around, you have failed. And if there’s not enough cash to fund the vision, you have failed. That’s why there’s only three things that a CEO should do.
[00:11:16] Vision, people, and cash. Now that’s a hard job and that’s why you get the kudos. That’s why you get the glory. That’s also why you get the pain. So I don’t really care what your title is. Founder, CEO, owner. This is your job. It’s vision, people, and cash. If every single person in the organization does not know the vision and can’t say it as articulately as you, you have failed.
[00:11:35] If you had let B players stick around A players, and you know, the high achievers don’t like average performers. Average performers don’t like high achievers. They just don’t mix. So you, they will not stick around. You have failed and if there’s not enough cash to fund the vision, you have failed. If you’re not obsessed with these strings, you are not building.
[00:11:51] You are just babysitting your own ego. I’m just gonna tell you that right now. All right, here’s number three, and if none of those matters to you, please at least allow this to matter to you. What you measure is what you build, okay? What you measure is what you build, meaning the company does what you measure.
[00:12:12] That’s it. The company does what the leader measures i’s, say it again. The company does what the leader measures. Now this, you could also, this could also be on your own team. This could also be in your division. This could be in, you know, your group. This, you could be the founder, the visionary, the CEO, whatever the company does, what the leader measures.
[00:12:33] So I’ll give you an example. Now I was really loud in our last company at uh, at Real, right? I obsessed over this one metric called Agent Growth because I believe that our people were going to drive our culture and they were going to drive our profits and they were going to drive our innovation and they were going to drive.
[00:12:50] The delivery of the work hard be kind message in the marketplace. So I obsessed over one number. I operationalized over one number, which is the growth agent growth. Now, it wasn’t perfect. It, it, it actually may not have been the right metric, but it was the, it was our metric. It was the metric that I, I yelled louder than anyone else in the company.
[00:13:06] I probably yelled louder than anyone else in the industry because I believed that we had to do a better job for those agents who were joining our company and we had to deliver better for them. And that’s how we became the fastest growing publicly traded real estate brokerage in the world. Now, it was not magic, it was focused, let me explain.
[00:13:24] We grew from 6,800 agents to 28,000 agents in the worst. Three real estate decades, market decades in the, in the history, in the, the worst real estate market in the last three decades. Crazy, right? When every other business was down, we were the only business that was up. There was a reason for that. And that reason was the company, me company does what you measure.
[00:13:49] Most people don’t know what they measure, they just, that’s the problem. The company does what you measure and you want to measure something that everybody can rally behind. So if you want to really scale, if [00:14:00] you want to really grow, if you want, really have everyone charged behind your success, I would offer this.
[00:14:04] You gotta pick a metric, you gotta rally behind it and you cannot shut up about it. You just absolutely cannot shut up about it. There’s there, you just cannot shut up about it. And that’s what’s really important. So lemme give you those three lessons again. Lesson number one, A players are bust meaning.
[00:14:17] You gotta know the cycle. A players are tenix more impactful than B players, and they probably cost into 30% more. The cycle is, number one, you hire A players. Number two, you build a model that is challenging and lucrative. Number three, that gives you margins. And number four, you use those margins to hire more A players.
[00:14:31] That is the game. That is the flywheel, right? That is the infinite game because Damas says don’t build empires. Number two is the CEO has three jobs, vision people in cash. If your team doesn’t know the vision, you have failed. If you let B players stick around, you have failed. If there’s not enough cash to fund the vision, you have failed.
[00:14:45] So, and here is lesson number three. What you measure is what you build. Meaning the company does what the leader measures. And if you can pick a metric, rally behind it and not shut up about it, then it’s really hard. Gonna be really hard to build a billion billion our business. So I was a little preview with on what I’ve learned in the last kind of 20 years doing this.
[00:15:07] And I hope this would be helpful to you. So here’s what I’m gonna do. I’m giving you everything. So I’m building the next billion dollar business, but this time I am not doing it alone. I am excited to, you know, that you hopefully are coming with me. We’re gonna sort do it together and you don’t have to guess or reverse engineer what’s working.
[00:15:21] I’m just gonna give you everything that I’ve learned. So if you’re interested, just go to substack.com, check out the next billion. If found my email list, you’ll, you’ll find that as well. It’s a hundred percent free. It’s a hundred percent real, and I promise you it’ll help you bring, help you build whatever the next big things for you.
[00:15:34] So let’s make the next billion yours too. So hopefully this is helpful. Uh, hey, can you do me a favor? If you like this, could you take a screenshot and post this episode and tag me that way? I know this, you like this, then I can make more like this for you. So please take a screenshot. Post this and tag me.
[00:15:50] That way I can make more like this for you. And before you go, could just go to substack.com, find the next billion and subscribe. That way I can send you more of the good stuff. I’ll catch you on the next one.
[00:16:07] Hey, it’s Sharran, I have a cool gift for you. Since you like this podcast, I actually have an ultra super secret private podcast that I make just for my partner companies and the CEOs and influencers that I advise. It’s called 10 K wisdom because I try to wrap 10, 000 worth of value in every single episode in just under 10 minutes.
[00:16:31] That’s why it’s called 10 K wisdom. It’s raw. It’s real. It’s got no intro or outro or anything like that. It’s just straight to the point and to the insights. Since you like this podcast, I think you will like that. So for the first time, I’m making it available to you. Just go to 10Kwisdom.com the number 10K wisdom.com and my team will activate it for you as my gift. Go to 10Kwisdom.com. I’ll see you there.