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What happens behind billion-dollar boardrooms? Sharran just walked out of three, and he’s sharing the seven lessons every entrepreneur needs right now. Instead of drowning in theory or corporate jargon, Sharran distills insights from billion-dollar companies, major media platforms, and investment firms into practical strategies you can implement today.
From why systems matter more than superstars to the critical role of onboarding and the difference between amateurs and professionals when it comes to automation, this episode is packed with insights that challenge conventional wisdom.
If you’ve ever wondered what the smartest operators in the world are focused on right now, this episode gives you a front-row seat. Tune in to learn how to rethink systems, plan ahead, and create breakthroughs in your business.
“Amateurs automate for efficiency. Professionals automate for accuracy.”
– Sharran Srivatsaa
Timestamps:
01:25 – Why boards are often broken and how Sharran reframed their value
05:17 – Lesson 1: Systems carry the real weight, not just talent
06:40 – Lesson 2: Always design with scale in mind
07:57 – Lesson 3: Iteration beats waiting for perfection
09:02 – Lesson 4: Use pre-mortems to plan for failure in advance
10:28 – Lesson 5: Language shapes culture–ditch acronyms and clarify terms
11:43 – Lesson 6: Automate for accuracy, not just for efficiency
15:10 – Lesson 7: Make “Day One” better through meaningful onboarding
Resources:
– The Next Billion by Sharran Srivatsaa
– 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 in this episode I’m gonna break down for you seven lessons that I learned from my last three board meetings that I was on. And I framed this in such a way that it is if I was a reporter and I fly on the wall just like you were, what?
[00:00:15] Big ideas, lessons can I take out that I can give you, not from how a board meeting is run or not, why you can’t be in a, you know, billion dollar public company board meeting or not, why you can’t be in a media company’s board meeting or not, why you can’t be an investment firms board meeting. But what was the biggest lesson that the top operators management teams are working on right now, and how can you take that and install that in your business and in your life?
[00:00:37] That’s what I pulled out and that’s what I’m sharing with you today. So these are seven big lessons from my last three board meetings, and it all starts right now.
[00:00:50] 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.
[00:01:13] That is the question, and this podcast will give you the answer. My name is Sharran Srivatsaa and Welcome to Business School.
[00:01:25] So one of the things that I actually hate about business is boards. Boards are generally terrible and there is this big contention between why someone has a board of directors and what the company really needs. And most of the time boards actually are there as a. Structural mechanism, especially like in a public company or in a large private company or having a board seat to help make decisions.
[00:01:48] And the management team doesn’t like having the board. The board doesn’t like being on there. It’s just like it, it is a, I, I’ve noticed that it net net, it is a friction based experience unless it’s designed wealth. The reason I’m telling you all of this is because for many years I was on several boards and I hated it, and I saw even from a, you know, board of a charity to a board of a public company, the things that I used to do in the past, I was so frustrated that four hours of my time would just get so wasted and we would talk about.
[00:02:16] Just things that didn’t really matter. Several board members often were incompetent and we would have to re-explain the business over and over to them. And it just bothered me so much that I quit being on boards completely. ’cause I thought it was a total waste of my time. But recently, I am back on a few boards and mainly because I really respect the management teams, they care about the board’s input they actually use, utilize the board as a good advisory mechanism.
[00:02:41] And so what I wanna tell you about today is some lessons that I learned. I just came out of. Three big board meetings. One was a, they with a, you know, kind of billion dollar publicly prorated company. One was one of the largest media platforms in an industry, and one was with an investment company deploying, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars of capital.
[00:02:57] All very different. And, uh, even though the rooms were different, the topics were different, the operators were different after all of these board meetings. I always step back right after the board meeting and I’m like, what are these lessons learned? What was, uh, unique to me? Because the, it’s also an interesting experience for me.
[00:03:13] There are, there, you’re sitting with some brilliant people and if I can’t mind the lessons, then I’m an idiot. So. I wrote, not, not joking. I wrote down 101 total, like learning based observations, and now clearly I’m not gonna give you 101 right now. I wrote those 101 down for myself. These were just like, you know, ideas, small kind of decisions, but bigger shifts in ideas and principles, in know small cues as to how someone handled something or how someone presented something.
[00:03:39] If you’re in multiple, like four to six hour meetings, you start to realize that there is some pretty amazing nuggets that you can take away. Sometimes. I wish that you could be on. You know, fly on the wall just watching how this stuff happens, because this is how the big leagues work. So, uh, in this kind of podcast, I, I actually wrote this.
[00:03:55] I, I wrote a great article for you. You should go look at it. It’s called 10 Lessons from Three Board Meetings On My Substack. It’s on my Substack is called the Next Billion. Go to my next billion.com, that’s my next billion.com. Always a hundred percent free. And look for, uh, 10 lessons from three board meetings, and I break.
[00:04:10] Kind of break it all down. So what I’m gonna share with you today is like, I wanna show you the actionable version of what I wrote. ’cause it’s very hard for people to sit and read. ’cause in today’s kind of, you know, TikTok fight world, if the, you know, people talk about the hook being. Three seconds long.
[00:04:23] If you don’t like, you know, something for more than three seconds, you just swipe. That’s how we’re wired. And so this, this short term kind of dopamine hit is terrible, which is why you’re not gonna read all that. I wanted to share. Share. So I thought, since I have you for the next 12 minutes, I thought I would kind of break down some of that.
[00:04:38] Key lessons that can actually be kind of helpful to you. Now I’m taking the approach of like a reporter or what if I was writing a Forbes article or a Harvard Business Review article as a, as if I, I was watching these boards work and watching them interact with their management teams. I was watching the lessons learned and what can I pull out from them that I could give to you that will help you in your business right now?
[00:04:58] Not, and you don’t have to have a board. You just have to figure out how to utilize this stuff because these are business lessons, not about how to talk to your board. So no one cares about the board. They just care about how you. Build a better business because if you build a better business, you, your, your team is better, the world is better, you are better, your family’s better, you make more money and everyone wins, right?
[00:05:15] So here’s a, here’s a couple of big lessons. Lesson number one is the systems carry a lot of the weight. So I will tell you this, while a lot of the boards. Talks about kind of important people and having smart people there. Everyone, all the people are there to build great systems and infrastructure. That is the most important thing.
[00:05:34] So your job is not to find a talented person who’s a talented person that does talented work. Your job is to find a talented person that can build a system that makes the business run. They want to, you want them to create a machine, which is why you have the talented person in the first place. Like that is the big I idea, right?
[00:05:50] And so you want to think of these people as like you want. Each person you hire is building a little house in a big community that is your company, a lot, a big community full of houses. Each of them builds a system, and once they built a house, it’s just maintenance. They’re not rebuilding a house every time.
[00:06:03] The right system. I will tell you, the right system will beat the perfect day, the perfect person, because there’s some insane magic in the boring stuff that never breaks. So every time you have a smart person, you want to ask them, Hey, what. Like what system or infrastructure that are they building? You gotta get used to building boring stuff.
[00:06:20] Building boring stuff is the answer. Like efficiency is the answer. You the, the entire value of a business is to do things better, faster, cheaper, you know, and more efficiently. And you systems are gonna carry the weight. So the question you should be asking is, yeah. Yeah, you Johnny are talented. Yeah, you Jimmy are talented, but what system are you building?
[00:06:38] That’s kind of number one. Here’s number two, you gotta kind of design with scale in mind. And so it’s not just building for today, but it’s also building for what’s coming tomorrow because tomorrow will come faster than you know, and now you have a constraint that you can’t solve. Most people are solving the fire of today.
[00:06:53] They’re not solving the constraint of tomorrow. So you have to kind of use some version of, you know, 80 20 where you’re solving the pain of today, but also planning for the pain of tomorrow. And that’s why boards are important because they’re not in your stuff day to day. So when you tell them, Hey, you’re gonna hire this person to solve this problem, they’re gonna say, well, what happens this to this problem tomorrow?
[00:07:09] So the easiest way to kinda look at it is to say, Hey. If you’re doing, you know, if you’re selling 10 units of something today, if you’re selling 10 houses today, selling 10 loans, or today selling 10 coaching clients today, 10 selling 10 Louis Vuitton bags today, selling 10 pizzas today, what would happen if that became a hundred?
[00:07:24] And a lot of people’s, like, I can take unlimited leads. That is not true. You cannot take unlimited leads because the, the quality will degrade in how you service those leads, especially if a human is involved. So the question is what needs to get redesigned? And if, if, you know, that needs to get redesigned, you redesigned that right now because if it work, it would work for.
[00:07:40] You know, a hundred units, it’ll work for 10. It’ll work for 10 beautifully, right? So, and you can just add the capacity later, but you gotta design the system better. The cost of fixing stuff later is way more expensive than you can imagine. So fix stuff right now I’m thinking about scale overall. So number two, design would kind of scale in mind.
[00:07:57] Here’s number three, iteration is the answer to everything. And so you can’t wait for like a big win. You can’t say, oh, I’m gonna spend three months doing this project, spend three months doing this transformation. Spend three like. You just gotta, that is ter, it’s a terrible way to approach life. I talk about, you know, this, this idea often, which is, uh, test, invest and scale.
[00:08:14] It’s the business way of thinking of crawl, walk, run. So a lot of people will say, crawl, walk, run, which means start stro, crawl like a baby. Then you walk and then you run. It’s no different than test, invest and scale. So your idea is like, what? Minimum thing can I put out there that can test it to make sure all the things work great.
[00:08:29] Then can I invest a little bit in it? Cool. Then can I actually scale it? What is scaling? It’s to say, all right, now that if I put it into production, how will this work? So the is the test, invest and scale methodology is really good, but the idea is don’t spend a year working on a project like. You gotta find a way to say, Hey, what is the one week version of this project that I can build and test right now?
[00:08:48] If you don’t do that, then you’re gonna be building stuff that is, is kind of gets outdated very quickly because the models, the platforms of technology all are moving way too fast. So I would think iteration is the only way. That’s like big lesson number three. Here’s lesson number four. Probably if you’re not paying attention, this is probably a good one.
[00:09:03] You gotta plan for what may go wrong from the start, meaning. A lot of people will say, Hey, you know what? This broke down. Let’s solve the problem. And then like, like, let’s think about it. Let’s do a post-mortem. My idea is to always do a pre-mortem. A pre-mortem is essentially to say, okay, we’re gonna do this event, assume this event failed.
[00:09:21] Why would, why, why could it have failed? And that makes everybody stop and look at the current system and say, okay, it could have failed because of this. It could have failed because of that. It could have failed because of this. It could have, you know, broken because of that. Now you have the people that actually designed the system working to break the system because the people that design the system are the ones that actually know how the system can break if they focus on breaking the system.
[00:09:41] What do think about this for a second. What do people, why does. The NSA. Why does the CIA, why does nasa, why does the FBI, why do these, you know, these government agencies? Why do big companies, why do they ask hackers to come and help them build a better security system? Why? Because the hackers are the ones that have broken all the security system.
[00:10:02] They know how to break stuff. You want the people that build stuff to actually break stuff. And that’s really important. You wanna become really good at breaking things because then you’ll build much better things. So the question I would always ask is like how? What is the pre-mortem? Assume that what you are launching has failed.
[00:10:17] Now list all the reasons why. And once you do that, you can go back and fix those reasons and they will not fail for those reasons anymore. That’s the way to actually win. So plan for what may go wrong. That’s number four. Here’s number five. You gotta use language like infrastructure. There’s a great quote that I, my dad used to use a lot.
[00:10:33] He says, the limits of my language are the limits of my world, right? Or the limits of language. Limits of your language are the limits of your world. And the, there is so much jargon that people use and. People just don’t like, if there’s a lot of jargon, people don’t understand it. They don’t wanna clarify because it makes ’em look dumb.
[00:10:49] And if you don’t use, if you are using the language, you should just define the term. So if you say, Hey, we’re talking about this KPI, which is a key performance indicator, hey, we’re talking about, you know, adjusted, uh, you know, adjusted ebitda, which is taking the EBITDA and adding back stock comp. Like you gotta like actually define the terms because we use way too much.
[00:11:08] Language and a kind of acronyms based stuff in our world and it affects the how the teams work. And so you also have to give the teams the, the courage to say, Hey, stop. Wait, what does that mean? Because sometimes you have to repeat it over and over for people to actually get it. Now, I don’t think acronyms are bad, but I actually think companies that don’t use acronyms will outperform companies that do.
[00:11:30] And that’s why this is really important. So I would use language like infrastructure, so you don’t have to use a lot of acronyms, and if you do, you have to train around them, right? Here’s a h here’s like number six that I want to give you, and this is kind of like my big lesson. You gotta introduce automation with a lot of care.
[00:11:44] And what I mean by that is, lemme give you a, a Sharan original on this one. Amateurs automate for efficiency, but professionals automate for accuracy. When I was, I’ll say it again. I’m amateurs automate for efficiency, but professionals automate for accuracy. And when I actually got in this automation world, like I’m a.
[00:11:58] Zapier Ninja, like I am a make.com ninja. Like I do, I do any in my sleep. I love the automation stuff because it allows me to say I have full understanding of the system so I can build things around it very well. But what, what I’m trying to say is, in this world of AI and data, everything that you do, accuracy is the answer.
[00:12:13] The reason why people don’t wanna do automation is because they’re afraid. Not of the efficiency, but they’re afraid of the accuracy. You don’t want to automate, you know, you don’t wanna put AI in your email, not because you don’t wanna become more efficient. You don’t wanna put AI in your email because you’re afraid that AI is gonna say, do something dumb.
[00:12:29] So you’re not afraid of the efficiency or you’re afraid of the accuracy. So the job of automation is to actually fix the. Accuracy. So whatever you do, you should figure out how to fix accuracy and automation is the number one thing. Forms email automation, spreadsheets, all that it, the automation fixes accuracy.
[00:12:44] So anything that you can do to fix accuracy, to fix better data is a really, really good thing. So my recommendation would be if you’re doing something manually right now, it’s only the problem is, but that is not the efficiency alone, it’s the accuracy. You can’t make a data model around it. You have to have people double check the effort you have to.
[00:12:59] People double check and look at the documents. It’s really terrible. So. That said, I would say this, you gotta automate every darn thing because now that you have a large lead language model, it can actually think better than you. I will tell you this, and you’re gonna hate me for saying this. Human intelligence is not the smartest thing in the world.
[00:13:15] You can’t say things like, oh my gosh. You know, it can’t be a human. 1000 GPUs is smarter than you. Like. There’s a reason why an entire data center is smarter than you. Sure. If you are the, the number one chest flare in the world and it can’t beat you, I maybe understand that. But for the 99.999% of things that we do, it will beat you.
[00:13:34] It will beat me. We are irrelevant. Like you have to understand that that is the, that is why the LLMs are better. That is why outta artificial intelligence works. You, you have to bet on the fact that you know, you’re going to not only get, you know, artificial general intelligence where the. Where it’s gonna be just as smart as a human, but you’re gonna get artificial super intelligence where it is smarter than all humans combined.
[00:13:55] And the only factor around this, the, the time factor around this, is [00:14:00] just the factor of us getting more compute, meaning more hardware resources to do more, have more computational power so that it can work better than us. And the sooner you realize that the. Faster you will win because you’re betting on something that’s an inevitability.
[00:14:10] Y you humans are known for their creativity and their, for their humanity, for their love, their care, their compassion. That can never be replaced by a human. I am, uh, for a robot, I a hundred percent get that. But I will tell you everything else that we day to day do in our normal lives, like there is going to be a.
[00:14:24] You know, a compute power, A-A-A-A-C-P-U or robot that can do it better than you and I, the sooner we realize is the better we’re gonna build a better world. And I’m not saying that, you know, the destruction of humanities here, I actually think this is really good. It allows us to be human. It allows us to do what we do.
[00:14:38] There’s a reason why the factories came about. The factories came about to build stuff. Why? Because they can do it with more accuracy. They can do it better than, than we can. An assembly line of workers is one thing, like an automated. A machine doing one thing is something completely different. You get fewer errors doing things and, and when it comes to like a pacemaker, you would much rather a machine build it with to spec rather than 25 humans sit there and try to put this pacemaker together because I don’t trust that.
[00:15:01] I trust what the machine did to spec. That’s why, you know, introducing automation and, and innovation with care is really important. I’ll give you my last kind of big lesson is this is, you know, you’ve gotta make day one better. And when I say you gotta make day one better, all, I mean, is that how you start?
[00:15:17] Everything is how you, everything goes. Some. If you bring a new person, if you bring a new client on board, their first three, four days, they are, they’re like, man, they understand that they have to spend time with you. So they put more effort, put more care, put more love into it. How their onboarding is, is how their relationship with you is gonna be.
[00:15:32] If you have a new employee that’s coming in and they leave, if you have a lot of people that are leaving your company, uh, the reason is because churn is really high. People leave your company only because their onboarding is terrible. You just gotta fix the onboarding first. You gotta make them feel, you know, have increase their level of contribution first.
[00:15:46] Bringing on new people on your team, you literally should block off time to train and onboard this person so that they not give them 42 le videos to go through. Nobody wants to go through 42 freaking videos. That is not how onboarding works. That’s terrible, right? If, if I, if I locked in and looked at a mandatory onboarding training for, you know, anti-money launder.
[00:16:05] Nobody, nobody’s excited to go through anti-money laundering training. Nobody’s really excited to go sit and watch 14 hours of sexual harassment videos. They understand that they have to do that in the workplace. They understand how to do it. They, I know they have to do it because the company’s doing to cover their butt.
[00:16:18] They know all of that, but that is not onboarding. No one wants to read 1400 documents. No one wants, one wants to watch. 82 mandatory videos, and if you think you just generated automation to do all of that, you are wrong. No one likes that stuff. You have to fix it. And that’s why people leave. If the first thing that I came excited to join your company and then you, you sent me like, you know, three days of mandatory videos, like, I wanna blow my brains out.
[00:16:39] That’s terrible. You took the best, most excited and most committed time of my involvement with your company and you made me watch 42 videos. How, like how terrible is that? You know, you’re losing my humanity from day one. Instead, get me to do the most, you know, the most valuable thing right now. Get me to ship a piece of work.
[00:16:57] Get me to do my job immediately. Show me. Show me what makes the company tick. Figure out. A better version of me from me make me contribute at a super high level. I really like this idea of like, you know, getting people in their first week to ship something important. Getting people in their first week to contribute something important.
[00:17:14] Put the make the stakes super high because if I came in the first week and you said, Hey, Sharan, week one, you gotta learn this business because I want you at the end of this week to deliver this really awesome presentation. That is gonna, you know that that’s gonna set the course of X, Y, Z project. Now I’m gonna work my ass off because I get to deliver something and now I feel a sense of ownership to it.
[00:17:30] That is super important. That is how you actually drive value, not by making, you know, people watch sexual harassment and anti-money laundering videos, which is freaking dumb. And we all have to agree and understand that, but we still do it anyway because you have to do the HR CYA, and I understand that, but we gotta make it better.
[00:17:45] It’s the same thing when you’re, if you’re a coaching client or a real estate agent, or a mortgage broker or whatever, don’t put people through the self-managed portals, that’s fine. But what do they need to know? They need to be on a call with you for five minutes and know the five important things. Show your humanity around that.
[00:17:59] If, if you can’t tell, this was like the most important thing I wanted to share with you. I, I, I may, maybe this is, if I, if I could, if, if all I did was make 10 podcasts just about this, you will win bigger because someone’s first two, three days with you, first two, three hours with you, first two, three interactions with you when they join your company, when they become your client, when they become a new patient, when they become a new customer, that is extremely delightful and that’s why that is really, really important.
[00:18:24] You gotta over-engineer that process for not only delight, but deep contribution and that’s when you’ve been win super big. Alright, that was my rant, I hope. Hope that was, um, broadly helpful. So just to summarize for you right. This, these were all the multiple ideas that I pulled out. These are, I think I gave you seven, seven big ideas from 101 kind of ideas that I wrote down from three board meetings that I went to in the last, uh, last couple months.
[00:18:47] I hope these were helpful to you. If this was interesting, you know, please screenshot this and tag me. That way I can make more like this for you. So screenshot this, tag me. I hope this is helpful and I can make more like this for you.
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[00:19:28] 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.