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“All I had was an idea, a few contacts…and $2000. And off we went” – Priya Sharma on her deep dive into entrepreneurship and the birth of Toronto Custom Suits

Faheem Moosa — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 04:21:06 +0000

Are you an armchair entrepreneur waiting to open your dream business but don’t have capital to do so? Are you waiting for the ‘right moment’ to jump into the deep, dark world of business? Wonder what it’s like to ‘bootstrap’ a new business? If you answered YES to any of those questions, you want to hear the inspiring story of my newest guest, Priya Sharma, founder of Toronto Custom Suits. Join us as Priya talks about her initiation by fire into entrepreneurship and her adventures in the fashion world…

Faheem Moosa: Thanks for joining us, Priya. Tell us about Toronto Custom Suits and why you started it. What makes TCS different from other players?

Priya Sharma: Toronto Custom Suits is a men’s custom suits business that I started a little under a year ago. I have been a part of the corporate fashion world in Toronto for sometime now, but like many other people I wanted to start my own business and to have my own line one day, but there was never a right time for that. When the recession started in 2008, many people in the industry were victims to downsizing and I was no exception. Suddenly I found myself with no job and I was pondering, “Do I apply for a job that I don’t really love just so I can be secure and go through the motions? Or do I take the opportunity to follow my dreams?” It’s not as though I was giving anything up first place. I decided to go with the latter and wondered, “What can I do that will allow me to use my experience and my knowledge in fashion and be profitable in the Toronto market?”

I realized that in Toronto, you could either go to Harry Rosen and get an incredible bespoke suit with great customer service for $4000, or you go to a Hong Kong or a Thailand based agent – such as Maxwell’s – that puts out a decent product for a cheap price but with little to no service. I realized there was a huge gap in the market. I realized that if I kept my overheads low, offered great customer service and utilized master tailors from the Far East, I could really be on to something. And that is how Toronto Custom Suits was born. What makes us different from all the other people that do this is by far our customer service. When I ask my customers what keeps them coming back to Toronto Custom Suits, they mention customer service, not the price point. It’s all about relationship building and offering what’s current in the market for men, in addition to working with different body shapes and sizes and determining what’s going to be perfect for each individual client. It is much better than offering a cookie cutter suit to our clients and saying ‘Here’s what all the Bay Street folks are wearing, so you should wear this too!’

FM: Talk us through the start-up phase and your bootstrapping experience.

PS: Well, the startup phase in general was tough, honestly, it’s probably the one phase with this whole experience where you really feel like giving up – it’s one massive, uphill battle. But if you get through it then it’s really rewarding. I had an idea, I had some contacts from my previous work (I did product development, so I have some contacts in Asia) and I didn’t have a job. And so I took $2,000 from my savings and I told myself that I am going to start this entire business on this $2,000. And with that, off we went. I didn’t know for sure that this was going to work, I didn’t know what was going to happen but I knew that I needed to try it.

I used the $2,000 to get myself set up legally and just to get the initial word out so I could sell a few suits and test the market, and also finance my growth. That was my plan. This involved me getting really creative. I hired a web designer that came recommended through friends. I promised them I’d give them a lot of future business if they could help me get started for a small fee. They did a fantastic job, and eventually when I was profitable I went back and I did a complete overhaul. But the point was in the beginning I just did what was necessary to have something that represents who we are, without compromising on quality.

When I started there was no retail space. Our pitch was that we are mobile and will come to your office or home. Our main clients were the finance professionals who just don’t have the time to book appointments for an hour and go through the buying process. That was our big pitch. It really helped keep overheads really low – which is the biggest key to our business model. In the beginning all these things are really tough when you only have $2,000 and don’t take a pay cheque. Every cent that you earn, you put back into the business, because eventually you need to purchase things like rolling racks and steamers and mirrors which cost a lot of money. So, the startup process was definitely rough, but once word of mouth started to spread, it made for an easier ride.

Another secret to the business model was that I initially carried no inventory. All I had in my hand when I started this business were some books, some fabric swatches, and a catalogue that told you what kind of options you can get, and just one sample – a jacket and a pair of pants. Every time a client placed an order, I used the payment as working capital. There was no inventory, there were no stocking of things and the business functioned just on a per order basis.

For the most part, I still operate this way. But these days I do have a lot more samples. If I come across a novelty piece I will order a few of them in standard sizes to show customers. So we have a lot more samples to show people but we don’t sell anything off the rack.

FM: How did you get the word out about your company? What methods did you try – what worked and what didn’t?

PS: When I first started I thought my target audience was going to be downtown Toronto professionals that wear suits everyday. But as we started growing, a new clientele opened up that I didn’t focus on but just evolved…and that was the wedding client. Wedding suits soon became the number one item we sold! And it wasn’t planned but just worked out that way.

In terms of advertising, there were a lot of things that worked, and a lot of things that definitely did not work. And when you are on a slim budget, hindsight is always 20-20, so when you go back you think ‘Oh, I wish I wouldn’t have put any dollars into this’, but by that time it’s too late.

Sales events didn’t work for us. Sales events are where you are hoping to get walk-by clientele during a launch party of sorts, etc. where you are trying to attract a large group of people. We now realize the reason that didn’t work was because your typical custom suit customer wants to have an intimate experience, a one-on-one sales process. You can’t have that sort of consultation with somebody in a large group setting where there are people walking by and asking questions, so that did not work. Handing out fliers and all that type of ‘in your face’ advertising did not work either.

On the other hand, Google advertising and search engine optimization worked extremely well for us. If you’re looking to buy something, especially for the first time, you are very likely going to Google it. So if we can make ourselves rank #1 on Google, then that allows us the opportunity to connect with first time suit customers, who don’t already have a tailor or supplier. Once given that opportunity, if we give them a great experience and a great product, there’s no reason why they should go anywhere else.

That being said, by far the best advertising for us has been word-of-mouth. Happy customers are walking advertisements. If someone feels confident and happy in their garment and is walking down the street and someone asks, ‘Where did you get that?’, they will say with pride – Toronto Custom Suits!

FM: What has been the most challenging aspect of your bootstrapping experience? Is there anything you would’ve done differently? What learning can other entrepreneurs take from your experience?

PS: I think for myself, honestly, the number one most challenging aspect was the internal battle to stay positive and focused. There are external things such as managing cash flow, etc. but the one thing that’s important is to have a positive attitude everyday. When you start and there is not a cent coming in but just money going out, it can be tough on you.

It’s easy to get stressed out when small things don’t go your way, like when you have a few leads and they don’t work out. That can get you all worked up and make you wonder if it is not going to work out. Once you give up mentally, you are done. There’s no way you are going to be profitable if you are not on your A-game – it’s going to go downhill from there.

If you believe in your gut that you’re on to something, then everyday you must tell yourself when you go to bed that you are on the right course. Even though you didn’t sell anything today, remind yourself it will get better, and that way people believe in you. If you don’t believe in yourself, nobody is going to believe in you. For anybody else out there who is thinking they want to start a business, we all think that we want immediate results right away, but even though that doesn’t happen in most cases, follow your passion and then the rest will come.

FM: What’s next for Toronto Custom Suits? Where do you plan on taking the business?

PS: Right now, I’m focused on building the Toronto client base. When I walk outside my door everyday I am surrounded by potential clients. So I don’t know that I’ll ever be able to stop. There’ll always be more room for growth, but when I think of the future I feel that with the way this is going, once we have a solid presence in Toronto, then Calgary Customs Suits or Vancouver Customs Suits or Ottawa Customs Suits are really not that far behind. I was toying with the idea of starting these operations myself…

That’s the direction we are moving towards. However, we are still very new and I definitely haven’t reached all my goals. There is so much work to be done but it’s tough not to get excited when I look at the kind of growth we have had so far. That being said, right now I really, really want to build the Toronto market, have a substantial presence and have a lot of happy customers wearing Toronto Custom Suits!

Check out Toronto Custom Suits here.

The single most important factor in FreshBooks’ phenomenal success – with Mike McDerment, CEO

Faheem Moosa — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 04:26:46 +0000

If you’re a FreshBooks (online invoicing service) user, you know how obsessive these folks are about customer service. The benefits of delivering a great customer experience are obvious – more loyalty, leading to more sales and (hopefully) more profits. But how do you even begin to build a customer-centric company culture? How do you remain consistent, especially when your company’s growing really fast and things keep changing at the drop of a hat? Can you measure something as vague as ‘good customer service’?

These are questions that kinda keep me up at night. Being a FreshBooks customer for several years, I’m convinced that an awesome customer experience is the single most important factor that catapulted the company into the spotlight in a fiercely competitive industry. Since launching in 2004, FreshBooks has over 1.25 million users! I’ve always wondered what it is that really goes on inside FreshBooks that allows its team to deliver exceptional customer experiences. So I invited the devil himself – Mike McDerment, CEO – to find out:

Faheem Moosa: Mike, thanks for taking the time to speak with me – it’s always great to have you here. FreshBooks is known for its strong customer service culture. Was this a conscious decision you made early on or has your customer service philosophy evolved over time?

Mike McDerment: I think there have been a series of conscious decisions along the way but where it came from I would say it was more our culture, and the truth is I didn’t realize where it came from until I went through an exercise with an outside consultant a while back. We had had somebody have a look at what we were doing and give us some objective feedback. And the first thing that this guy did was he sat down one at a time with the founders of our company and went through the various stories from our inception to understand our motivations and the way we work. He made something very clear to me, which I never really realized until then. Before I was running FreshBooks I was running a successful little consulting firm. We never did any marketing for it – we basically just built the business through word-of-mouth one customer at a time and had pretty big clients by the end of it (largest real estate brokerage in Canada, largest privately-held real estate company in Canada, travel companies, etc.). We built the business doing a great job for each client and were really good with setting expectations and delivering against them, all of which is very long-winded way of saying that when we built FreshBooks we had a culture that kind of migrated to this business. When we were running our consulting firm in a basement, we were very focused on customers – we spoke to them, took good care of them, we wanted them to come back and we had done everything we could to foster that kind of attitude and orientation ever since.

And so now the conscious decisions are around ‘how could we do a better job of that?’ Why would we invest two months of our employees’ time, (everyone at FreshBooks starts and spends their first two months in customer service)? It’s a massive investment – we think it’s very important so we do it.

FM: Describe some of FreshBooks’ customer service initiatives that have delighted its customers. Which of these initiatives are you most proud of, and why?

MM: Well I am going to be dead simple…everything we do here is about the customer – everything! I love the days when we improve the product - that delights the customers. I love it when I see new things deployed that have been built by our development and design teams. I love it when our customers are happy about it and give us feedback and are up fired up…that is extraordinary. We run a Software as a Service business where adding new improvements to the product is a big part of offering great service – we do that every two weeks.

And then there are things like…we just always answered the telephone from day one and we still get phone calls from people who literally phone us just to see if we’re there and to see if its not a hoax that our phone number is on our website. So every time we take one of those calls I am really proud of that. It’s a simple thing but I love being able to deliver that experience to somebody where they weren’t expecting anyone to be there.

In terms of specific stories…we have done all kinds of things. For example, one of the more noteworthy ones is we send things to our customers from time to time. We will send somebody – who is nice with us on email and really like what we are doing – a T-shirt or flowers. There has been times when people had a late night issue, were really cramming to get some invoices out the door and just needed support because their credit card was toast and they needed to get into their accounts so they can send some invoices. I go, ‘Okay you send some invoices and pay us back when you get paid’. And sure enough, they do. Pick any one at FreshBooks and speak with them because they’ve have all been in service, and have all done a million little things for people. Sometimes the really heroic stuff is the ‘little thing’.

FM: What challenges have you faced while building a strong customer service culture amidst rapid growth? Is there anything you would have done differently?

MM: I honestly feel like we make it a lot easier on ourselves by hiring the right people – people who share our values. We don’t hire people who we think are going to be short with customers because chances are that it says that they are not a fit for this culture. I also think we make things a lot easier on ourselves by starting everybody – no matter what department – for the first two months in customer service, because they get so grounded in our customer, our product and our culture that they understand the importance of this. For example, the marketing team always knows that they can talk about great service because they lived it themselves and they continue to do so during our ongoing rotation that sends them back to customer service once a month or so. I think just ingraining customer service as the bedrock of the experience of everybody who is on the team has made it a lot easier for us to get buy-in.

I think in several other organizations service is perceived as a cost centre whereas I perceive it as an opportunity. The better you know your customer, the better you can serve them. And the better you know them, the faster you can realize other opportunities in the marketplace. If you do a better job of developing a product you are going to generate more word-of-mouth – all of which creates this virtuous cycle where when you take care of customers, they help you market the product. This helps drive more business so you can work on the products some more so customers can continue to tell people about it…and on it goes.

It’s hard to say if there is a massive change or anything that I would’ve done differently. I actually think our culture has evolved and the way we teach people has been extraordinary. Everybody who starts here gets a ‘buddy’ who works with them for their first two months to answer questions and lead them through some of the internal curriculum about how we do things. And this has evolved as it needed to, which is fascinating. So, I can’t say that I would do a lot differently. Frankly, it has been wonderful to see all of that evolve out of our culture naturally and that people want to do the best job they can to help others get up and started.

FM: What tools, systems or processes do you recommend entrepreneurial companies make use of to deliver extraordinary customer experiences?

MM: First of all, I think it helps if you break down all the experiences your customer has – whether it is trialing your product or visiting your website or just visiting your office – and designing the hell out of those experiences. For example, when someone’s visiting your office, ask yourself how you can make that experience extraordinary. Can you do better than just say, ‘Hey how’re you doing, sit over there and here’s a newspaper?’ I think you probably can. So, break down all the touch points your customers have with your business and try to make them more remarkable. Frankly, I feel like we still have a lot of work to do there, which is just great because it means there’s just lots of opportunities to improve. So that’s not just about using ‘tools’. It’s about creativity and taking the time to not accept whatever you have today but to reinvent and try to improve it.

As for tools, I think you need to figure out what works best for you – its not so much the tool that matters. I’m a big fan of the telephone. I’ve been talking to customers on the phone for a long time. Also, there are tons of services and software that will help you manage, for example, email that comes in from your customers or a phone system that will help you manage calls. However, it’s my belief that it’s not about the tool but about how you use it. Tools can help efficiency, but if you don’t have right team to use those tools, just forget about it. The tools are always secondary to the execution.

FM: How does FreshBooks measure its customer service initiatives and ensure a high Return on Investment (ROI) from each initiative?

Mike McDerment: Interestingly, this is something we are thinking more about. There are several metrics in a recurring-revenue business like ours, such as churn rate, lifetime value (LTV) etc. that can be influenced by customer service. Historically, we just focus on answering all our phone calls from 9 to 6 or sometimes even later than that. We are returning emails within two business hours or less (except maybe on Monday mornings when it might be three hours because of the backlog from over the weekend), so that’s really important. We also focus on responsiveness to date, and now we are looking at things that we can go further in. There are other metrics that we look at, but the trouble is some of the stuff does not relate just to customer service, right? There are metrics like the Net Promoter Score (NPS), which is the measure of your whole business, of which service is a component. Can you directly attribute NPS to customer service? It’s hard to say.

We currently don’t ask customers to rate their customer service experience on a scale 1 to 5, which might be something we would do in the future. I should point out that we don’t look at our service team as just a service team. Our customer service team does a lot more than just respond to emails and pick up the phones and stuff like that. Our core support team only does support for about three days a week. On the other two days they are working on projects that help advance the business in one way or another, whether it’s by developing content that teaches people how to use the product, working on some of our internal systems – perhaps documentation – to make people better in doing customer service themselves. I think that’s a balance that most outsiders wouldn’t expect, where sixty percent of our customer service folks’ time is actually spent on the role itself, while the other forty percent is spent doing other important stuff. I think that speaks to the kinds of people we like to have in customer support and the influence we think they can have on the business.

If we have this same conversation in a year, I feel like I may have more to say on the subject (of metrics), as we are just kind of opening this up and seeing how we can apply ourselves to this. I think the opportunity is for us to do more to service than we offer and I have a feeling I will never have that feeling go away. I am also very reluctant to describe certain metrics like average call time – I don’t ever want to know how long the average call time is. Because I just think a call should be as long as a call is.

Having said that, I think there are other things that are important like ‘responsiveness’ times or maybe the percentage of your customer base you talk to every month, etc. I am curious to see what we come up with in this regard. So I think there is a whole bunch of things that we will be exploring in greater detail; as we get larger obviously it will get more challenging. Today we’re a 40-person company and have everyone involved in support. Maybe we are 90 people or more, we will have learned a lot and look at this stuff differently than we do today.

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The 10 Goals That Changed An Entrepreneur’s Life – with Joe Cirulli

Faheem Moosa — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 01:29:38 +0000

This post first appeared on Mixergy.

When Joe Cirulli reached in his pocket for some money to buy a soda and discovered that he had only 12 cents left to his name, he was embarrassed. Then he got angry that he allowed himself to get in that position.

Soon after, Joe wrote down a list of 10 goals. The list included “Save $1 million,” and “Own a Mercedes-Benz like the one driven by the Six Million Dollar Man” and “Own a health club in Gainesville.” (See the full list below.) He read his list every morning and every night. Then, one at a time, he achieved all of those goals.

In this program, you’ll hear the inspiring story of how he did that, and you’ll get advice on how you can too.

Can’t see the video? Click here.

The 10 goals

1. Own a health club in Gainesville

2. Make it respected in the community

3. Earn $100,000 by the age of 25

4. Own a Mercedes-Benz like the one driven by the Six Million Dollar Man

5. Own a home in the mountains and one by the ocean and build another for his parents

6. Become a black belt

7. Become a pilot and own a plane

8. Travel all over the United States

9. Travel all over the world; and 10. Save $1 million.

About Joe Cirulli

Joe Cirulli owns the Gainesville Health & Fitness Center, a 65,000 square foot club with over 28,000 members, along with Gainesville Health & Fitness Center for Women, a 24,000 square foot women-only center. 2004 marks the 28th year of business for GHFC.

Involver’s Founder Reveals How The Smartest Brands Use Facebook – with Rahim Fazal

Faheem Moosa — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 01:36:25 +0000

Regular readers of this blog might remember my interview with Rahim Fazal, Founder of Involver, a few months ago. If you missed that interview, you can check it out here.

Andrew Warner of Mixergy recently caught up with Rahim and engaged him in a fascinating conversation, primarily revolving around how brands can get the biggest bang for their buck on Facebook. Here’s what Andrew had to say, followed by the interview:

I asked Rahim Fazal to teach the business side of using Facebook because his company, Involver, has helped brands like American Apparel, Us Weekly and Puma grow their businesses using social media.

Here’s an example of what they’ve done. “We started working with Us Weekly, the popular gossip magazine, in April 2009,” he said in this program. “And they used the Involver product, and its suite of applications, to grow their Facebook Fan Page in about six months, from 2,700 fans to over 250,000.”

Why does growing fans even matter to a business? And more importantly, how can you go from building your business’s fan-base to monetizing? Those are the two big questions that this program answers. Along the way, you’ll get to know the entrepreneur who co-founded Involver, a guy who negotiated the sale of his first company for $1.5 million while taking his senior year final exams.

Business Tips via Mixergy, home of the ambitious upstart!

Can’t see the video? Click here.

About Rahim Fazal

Rahim Fazal, is CEO and Co-Founder of Involver, the fastest growing social media platforms for brands. He is a three-time entrepreneur. While still in high school, Rahim co-founded a web-hosting company and negotiated its sale for $1.5 million while taking his Senior Year final exams. He then started a web services platform business and eventually took it public, becoming one of the youngest directors ever of a publicly traded company in the United States.

In 2008, Inc Magazine named Rahim one of its top 30 entrepreneurs under 30, and in 2009, iMedia named Rahim one of the advertising industry’s top 25 digital thought-leaders.

How Serial Entrepreneur Noah Alper Created The $100 Mil Noah’s Bagels After Bouncing Back From A Failure

Faheem Moosa — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 14:12:53 +0000

This interview first appeared on Mixergy.

Noah Alper is open about his setbacks. His previous company, which aimed to sell giftware from Israel to born-again Christians, “was a total and absolute failure,” he admits. But things change fast for entrepreneurs and just 6 months after he closed that business, he launched Noah’s New York Bagels and “had a tiger by the tail.”

In this program, you’ll see how he did it by being a mensch, a Yiddish word which means “a person of integrity.”

Business Tips via Mixergy, home of the ambitious upstart!

Can’t see video? Click here.

About Noah Alper

Noah Alper is the founder of Noah’s New York Bagels, which he sold for $100 million 6 1/2 years after launching it. He is also the founder of six other ventures, including the grocery store company, Bread & Circus, once the Northeast’s largest natural foods chain and now part of Whole Foods Market. Today he consults in areas of entrepreneurship, strategic management, executive coaching and business planning.

He is also the author of Business Mensch, a book about lessons from his business experiences.

How Australia’s Internet Pioneer Helped Get The Country Online – with Lloyd Ernst

Faheem Moosa — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 00:45:19 +0000

This interview first appeared on Mixergy.

Lloyd Ernst introduced Australians to the internet by getting the country’s most tech savvy into hotel ballrooms and blowing them away by showing off how email worked. He was introducing them to the future. That’s what he does.

It started when he hooked up a computer in his garage to a phone and created a bulletin board called PowerUp. At first, only one person could log in at a time, but as the business grew he paid for more modems and more phone lines and pretty soon his customers could talk to each other. Then the internet came and PowerUp let its customers connect to the world. But how do you explain something so new? That’s where the ball rooms came in.

After selling PowerUp, his next company, WebCentral, helped companies set up their first web sites, back when the concept of web sites was still foreign. Listen to this interview to hear how he built and sold WebCentral, and how he continues to ride the cutting edge with his latest company, Event Zero.

Business Tips via Mixergy, home of the ambitious upstart!

If you’re reading this on your RSS Reader or email and can’t see the video, click here.

About Lloyd Ernst

Lloyd Ernst is a founding shareholder and Director of Brisbane based Event Zero Pty Ltd, which developed a Complex Event Processing CEP platform which is design to provide organisation with Real time operational intelligence by analysing very large amounts of data in real time from disparate data sources. He’s also the founder of PowerUp Pty Ltd, WebCentral Pty Ltd, XtreamLok, and SinoCode Ltd.

You can see is full biography on Lloyde.com

How The Founder Of iContact Reached $1 Mil In Sales A Few Days After Turning 21 – with Ryan Allis

Faheem Moosa — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 23:56:46 +0000

This interview first appeared on Andrew Warner’s Mixergy.

When he was 16, Ryan Allis wrote and framed a big goal: to build a company with $1 million sales by the time he was 21 years old. “I missed it by 18 days,” he says. “But I sure as heck would have missed it by 18 years had I not written down that goal and figured out how to align the people in my life and the knowledge and resources I needed to bring into my world in order to make that happen.” Ryan says you can get there too.

He made it happen by launching iContact, whose motto is “email marketing simplified.” In this program you’ll see how he hustled to get his first customers. You’ll see the struggles on his way to reach his first million and how the business generates over $3 million in monthly (not annual, but monthly) sales.

Oh, and now he has new goals. He wears 2 of them on his wrist every day. You’ll see them in the interview and hear Ryan explain what they are.

Business Tips via Mixergy, home of the ambitious upstart!

If you’re reading this on your RSS reader or email and can’t see the video, click here.

About Ryan Allis

Ryan Allis is is the Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of iContact, the leading global provider of email marketing services to small and mid-sized businesses. He is also the author of the book Zero to One Million, which reached the Wall Street Journal Bestseller list. And he’s the founder of The Humanity Campaign, a non-profit organization that provides support to community-based organizations in the developing world.

If you appreciate this interview, you can thank him on Twitter.

“The Smartest Unknown Indian Entrepreneur” Talks About How He Built Zoho Into A Bootstrapped Powerhouse – with Sridhar Vembu

Faheem Moosa — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 00:27:17 +0000

This interview first appeared on Mixergy.

“The Smartest Unknown Indian Entrepreneur” is what Forbes called Zoho’s co-founder, Sridhar Vembu. He’s become a little less unknown since that article came out, but when it bubbled to the top of Hacker News recently I read it I wanted more details about how he bootstrapped Zoho into a profitable online application provider.

So I invited him to Mixergy to tell us the story of how he built his company.

Business Tips via Mixergy, home of the ambitious upstart!

If you’re reading this on your RSS Reader or email and can’t view the video, click here.

About Sridhar Vembu

Sridhar Vembu is the co-founder of Zoho, Corp. The company is organized around 3 major divisions. Zoho.com provides a comprehensive suite of applications for businesses – from on-line productivity to CRM and custom applications. ManageEngine allows enterprise IT organizations better manage their networks, servers and infrastructure. WebNMS focuses on the needs of original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) in the network and telecom space.

You can see his Hacker News submissions and comments here.

How A Driven 16-Year-Old Built A $100 Million Net Worth By The Time He Turned 25 – with Gurbaksh Chahal

Faheem Moosa — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 04:56:48 +0000

This interview first appeared on Andrew Warner’s Mixergy.

Oprah showed how dramatic the transformation was for internet entrepreneur, Gurbaksh Chahal. In the before pictures, she showed a tiny Indian kid with a turban, who was picked on by other kids and how’s family struggled financially. In the after shots, she showed an adult with a stunning penthouse, hot car and confidence to spare.

I invited Gurbaksh to Mixergy to talk about how he did it. In this program, you’ll hear how at 16 he got the idea to create ClickAgents, the ad brokerage business. And how he funded it by selling ads before he could even run them. You’ll hear why he sold the business. And how he made his next startup, BlueLithium, profitable within 3 months. You’ll hear why he sold that company to Yahoo! and about his vision for gWallet, his latest startup.

Business Tips via Mixergy, home of the ambitious upstart!

If you’re reading this on your RSS Reader or email and can’t view the video, click here.

About Gurbaksh Chahal

Gurbaksh Chahal is currently the founder and CEO of gWallet, a virtual currency platform for social media. He left high school at 16 to form Click Agents, an Internet advertising company, which he sold two years later for $40 million. In January 2004, he launched a second company, BlueLithium – the next generation in Internet advertising. The company was focused on data, optimization, and analytics and became a pioneer of behavioral targeting. On September 4th, 2007, Yahoo! announced that it was acquiring BlueLithium for $300 million in cash.

How to negotiate like a pro – with Jim Camp

Faheem Moosa — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 00:40:00 +0000

I really appreciate the comments and emails from many of you about the usefulness of this blog. I know I’ve been inconsistent with my posts lately and have none to blame but myself. Part of the reason for this is that Springboarders, my business planning company, has been commanding much of my attention lately. And of course that’s a good thing – business is terrific and no complaints! However, I am a bit frustrated at my inability to post interviews frequently and don’t want to let you down, especially those of you who enjoy reading my interviews with successful entrepreneurs. So, today I am going to try something different.

There are several websites/blogs out there with fantastic interviews of successful entrepreneurs. My intent is to periodically post a select few of these interviews on my blog so you guys can get the benefit of reading/viewing an eclectic mix of interviews. I assure you I will pick and choose only those interviews that I feel would be of value to you guys. I plan to continue interviewing entrepreneurs whenever time permits, so you will see original content from time to time. I would love to hear from you whether or not this idea makes sense. I’m always open to suggestions, so feel free to leave a comment below or email me at fmoosa [at] springboarders.ca

The following interview first appeared on Mixergy, which in my opinion is one of the best websites showcasing interviews with successful entrepreneurs. Check them out if you haven’t already.

In the video interview below, Andrew Warner (Founder of Mixergy) speaks with Jim Camp, whose “Start with No” negotiating methods have been trusted by over 500 multinationals and have been taught to over 100,000 students till date. Negotiation is an important part of everyday life for most of us. For entrepreneurs, it’s even more important. I know I’ve made several blunders both in my personal and business life and when I look back, I realize how I could’ve gotten what I wanted simply by knowing how to negotiate with, convince and influence people better. Enjoy the interview!

Business Tips via Mixergy, home of the ambitious upstart!

If you’re reading this on your RSS reader and can’t see the video, click here.

About Jim Camp

Jim Camp is a leading global expert on negotiations and has trained and coached over 100,000 people through thousands of negotiations in more than 500 multinational organizations, including Texas Instruments, Intel, Applied Materials, Merrill Lynch, IBM, Cisco Systems, Prudential Insurance, and Nationwide Insurance.

Camp is the best-selling author of two negotiation books in 12 languages, Start with No and No: The Only System Of Negotiation You Need For Work and Home.