I had the great privilege of having a chat with one of the most admired entrepreneurs in the online marketing and coaching business.
Vinil Ramdev is an entrepreneur, marketer, personal branding consultant, sales trainer, and now more recently a researcher on happiness. He believes he’s more of a philosopher than anything else.
People who know him well will tell you that although he has a serious business side to him, he’s almost always up for a good laugh.
Here’s an extract from his interview.
Tell us a bit about your entrepreneurial and professional journey.
I started my first serious business way back in 2005. It was a retail business. I was just out of college, but I had dabbled in several businesses before that.
I considered those businesses more of a hobby than something serious.
In 2005, my first serious business was in retail. I exited it in 2009, and I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do after I exited the retail business. So I decided to become a consultant.
My real skill was in sales, marketing, and customer service.
I started writing blog posts to demonstrate my expertise, and sell my services. Soon my blog had 160 contributors, and we were generating revenue just from my blog. In 2014, I sold that blog and started pursuing other things. I realized that my real passion was in coaching, online marketing, building communities, personal branding and sales.
I started taking up coaching clients all over again. This time, I was more prepared than ever before because I had the wisdom of experience.
I now coach people in sales, marketing, personal branding, soft-skills, and personal development (happiness achievement).
My latest project is a research on happiness. I genuinely want to help people live a happy life. I think being happy is a learned skill. They don’t teach it in college. So here I am, trying to unravel the mystery of happiness.
You wrote a great article about burn-out that was published in Entrepreneur magazine, what are the symptoms of burnout, and how can you overcome it?
If you are an entrepreneur or a self-employed professional, burnout can be a real concern. I tell most of my clients, it’s your top performers who you need to watch out for. Because they are the ones who are most likely to burn out.
It’s a topic that is very dear to my heart because I experienced burnout several times in my professional career. The first one was when I had just graduated from college. I was studying, working, spending long hours learning to build a business. I was tired, demotivated, and it was hard for me to do anything.
I met up with my counselor, and she told me that I needed a break. That’s when I got back to India for a 10-day holiday and stayed back for more than ten years. I ended up starting a business in my home country.
Once you are an entrepreneur, you are working almost 24 hours a day, if not physically at least mentally. It’s important to invest not just in your business, but also on yourself. By that, I mean it’s important to take time off from work to develop your passions, interests, and hobbies. Burn out is a huge topic and I plan on covering it in more detail in my upcoming book.
You’ve also written an article on self-discipline. Tell us more about it.
We hear the word discipline, but most of us are not sure what it really means. One day, I sat down and thought about the real meaning of this word. For me, discipline is following a plan or a schedule irrespective of your emotional state. If you’ve had a bad day, you still go through your schedule even if you are feeling pathetic.
It’s one of the most important qualities in life if you want to get ahead. Research says that disciplined people are more likely to be happy.
Tell us a bit about your online properties, and training programs.
The two communities I am working on at the moment are CEO Hangout and Trainer Hangout. The target segment for CEO Hangout is business owners and top-level executives. We organize workshops, training programs, and business conferences. We also do retreats once a year.
Trainer Hangout, on the other hand, is a community for trainers, coaches, consultants, and bloggers. I started Trainer Hangout after my friends in the coaching business asked me, how I get to pack up my training workshops, while they have been in this business for several years and still struggle to get clients. So I thought it was a nice idea to have an educational blog that gives back to this community.
You also have a sales and customer service training school, tell us about it.
When I was in the retail business, I would go store to store just to check out their customer service. I made a list of all the great things service professionals did, and all the pathetic things that cost them sales. That was my real research, all done on the ground. It became my manual.
I also built a lot of sales training programs in-house to train my own employees. Every time, I focused on training my salespeople, sales went up.
I had all these great training programs with me that I thought I should offer this to people outside my company. That’s how the training school started.
Now I have two types of people coming to my training school, one is people who want to get a job in sales and customer service, and the other are companies. Once people finish a training program, we help them with placement. Many companies have contacted us because they want to hire salespeople who are well-trained. It’s a win-win for both the employee and the company hiring them.
My salestraining school is called Higher Growth Academy (https://www.highergrowthacademy.com/) in case anyone wants to check it out.
Is there anything else you want to say?
I have a lot more to say, but that’ll be all for today.
If any of your readers want to get in touch with me, I’m on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter; just search for Vinil Ramdev on each of these social networks. It’s always nice to know new people.
Tori is a professional blogger.