Exactly How I Built Two $1B+ Businesses in My 30s

In 2011, I left my job at Goldman Sachs to take the biggest risk of my life. In fact, I reverse mortgaged my house to invest in a struggling business. And in a five-year period, that risk actually paid off. We were able to build a business 10x in five years. We grew from $300 million to $3.4 billion and got bought by Douglas Elliman. Then I was lucky enough to do the same thing again. In 2022, I joined a company called Real. And we took that business from $250 million enterprise value on the NASDAQ to over $1.2 billion in just 30 months. Hey, my name is Sharan Srivatsav. As you can see, I've had a chance to build $2 billion businesses, invested in 100-plus companies. I was an investment banker at Goldman Sachs. And today, I am the CEO of Acquisition.com. And what I want to tell you about in this video is how you can build an extremely large business with a very small brand. And I believe. I believe that there's three pillars to this. And the first pillar is you get your value prop right. Well, what is a value prop? A value prop is the message that you give to the marketplace that differentiates you from everyone else and explains your exact value of why you exist. And the best way I can explain the value prop to you is by giving you the value prop of both billion-dollar companies that we built. The first one is Telus Properties. Telus was a small business in the real estate space. It was a small business in Beverly Hills, California when I took it over. It had one office and 28 agents in Beverly Hills. And we got a chance to build that from one office and 28 agents to 22 offices and 700-plus agents in a five-year period. There was 10X in five years and then sold the business to Douglas Elliman. Now, in that five-year period, I have to tell you this one truth, which is I left Goldman Sachs to become the operator of this business. I had never run a business before. In fact, I was. Googling how to be a CEO. And I realized that I needed to figure out something. I needed to figure out how to run this business. But I had a friend tell me that it was not about figuring out how to run the business. It was about figuring out the value prop. And so I looked around and I asked everybody in the business. I asked all 28 agents why they chose to be at Telus. And that was the big switch for me. As I went through and figured out why they chose to be at Telus, they. Dispelled all the myths that I thought was the answer. I thought it was the brand. Or I thought it was the leadership. Or I thought it was the competitive fee structure. I thought it was, you know, the culture that we'd built. And those were all secondary reasons. But the primary reason that everybody stated to me was that being on that platform saved them roughly one day a week. Think about that. Every single person said some version of that to me. And so. I then packaged. Into a value proposition, which is. If you're a real estate agent in California and. You want to save at least one day a week, then you should come to Telus. So the question always became, hey, if our platform could save you one day a week, what would you do with another 52 days a year? And now that created an entire business. That created an entire movement. That created a 10x in five-year story. I actually happened upon it by accident. By doing the interviews of asking people why they like to do that thing. And I think that the gold in understanding your value prop may not be the reason you actually started the business. The goal may be why someone else signed up to work with you, to coach with you, to buy from you, to invest in you. Because their reasons may not be your reasons. And we need to find the value prop in them. A lot of times, marketers and salespeople think that they can come up with the value prop themselves. I think you can get a starting point of it. But it's really hard to know why someone else bought. So it's really important to ask that person why they bought. And the way you figure that out is by asking one important question, which is, what is one thing, if I took away, that you would not want to work with us anymore? If you can answer that question, they will go to the heart of what the value prop of why exactly they are with you. And a lot of people in their business get afraid to ask that question because they think that, wow. If I'm asking this question, it's going to make the client or make the customer think and double think as to why they've actually done it. But I will tell you, we all know why we go to a restaurant. We all know why we go to a store. We all know why we go on vacation. We all know why we choose one airline over another airline. We know exactly why we do that. No one's ever asked us that. If I could give you one day back a week, what would you do with an extra 52 days a year? That was the value prop that built a $3.4 billion business that we then got to sell to Douglas Elliman. That was example number one. I'll give you a separate different example. The second example was a real. Real was a publicly traded real estate brokerage on the NASDAQ. We took it from a $200 million valuation to a $1.2 billion valuation in less than 30 months. Got to do all of this on the back of a small personal brand. And I'll tell you exactly how I did in just a second. But from a value prop perspective, I realized the same exact story. Different people had joined the business for different reasons. When I figured out and I asked them why. I found the same common theme, which was the multiple streams of income. At real, there was an opportunity not to just make money one way, but to make money multiple ways. And that was a very clear method overall. So you can make money through selling real estate. You can make money through stock options. You can make money through revenue share. You can make money through affiliate businesses. There were eight different ways to make money at real. And so we created this. You know, value prop, which is the eight ways to make money at real. But for most people at any other company, there was only one way. And they instantly knew that eight ways to make money real versus what I have right now was a very compelling reason why people were interested in that thing. And just by figuring out the value prop got us in the eyes and hearts and minds of more people. And that allows you, one, to attract the right people. And two, it gives them a way to spread the message about you. Let me tell you what I mean by that. The people that joined us, people that worked with us, people that cared about us, then became evangelists of the brand because now they are able to take the value prop that you give them and tell that same value prop to others. They now become this referral army for you because your value prop is so tightly packaged. So pillar number one of using a small brand to build a big business is to have your value prop very tight because then you only have to sell people once. And they're the package. And then you have to sell people twice. And then you have to sell people three times. brand, especially personal brands that help you drive more business people. misunderstand that they really think that just because you have a big brand, you get a bunch of leads. No, the job of the brand is to be so big that it creates familiarity and trust so that when you use that to advertise and create marketing campaigns, there's trust built into it and it reduces customer acquisition costs. And that is what helps you run the business. Now, how do you do that? Well, you do that by giving away your best stuff for free, meaning whatever you would pay for, whatever someone would pay to work with you for, what if you gave that away for free? Instead of building a course that you would sell for $2,000, can you build a course and give the $2,000 course away for free? Because when you do that, now you actually build a positive association with your brand related to the quality of the work product that you have. Now, that may be a online course that you gave for free. That may be, you know, a dental treatment that you gave for free. That may be a chiropractic, you know, a consult appointment that you gave for free. That may be a coaching session that you gave for free. That may be, you know, that's, have you ever noticed you walk into a Costco or a food court and you're walking by and they hand you a piece of teriyaki chicken? Why do they do that? Because there's seven restaurants out there and the only line is in the line with the restaurant that has teriyaki chicken. Why? Because there's a person out there in front handing people with their toothpick pieces of teriyaki chicken. They're giving away their best stuff to taste their stuff, which is really, really, really, really, really, really, the uncertainty of what everything else could be. Therefore, you want to actually work with the thing because it reduces the stress, it reduces the uncertainty and dramatically improves the connection with the brand and it gives them safety. That's what's extremely important. Now, I will actually tell you for us at acquisition.com, we have created such a big brand engine with Alex, my partner, Alex Hermosi, with his wife and my partner, Leila Hermosi and our brand that you're participating in. So, we're going to be doing a lot of work on that. Thank you for doing that. Between the tens of millions of followers and the billions of impressions that we get on an annual basis, we're able to reduce CAC so much that we actually have negative CAC. That means the marketplace pays us, the marketplace pays us to actually generate business, right? And it actually costs money, a significant investment to create business. Brand assets just like this, to be with you, to share this with you, that we're doing that in a very specific way. It's actually 99% selfless and 1% selfish. The 99% selflessness has got to do with us giving you the best stuff, is us telling you all the back end of what's happening, is us not gatekeeping any information so that you know that I'm telling you everything. But because of that, the 1% selfishness is that because you get trust and association with the brand that, hey, I talked to the Tron guy on camera and he told me everything. He told me the exact numbers. He told me what he did to tell us. He told me the exact value prop. He told me the real value. Heck, he told me everything that I needed to know. I trust him more because he was authentic. He was real. And because of that, what happens? It reduces the cost of acquiring a client. It creates safety and that safety goes a long way when you can actually have a small brand that can build a big business. That's pillar number two. Here's pillar number three of having a small brand that builds a big business, which is, um, I'll give you both those examples of, of tell us in real. Again, we built $2 billion companies of a really small brand. The first one was on a podcast, by the way. Uh, this was when podcasts were cool and just started. And I'll tell you exactly what happened. We had, uh, one office in Beverly Hills and we were starting to grow the business. And as the business grew, we started opening more and more offices. We ended up with 22 offices total. But as we started growing the offices, I was driving 450 miles a week. And if I was in one office in Santa Barbara, I was not in another office in Malibu. So I asked my, you know, director of it, Hey, is there a way that I could create some content that everybody in every office could hear and see so that I wouldn't have to have to be in multiple places at the same time. So what we did was we, um, every day I at 9am, I did a drive call. So I would, I would do, I would make a podcast while I was driving in LA traffic and I would create a podcast. And my director of it would put it on a podcast. And he said, Hey, he created this podcast, which was a secret private to all our offices only. And I thought that was a great idea. Well, after a few months, we realized that that podcast was not private and it was actually public. And everybody in all the companies knew about everything that we were talking about. And I didn't realize that that was the thing, the, we made an error and we made this private podcast public. And that public podcast is what showed the, the, the internal authenticity of the company. It showed every lesson that we learned. Literally it was, imagine if you could, uh, if you could just listen to your competitors, uh, internal company calls, that's what this was like. And it was so raw and so real that it made more people want to join our business, more people want to work with us. And that's what helped the business grow. And we took one office and 28 agents to 22 offices and 700 agents in five years, completely organically with no ad spend all by on the backs of my podcast. That's how you build a big business of a small brand, but you had to like, you know, uh, ride the trend of what the podcast was happening at that time. The second is, uh, on the business call real, we, we, we had 6,800 agents at real, uh, 6,800 agents at real in North America. And in a 30 month period, we were able to grow from 6,000 to 5,800, uh, to 25,000 agents overall. And during that time, we were able to become the fastest growing publicly traded real estate brokerage in the world. And we did that all off of one simple, uh, engine, which was my Instagram. And all we did was to take my Instagram and use that to promote speaking engagements. So I would say, Hey, I'm going to be in Raleigh, North Carolina to deliver this, you know, keynote on how to grow your real estate business. And I would then go show up and go to the real estate business. And based on me showing up there, people would show up and we would use that to funnel them back into a, um, into a, into a chat sequence and a DM sequence. And they would then use that to come into our funnel. And we would, and our team would talk to them and grow the business. So we use that same exact format to grow the business from 6,800 agents to 25,000 agents in 30 months. Again, at that time, my Instagram following was maybe under 300,000 people total of which maybe 200,000 were Instagram or real estate agents, but that was one of the smallest niche brands you could find. But the monetization was able to build a billion dollar business. So you can use a small brand to build a big business. If your funnel is really simple, right? That way you knew when you woke up exactly what you were going to do. And the great part in all of this is it allows you to first drive the correct value prop to tell people that who you are exactly who you are. Second, it allows you to build this brand that lowers CAC. But the third is you do the same thing over and over and over again. And after a while you do it, the machine gets so well oiled that you're, you truly like it flips your mind to realize that you can use a small brand to build a large business. I will tell you right now that most companies, it is an anomaly for companies to actually have large brands. Yeah. If you noted recently, uh, Ryan Reynolds bought Rexham, the football club out of Wales, and it was a fourth tier football, club, soccer club. And him and his partner like use their big brands on a bad club to grow a big business. And it's one of, and it's a really popular club right now. However, most industries may be in garage doors or may be in home services or may be in mortgage or may be in title or may be in, in a real estate escrow or may be in chiropractic. There are very small niches on exactly who you want to do and who you want to work with. You can build a big business of a small brand, because it allows you to be bigger in life than you are. Cause no one else is doing that thing overall. That is the third big pillar. You can build a big business with a small brand. I tell you all of this for one important reason, which is fame is the most efficient business model. And when you figure that out, you start to realize that the velocity in which a fame can help you build a business is that it helps you build a business, build a business your way with the right value prop and, and to reduce CAC all simultaneously. Fame is the most efficient business model. So if there's anything that you can do right now is to ask yourself, how can I create so much value in the marketplace that my brand becomes so big in such a small market.