Exclusive! Great Companies are Built by Amazing Teams: Rajiv Talreja

Rajiv Talreja is a renowned Indian entrepreneur, author, and business coach who has significantly impacted business and personal development. He is known for his entrepreneurship, sales, marketing, and leadership expertise.

In an exclusive conversation with us, he spoke about his challenges, leadership philosophy, and advice to entrepreneurs. 

Here are the edited excerpts from the exclusive and delightful interaction:

How did you get started in entrepreneurship, and what inspired you to pursue this career path?

My journey as an entrepreneur began in the year 2006, September. So during my college days, I built a youth organisation with my friends where we conducted workshops for fellow college students on career planning and emotional intelligence. So that's what exposed me to the space of training and coaching. And then, after that, I was looking at taking up a job through campus recruitment, and I also got a placement in one of the Big Fours. But then my father, an entrepreneur, a retail business owner and an 8th Standard dropout, told me that he would love for me to pursue entrepreneurship and start a business rather than take up a job to the point that he didn't give me an option. He said you need to start a business. Because I had this exposure to training and coaching and had done a few certifications in NLP and executive coaching, I decided to set up Quantum Leap in September 2006. In the initial years of Quantum Leap, we focused more on performance coaching at workplaces, helping teams achieve goals in breakthrough timelines. So that's how my journey as an entrepreneur started.

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Can you share some of the biggest challenges you've faced as an entrepreneur and how you overcame them?

As an entrepreneur, I have faced a lot of challenges. In my first 10 years as an entrepreneur, I didn't understand how to build a scalable and profitable business. I was making the classic mistake of doing everything myself, not paying myself consistently, and creating a totally owner-dependent business with no systems. I didn't bother learning Marketing. I always thought my work would speak for itself and had inconsistent income patterns. I also fell into the trap of pursuing opportunities without having the vision or capability, which is a classic trap that many business owners fall into because when what you are doing is not making money, you become open to exploring pretty much anything and everything without a vision. 

These are some of the mistakes that I made.

The turning point came in October 2014 when I decided to learn how to build a scalable, profitable business.

I went on a 14-month journey from Oct 2014 to Dec 2015. Interviewed 300 leaders across India like Kiran Mazumdar Shaw (Biocon), Ashok Soota (Happiest Minds Technologies), and CK Kumaravel (Natural Salon), to name a few and interviewed these people to understand the psychology, systems, processes and best practices behind building scalable and profitable businesses. 

So these 14 months were the turning point in my life. 

What advice would you give someone just starting as an entrepreneur?

Be a lifelong learner.

More than just having product/service capabilities is required to build a successful business. You've got to integrate multiple capabilities to build a successful business. You've got to learn how to create a profitable and scalable business model, how to do Marketing so that you can generate leads, how to set up Sales processes, Operations systems, delegation, firing, appraising salaries, managing money, how to take care of compliances…etc. 

The business integrates multiple capabilities; no school, college or university teaches these capabilities. As an entrepreneur, you are focused on upskilling proactively, and the sooner you upskill, the sooner you build your capability, and the sooner the chances are that you will stabilise your business and create a foundation for a successful business.

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Can you talk about your leadership and team-building philosophy and how it has helped you build successful businesses?

My philosophy on leadership and team building is very simple. I believe that no one on the planet has built a successful business enterprise doing everything by themselves. 

Great companies are not built but great entrepreneurs. Great companies are built by amazing teams. If you are serious about building amazing teams-

1. Design a culture where results and relationships are balanced, where people feel respected and focused on getting the work done. 
2. Design a culture where people have permission to make mistakes and don't feel judged or attacked when they are making mistakes. That's when innovation will happen, and that's when you will build leaders. 

Allowing people to fail and creating an environment where they can fail but fail differently is the only way to build a second line of leaders who help you build a successful business. 

How do you stay current with trends and changes in the business world, and how do you adapt your strategies accordingly?

I follow a ritual to stay updated with current trends every week. I do a networking lunch/dinner with one other person from the industry who I believe is doing fantastic work in fields like finance, tech, marketing, scaling up, etc. I love to meet people who are out there and making things happen. 

Beyond that, as a business, we are at an advantage because we get exposed to many entrepreneurs as we handhold them to scale their businesses. While we are in the process of coaching and consulting entrepreneurs from across 185 different industries, we understand the best practices, what works, what doesn't work, and what's changing, so that's a great source of learning for me. 

So I always say that we are blessed to be in a business where we get paid to learn from our clients. 

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