Amplify: Raise Your Voice, Boost Your Brand and Grow Your Business

How can you create a marketing system that enables you to grow as a business with the least amount of effort? Having been bitten by the entrepreneurial bug, this was the question that annoyed me the most. Over the years, I collected a variety of designations, which include software engineer, software quality manager, tutor, financial advisor, restaurateur, chef, business owner, restaurant manager, bartender, podcaster, speaker and, now, author. I took part in different industries, negotiation standpoints, marketing struggles, c-suite egos and a variety of business challenges. But the biggest challenge remained the one above. One of the most interesting things I’ve ever done is interview my dad on my podcast. In that interview, when I asked him if he wished I did something different, he reluctantly said that he wished I did something in ‘my field’. He said that with two Masters’ degrees from two different Australian universities, I should have been well-placed to build a computer business. Which is true. However, I’ve refused to play in one field. I don’t really associate myself with any one type of industry. I believe that I am a learner. A generalist. I am a person with shiny-ball syndrome, sure. But, most importantly, I am an entrepreneur. I am one of those people who love to put themselves in uncomfortable situations to challenge the status quo and bring a bunch of people together over that situation. Whether it was opening a restaurant that merged Portuguese flavours with Indian spices, or creating the first podcasting conference in the Southern Hemisphere, I loved bringing people together over a new theme and talking about it. And therein lay the answer to the question. Speech is powerful. Think about every single change in human history. Whether it is race equality or having a phone with one button, we can all trace the big shift to a speech that moved a mass of people to make change possible. As a business owner, how many great conversations have you had in the last month that you just wish you recorded? When I first got to Australia, if you told me that, as a person of Indian origin, my biggest asset would be my voice, I would have politely asked you to stop making fun of the way I speak. I would have tried extremely hard to sound more Australian and not be seen as a stereotypical Indian with an IT background who drove a cab while I went through university. As it stands today, because of my podcast, I have a global audience in 133 countries and have developed relationships with over 200 brilliant people who have been guests on my show. That is 200 different perspectives on business and entrepreneurship, and works out to about four one-hour conversations a week for the last two years. A lot of these people are hard to reach, busy business owners who would not have given me any of their time in another situation. While I was building these relationships with potential partners, I established a team and took the best bits of those conversations to create a marketing system that would not only get my business the right kind of attention, but also the right kind of engagement. The engagement that takes an innocent bystander from lead to customer. So, despite having written a thesis on software quality systems, I am less than surprised that my book is on marketing and business growth.