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Have you ever felt stuck in your business, unsure of which direction to take when money starts slowing down? It’s a frustrating place to be. You chase the next big thing–new strategies, new tools–only to end up spinning your wheels, making no real progress. In this episode, Sharran reveals the secret to getting off that hamster wheel and back on track with what he calls the money highway.
Sharran walks you through the four powerful “money highways” that can guarantee you success, regardless of market shifts. He explains how understanding the core path that works for your business and sticking to it will keep your income fully under your control. No more randomness. No more chasing shiny pennies.
Feeling lost on your money journey? Listen to this episode and discover how to get back on track with confidence. You’ll never have to wonder how to make more money again because you’ll have the proven blueprint in your hands.
“Making money should never feel random for you. It should be under your control. You should know that you can make money at any point in time, and that is the job of the money highway.”
– Sharran Srivatsaa
Timestamps:
01:20 – Understanding the money highway and why every entrepreneur needs one
03:25 – Effort Highway: A predictable path that requires consistent effort
06:25 – Pattern Highway: Identifying patterns in your past successes and replicating them
10:05 – Ideal Client Highway: Focusing on your best clients for a predictable flow of business
13:45 – Conversion Highway: Understanding the ratio of conversations to contracts
20:44 – Getting back on the money highway when you feel stuck.
Resources:
– The Next Billion by Sharran Srivatsaa
– Board Member: ARC Multifamily Real Estate Investing
– Board Member: The Real Brokerage
Connect with Sharran:
– X
– YouTube
– Threads
Transcript:
[00:00:00] Hey, this is Sharran Srivatsaa. Welcome back to the Business School Podcast. And in this episode, I’m gonna talk to you about the Money Highway, meaning every entrepreneur needs what I call the Money Highway. It is the clear proven path that you can get on anytime you want to generate more money. And most business owners often get stuck and they don’t know which road to take and which road slows them down because they chase the shiny penny.
[00:00:21] They want the next cool thing, instead of driving on that road that actually works, that you know. That makes you more money. In this episode, I’m gonna show you how to find your money highway, how to stay on it, and how to keep your income fully under your control. I’m gonna break it all down step by step, starting right now.
[00:00:45] One thing is for certain, just because it’s tried and true doesn’t mean it’s working right now. So the big question is this. Where can you learn what is working right now? The strategies, the tactics, the psychology, and the exact [00:01:00] how to, how to grow your business, how to blow up your personal brand and supercharge your personal growth.
[00:01:07] That is the question. This podcast will give you the answer. My name is Sharran Srivatsaa, and Welcome to Business School.
[00:01:20] So if you’re an entrepreneur or business owner, you should have a money highway. And what is a money highway? It means you know exactly how to get back on the road to make the money that you need. At any point in time. You should just know that you should have the formula for that. And the core problem is that most business owners don’t know what to do next when the money slows down, when the.
[00:01:41] Pipeline dries up when you have to make more money. You’re like, man, should I go start chasing that new lead generation source, or should I go knock on doors or should I just go run more Facebook ads? And you start to maybe feel stuck. You start to spin your wheels. You start to do busy work, but that’s the entire problem.
[00:01:57] It is your job to figure out what your money highway is because your money highway may not be the same money highway for me and to stay on it. As often as possible for as long as possible. And the only time you get off is if someone else can stay on the Money Highway for you. So my point is, making money should never feel random for you.
[00:02:16] It should be under your control. You should know that you can make money at any point in time, and that is the job of the Money Highway. So think about this for a second. A lot of times people make money and they get off and they suddenly stop making money. Why you got off on the wrong exit? The longer you stay off, the harder it is to merge back in and your job knows the job.
[00:02:37] You know, like it ramps back on, right? Like you need to figure out how to get back on this highway. So here’s the main idea. Once you know your highway, you never have to chase this. Shiny Penny syndrome at all because you always have a path that works. And today I want to talk to you about four ways in which you can build these Money Highways.
[00:02:54] I came up with a little acronym for myself to remember this, and I really think about this concept called the Money Highway. Whenever you’re stuck, whenever you wanna make more money, you should think about what is My Money Highway? So the first, it’s the, I like to give my stuff like some kind of acronym so I can remember it, or a framework name, so it’s etched in my memory.
[00:03:12] So the acronym here is Epic. You wanna have an Epic Money Highway and I’ll break down the four money highways for you so that you can figure out which one is the best one for you to get on and hopefully never get off. Alright? Highway number one, which is E for Epic is the Effort Highway. Okay. What is the Effort Highway?
[00:03:31] The Effort Highway is essentially a predictable input output type highway, right? And so. This is the, I have to tell you, this is kind of like the brute force path. It’s not sexy, but it’s guaranteed to work kind of path. We all know that, hey, we can, we can get to, we, we, you’re in Orange County and you can get to San Diego.
[00:03:51] The brute force path is you can get on PCH and you can walk, you can get on the beach and you could walk all the way and you’ll get there. Right? It is the brute force way, but. It’s not sexy, but it works. So think about it this way. Hey, if I made a hundred calls, would I get one client prop? I would say for most businesses, unless you were dumb and you didn’t know what to say, for most businesses, if you made a hundred calls, you would get one client.
[00:04:14] Right? And so the the thinking that I’m thinking about is, and. Like a vending machine. The vending machine analogy is a good one. You, you put a dollar in and you get a snack. Now you may not like a dollar. If you put a hundred dollars and I get a snack, you’re like, man, it’s maybe not worth it, but you’re still guaranteed to get the snack.
[00:04:28] And that’s what’s important here. Now, if, for example, if you said, Hey, you know, I can start cold calling and cold calling gets me a. 2% conversion rate, and that means if I make a hundred cold calls, I get, you know, I get two meetings. Well, that’s good. At least you know that you put in the effort and you get the result.
[00:04:43] By the way, I will tell you this, I like this a lot because every entrepreneur should have one. Emergency break. This is what, this is the effort based money highway. When all things break, you know that, man, if all things break, we know people talk about like back to basics. No, like all these coaches and consultants that take back to basics.
[00:05:02] What does it actually mean? It means that there is something, there is a way you may not want to do it, but there is a way that if you did it, it will work, right? And so you should always know that if push come to shove, if things break down, you know that if. Anything happened, you could always go back to the effort highway.
[00:05:19] So that is the effort. Highway is number one. And the thing that you should ask yourself is, this is the question, what can I do so that it would be unreasonable for me not to win? Right? What can I do? So that it would be unreasonable for me not to win. And if you say, Hey, if I made a hundred calls a day for the next 10 days, it would be unreasonable for you not to get a client, correct?
[00:05:43] Yes. If you did a hundred pushups a day for the next 50 days, it would be unreasonable for you not to get strong, right? If you ate a salad two times a day for the next 30 days, it would be unreasonable that you didn’t get healthier and lose a bunch of weight. It would be unreasonable. I came home and hugged your children and hugged your spouse and were a really present parent, father, whatever, for the next 30 days, it would be unreasonable.
[00:06:11] You wouldn’t have a better family life, right? It would be unreasonable. And that is straight up the Effort Highway. Every single person has access to this. The effort is free, but you need to know which effort Highway is because the effort highway will generate money for you. Now, you may be like, Sean, that’s not for me.
[00:06:24] I wanna do something else. Cool. Here’s highway number two. When I talked about the thing called Epic, right? So E for Effort. Effort, highway P in Epic for pattern Highway. So here’s what I mean by pattern. Something happened for you to get. Results already, and it is our job to figure out what that thing is.
[00:06:43] You already have some success. Why did you have that success? For most people, it is not random. So let’s figure out what is not random about it. Let’s figure out the pattern around it. Uh, I we want to figure out to like look at the current clients that you have or the past clients, customers that you have, and like what is common among them.
[00:07:01] And the easiest way is to, is to. You want to just take a list of your last 20 to 50 clients and the more the better. ’cause it has context and you have AI these days, so you can do that. And you’re just looking for breadcrumbs, right? You’re saying, Hey, how did this client come to be? Where did I get this client?
[00:07:20] What was the source of this client? And the the crazy part is. You, you want to figure out where this client came from? Now, the crazy, the, the interesting thing that most people will do, and the, this is where this stuff breaks down, is they will not do it granularly enough for a behavior. So please let me explain if you are not, if like, if you want to listen to any part of this episode, this is it.
[00:07:40] I’ve had cl, I’ve had friends do this. I’ve suggested to, you know, our portfolio companies and our clients to do this, and they will say things like, yeah, Sharon, I figured out that 60% of our clients come from repeat and referrals. Now, here’s the problem with that. You’ve identified the category of the source.
[00:07:57] Repeat and referral or paid ads or an event, but you’ve not identified the behavior that will get you that result. When I say paid ads, I don’t know whether I should run more paid ads, whether I should do retargeting, whether I should run paid ads during holidays, whether I should run a particular type of paid a.
[00:08:16] I’m trying to get to the part where I don’t just predict. Category on it. I get to a behavior, and the behavior is the thing that I can repeat. The behavior is the highway. I need to get to a money highway. I need to get to a highway where I’m driving, where I’m doing something. The thing that I’m doing is gonna generate the result.
[00:08:33] So when someone says, oh, you know, half my clients come from online leads and half my clients come from referrals and repeat, I’m like. You’ll never make any more money. That business is useless. That knowledge is the good, good for you, that you have figured that out, but it makes no sense for you to do anything because it doesn’t give you any intelligence on what to do next.
[00:08:53] It does not give you a behavior to, to model, to get on this money highway. So what is the behavior? And that’s what’s important. It’s so, like a lot of people tell me, 60% of my clients come from repeated referrals. Well, okay, how many of those. What did you do to generate that referral? Did you call, did you send, you know, a, a letter every month?
[00:09:10] Did you, when you called, did you ask for a referral? Did you send them a referral fee? When they got a referral, did you, uh, send them a gift? And as a thank you for every single referral, did you send their partner or spouse booking a flowers on the referral? Did you post on the internet and make a video about them for the referral?
[00:09:26] Like, what did you do that generated the referral? And then you do that thing because that is what gets you on the money highway. The crazy part is this. People say, well, like what worked before? Well, you know, I don’t know if it’ll work again. The behavior will work again unless you prove that it wouldn’t.
[00:09:41] But now you’ve seen that your last 10, 20, 30 clients came because you ran the, the. All of them came to an event that you did. Well do more events. Now that makes sense. So your, your category is now repeat and referral. Your category is doing the event because you wanna map everything to behavior. Pattern matching is not about categories.
[00:10:00] Pattern matching is about behavior. Alright? That is highway number money, highway number two. Here’s money highway number three, which is, you’re gonna like this, I call this the A PIC Epic, right? I is the ideal client highway now. Please know this. Your best clients come from your best clients, and so you gotta figure out who your best clients are.
[00:10:20] And most people don’t know who their best clients are. I’m gonna give you a interesting way to understand your best clients in the best possible way. Now, uh, you only probably need to do this with 10 or 20 people. Here’s what I would recommend that you. So you would turn on either like a voice recording, like a voice app, or you know, voice note, or you would talk to AI directly and you would think about your 10 to 20 top clients, right?
[00:10:43] Because your best clients come from your best clients. And what you’re gonna tell AI is, listen, my client Sarah, she’s one of my top clients, and I’m gonna tell you everything that I know about Sarah. And so you go on a walk and you just start talking about Sarah. Hey, you know Sarah’s from Charlotte, North Carolina.
[00:10:57] She grew up in Hawaii. You know, she is, I think she’s 25 to 30 years old. I have done X, y, Z amount of business with her. She bought this and she bought that. The reason she did it for this, and the reason she did it for, it’s for that, the reason she liked the program was because of this and because of this, she actually did that.
[00:11:12] She actually drives this kind of car. She lives in this kind of house, and she does this kind of job, and whenever she calls me, she has this kind of issue like, do you see what I’m doing? I’m telling the. AI man, or thinking about the, I’m giving them everything related to Sarah, right? Everything that I know.
[00:11:27] And then after I’m done with that, I go to my next client, Johnny. I say, now I’m gonna tell you about Johnny. And I just tell them everything that I know about Johnny. Then I tell them everything I know about Jimmy. Then I tell ’em everything I know about Alex. Then I tell you everything I know about. I don’t know, Pete and I just keep telling them everything I know about all my top 20 clients.
[00:11:46] You, it will take you next time you go on a walk, just talk and just give everything that you know, all the context that you know. At some point AI is gonna have everything that, you know, 10 to 20 clients worth of. All this material, and then now you say, Hey, here are my 20 best clients, because they know my best clients come from my best clients.
[00:12:03] Based on all this context that you have, based on all this information that I gave you, I want you to design a psychographic and a demographic ideal client avatar. Now, based on all of this, here’s my business. This is who I am. I’m a real estate agent. I’m a mortgage broker. I’m a coach, I’m a consultant, I’m an entrepreneur, I’m a chiropractor, whatever.
[00:12:21] Then here’s my service. Here’s what I do. Here are my best clients. You have all the psychographic details here. I want you to build this, the most detailed, psychographic analysis of them. Awesome. Now, I want you to create messaging that will talk to these people well, and this messaging needs can be my brand messaging, it can be my email messaging, it can be a LinkedIn post.
[00:12:39] It can be videos like, what should I be talking about? What should I be writing about? What activity should I be doing to reach this group? You would be freaking amazed at what results that you get for this. Like it will blow your mind because your best clients come from your best clients and you’ve never had a chance to mine what you’ve done with your best clients.
[00:13:00] But you have to give it all the context. The AI does really well when it has all the context and it can mash all the context together and give you the most insane, you know, analysis that you couldn’t, would’ve never been able to do by yourself. And that is the ideal client highway. When you don’t, you should not be marketing to everyone, right?
[00:13:18] You should only market to your clients. Twin, if you will, because the whole 80 20 Pareto principle is, it is at play here. It makes sense. The job here is you want to find the DNA of your business and you want to extract it and you wanna replace it. And this is when you get a chance to have so much information and based on that, you can crush it because now you know exactly who your best clients are.
[00:13:40] That is the ideal client, highway number three, which I think will be very helpful to you. And last but not least here is EPIC. E for effort, highway P for pattern, highway I for ideal client highway and four and C Epic for the conversion highway. What’s a conversion highway? Well, this is really simple.
[00:13:57] Most industries that I’ve known adopt some certain ratios. They un, most industries, when I talk to a coaches or like top performers in the industry, they all have certain ratios. They’re like, Hey, if you do some of these things, this happens. If you do some of these things, this happens. In general, if you make these conversations, this happen.
[00:14:13] If you get in front of this many clients, this happens if you do this many events, this happens. If you send out this many emails, this happens. Like there’s a general ratio among things. So for example, like in in Realist, I, I’ll, I love using the real estate agent example because everybody understands real estate and the real estate agent people, by the way, fewer ever doing anything business related, right?
[00:14:34] You want to talk about. Three things make everybody understand. Number one, how real estate agents work. Buying a home, selling a home, that process most people understand. Number two, gyms. People understand going to a gym, paying for a gym, like not going to a gym, like how you sell a gym, personal training.
[00:14:52] They understand. That’s very easy to understand. And third is how to get six pack apps. Anytime you want to talk to somebody and like you want [00:15:00] to use an analogy. Use one of those three because people literally understand that very, very quickly. So if you’re a real estate agent and you essentially your job is to do what?
[00:15:09] Is to have more conversations with people, because you have a very wide market. So the more conversations you have, the more appointments you’ll get, more appointments you’ll get, the more contracts you’ll find, the more contracts you can sign, the more money you make, more commissions you get. Right. So we, since we know that path.
[00:15:22] Since we know the conversion highway exists, we know like, all right, cool. So if you reverse engineer it, hey, so if I need more commissions, I need more contracts. If I need more contracts, I need more appointments. Very hard to get appointments without contracts. And if I need more appointments, I need to be talking to more people.
[00:15:37] So now from a conversation perspective, I just need to figure out how to reach more people and what do I say to them? Most people don’t have conversations. They don’t call, they don’t text, they don’t door knock, they don’t email, et cetera because they don’t know what conversations to have. So now the industry, there’s an industry pattern about the conversations you need to have, and that’s all you need.
[00:15:53] Essentially what it is, is this is a recipe, right? If you know the right ingredients and the right ratios, the dish turns out pretty good, and now is it the most efficient? Probably not is the most effective, probably not, but at least you know that you can start to work with it. Now, the best part about this is industry ratios.
[00:16:11] Are built around general baseline knowledge without taking skill into consideration. It is all about odds, right? So if you have any kind of skill, so if you, if your industry’s, you know, like appointment conversion rate is 2%, and if you worked on your skill for five hours, if you just memorized the scripts and did some role play, you’ll probably converted twice that rate.
[00:16:30] So instead of 2%, you’d be doing 4%, and instantly you’re probably in the top 10% of the industry just because you spent four hours working on your skill. What I’m trying to tell you in the conversion highway is two things. Number one. There is, you have to understand what’s the kind of. Map in your industry is like conversations to appointments, to contracts, to commissions, right?
[00:16:52] If you know that, then you can put numbers to it and you can say, all right, hey, for every a hundred people I talk to, I get 50 of these, I get 20 of these, and I get two of those. If the two of those is $25,000, I get $50,000. So every time I talk to a hundred people, I make $50,000. Like now when you know that you realize that.
[00:17:06] Each conversation is not worth, like every time you talk, get on the phone. If you, if if a hundred, if you talk to a hundred people and you make $50,000 right now, it’s really great because now you can say, Hey, for every person that I talk to, I make $500. That’s pretty amazing. So if I told you, Hey, no matter what, for everybody that you talk to, you make $500.
[00:17:28] Like, would you take that job? It’s a pretty great job. You would do that and that’s what you wanna know, right? And so I, I, I am, I’m, the reason I’m telling you this is most of this, the weak ratios. Actually reveals weak skills. And so if you see an industry that has weak ratios, literally you can obliterate everybody in your industry like real estate, mortgage coaching, consulting, chiropractic, you know, solar sales, insurance sales.
[00:17:52] They all have these really bad industry ratios because there’s really bad skill. There’s like the, there’s such an 80 20 rule, and the top 20% do so well because they’re just spent, they get coaching, they spend some time, they listen to podcasts like this, they get the ideas. They’re able to articulate things well, and the reason I know of this is because we’ve advised all of them we own, like we own a insurance business.
[00:18:11] We own real estate businesses, we own mortgage companies. Like I know all of these because I see it day to day and my job is to just get each of their skills better and they will print money. By the way, I want, I want to tell you this one thing. So that was my fourth one, which was the conversion highway.
[00:18:23] You need to know the map and you need to feel better about, you know, doing better on the map. The most important thing I wanna tell you about here is a little tangent, which. People always talk about like buy referral only. And I wanna tell you this, buy referrals only is easy, but extremely dangerous.
[00:18:39] Alright? You are doing by if, if you have, if you are printing money and you have no more capacity and you can’t take any more clients and you only take by referral, I understand, but you can tell me that you are, you have a growth-based business on referrals because referrals are a comfort drug. It makes you feel good, but it’s not scalable.
[00:18:58] No one is waking up in the morning thinking about sending you a referral. It is completely out of your control. Everyone else is on the highway and is throwing you scraps. You have no idea, like you have no idea whether you’re gonna get any kind of lead. You have no idea with any kind of certainty. And if someone else occupies that spot, if their friend gets in the business and their cousin gets into business or whatever, you’re gone.
[00:19:16] You’re done. You’re toast. That’s why like the, did, you know the, the number one reason people want referrals is because they don’t have to do any sales or marketing. It makes, and that’s why they’re happy to pay referral fees, et cetera, because lazy people like only work on referrals because the easiest kind of business you can get are referrals.
[00:19:32] ’cause you can just be like, great, and you can sign them up because you don’t have to do any sales, you don’t have to do any marketing. You don’t have to be get any of that. So I’m not saying it’s it. You shouldn’t do that. I’m just saying that can’t be a core pillar of your business if you are in a growth-oriented business.
[00:19:46] And by the way, the crazy part, like asking for referrals is a skill. And then you have to build a system around that skill and people just don’t do that. I will tell you, referrals are your gravy train, and they’re not the main course. If you’re doing a growth-based business. Now, if you’re not having a growth-based business and you’re just like, you’re, you’re chilling and you’re good, and you just work, whatever business you get, that’s fine.
[00:20:10] But if you want to grow your business. And you and you’re thinking about referrals, that is not a core source unless you have a system around it to drive more referrals, right? You need to show me your referrals as a growth channel, not referrals as just being a receiving channel. This is why this is super important.
[00:20:26] So let’s talk about epic system effort Highway. Where you actually like brute force put in effort patterns where like, Hey, you know, if I do XI get Y patterns, ideal clients where I talk to you about the ai and you’re like, Hey listen, how do I actually understand my ideal client avatar and convergence?
[00:20:40] Like, what is the map in your industry and how do you guys, a little bit more skill to do better? The, the, the, the daily reflection that I want to ask I want you to think about is if you get stuck, you should just ask yourself, Hmm, how do I get back on the money highway? That’s all you should ask is how do I get back on the money highway?
[00:20:53] That’s the most important thing. And if you’re off the highway, if you’re parked, if you’re on a different ramp, if you’re a different exit, if you’re, if you’re not on the highway, just that’s cool. Just say, okay, which I just need to get back on the highway. What do I need to get? What behavior do I need to exhibit to get back on this highway?
[00:21:08] And then you’ll be back on. You’ll start making more money. You’ll feel momentum. It’ll be good for you, good for your family, and like it’s good for everyone because you’re doing the thing that is actually driving you towards the goal that you want. So my challenge for you is this. You gotta pick one highway.
[00:21:19] Is it the effort highway? Is it the pattern highway? Is it the ideal client highway, or is it just a straight up convergence highway? And you gotta drive because getting on the highway is how you get more money and you don’t exit until you’ve hit your next milestone. Don’t until, until you, you’ve hit that next goal.
[00:21:33] Don’t until you go on cruise control, right? That’s what you truly, truly want. Hey, by the way, I hope if you get stuck, just think about how do I get back on the money highway. I think that will help you a lot. If you like this, do me a favor. Can you screenshot this and tag me in on social because that way I know you like this and I can make more like this for you.
[00:21:47] So please do me a favor. Screenshot this, tag me, and uh, that way I can make more like this for you.
[00:21:59] Hey, this is Sharran. I have an awesome free gift for you just for listening to the podcast. As you may know, I’ve got a chance to build $2 billion companies the hard way. So if you like this episode, you’ll love getting the exact playbooks from those wins. It’s on my Substack, called My Next Billion. It has the exact frameworks I wish someone had given me when I was figuring it all out. Now you get the real lessons from the trenches as I go for a three-peat and build the next billion. So everything’s free at mynextbillion.com. Please check it out at mynextbillion.com.
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