Achieve Business Success Through A Growth Mindset, with Ninad Tipnis

Dan Sullivan: Hi, this is Dan Sullivan. I'd like to welcome you to the Multiplier Mindset podcast. Hi, this is Dan Sullivan and I've got a great treat today, and this is the very first entrepreneur who registered for The Free Zone Frontier Program when we started it. I talked about it to a group of top-level 10x clients, and right at the end of the day, we actually had an application. Ninad came up and he said, "I just want you to know I'm in your new program." So that's the kind of person that Ninad is, and it's been such a pleasure having conversations with Ninad.
 
Ninad lives in Mumbai in India, and so he comes the furthest. Right now, he's having a nice evening in Mumbai, and basically I've just woken up here in Toronto. So that's what we can do with Zoom these days. Ninad, before we get to how you put your entrepreneurial career together and how you've built it into an amazing service for tremendous multinationals who come to India, just talk about right now what you're so excited about now. What's the big thing that really, really lights your fire?
 
Ninad Tipnis: Thank you, Dan. Thank you for having me on this conversation. The two things I'm most excited about were non-existent a month back, and so these are, besides my existing business, it is expanding my service and my capability globally and finding perfect-fit collaborators, if you will. And once this algorithm works in one place, it can work in any city across the world, wherever my capability is of service to consumers. And so that is pretty much all over the planet.
The second thing I'm working on is, I'm scanning the world for like-minded entrepreneurs, like-minded successful individuals for whom the workplace is a very important component of their scheme of things. I believe I can analyze a workplace, marry to their aspirations, and create a combination which is better than anywhere in the world. I do this in the most rapid way, giving them the workplace of their dreams. So these are two projects which I'm most excited about as of now.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, and I think that within the last month or so, you had your first project outside of India, and this is for the big company. This is for your major company. I remember when you first came into Free Zone, you had linked up with an architectural engineering company in Chicago. They wanted to go into India. They didn't know India. They were around the world, but they had not known how to get into the Indian market.
 
And you've got vast experience with the key centers, all the key corporate centers, certainly the corporate centers in India. I remember how excited you were that you could do that. It's kind of interesting. If you had had Zoom back then as extensively as we have it today, it probably would've gone a lot faster. So talk a little bit about how we've suddenly acquired this technology, and this is one of the reasons why you can think globally right now.
 
Ninad Tipnis: A lot of credit goes to The Free Zone Frontier Program and how we've been thinking on our thinking. The evolutionary nature of the program where we are not only coming up with concepts, and you not only explained these concepts to us, but we actually implement, starting with you. You walk the talk, Dan, and that is so inspiring. And all the group discussions which happen, I see various manifestations of that same concept taking shape. So that kind of sharpens my skill, and I kind of extrapolate all those learnings which happened throughout that day, and I just take them home with me.
 
Just the Zoom call which we had, I mean none of us imagined that we would be learning such quality content virtually. But the perfect fit, which you explained that day on that workshop, I now have a perfect-fit vision, which is essentially seven parameters for success for whatever you are seeking. And I now have a perfect-fit vision for not only the collaborator I want to join hands with, but also the person enabling the collaboration. So I have a perfect-fit vision for the enabler, and I have a perfect-fit vision for the collaborator. So this is real, this works, this is practical, and therefore monetizable.
 
Dan Sullivan: The perfect-fit vision. It's actually a thinking tool I created in The Free Zone Frontier Program. Actually, I did it in collaboration with another Free Zone Frontier innovator, Steven Palter, who's got a marvelous technology called Lodestone, where you can have instant global events with two to three thousand people where the membership, the people who are actually on the event, actually create the knowledge that they're talking about.
 
Then that knowledge is distilled through artificial intelligence, and it's fed back to the community. So through a series of events, four or five, sometimes 10 events, what happens is, a community on a global basis using virtual communication like we're doing now, can actually create a community. But what I'd like to do, Ninad, is go back. When did you make the entrepreneurial crossover? When did you become an entrepreneur that you could say to yourself, "I'm now on my own. I'm now taking responsibility for myself. I'm now fully dealing with the marketplace straight on." When was that?
 
Ninad Tipnis: This is almost 18 years back, and so I did a decade of work with a firm before I decided to become an entrepreneur.
 
Dan Sullivan: I should say to everybody, Ninad's specialty is space planning and design so that workspaces really work. He works with all sorts of other skills, and he has all sorts of other skills, but it's architecture, it's space planning. And probably as you go forward, you're going to be more right at the beginning of the design of anything.
 
Ninad Tipnis: Yeah, we do workspaces. Ever since I founded this company, we've been specializing in workplace design, and we have a vertical which also builds the designs we generate. So after 10 years of working in an architectural firm, I finally decided that my potential of achieving success is far, far higher than what I'm doing in the firm. Also, freedom was a very important motivator to get started. Now when I started, it was far from successful.
 
I was struggling and I was trying to make my business survive initially. For the first 60 months, we actually worked from paycheck to paycheck and we were making things happen. But then after the first five years, we started getting successful, and then we never looked back. After that first phase, the success phase lasted for a while until I reached a point where I was not growing any further. Sure, we were doing projects, we were working, but we were not experiencing the growth, which is when I heard you for the first time in a CD.
 
You were interviewed by SUCCESS magazine. This is way back in 2012 when you were speaking to Darren Hardy who was interviewing you on SUCCESS magazine. I felt that you're talking to me, and you were speaking of this concept of the Ceiling of Complexity. In two hours, I signed up for 10x in 2012. Before I knew it, I was on the plane to Toronto. I used to visit you in Toronto before Chicago. So that is how my journey started. In the very first year, I broke the Ceiling of Complexity and there is no looking back.
 
Dan Sullivan: So from the standpoint of the first moves you made, because the Ceiling of Complexity comes about because the entrepreneur is trying to do everything and isn't really taking care of personal freedom. They're using their personal life, actually, to feed their business life. So if there were two or three concepts that really hit home during the first year in the 10x Program, what would you say they were?
 
Ninad Tipnis: I think the very first thing which appealed to me was "The Gap" analysis and how that helped me switch my mode of measurement. The statement you made that, "This is your game, so you define the rules of the game. And you define the rules of the game such that you win every time." That was profound, and it was so liberating. The second thing, and the most important thing, which you follow even today, is three crucial things.
 
So after I achieve my three crucial results for the day, I'm living in bonus territory, and so that is an experience of enhanced freedom. From that feeling of enhanced freedom, you tend to operate at your very best. So these were profound things. They appear to be very small things as we are having these conversations, but they really translate into huge results, which I have experienced. Ever since I joined the program, mathematically I would've grown 15 to 20 times, so these are not so small.
 
Dan Sullivan: Talk a little bit about the specialty you developed in working with multinational firms who were thinking about bringing their operation to India.
 
Ninad Tipnis: For the first five years, like I said, it was fighting for survival. There was no real success mantra; it was just keeping the company alive. But once we started tasting success, we realized, and again, I get back to a concept which I learned early on, which is the ideal client, the best client, and the worst client. So I realized in the first five years I was working with entities and people which didn't give me the best of experience.
 
So when I started tasting success, I chose the experience which I wanted to enjoy from my work. That gravitated towards some of the largest organizations in the world, multinational corporates, and large workspaces initially. So just making the choice and predicting your experience in the journey also made a huge difference. In that phase, we chose to design and build workspaces only for multi-billion-dollar organizations.
 
So with that kind of revenue, there are processes, there is a mindset which comes in, a mindset of excellence, if you will. And that excellence rubbed on us. We happened to be one of the very few providers in India who could understand multiple geographies, who could understand what an American company requires, what a Canadian company requires, what a Chinese company requires, what a German company requires.
 
And before we knew it, we were working for the top four banks in the world out of the top 10, from Europe, from China, from all over the place. So our experience of working with entities from multiple geographies is, I think, an experience which is exclusive to us. Very few people in the geography can actually cater to clients from all geographies.
 
Dan Sullivan: A lot of entrepreneurs come into the program, and I coach a lot of entrepreneurs. But the thing that really struck me is that you approached me and you talked to me that even as successful as you were, you were feeling a bit boxed in because the space was already determined by someone else. They would have an architect, they would have a construction company, and you were brought in basically in some cases to fix something that was bad. And you were talking about that, that you wanted to get into the project earlier, you wanted to start. So can you talk a little bit? Because that brings us right up to the beginning of the Free Zone.
 
Ninad Tipnis: Sure. At the beginning of the last five years, we saw multinational corporates, large organizations, getting their principle architects doing the design. Through our work and through the rules we laid out, we changed that equation totally. So we happened to be the first architects who came in contact with them if they had any program in India. That was a huge, huge achievement. So no longer did we have to work with principal architects, we happened to be the principal. And that was just a few tweaks in our mindset.
 
Again, it is choosing. It is choosing your clients. It is choosing who you want to work with. So essentially we chose people who subscribe to our rules, and our rules were designed to create successful projects for them. So it was never about us; it was always about them. It was mapping their aspirations, mapping their success criteria, and then adapting and making our business model compatible to that. Now we happen to be the earliest entrants in the equation, if you will.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. One of the big things, you began to range- Not only would you start collaborating with these, and you're really a collaborator and you're not a vendor, you're a collaborator. And I think you choose your projects based on, do I get to be part of the creative process with the other person here? You started ranging outside of India and you started thinking, "Well, why don't I collaborate with them where they are?" I remember you came to Chicago, and at a conference, you were able to start collaborating with a hundred-year-old Chicago firm that was international but not in India.
 
So it seems to me that every three months when I see you, you've jumped another level in your thinking about who the best collaborators are. And if you can talk about just starting with someone who would write you a check so that you could pay the bills, and now where you are where you're saying, "I can deal with anyone in the world, and I'm looking for people who have vision," what were the steps in your mindset of expanding, expanding, expanding, expanding?
 
Ninad Tipnis: Sure. Again, another great concept which you introduced in Free Zone, which is the Simplifier-Multiplier concept, and the awareness that I'm 100% simplifying. So throw me any complexity in terms of an architectural workspace program, or how the client thinks, or how the client wants to enter the country, I can see right through the simplest algorithm in that complexity. And so I realized early on, thanks to your concept, that I'm 100% simplifying. Once that was established, I knew that I had to find somebody who could multiply my simplicity. So my search for collaborators became that much more refined, and I started seeking collaborators with laser focus.
 
And being a natural collaborator, I could make out who could complement me. The other concept which helped, you introduced, "Who do you want to be a hero to?" I realized that my collaborator and I, we both want to be heroes to the same entity. That kind of, again, further refined. I always am fascinated with Michelangelo's David. David is all about removing the excess marble from the block of stone. So every quarter, you give me more tools and more strategies to chip away from that block of marble, and therefore making my David more and more [inaudible].
 
Dan Sullivan: How did the rest of the world change when you saw that, "I'm a hundred percent this. Now, what am I looking for?"
 
Ninad Tipnis: Definitely I started seeking Multipliers. There are some great Simplifiers out there as well, but the best collaborations happen when you collaborate as a Simplifier with a Multiplier. That was the first calling. But then there are also Complicators, people who are neither Simplifiers nor Multipliers.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. A Complicator is someone who tries to prevent a Simplifier from simplifying, and tries to prevent a Multiplier from multiplying.
 
Ninad Tipnis: Exactly. Exactly. So Part A of the journey was finding your Multiplier, but Part B was to remain within the realm of your simplification, which gives you so much joy anyways. So this is so much fun. This is so much fun.
 
Dan Sullivan: The last question I'd like to ask you is very timely right now. It's just that you mentioned that COVID to a certain extent has been a blessing. I certainly feel that way. And both myself and also my team have just been enormously, in a certain sense surprised, but also just validated that everything that we've been presenting in Strategic Coach has really taken root. It's been internalized by our entrepreneurs.
 
And even where it's been difficult because of the industry that they're in, they've said, "No, no, don't think about The Gap. Think about The Gain here." And they're making changes to their personal life, they're making changes to their teams, they're making changes. But in every case, they've gone out to help their clients have a bigger future.
 
Ninad Tipnis: Absolutely. So the minute you start getting clarity on the future and you start creating a new future, I think that is when your mindset is abundant, your mindset is optimistic, and you are in the best place to serve your ecosystem. So I think it is relentless action and focusing on the mindset. I could see that in the multiple Zoom calls. And I kind of replicated getting to Zoom, drawing inspiration from you. And this thing works. This new project we are working on, I haven't met the clients at all. It's all through Zoom.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. One of the big principles of Strategic Coach is that it's a 360-degree life, and that your entrepreneurial company is the means by which entrepreneurism and success, bigger and better, goes into your personal life. So could you talk a little bit as a closeout here on our interview?
 
Ninad Tipnis: Absolutely. I think you always encouraged us to look at our lives with the Four Freedoms, the Freedom of Time, the Freedom of Relationship, the Freedom of Money, and the Freedom of Purpose. So there has been an abundance of time in this phase. So your purpose keeps getting more and more refined. You keep getting more and more anchored around what you actually want to do. That shows up in your offering, that shows up when you make your presentations on Zoom. It helps you forge new relationships.
 
Collaborations are nothing but new relationships you are establishing. So I think the Freedom of Money, all my workshop mates, my buddies, have achieved long back in their lives. We all have Self-Managing Companies. So the other freedoms which we aspire for are time, relationship, and purpose. And I think that we received a lot of clarity. And the new ones, which we all learned together and we all experimented real-time. Like you always say, the Free Zone Frontier group is your lab. Right?
 
Dan Sullivan: Ninad, first of all, I'm keeping you up late. But Zoom is an instant transportation vehicle so we were able to travel to a third place and have our conversation. But I want to tell you, first of all, what a great confidence builder it was on that very first day when I talked about the Free Zone, you were the first up. And I get a sense that you're always going to be the first doing something that the other entrepreneurs in the Free Zone and all the other entrepreneurs in Strategic Coach are going to say, "Wow, he's shooting ahead." But you're a great role model for a constantly innovative, constantly value-creating entrepreneur, and it's such a great pleasure to know you.
 
Ninad Tipnis: Thank you, Dan. Thank you for all your mentoring, and I look forward to many, many years of learning together. Thank you so much.
 
Dan Sullivan: Thank you.