https://youtu.be/x9I054pknWM Sri Kaza, serial CEO (most recently of BriteCap Financial) and author of Un-Convention: A Small Business Strategy Guide, joins me to share how unconventional thinking and the Trust Equation Framework can transform client relationships and small-business strategy. Sri explains how he discovered entrepreneurship through his own career, from Y2K programmer to global sales executive to CEO, and why developing people is at the heart of his personal “Why.” We explore Sri’s memorable experience selling software in Japan—where karaoke, izakayas, and takoyaki roulette taught him more about trust than any sales manual—and how David Maister’s Trust Equation Framework — credibility × reliability × intimacy ÷ self-interest — later helped him make sense of it. Sri also unpacks the principles behind his book Un-Convention: why small businesses can leverage their proximity to customers, nimbleness, and purpose to outperform bigger competitors, and how to avoid “empty-calorie” expansion by focusing on the right customers. --- Drink Yourself to Trust with Sri Kaza Good day. Dear listeners. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint podcast, and my guest today is Sri Kaza, a serial CEO, most recently of a FinTech company called Bright Cap Financial. But importantly, he is the author of Unconvention: A Small Business Strategy Guide. Sri, welcome to the show.  Thanks for having me, Steve. Appreciate the opportunity to chat.  You have a very fascinating story. So let's dive in. But let's start with my favorite question. What is your personal why and what are you doing to manifest it in your businesses and in your practice?  So, you know, my personal why is I love developing people and getting the most out of myself and helping them get the most out of themselves and it's kind of led me to down the path of writing this book and getting out and working with small businesses because, you know, entrepreneurs are a fantastic, I'd say, lever for me to help somebody kind of build something or get the most got to themselves. To me, giving back in this way is something that's just, feels almost natural, feels like something that I can really feel good about and do more of. Okay, so why are entrepreneurs so close to your heart?  Well, you know, I didn't realize it until much later in my career, but I, you know, I learned that I'm kind of an entrepreneur myself, you know, looking backwards. It's pretty easy to tell that, but I wouldn't have known, or I wouldn't have thought about it that way, you know, growing up and when I look around and look at the people I've mentored or worked with today, I get most inspired by the people who find ideas and kind of make the most out of them when they put 'em into entrepreneurship.  Well, awesome. So you have been running different companies. I mean, you, you talked before and I learned that you traveled around the world as a sales executive and, and CEO. So what's the most memorable story from your international travels that you could share with us?  When I was really young, I'd started my career as an engineer. I started out as a, I thought I'd be a chemical engineer. It turned out I was gonna be a programmer because it was around the time of Y2K and every business in the world wanted to kind a rewrite their software to do something different, get out of the big Y2K bug. I flipped that early career being a programmer into sales. When I learned that, you know, an important piece of selling software was to get somebody credible in the room who could explain how the software or the technology worked. I did so well that my superior said, ‘Hey, why don't you, why don't you go out to Japan? We're about to have a product in Japan and we need somebody there to help us sell that product.’ So, of course, you know, at 20, I don't know, 22, 23, I really didn't know much about anything. Of course, I thought I could do whatever they asked and I'm perfectly capable. What? Learn a foreign language and live in another country for a few years and, and sell millions of dollars of software to people I don't know. Sure. Why not? Right? Of course I can do that. So, you know, the stories from there and I've gotten probably more than we could possibly share in the time that we have. But then the source from there. One of the first things that started to sink in is I got immediate credibility showing up because I was a foreigner. And at the time, and I don't know that this is true anymore, but at the time when I showed up coming in from the US, coming from California all of the people I interacted with, you must know a lot about technology because you're an American and that's where all of this, you know, you're from the San Francisco. That's where all this technology stuff is happening. And you know, maybe I knew a little bit more than the folks around me, but it's not like I was some genius or it's not like half of what I was saying was stuff I had I hadn't learned like days earlier. But nonetheless, yeah, I could really talk to people and, you know, hung on every word about what our technology could do. But what was wild was we got there and the software that was on its way still wasn't ready. So for folks who don't know back then in like the year 2000, 2001 computer languages, mostly all the code that was written for American companies, it would share language itself, the English language in single byte characters. So you've got 256 bytes that you could, or different combinations of bits and, you know, bits to get to a byte. That means 256 different letters, capital letters, lowercase letters, period, all that wonderful stuff in Japan. You couldn't represent characters that way. You needed a double byte, right? You need two different bytes, so way more accommodations of possibilities. And just like pre Y2K, there was these issues where, oh wait, the calendar dates for the century weren't there. Here, the data structures weren't there for just common language translation. My engineering team at the company I was at was working hard to kind of put that in place, but it took six months to a year to kind of sell some of this expensive software, these big enterprises. So they said, get out there, sell it, and by the time you're done selling it, we'll have it ready. So, I'm out there and I'm meeting people doing some, you know, conversations with businesses and mostly I'm showing them slides 'cause there's no software to show.  Right, right. And half of the meetings didn't even have slides, just, you know, talked. But what I really found interesting was most of the time I'm interacting with my potential prospects. We weren't in meeting rooms, we weren't having meeting discussions on what the software did or anything about their plans for how they might use the software. We were sitting in bars or izakayas or karaoke places, drinking, and the thing that really stuck with me was it took me almost six months to get the first big deal done, right? We drank with these guys twice a month, maybe three times a month. And slowly progressing through their organization, like getting to the next level of decision making. The next level as a super maker, you could tell you were seeing success when the drinking party started to get bigger, like we'd go drinking, we wouldn't even have a meeting. The next day we'd go drinking again. Okay. We'd have a meeting, you know, three weeks later, four weeks later, we'd go drinking. But now there'd be a new guy, more senior guy who joined. And you'd slowly like, oh, we're getting there deeper into like the real decision maker. We're navigating the organization. But really, quite honestly, it was just a lot of drinking. Fun stuff, fun stories. We'd go around and the first time I'd had something called Takoyaki which is this little grilled dough ball with octopus inside, tasty Japanese treat. But a fun game they'll play when they're out drinking is they'll order Takoyaki roulette, which is a Takoyaki balls all look the same. One of 'em has a big chunk of wasabi in there, so when you bite into it, woo yellow wasabi. So, I remember going out, you know, eating with them and you know, we get this order. I'm looking at the table saying, oh, that looks good. Let me grab one, eat it. Great. Everyone's staring at me and I'm like, did I commit like a faux pa? Did I go too fast? Eh, it seems like I'm okay. I'm okay. And then they all watch me and they watch me eat it and I'm like, huh, this is interesting. And then I, you know, I finish it. Then of course the next couple of guys grab some and then one of 'em like spits it out and like, gross and everybody's laughing and I'm like, what? Why are you laughing at this guy? He didn't like it. But I, you know, this whole time I'm going out to meet these guys and all they really want to do is ask me about what my life is like in California, what I think of Japan, what I think of Japanese girls, like nothing to do with work. And just like, you know, goofing off six months in. Right? Finally, what our biggest, biggest meeting comes up and we get the meeting, it's in like a week or two, and everybody in the office is celebrating because the Japanese partner I was working with realized that actually, because we have that meeting with the boss man who actually is gonna make the decision, the deal's already done. And I'm thinking to myself, you know, I still haven't demoed any of the software. We still don't know like what's the pricing? What's this? And the partner I was working with explained to me is, look, this is about relationships, this is about having a relationship with the companies where they really know how to work with each other, where they, they trusted to kind of bring the right software in this whole six months of these interactions, it wasn't about trying to convince them that your software is good, right? Because the software is good.