Rajesh Nagjee: The CEO You Become Determines the Business You Build

SUMMARY KEYWORDS 

CEO Freedom Operating System, inner game, outer game, business growth, EOS implementation, scaling up, time criticality, parental completion, American Express Saudi Arabia, strategy execution, entrepreneurial mindset, business frameworks, personal fulfillment, leadership alignment, business success. 

SPEAKERS 

Rajesh Nagjee, Spea Debra Chantry-Taylor 

Rajesh Nagjee  00:00 

They really promise, and they deliver what they promise. So, I started calling them the Ferrari. They will deliver a world-class Ferrari, but what seems to get pissed out is that the founder and the CEO is still driving the Ferrari on his salon skills. The point is, by setting the goal, creating a pressure cooker, we don't get the results. So, how do you remove the pressure cook around people, respect them, be with them? That's how you nurture the inner game of yourself and your team. You'll start seeing some amazing results. 

Debra Chantry-Taylor  00:37 

Hello, and welcome to another episode of Better Business, Better Life. I'm your host, Debra Chanter Taylor, and I'm passionate about helping entrepreneurs lead their ideal life by creating better businesses. I started this show almost five years, over five years ago, actually, in order to have founders and CEOs share their experiences of the way that they have created a business that they really love and they truly enjoy, and that it gives them the opportunity to enjoy their life as well. And I bring CEOs and founders onto the show to share that, as well as people who've got real world experience and have some expertise they can share. So today is one of those people who has been there and been a CEO and been a founder and created the life that they wanted and has now moved into helping other founders in that space. They want to impact the lives of 1 million people who will probably never ever know their name. He believes that the reason that operating systems, such as EOS and scaling up and Bloom growth, fail is because the system itself delivers what it promises, but if it delivers a Ferrari, you need to learn how to be a Ferrari driver. Otherwise, you're not going to get the most from that Ferrari. He is the creator of the CEO Freedom Operating System, and today he's going to share with you the difference between the outer game and the inner game of business, and how you need to consider what it is you need to be as a CEO and a founder to really get the most from your business. I'd like to introduce Rajesh Najee, who is the CEO and founder of the CEO Business Growth Programme. Welcome to the show, Rajesh. We're looking forward to hearing about your story, and where you've come from, where you've got to now, but welcome. 

Rajesh Nagjee  02:24 

Thank you, thank you, Debra. Thank you for having me. It's brilliant being with someone who's got this rich background, and you know I'm very happy to engage in this conversation with you. 

Debra Chantry-Taylor  02:38 

I'm looking forward to, we had a little bit of a chat offline before we started, so I know a little bit about you, but I'm going to ask you to tell our listeners about yourself and where you started, and share a couple of the little, shall we call them diversions along the way in your, in your journey. 

Rajesh Nagjee  02:53 

I think the best way to introduce myself is I'm a very avid boss rider, and one of the things that I did at the age of 19 was fell off the horse and broke my leg, and that is the start of, you know, a whole journey in life where I have been a similar entrepreneur. Started out in my ancestor business, which is, you know, established in 1880 worked there for 10 years, then I took a sabbatical for three and a half years to pursue music, and then I created a for-profit hospital, a trauma care hospital, ran that for close to 11 years, and in each of these I have fallen off the horse more times than I care to admit. You know, it's embarrassing, but then I realised that if you want to learn horse riding, you best go to somebody who's fallen off the horse a couple of times. I qualify. I qualify. I'll tell you what to do. So that's basically, you know, the way I look at it. I don't take myself seriously. The purpose of my life is to make friends, have fun, be playful, and make memories, and I hope to do that, that if you're listening to this podcast, that we become friends, and I'll probably have few good gifts for you at the end, so that that will consolidate our relationship. 

Debra Chantry-Taylor  04:13 

Fantastic. So, yes, you said that you started, you know, with the family business from 1880 that you got, you got bored with that, didn't you? So, what happened? What happened there? 

Rajesh Nagjee  04:23 

So I got bored, because you know what happens is that we in the umbrella business in textiles and all of those things, so it was a b play, and we, you know, dealt with the very small traders, because that's really how you know the umbrella business set up for distribution, and so the quality of those interactions was not great for me. I wanted, I aspired to interact with people who, you know, were scaling up and growing companies and doing amazing things, and so that's really what left me. In the meantime, I'd gotten my first MBA. From India, and was amongst the top 5% in the class, and felt very good, except that one month later I realised, you know, I was probably dumb and didn't get what the purpose of that business. So years later I did a second MBA at London Business School, was number one again at the top of the class, and then I said I am a certified dumb boy. Don't care if business schools teach you how to manage business, and they work with philosophy, history, and they work with journalism, business journalism. They talk about business. It's I can talk about cycling, but I'm just.. I give you a cycle and you wobble, you're never going to be able to learn how to cycle. So this is the totality of, you know, what I sort of sidetracked a little bit to create the picture of, you know, what I found boring, there was no stretch, and I had a wonderful father, he's passed on. I went to him and I said, "Listen, I need to take a sabbatical, and he says, "How long? I said, "Open-ended, what you're going to do is you're going to play music. He's okay, go for it. So that's the long scenic road answered your question. 

Debra Chantry-Taylor  06:22 

Yeah, it's interesting. And so, but you said that you know, after taking a few years off to be a musician, you then decided to build this hospital. That's quite a leap. I'm right. I'm kind of curious to know how one goes from playing an instrument and to wanting to build a world-class hospital. 

Rajesh Nagjee  06:38 

So, I built a world-class hospital because I'm an addict, and I wanted to indulge in an addiction. It's not your normal addiction of drugs or alcohol, any of that. I'm an addict of the total quality of my sitar, and the sitar is made from various different diverse elements, you know. So, there's a board at the bottom, then there's board, and there are metal threads, and so on, so forth. Now that total quality can only get in a very dry climate. Bombay, or Mumbai, basically is very close to the sea, so the humidity factor is very high, and that kind of dilutes that tonal quality to about 60% so I always wanted to set up something, and I said, you know, the best thing for me to do after my sabbatical is to set up a hospital. Actually, it was a nursing home of body beds, because what do I know about medicine? I'm a good organiser, I organise things, I'll set up the nursing home and upstairs I'll have my place to practice. That was a dream, but in two months' time, on paper, it grew to a 450 bed complex, and you know, we commissioned 150 beds, and that was one of the finest periods of my life. The amount of effort we put in, the lives that we save, we did a math, you know, we actually checked, because this is 200 kilometres from Bombay, and we save 550 lives on average every year, because of where their hospital is placed, because trauma care patients have to travel either to Mumbai or Pune, which is 200 kilometres, and they don't survive that journey, 

Debra Chantry-Taylor  08:21 

and so you, you did that, and I think if I heard you right, you ran that for 11 and a half years. What were the biggest lessons that you learned from running that hospital? 

Rajesh Nagjee  08:28 

Well, you know, as, as, as a lay person who doesn't know anything about medicine or hospitals, you know, I like the word critical care, and I said, you know, critical care hospital is something great, because we will take care of patients who are in critical condition, and that was the extent of my thinking. How dumb and how blamed that thinking was, because I realised critical, that word critical means two different things, it means critical condition for the patient and the relatives, but it means critical in terms of time, the in from a supplier point of view, or from an administrative point of view. So I started honing in on how can we shave off time in every single aspect, you know, admissions normally takes about 45 minutes to one hour, we brought it down to and then we further brought it down to 11 minutes, so these are the kind of things that you know I really applied a lot of focus energy and being relentless and unforgiving in shaving off time, so it's that time criticality which is something that I learned there, which I didn't have from my previous background. I had quality criticality and cost criticality, so these are the three fundamentals. So when I got the time criticality, and then all my subsequent work revolves around time criticality, then finding the bottlenecks and the constraints, and how can we. We break through them, 

Debra Chantry-Taylor  10:02 

okay. And I know that you mentioned this when we talked beforehand, but I mean, you, you did use some frameworks when you were looking to build these businesses, and so you're familiar with the Rockefeller habits, EOS, Bloom, all those different frameworks that are available. How did that help? But also, where did you see the challenges? 

Rajesh Nagjee  10:21 

Well, you know, so I, when I went through the two MBAs, I realised that I knew a lot about business, but I was not a neighbour, and that's when I made the distinction that what comes out of business schools, largely these are all generalisations, so very largely what comes out is world-class business journalism, philosophy, and history. These three subjects are not designed to make things work. Physics is the only subject that's designed to make things work. So I started exploring frameworks in physics. So the first one I came across was the theory of constraints, and I went and got certified by Doctor Rat himself before he passed, and there was one of the most gruelling certifications that I went through, and then from there onwards to various other frameworks. Now this is not just in the hospital period, but in the last 30 years totality, so you know, like outcome-driven innovation, and so on, so forth, but during the hospital, you know, the thing that really, really helped me was to get people to connect with, you know, especially the staff to connect with the relationship with their parents, complete that, and then they were free from all the upsets and baggage, and all the rest of it. So I took the entire hospital staff, 350 people, through a parental completion process, which is a two-day process, and that showed some remarkable results, and so that's one of the things that's embedded in the work that I do, is to have people complete the relationship with their parents, because we don't realise, you know, how it holds us back, and so one by one, all these frameworks that help, I found that they were all temporary, they were not permanent, they didn't, except for the panel completion, and that's when I got the distinction that all frameworks that operate in the outer game of business are great for a certain time, they work and then they don't work, because the real power is in the inner game of business, and unless the velocity of both teams is aligned, you're not going to get anything that's sustainable, and that's what I learned, and that's why I indulged in, you know, I spent 80,000 hours in developing competencies in all these frameworks and physics. Later on, once I sold the hospital, you know, I went through Rockefeller habits implementation, which is now called scaling up in my wife's company, and because I have this rich background, I was able to pick up the entire process end to end and studied, and you know, attended many of the workshops of Rockefeller habits, and then I implemented them in 40 different companies. These are companies that I was working with, and it was fantastic, you know, great results. Then one year later, the what you know, everybody had engaged in the Rockefeller habits, was so diluted. Two years later, hardly anything remained, and that's when I started researching all these frameworks, whether it is Rockefeller habits or US or Bloomberg, or whatever. These are all, you know, they are fantastic. They really promise, and they deliver what they promise. So I started calling them the Ferrari, that you go for a US implementation, or you go for Rockefeller, or any of these, they will deliver a world-class Ferrari, but what seems to get missed out is that the founder and the CEO, does he have the licence to drive that Ferrari, or is he still driving the Ferrari on his salon skills, and that's really where the big disconnect 

Debra Chantry-Taylor  14:20 

1. I think that'sa reallygreat, you know, that I love racing cars. That's a great analogy for me. It's absolutely right. We do. We fine tune the car until you've got the best sports car out there, but if you don't know how to drive it, it's not going to work. So, tell me a little bit about the work that you do. Then, the inner business work, as you called it, what does that look like? What are you trying to achieve with that? 

Rajesh Nagjee  14:39 

Fundamentally, you know, this. It all started with coming across a body of work by Tim Galway. It's called The Inner Game of Tennis, and it starts out with a brilliant story, so arresting that he was taking some time off at a resort, and then he found a bunch of people you. Who had also come for a seminar or webinar, or whatever, and then they were actually trying to hit the ball. They were novices, and he found that most of them were missing the ball. So he stepped in and said, Is it okay if I coach you guys for 10 minutes? It's complimentary, won't charge you, and he says, 'Sure, sure. So then he just asked them to put the racket aside and he started throwing balls when the ball comes near you and it hits the ground in front of you, say ball, and when it is in striking distance say hit, and he kept doing that, and then he said, okay, now pick up the racket and say ball and say hit, and they were all surprised that earlier they were able to get one or two out of 10, they were able to connect, and now it went up to nine or 10 out of 10, so, so the basics there is that the inner game interferes with our outer game, so there is fear, there's doubt, there's anxiety, there's all kinds of undue pressure that we create on ourselves by, you know, these brave goals that we set, the bee hacks, and then we get jammed up because nobody's actually looked at, do I have the capacity, do I have the competence to have the capability of delivering this to it's very good to build a business on Excel, but you know the gap between where you are being able to go is a huge competency gap, and all of that competency gap lives in the inner game. So, what I do is basically look at the outer game performance, and one of the first things, which is very disturbing for my founders, is I tell them, 'Listen, I want you to be a genius founder. Right now, you're not operating as a genius founder, so would you like that? Of course, I would like it. So, all right, so the genius founder, you, you know you achieved 100 last year, I want you to know, set a target to achieve 90, and he said, "What do you mean, you know, I'm gonna do that? I say, "Just try, let's let's work on it, let's see what happens. Everybody started getting relaxed after that. Then I said, "Okay, the next thing is we're not going to set up an annual goal, we're going to set up a goal which is three years out, which means now you have 12 quarters. So, if you miss one quarter out of 12, there's no big shakes. So, slowly, slowly, slowly, the inner game of the team started to relax, and they started performing. And you know, there's no handbrake, there's no full break. Nobody's going to stop at 90, they take on a challenge. You say, stupid, we don't want to stop at 90. We did 100 you won't do 130 and 40. So, the point is, by setting the goal, creating a pressure cooker, we don't get the results. So, how do you remove the pressure cooker around people? How do you respect them? How do you be with them? That's how you nurture the inner game of yourself and your team, and you'll start seeing some amazing results. 

Debra Chantry-Taylor  18:07 

It's a really interesting sort of philosophy. So, can you give me an example of businesses that you've worked with and what impact that has had for them? 

Rajesh Nagjee  18:14 

So, one of the latest businesses that I worked with was American Express Saudi Arabia, we set up their five year strategy, and you know when, when in the earlier period, when we were still negotiating, my quote for doing the strategy turned out to be 30% higher than McKinsey and Bain and Company, so the outgoing CEO blew a fuse, and he got on the call. He was absolutely, you know, angry, and he said, "Listen, I just owe you the courtesy of this call, but I've decided not to work with you. So I said, "Sure, sir, that's your call, but let's just have this 10 minute conversation, and you know he says, you know, you seem to be delusional. You're sending us a court, which 30% higher than McKinsey, Bain and Company. You don't have any banking experience, you don't have any credit card experience, you don't have any experience in Saudi Arabia, and you're still sending such a quote. Can you explain? I said, yeah, you answered my question. I mean, you answered your own question. This is, he got darker in the faces. What are you talking about? So, look, if you get McKenzie to do the strategy, you know, and I know I can't beat them in the strategy that they create, they will create such a wonderful strategy. They'll queue a document, as many copies as you want, and then hand them over to you. And here's the invoice, you pay the invoice, you feel great, great accomplishment. And after that, exactly what you've been doing for the last five years, what you'll be doing is yourself with a strategy document, which. You will need to execute and implement with me, you know, and I know I don't have that competence. What am I going to do? Where am I going to source that intelligence from? That acumen from is from the people. So my strategy is going to be from the people, of the people, by the people. And what's going to happen is that you'll have to just sit back and see how things take off, so they took the call, and they actually awarded the contract to me, and I worked with them after paperwork and people set up. They came back and said, "Listen, you know it's we, you have asked for one year, but we have only six months. The board is ratified, six months. I said, "It can't be done in six months, so no problem. Makenzie or somebody will do it to fund our money. I said, oh my god, that's like a nasty one. So, anyway, I long story short, six months went twice in a month, instead of once a month, there, and we worked with all the people. The first year, the target was to go from $14 million you know, Emitta to 18 million. We hit 25 million in the first year, because the people pulled it. The next year, the pressure was not to go bombastic on the goal, so they said, okay, the board, International Board, ratified 28 million from 25 we hit 45 million in the next year. There's no handbrake once people are going, and then this third year the goal they said is, look, now you really can't go over that. So internally we set 60, but we're going to hit 55 and the board is ratified 48 So this is all you know. This all comes from aligning the inner game and the outer game. People have agency that we respected, and what I did with all of them is, listen, you know, there's something called process and something called outcome. If you, you know, align with the CEO on the outcome, then you have agency to figure out your process, and so it's a complete, you know, 180 degree shift from what people are used to, because everybody's talking process, process, process, process, process, process, process, and so they also pushed back. I said, "Okay, I'm coming back in two weeks' time. There's an experiment for all of you. That experiment is that if you like coffee or if you like tea, it's up to you. Write down your recipe the way you like it is your recipe. Don't want to create it, and then for at least for seven days out of these 14 try creating coffee or tea based on the recipe and see if you get consistent results and that's when they got it that the process which they had created themselves is giving them inconsistent outcomes whereas if you really align on a coffee or tea with the outcome very specific there'll be lots of variations in the process because the milk may be different, the water, whatever those things are, you'll, you'll get the shape, the colour, the taste all right, because you're focused on the outcomes. So that big learning in the inner game got them to appreciate the direction in which we were going. 

Debra Chantry-Taylor  23:19 

And how do people know that they're that they're stuck, that they're not getting what they want? 

Rajesh Nagjee  23:26 

Very, very simple. I just say, listen, let me talk to your family. I'm going to ask them three questions. You know, do you miss out on your children's piano concert or soccer game? Number one. Number two, do you miss taking your spouse or going with your spouse on a date every week or two weeks, whatever your thing is. And number three, do you get to spend time with your parents and your family, and do you spend quality time? If the answer to any of this is less than eight on PEM, then you are stuck, brother or sister, there's no, I can't do anything about it, but that's the bad news. 

Debra Chantry-Taylor  24:07 

Buildings a very good test for our listeners to do right now. Ask yourself those three questions and see what your true answer is. Yeah, 

Rajesh Nagjee  24:13 

sorry, I'm interrupting. There's a distinction between the fruits of success and the experience of success. The fruits of success is what you can demonstrate, your bank balance, your car, your corner office, you know, your yacht, whatever. But the experience of success lives within your relationships, and everybody keeps postponing that. And you know, children grow, and they, they move away, and their memory is, my parent was never there for me. I mean, is that what you want to build? Is that a legacy? Is that the wealth you want to enjoy? So, you got to figure this out, you know. There's this.. I know business is tough. I mean, I've built businesses myself. I've fallen off so many times, you know. And I also.. again, the another very big horse that I follow up is. My first marriage ended up in a divorce, so I'm qualified to talk to you about what not to do to ensure my second marriage is flourishing, and largely I think 80 90% has to do with my wife, where you know she probably a lot, but hey, you know the experience of success really comes through when you're focused on that, 

Debra Chantry-Taylor  25:22 

yeah, and it's really true. I mean, I think when you've, you've had some of the fall off the horses, it really gives you a lot of insight and really helps you. I've been through it, been through a couple of marriages, and also a few businesses that have been sort of a couple of successes, and a couple of not quite so successful, but it certainly teaches you a lot. Okay, so you've developed a framework now for working with these CEOs with these founders. Can you tell us a little bit about that, and what you, what you do? 

Rajesh Nagjee  25:51 

So, basically, you know, this is called the CEO Freedom Operating System, and by itself it just sort of hits the founders who suddenly realise that they're living two lives, the life where they have a mass public, where they got to show that they're very successful, and the other life is when they are, you know, at night they have sleepless nights, and they're, you know, worried about, are they going to meet payroll, and so on, so forth. So that's the trap. It's called the CEO's trap, or the founder's trap. And my job is to get the alignment between the founder and the leadership team, the outer game and the inner game, that starts creating the freedom for everybody to enjoy both the outward success and the inner fulfilment. Now this sits on a tripod. The outer game sits on a tripod based on the theory of constraints. Number two is outcome driven innovation. Third is the dynamics of strategy. So that tripod is enough, because anything that pitches a track, or is very, very stable, and in the inner game is always the exploration about, you know, what are your 20 values or the things that you really, really value, and you know, are you, how do you rate them, and can we increase, and everybody comes across those 20 with an average score of part four on 10, that itself is a consistent story. So we work on taking those scores step by step to eight on 10, and it takes a while. It's not something that you can, you know. So this is one of the gifts for you. If you want, just reach out. That's my email address, a better you write to coordinator at Rajesh nanky.com and ask them for the four score cards. So, the first scorecard is the nine areas of life, the second is the nine areas of business, then the third is the 20 soul level desires, as I call them, and the last is the 30 asset stocks, which comes from dynamics of strategy, and it's all self explanatory. Once you know the score, you yourself will find out, you know, where the bottlenecks are, which is robbing you of both the fruits of success as well as the experience of success. 

Debra Chantry-Taylor  28:15 

Okay, that's fantastic. So we will make sure that that link is in the podcast notes, that people can actually find that and request that if you're sitting here and you're listening, you're thinking, yeah, this sounds very much like me. What advice would you give to somebody who's perhaps listening and kind of going, yep, I tick all those boxes, I can see this is happening with in my life. Where would you suggest? I mean, yes, they can start with the with doing the checklist and seeing where things are at, but what else could they do to really help them on that pathway, 

Rajesh Nagjee  28:42 

having worked with over 40,000 CXOs and mentored 350 CEOs, my starting message for everybody is, you know, you are able, and once you allow that to sink in, then look at the experience that you have when things don't work out, is you know that that whole experience, that sinking experience, there's something wrong here, there's something wrong with me, maybe I'm not cut out for this, and all those doubts that create fear, doubt, anxiety, sleepless nights, now instead of indulging in there's something wrong here, create a context that there is nothing wrong. So, you know, you're travelling for a meeting, and you're going to meet Debra at 4o'clock and 320 on the way. You get a flat tire. Now, you know you're going to be late, you come out, and then you start kicking that tire and throw up your hand. That's it. This shouldn't be, this can't be it, this isn't it. Why me? What did I do wrong? And you go into, there's something wrong here, something wrong with me. I wish I had taken care of that, and all that. That whole, you know, noise in the head, isn't it better to say this? Nothing wrong here. This is it. Fix the damn tire. Let Debra's team know that you're going to be late, and request for 15 minutes or 20 minutes, whatever the time is, and get on with life. So, the antidote for all of this - this shouldn't be it. This can't be. This isn't it. Why I mean is this is it, and there's nothing wrong here, and you're able, and you're smart, and you're capable, you only forgotten it. We just need somebody to shout that and listen to me speaking softly, as if I'm shouting you a year that you are able. That's what my father did, that's what he told me from the age of four, and he coined this sentence so beautifully. He said, "The moment you decide, you will succeed, and I was able to decode that 55 years later, that here Teflon quoted me that every time things didn't work out, I would say, "I haven't decided to succeed. The moment I decide, I will make it happen. That's when I discovered the ultimate success formula, that's called Don't Stop Till You Succinct. So that's basically in totality starts with this is it, instead of this isn't it start with there's nothing wrong here instead of there's something wrong here. I mean, you know, I have gone through this countless times and been through that valley, and come on, so that's my, my offering 

Rajesh Nagjee  31:30 

for you. 

Debra Chantry-Taylor  31:30 

I love that. I really love that. And, obviously, your father was a very wise man. It's great you were able to decode some of what he's told you, told you later on in life. Okay, fantastic, some real gold in there, I think, for me, obviously. As an EOS implementer, I'm very passionate about the frameworks and things we bring, but I've also done a lot of work in terms of the inner mindset stuff myself, and I know we are mostly it is us, and it's a, it's a, what do you call it, consequence of some of the things that we've been brought up with in our early life that creates these self-limiting beliefs, and and we tend to, I see a lot of entrepreneurs and founders who, who almost love to create fires, and it's usually because of something that happened in their previous kind of, in their, in their childhood that they're actually fighting against, and and not able to just live in the moment and be successful, and not get, I think, I think you said it. Don't get stressed out by the things you can't control. 

Rajesh Nagjee  32:24 

So you know, if you just listen to what Debra just said, she's made a clear distinction between, and I'm just talking about us, and an EOS implementation partner who has that sensitivity and that desire to make 10 years implementation successful is to focus not only on the outer game that US offers, and it's absolutely brilliant beyond doubt, but the inner part, that coaching and listening carefully, so unless you find that in a US implementer, you know, you, I would highly recommend Debra, from just what she just shared, because you can't share what you haven't distinguished. The law is very simple, the eye cannot see what you haven't distinguished. So it was beautiful, just the way you framed it, and I'm sure that most of your implementations are very, very successful, which is not the case with so many implementations, whether it's or scaling up us, they don't work out, because you know I'm contracted to build a Ferrari, I build the Ferrari, handed over to you, and then good luck to you, and there's no licencing phenomena. So that's the work I was doing with Bloom. Then, how do we, you know, create a licencing process for people to drive that ferocious Ferrari down very steep mountain at breakneck speed, still be able to hold their own. 

Debra Chantry-Taylor  34:02 

Let's finish off with the car analogy is absolutely gold to me. So I know that you do a lot of work with, you know, in groups and also one on ones. I saw from the site that you, you work with CEOs, founders, leaders who are, who have got, you know, who are struggling, that can say you can do group work, you can do one on one work. How do people get in contact with you if they'd like to have a chat with you? Rajesh, 

Rajesh Nagjee  34:23 

I think the easiest is to reach out to either coordinator at Rajesh nanchi.com or to me. Coordinator is your best bet because she's really on top of the game. I'm, you know, all over the place, I'm working with clients, and so on, so forth. I would like to respond within 48 hours, but sometimes it stretches a little bit more, but I would love to, you know, get into your whatever it is that you're working on, and you know, you got to have two budgets. The first budget is, you got to have the budget of learning. In and stretching, because I'm not an easy coach. I'm an Olympic level coach. The difference between Olympic level coach and a normal coach is an Olympic level coach will not let you go, you know? If you have fever, is it okay? I'll run with you. If you follow, I'll take you to hospital, but you don't get time off. So that's the level of coaching I received from people coaches. Now, payback time, so that, so that is, and my work comes with a guarantee that you know you work with me and you get the result, and if you don't get the result, here's your money back. Thank you very much. Probably the only business coach who offers such a guarantee, and I'm very selective with whom I work. You're very serious, and I like working with you, and you and I get into, you know, kind of a rapport. Then things can really, really work out. 

Debra Chantry-Taylor  35:53 

I love it. I think that, I mean, that's a true iteration of backing your, the work that you do, and being very confident, you know, writer, a lot of coaches out there who haven't ridden the horse, haven't fallen off the horse, and are really teaching from a place of academia, as opposed to a place of real experience. And I think that's the really that your experience has shone through, and everything that you've talked about today. And I really appreciate you taking the time and sharing those experiences and giving some gold to the listeners here, 

Rajesh Nagjee  36:21 

thank you so much. Thank you, Debra. It's absolutely brilliant being with you, and was very easy, and you know, it wasn't scary, it wasn't, you know, you were so gentle, and you just kind of led the conversation so brilliantly. 

Debra Chantry-Taylor  36:37 

Thank you very much. I'm not always gentle, to be fair, I think if you ask some of my clients, they would tell you that there's definitely a side of me that is not gentle at all, but I do. I love, I started this podcast many, many years ago with the intention of it was originally to promote myself, and then I realised what I actually enjoy is the conversations. I love having conversations with people, I love learning, and I figure if I take something from it and I'm learning something from it. Then somebody else will too, and, and it's changed the whole way that I approach it. I just want to meet people, talk about the things that we have, you know, the passions we have, the things we have in common, and and learn from each other. So, yeah, and I definitely got that today. So, thank you, 

Rajesh Nagjee  37:14 

thank you, thank you so much. So did I. 

Debra Chantry-Taylor  37:17 

Yeah, thank you. Lovely, enjoy the rest of your afternoon, and we'll talk soon, thank.