00:00:00 – 00:00:07 Nitin Bajaj Welcome to The Industry Show. I’m your host, Nitin Bajaj, and joining me today is Ramesh Swamy . Ramesh, welcome on the show.

00:00:08 – 00:00:09 Ramesh Swamy  Thank you so much, Nitin.

00:00:10 – 00:00:13 Nitin Bajaj It’s great to have you here. Let’s start with who is Ramesh?

00:00:15 – 00:00:31 Ramesh Swamy  Yeah, that’s an interesting question. It depends who you are asking the question. So I think that in my world, I’m known as many things, right? So first and foremost, I’m a father. So that’s number one. Very important to me that I am a good father and I spend my time being a father, and everything else revolves around that.

00:00:31 – 00:00:40 Ramesh Swamy  The second thing I would say is I’m a founder, entrepreneur, business person, right? So I’ve had the corporate career. Now I’m founding companies and I’m an entrepreneur and I’ve done various things.

00:00:42 – 00:01:09 Ramesh Swamy  The third thing, again, people know me for different things. The third thing is, I would say, is my philanthropic side. I’ve served on many nonprofit boards. Currently, I’m the chairperson of the board for the International Pemphigus and Pemphigoid Foundation. It’s a rare disease that affects Indians, actually, and others, but a lot to do with Indians. And basically, it’s a disease where your body is really, your immune system attacks your skin and other middle skin layers and other things. And so that’s something I’m very committed to and recently became the chair.

00:01:10 – 00:01:37 Ramesh Swamy  And then finally on, there’s a whole host of other things, but I would just leave it with, I’ve been involved with some creative endeavors, documentary filmmaking. We’re making a Larry King documentary, which is coming out in probably the next six months. And then we’re also doing a documentary on the Marshall Islands soccer team making the World Cup, which is, has a lot of different aspects to it. Climate change and we bombed the Marshall Islands and all of those things. It’s a very nice storyline. So it depends how you know me, right? So that’s what people know me for different things.

00:01:37 – 00:02:04 Nitin Bajaj True. And I’ll add one more to it. That’s how I got to know you is you’re a great mentor and someone who’s given back to the community as an alum. We met way back at Pepperdine. That was, geez, almost more than 15 years ago now, but I’ve known you to be an amazing and very helpful person. And your work in the philanthropy side obviously carries that reputation. So thank you for doing what you do.

00:02:04 – 00:02:07 Ramesh Swamy  No, thank you. Thank you again for everything you do as well. This is great.

00:02:08 – 00:02:26 Nitin Bajaj Now tell us about Halifax, starting with why did you start it and give us a sense over the journey you’ve had over the past few years, the size, scale, but most importantly, the impact that you and the team have been able to create.

00:02:26 – 00:02:55 Ramesh Swamy  Yeah, it’s interesting. So Halifax West was founded almost 10 years ago now, December 2016. And really how it happened was I was at Deloitte for many years and I’d left to become an executive and a lot of people were still calling me to help them out with different things that they were involved with. Various, a lot of it was buy-side M&A type stuff, but other sorts of advisory work, just people that needed help. And they continued to call me. So I started doing it on the side as a side hustle. And then in 2019, I decided to do it full time.

00:02:55 – 00:03:26 Ramesh Swamy  And it’s interesting the journey of the firm. So it started a lot as three things was transactions, operations, and restructuring. And early on, I was doing a lot of operations type work, interim CXO, I’ll call it. But then I switched back to transactions again, did a couple of transactions, and some of those transactions would involve some restructuring as well. And then I would switch back to becoming an operator again. And then transactions, operator, and then, so finally really started settling in on this idea of merchant banking probably about two years ago.

00:03:26 – 00:03:42 Ramesh Swamy  And merchant banking for the lower middle market, independent sponsor market. And that really is predicated on three main macro trends, right? So what do we know? We know that there’s millions, literally millions of businesses where the owners are aging out, the boomer generation now in 2030 and beyond. So that’s number one.

00:03:42 – 00:04:01 Ramesh Swamy  Number two, that’s given rise to the rise, I’ll call it the rise of independent sponsors. Independent sponsors are deal-by-deal private equity firms. I’ll call them that, right? They raise capital on a deal-by-deal basis, no committed funds. That group has risen now. It’s become so common and there’s so many of them out there.

00:04:01 – 00:04:15 Ramesh Swamy  The third thing in terms of macroeconomic trends is the rise of private credit. So a lot of money is going to private credit. So what did we decide to do? We put ourselves right in the middle of all of that. And that’s what really Halifax West is. It’s a merchant bank focused on all of that.

00:04:15 – 00:04:35 Ramesh Swamy  So we really spend the majority of our time working with independent sponsors, helping them buy companies. And then the other portion of our time, we do capital solutions, which is just recaps and other debt advisory stuff. So that’s really how it happened and why it happened. And quite frankly, I think we’re the only ones that necessarily are doing it this way. So that’s an important piece as well. So I think we’re a one of one, at least from what I can tell.

00:04:36 – 00:05:02 Nitin Bajaj That’s a really interesting combination of your experience coming from that space. And then the timing of, we call it the silvering economy. A lot of people are aging out. And then there is this trend of private equity wanting to come in and capitalize on all of these businesses, buy them out, structure them, grow the size, and then flip them out or maybe in some cases, continue to operate them.

00:05:03 – 00:05:13 Nitin Bajaj And you bring that unique experience to that place. So it’s like you’re in a great place, right place, right time, in the right opportunity. So really happy for you.

00:05:14 – 00:05:36 Ramesh Swamy  No, thank you. Thank you. No, we feel good about it. I think we are really growing and we’re able to really, I think we’re just different. We’re just different. We’re, like I say, we’re long-term greedy. We’re not transaction people, right? We’re relationship-oriented, long-term greedy. We invest a lot of time, even if we don’t have any sort of formal engagement, we still invest the time because that’s our model. Eventually we’ll get it because we know we’ll get it because that’s how it works.

00:05:37 – 00:06:09 Nitin Bajaj I agree a hundred percent. Now, a lot of this is extremely challenging, even though you made it sound so easy. You’ve been in the space for 20 plus years. You get the nuance, get the nitty-gritty. It’s, in many cases, a lot of regulation, a lot of dynamics, a lot of egos, a lot of challenges to oversimplify it. If I ask you to call out the biggest challenge, what would you pin that on?

00:06:09 – 00:06:18 Ramesh Swamy  Well, look, I think we, our challenge is time. We don’t have enough. And what do I mean by that? Personally, and even I can tell you about my day. My day is insane.

00:06:18 – 00:07:04 Ramesh Swamy  I wake up because I’m on the West Coast. I wake up to a full inbox. I wake up to missed phone calls. I wake up to a lot of things because most everybody’s on the East Coast when it comes to finance stuff. That’s number one. So I wake up before I even get out of bed, I’ve returned almost all my emails. I sit and type back my emails. And then I start making phone calls. Okay. And literally I don’t stop. I am on the phone and/or in meetings or and/or any number of things, but I’m always engaged all the way till probably the end of the day and beyond. And then I can, I don’t get to use my computer because I flip it open, but I don’t really use it because I’m always engaging with people. It’s really wild, actually. I don’t get to eat. I don’t get to literally do as much that most people, normal people get to do.

00:07:05 – 00:07:27 Ramesh Swamy  So there’s time, and it’s not just me. So our team is scattered across all kinds of time zones, but everybody is the same. None of us have a minute to breathe ever. And so what we’re trying to do now is actually scale up. We’re trying to bring in more people, get more help, and just try to identify, but it’s hard. It’s not easy to, because you don’t want to make a mistake either. So that’s the challenge, right? But time is our challenge.

00:07:27 – 00:07:59 Ramesh Swamy  And so I’ll just talk a little bit more about our business model and tell you why time is so challenging. In our business model, we basically go out and we bring independent sponsors into our network. Okay. It’s not a formal thing, but they come into our network. We, we sign NDAs. We’re all good. They’re confidentiality. Accountability-wise, I should say. And what ends up happening is they go out looking for deals every day. So think about this. We have upwards of a hundred private equity firms, and I don’t even know the number anymore, out there looking for deals every single day. When they find them, they bring them to us.

00:07:59 – 00:08:17 Ramesh Swamy  So it’s crazy. And so, but what do we do? We spend our time, we underwrite those deals, we structure them, we do all the work. We don’t, not for any money. We don’t get paid. We just do it because we’re long-term greedy. We know that once we show them, once we work together, we know we’re going to be friends and everything’s going to be fine. And so that’s really our model.

00:08:17 – 00:08:56 Ramesh Swamy  But the problem is when you have a model like that, it becomes very difficult. So I will say just to put a pin in all of this, our biggest challenge is selecting the right deals and learning to say no. That’s the biggest challenge. We used to take every single one because we want to be good guys, but it’s, oh my gosh, like what, what are you going to do? You have all these people bringing you them and you’re just like, you want to be helping everybody, but you can’t help everybody. If you try to help everybody, you’re helping nobody. That’s what, and that’s what ends up happening, right? So we were in a real phase where we were trying to help everybody and he was doing, some people are disserviced by doing that. So we’re really trying to be a little bit better about it. Focus is the best way to put it.

00:08:57 – 00:09:11 Nitin Bajaj True. Now on the flip side of challenges, and this is a good one to have, but a challenge nonetheless, there are opportunities on the other side of it. What’s the one that you’re most excited about?

00:09:11 – 00:09:42 Ramesh Swamy  Look, I think right now there’s a, that the macroeconomic trends are there and we’re on trend. There are very large merchant banks, Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan, whatever, the Ethereal ones, right? They’ll do the Twitter deal and stuff like that. That’s 40 billion here and there. That’s not where we live. We live in this under $20 million enterprise value world. And that’s where 99% of the stuff that we are seeing and in my opinion, most of the action is. So we’re on trend. This is where we live. This is what we know. We know it better than anybody. We feel like we’re very good at what we do.

00:09:42 – 00:10:12 Ramesh Swamy  And that’s why we really shrunk down. So if you looked at our website literally two months ago, you wouldn’t recognize what it is today. We used to complain about the website every day. Our website sucks. It doesn’t represent what we do. It doesn’t represent anybody would go to our website, they’d look at it, be like, oh, that’s not what we do. This is what we do. Finally, we brought somebody in to help us and they’ve redone our website. All the content has been flipped and now we actually have a website that represents what we actually do. And that has made our lives so much better. You have no idea. No idea.

00:10:12 – 00:10:43 Ramesh Swamy  Cause the other part of our journey here has been our internship model. We have built an internship model and it’s a very mature model where we bring in university students and they come in and they work with us for a semester. And what we found is because of word of mouth and all kinds of things happening, we get, we started getting, it started getting out of control. So we’re getting so many intern requests now and they were coming to my inbox, which was worse because we fixed our website. We have a proper career section. So now all of the student analysts are going there and applying and they’re not coming to me anymore.

00:10:44 – 00:11:08 Ramesh Swamy  I feel like we help a lot of students. A lot of them can’t get this experience. Now again, we are unpaid. It’s unpaid. And the demand is extraordinary. These are the top schools in the entire country, the top schools. And we don’t hire based on school. We put them through our process and we take the best ones. And they’re often, you don’t, we don’t look at ranks. They’re often not necessarily the best ranked. Who cares? We don’t care. We want the best kid, not the best rank. That’s what we say.

00:11:08 – 00:11:31 Ramesh Swamy  So anyway, I can spend a lot of time on that topic, but, and it’s one that I really love. I just love it. It’s so great that they’re engaged with us. And it’s just great. You should see these kids. They’re a lot smarter than I’ll ever be. They’re smart. I just talk. They’re smart. It’s great. So we have a lot of horsepower over here. We have the best and brightest over here. I’m thrilled about it.

00:11:32 – 00:11:54 Nitin Bajaj You’ve always had this passion. I remember you back when we met, you had this energy, this passion about helping and providing that platform. And it was never about the pedestal you come from. It was about giving you the opportunity and how hungry you are to prove something and do something. You always have had this bias for action.

00:11:55 – 00:12:10 Ramesh Swamy  Yes. No, we, that’s exactly what we look for. We don’t look for the people’s resumes. Don’t even look. We talk to people, whoever’s the most qualified by way of the things that we ask them for. That’s what we want in school. It’s the fire in the stomach, right?

00:12:10 – 00:12:10 Nitin Bajaj Yes.

00:12:10 – 00:12:13 Ramesh Swamy  You can’t, and you can’t just, you just don’t have it.

00:12:14 – 00:12:40 Nitin Bajaj Yep. I agree. Now, as we look forward, I’d love to take this moment to pause and reflect. And I’ll ask you two moments from your past life. One where things did not work out as you had expected. There was disappointment, failure, lessons. And another instance where things blew your expectations and became a success beyond your imagination.

00:12:42 – 00:12:48 Ramesh Swamy  Yeah. Geez, I can’t even remember how many times I failed. No, no. And so failures happen all the time.

00:12:48 – 00:12:48 Nitin Bajaj True.

00:12:48 – 00:12:58 Ramesh Swamy  I’ve failed lots of times. I’ve been, geez, I can’t even remember. There’ve been jobs where my performance hasn’t necessarily been aligned with what the expectation was.

00:12:58 – 00:13:15 Ramesh Swamy  I’ll say that because it’s, it’s interesting, right? Like I think what’s more important for success isn’t skills and abilities and talent. Those things are a given. Those are table stakes. It’s really cultural fit. It’s, it’s being able to communicate with people and be on their level.

00:13:16 – 00:13:34 Ramesh Swamy  And I think that when, what I can just tell you, I don’t have any specific examples, but I can tell you because there’s so too many and I could take up 10 hours of your time here. But what I can tell you is the times where I’ve failed. And I say I because I can take it personally. It’s a we, typically, it’s always the team, right? We always win together. We lose together.

00:13:34 – 00:13:57 Ramesh Swamy  And, but I always, this is our model, right? We say we win together, we lose together, but together we won’t lose. So I say that all the time on calls. That’s really important. But at the same time, if we don’t have that cultural fit and chemistry that goes beyond, yes, I have my undergrad, I have an MBA, I have two CPAs, I have the banking license, I have all these things, but you can throw it all in the trash. Yeah.

00:13:58 – 00:14:15 Ramesh Swamy  Because it doesn’t matter. If you and I are not in sync on that level, it’s not, and so I would say the most of my failures have been a result of being out of sync with somebody than my ability to be able to deliver what I need to deliver technically, if that makes sense.

00:14:15 – 00:14:33 Nitin Bajaj Makes a hundred percent sense. Cause I do believe that at the end of the day, people connect with people and that’s what makes the world go around. Right. And if you don’t, the wavelengths don’t sync, it doesn’t matter where you come from, what qualifications you have. We have to connect.

00:14:33 – 00:15:03 Ramesh Swamy  Yeah. And so stylistically, culturally, all of those things matter. They matter, right? Some people are very transactional, right? And so when I meet somebody that’s transactional and I approach them in my relationship orientation, it doesn’t work. Like you’re going to grind. So as an example, we’ll come along and we’ll do 10, 20 hours of work for you without even asking you for a penny. We don’t care. And then you come along and you start grinding us, right? Oh, the engagement process becomes difficult. You know what? It’s not worth it.

00:15:04 – 00:15:19 Ramesh Swamy  I can tell you some recent stories about that, but we’ve, we’ve, yes. So that’s what I would say. I think it’s, it’s cultural fit and being in sync is more important than skills and experience. That’s the main thing. And same thing with the interns. Same thing with anybody you bring around you.

00:15:20 – 00:15:34 Ramesh Swamy  We as a firm and me personally, we believe in a foxhole mentality. What does that mean? If you come into the foxhole, then you’re in, right? We protect you, you’re guarded, and we all stick together, right? That’s it. We have a foxhole mentality and that’s how we live our lives, right?

00:15:34 – 00:15:45 Ramesh Swamy  I think that’s, even if you do wrong, so a lot of people will do wrong. They’ll make mistakes. It’s okay. It’s okay. You’ll be safe, right? You’ll be safe. And I think that’s really important to us too.

00:15:46 – 00:15:49 Nitin Bajaj What about the success? I would love for you to brag about one.

00:15:49 – 00:16:00 Ramesh Swamy  I, again, saying I don’t think, I guess the failures would be much more as Michael Jordan missed a lot more game winners than he made. Just so we’re all clear here. There’s been a lot of failure here. Look, and I think success, we’ve had some successes.

00:16:01 – 00:16:12 Ramesh Swamy  I personally don’t take credit for it, but we’ve done some things, not in my whole career, we’ve done a lot of things, right? Back in legal aid foundation days, when I was on the board there, we did some things. We built a building.

00:16:12 – 00:16:23 Ramesh Swamy  I’m very proud of some of the things we did philanthropically. I’ve been proud of some of the things that, that I’ve been able to do, even at Deloitte, where at one point I had so much media. I was, yeah, there’s stories about how many, I had a lot of media.

00:16:23 – 00:16:37 Ramesh Swamy  I was in the media a lot back then and I was able to raise the profile of certain things I was doing. And then really, in every role I’ve ever had or any situation I’ve been in, it’s the team, obviously, right? So we, and I take no personal credit, we as a group have been able to achieve big things.

00:16:37 – 00:16:53 Ramesh Swamy  And that’s really what matters to me. It doesn’t really matter what I do or you do or he does or she does. You got to give credit to people and we do that. But at the end of the day, none of us are going to be anything without the other. I would never do anything. You can say, oh, he did that. No, I didn’t really do that.

00:16:53 – 00:17:07 Ramesh Swamy  Did Michael Jordan really win championships? He did, but it was a team, right? And then, so I think, and I just used, I keep using him, but it could be many examples of that, but we’re a team and that’s how we function, right? It’s not one person. No one person matters.

00:17:07 – 00:17:25 Ramesh Swamy  You can write, by the way, anybody’s replaceable. Even me. It’s my firm. In this case, I’m replaceable. Anywhere I’ve been replaceable, I am a thousand percent clear that there’s nothing that can’t be replaced. And so, including me. And so there’s that.

00:17:27 – 00:17:41 Nitin Bajaj We talked about this, but I’m still going to be stupid and brave to ask this question. What do you do to step off the gas and relax and de-stress?

00:17:42 – 00:17:46 Ramesh Swamy  I’m not sure that there’s any way that a guy like me can feel that. So let’s just start with that.

00:17:46 – 00:17:52 Ramesh Swamy  But lately what I’ve been doing, and yesterday is a good example. I’m doing yoga and I’m really bad.

00:17:52 – 00:18:03 Ramesh Swamy  I like, I’m Indian. I’m Indian. I’m supposed to be good at yoga, right? It’s a stereotype. I suck. I’m really bad. I might be the worst yogi in the world. If there were such a prize, I would have it.

00:18:04 – 00:18:06 Nitin Bajaj I might give you a run for your money on that one.

00:18:08 – 00:18:44 Ramesh Swamy  Lately I’ve also been doing twice a week sound baths. Okay. That has also been super beneficial to me. Just given the frequencies of the sound bath actually are able to positively reset my nervous system, but more importantly for somebody like me who’s got ADD, crazy ADD, it actually helps me like focus. It’s the strangest thing when I wake up. And sometimes I have subliminal thoughts. And when I get up, I reach my phone and I type them in because I get some extraordinarily, just really great ideas from the sound bath. I don’t, I know it’s a strange thing, but, and a lot of people, they don’t do these things, but I’ve been doing that.

00:18:44 – 00:19:10 Ramesh Swamy  I go to the gym. I’m doing boxing now once a week, which is good for stress relief. I play golf, but I haven’t been playing. And that’s been a real frustration of mine. I had not been playing enough golf. And so I need to start to play more. In fact, our team is playing now and I’m not part of it because I’m just, I don’t have enough rounds. I didn’t play enough rounds last year. But I’m a very, I just love to play and I’m a good competitor and I’m not a great golfer anymore, but I am a good competitor. I take it very seriously and I love it. So there’s that.

00:19:10 – 00:19:16 Ramesh Swamy  And really those are the main things other than spending time with my children and taking them places and doing things with them. That’s really what I, how I de-stress.

00:19:17 – 00:19:22 Nitin Bajaj Love that. Is there a book or a podcast that’s your favorite that you want to share?

00:19:23 – 00:19:35 Ramesh Swamy  It’s interesting. There’s a book that I read. Oh God. What year was that? 2016, 2015. And a lot of people have read it, but I really, I got a lot out of it was the power of now. Yeah.

00:19:35 – 00:19:49 Ramesh Swamy  And I talk about it. In fact, it still guides me a lot in a lot of ways, like when it comes to the future or the past or worrying about things. Cause I have a lot to worry about these days. And yet I still feel like I’m, I’m able to try to stay present.

00:19:49 – 00:19:57 Ramesh Swamy  I think that idea of staying present, I’m sure there’s a lot of other books and podcasts and other things that are related to this, this idea of staying present, but that’s one that sticks out to me.

00:19:59 – 00:20:09 Nitin Bajaj Yeah. I agree with that. Yeah. Now onto my favorite part of the show. We call this the one line life lessons. Ramesh, I would love for you to share your life lessons with us.

00:20:09 – 00:20:11 Ramesh Swamy  Okay. So I’ve got 52 of them.

00:20:13 – 00:20:14 Nitin Bajaj Bring it on. Bring it on.

00:20:14 – 00:20:30 Ramesh Swamy  I’m not going to bring y’all 52 because it would just take a long time. I actually was going to write a book on this in 2000 and, oh gosh, when was it? McGraw Hill was thinking about publishing this in 2014, 12, maybe. I can’t remember, but I’ve been collecting them. So I’ve got 52 of them.

00:20:30 – 00:21:09 Ramesh Swamy  Some of them, so I’ll just give you some examples. And they’re just one liners, right? I often say there’s no money in money. There’s money in upside. It’s very contrarian, right? You look at a young career, get a person and they’re young in their career and they’re thinking about making a job change and they’ll do something for an incremental amount. Oh man, these guys are going to pay me 10 percent more and this and that. And you think about it, right? In the long term, really, does that matter? It’s not the money that matters. It’s the upside. I think that’s one of the things that, at least in our firm as well, we, a lot of our team, everyone has upside, big upside. They get ownership in all the companies that we do our merchant banking deals, but that’s really important, right? So there’s no money in money. There’s money in upside.

00:21:10 – 00:22:15 Ramesh Swamy  Some of the other contrarian things I say, people think I’m crazy. I’m completely crazy. I say approach every situation with a win-lose attitude. So now you’re taught as a kid, no, don’t focus on winning or losing. It’s just play, right? No, I don’t mean it that way. What I mean is before you go into that situation, you need to clearly identify what are those things that constitute a win. I talk about this all the time, right? What is a win? So I’m going to come in and negotiate with you. Let’s just say we’re negotiating a deal, a term sheet even. What constitutes a win and what are those things I need to have a win and what are those things I can potentially not need to have a win, right? So if I know what a win looks like, I can steer myself to a win versus walking into the situation, not clear what that looks like, right? So I always say approach it with a win-lose attitude. So I know clearly at the end whether I’ve won or I’ve lost. Okay. So there, so that’s really important to me. It’s very much one of the things that guides us. I already talked a lot about, we win together and all that stuff that we’re very big into that. Okay.

00:22:16 – 00:23:12 Ramesh Swamy  So how you do anything is how you do everything is one of the terms that people use. So I’ve adapted that to, and I’m crazy. You’re going to think I’m crazy because I’m so contrary. I’ll have lunch with you. Okay. Let’s just say Nitin and you and I, hey, let’s go have lunch. Okay. If you go to that restaurant and you order a lot of food, more than you can eat, and then you waste it, yeah, you’re not going to see me again. I don’t do business with people that waste food. And I only use that as an indicator of how they do everything. If you’re going to waste food, that means you’re going to waste, be wasteful in your P&L, you’re going to be wasteful in other aspects of your life, right? If you waste food, you probably are not going to be my people, right? Take it home. Do something with it. It’s really, that’s so important. And that may be cultural because we’re Indian. I know we’re crazy about that too as Indians, but that’s fine. But, and I do, I am crazy about it just from being Indian too, but I say it though, I apply it to a business context.

00:23:12 – 00:23:43 Ramesh Swamy  Some of the other things I say, if you’re not helping, you’re hurting. So if you’re in a meeting and you don’t do anything, you don’t say anything, you’re just a distraction. I don’t need you. So you need to help. You have to be engaged and helping, right? So sometimes you get on these calls, right? Now it’s, okay, now is more than ever because everybody’s moved to virtual. So you get on these calls and you have all these people, but some of them are off camera and their kids there. They’re not doing anything. They’re not helping, right? They’re just a distraction. Don’t need it. You’re not helping. You’re hurting.

00:23:44 – 00:25:12 Ramesh Swamy  Trying to think of some more. Oh, when you go to a networking event, okay, I always say, don’t go to sell, go to buy. I never go to an event, right? Selling what we do. And I’ve never done that. Why would I? I don’t care. What I go to do is to buy. What am I buying? I’m not buying necessarily services, although sometimes I do. What I’m doing is our products or services, anything like that. I’m going to learn. When I say go to buy, I mean go to learn. And if I am talking and I’m not asking questions and I’m just sitting there telling you about me, I’m not learning. What have I learned? I’ve gone to an event and there’s wonderful people, hundreds of them. And I left there having pitched myself a hundred times. And I came out of there not knowing one thing. I didn’t learn anything from that. That interaction is precious. Oh my gosh. Whenever I’m, I don’t leave the house anymore. I’m famous for being a hermit. No, that’s fine. I’m like Bruce Wayne. So you see, I took my Batman thing down, but there’s a Batman mask back there. But so I’m famous for not going out anymore. But when I do leave the house and I go to an event, okay, I, I spend an enormous amount of time learning. I want to learn what everybody is doing. I want to hear what they’re doing. I want to hear how they’re doing it better. I want to hear how, what’s worked for them, what hasn’t. Pitch me. I’ll take it. I want it. But that’s the key. Go to sell, go to buy, not to sell. That is such a huge lesson to have so many more.

00:25:12 – 00:25:25 Ramesh Swamy  Jeez. I’m just looking at my list here. I can, I say, I always say do it right, not fast, right? So being able to do something right the first time is going to save you much more time than doing it fast, right? So we very clear about that.

00:25:25 – 00:25:36 Ramesh Swamy  I used to always say it’s not about money. It’s about magazine covers. Now I did have my first magazine cover. I tried to do it before I was 30, but I just barely, I think it slipped over, but fine. Okay.

00:25:36 – 00:25:59 Ramesh Swamy  I always thought a lot about eminence and being eminent and having thought leadership. And so I used to write a lot when I was younger and some of my papers were used. I was just a kid. I was literally a child. And these MBA programs where they were using some of the papers I wrote, everybody in the class was older than me, right? But I used to be really big into that idea of eminence. I think, I think I still am. I still am, but I worked my cycle through.

00:25:59 – 00:26:20 Ramesh Swamy  And what’s interesting about this is the first podcast I’ve ever done. No way I’ve done so many TV and radio interviews in my life. I’ve done more media interviews than anybody, but I’ll tell you what, and it’s been over 10 years. And this is, you are getting the honor of having my first, I don’t know if it’s an honor, but like the pleasure’s mine, but it is. This is my very first podcast. That’s so cool.

00:26:21 – 00:26:40 Ramesh Swamy  And I think I’d be remiss if I didn’t talk a little bit about the IPPF though. Yes. Because that’s really important to me. And that’s really how this came about. So I think we have this disease and nobody knows about it. It’s very rare, but I do think that there’s a lot that can be done in our community to help people suffering. It’s interesting because I didn’t know anything about this, obviously till I had it.

00:26:40 – 00:26:59 Ramesh Swamy  And then I had it and then all heck broke loose. I started, basically if you saw me in the middle of that time, my head was bleeding. I was bleeding. Like you could see open wounds. It was really, it was very, very traumatic. And a lot of people die, right? Because of the disease. And I just think that it’s one of those things that we’re really trying to raise awareness for.

00:26:59 – 00:27:27 Ramesh Swamy  You see those commercials and I still don’t know what it means. And I joked about it at our conference in November, this methylpheomioma or whatever, right? That disease, you see the commercial for that every commercial break on the news networks. And it’s like, what do you, why is it always on? How do we be that? Parkinson’s. No one really knew Parkinson’s that well until Michael J. Fox. People knew about it, but then Michael J. Fox, we have yet to find our Michael J. Fox. And so in the meantime, we just keep trudging along here and trying to figure this out.

00:27:27 – 00:27:48 Ramesh Swamy  But I do know that it does affect a lot of people. And I think that there is a, especially in the Indian community. And so I think that raising awareness to it is very important. And I take that role very seriously, very seriously. And so I’m, I want to, want to make a difference. I, I don’t spend as much time candidly as I’d like on it. Just right now, it’s been very busy, but I do plan to spend more time in the coming year.

00:27:49 – 00:28:47 Nitin Bajaj Again, Ramesh, first off, thank you for making the time for being with us to share your journey, your story, but for most importantly, being who you are, helping the community, helping raise awareness around this extremely painful reality that we have. We are genetically predisposed to a lot of conditions, Pemphigus being one of them. And thank you for raising awareness around it because the first thing you need is to know that there is some help, some support, other people that can provide some guidance to you when you, when it’s a rare disease, to have that support system. And I’m really glad that you’re at the helm of this and helping bring that visibility and support for the community. Thank you for sharing those life lessons. I resonate with every single one of them. And I’m really eager to see what’s the other 45 of them. And if I can help and be a resource in getting that book published, let’s get it done.

00:28:48 – 00:28:52 Ramesh Swamy  Yes. Thank you so much. Have a great rest of your week and year and life.