Hey everybody and welcome back to another episode of The Daily Grind. Today we have an awesome interview lined up for you while we are sitting down with the co-founder and CMO of Ready-When Tech. Satchin' Bala. Satchin' is an amazing man.
He has so many lessons to share with you all. As always, be sure you have a pen, piece of paper, sit back and dive deep in today's interview with Satchin' Bala. Enjoy. Today's episode is brought to you by the Just Go Grind Podcast with Justin Gordon.
As many of you know, I went from five days a week here on The Daily Grind to one day a week. That leaves plenty of days and a lot to learn from so many other people and just go grind in the podcast and Justin is absolutely amazing. I would encourage you all to go and check out that podcast, the interviews, entrepreneurs, CEOs and other go-getters giving you actual insight each and every episode. Some of the episodes and people and guests you've had on are absolutely amazing from Vanessa Doo, who's the founder of a 100 plus million revenue dollar company, Healthaid Kambucha and Rob Mather, founder and CEO of Against Malaria Foundation, one of the world's top rated charities, which has now raised more than 230 plus million dollars, which is absolutely amazing.
To Austin Reif, who's the co-founder of Morning Brew, The Daily News Letter with more than two million subscribers. As you can tell from those interviews alone, this podcast is phenomenal. So be sure, guys, go and check out the Just Go Grind Podcast with Justin Gordon today. Subscribe to the show and Apple Podcast, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts, simply search Just Go Grind to find it.
You can also find it in the show, no section of this podcast, everyone. Keep grinding. Welcome back to the podcast, everybody. As I mentioned today, we're sitting down with Sachin Bala.
Sachin's a creative and data-driven marketer that has built customer journeys and digital growth strategies across North America and internationally. He excels at developing foundational marketing initiatives for startups, grow-ups and enterprise companies with a proven track record for success. He works closely with senior leaders and the senior leadership team to improve various facets of an organization through sales, product operations, and marketing strategy user funnels automation, marketing cloud sales force, data segmentation and implementation of digital media strategies and metrics. As a super informative interview, everyone, as I mentioned, be sure you have that pen piece of paper and without further ado, please meet Sachin.
Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of The Daily Grind. Today, we have a special guest for you. We're joined by Sachin Bala.
Sachin, what's happening, man? How are you? Good, man. How are you doing?
I'm good. Good to meet you today. If you wouldn't mind, just briefly introducing yourself and explaining who you are and what it is that you do. Yeah, sure.
My name is Sachin Bala. I'm the co-founder and CMO of Reddy When. We're a new startup that just is about to launch this year in Q4. We specialize in digital estate planning, and what that means is we're really trying to help people plan for the end in some ways and really try to help them organize their life so that their families and friends and their executives can actually have an easier time with handling their estate.
Not only that, it's about protection, it's about security, and it's actually about making this process that hasn't really gone through a digital transformation as of yet and making it faster and easier for people. Got you. And when did the idea start to percolate, so to speak, and how did this whole idea come about? Yeah.
So one of my best friends, his brother, he's a notary, his name's Jesse Bate. He's the co-founder and CEO of Reddy When. He has been a notary out in BC for about 16 years now, and in BC notaries can actually do a lot of the legal planning that lawyers do currently in Ontario. So they do will planning.
They do a lot of the real estate work, stuff that notaries out here can't do. So he's been thinking about this idea for a really long time, and it came to me through my friend and he said, hey, would you want to invest? So I started talking to Jesse about it, and the more we started talking it aligned perfectly with some of my experience that I've had with not only advertising and marketing, but also in the startup world. And we decided that I would come on as a co-founder and help build the platform and really make it more, at first it was actually more about the security and the story.
And although that is a vital component of what we're doing, we've also built on top of that a journey. The idea is that estate planning is one of those things that you don't want to touch until you kind of have to do it. And when you have to do it, it's always in the worst case scenario. So we just want to make it welcoming in a way where it's not so morbid of what you're doing, but it's actually helpful to you and your families.
That's awesome. So we'd like to kind of hit the rewind button for you. So, Sachin, let's take it back. How did you get into marketing?
How did the career start? How did this whole path and journey begin? Yeah. Cool.
Cool. Cool. And that started off my career and my love with advertising. I was in the industry for about 12 years and I worked on Coors Light, Rogers, Campbells, Visa, and a few other smaller brands such as the Canadian Diabetes Association and some other ones.
But as the industry started to, sorry, as technology started to come about, things like social media and digital advertising, I started to really get interested into the idea of how efficient it was. Like, I always looked at a TV ad and I was just wondering like, how do we know people are watching this? But it just didn't make sense to me. And as we started going through the digital advertising, I really started to see efficiency and the effectiveness of digital ads.
And obviously, back in 2009 and 10 when Facebook came out, it was a while while West out there with digital advertising. And as we started to get more rules in place and make it a little bit more regulated, but it's been great for the industry, but there's also been a lot of innovation behind it around data analytics and so forth. So as I got interested in the digital side of things, that led me to actually be interested in the product. And when I started getting interested in products, I realized that a lot of the things that I would do to help my own clients, such as the Rogers of the world and so forth, I can actually do for a product that I'm really interested in doing.
So I made the leap from advertising into technology, I quit my job, I didn't have anything lined up, and I ended up at a company called Trade Rep. They built the first digital automotive option. So just to give a little bit of history here, so in all possible, there's all these physical options. And these physical options are for dealer to dealer transactions.
So they buy their cars. It's hyper-local. It comes in on a Wednesday, you go get your car, you make your bids, and it's a very ritual esque. And there's a lot of side deals that go on, and it's not very efficient, you lose a day at work for most times, and Trade Rep had this great idea back in 2011 to revolutionize that.
And the president and the founder, Mark Endress, he actually was a dealer. And when he came on, he started to see that if he actually built something, he could make his own dealership very efficient, and he was a coder. So he started actually working on that at night in 2009, sorry, and then 2011 at launch. And so I came on board in 2016.
I was employee number 70, and at that time, they were just in Canada. And the company really exploded at the time. Physical, I mean, smartphones adoption was huge. It started to grow, and volume in Canada grew.
So we have a marketing team at that point, and they didn't know how to manage things. So I came on board to help them actually grow the North American market. And what happened over the course of three years was nothing but short of amazing. It really gave me the confidence to do what I'm doing now, but it also gave me such a strong education on how to run a startup.
To me, it was like going to school. We grew, by the end of 2018, we were 800 plus employees. And we were all over North America, coast to coast. Sales had tripled across that, and we started to build out our teams, not only sales and marketing.
And I started to really play a role in creative solutioning, meaning I was involved with the product team, I was involved with operations, I was involved with sales, I was involved with all facets of the organization. And it really helped me to understand how a company can grow, you know, where are some system errors, where are some, you know, just normal errors that we as humans make that we can be a little more efficient on. And then the big education came for me when we were acquired in 2017 by CAR, K-A-R, CAR Google, and they brought up, they were, we were their digital auction arm that they wanted to push out, and they invested a lot of money into us to do that. And so in 2017, we were acquired, which was a huge win for the company and for the founders.
And then in 2019, the CMO of CAR, my boss, he asked me to run international marketing. So that was a focus on Europe and the UK. And I did that for a year and a bit. And then just earlier this year, he asked me to run a new department that they were just forming in CAR called Digital Product, which digital meant digital advertising and digital marketing.
And then a product was related to product and product marketing and really bringing forward the wave of the future for CAR overall. Very cool. So because you've had this like unique opportunity of working in a startup from kind of the ground floor and you kind of get your hands on everything, there's a lot of people listening who have aspirations of starting their own companies or maybe they're working in one, what are some of those key lessons that you learned early on, like maybe some mistakes that you see that other people make to avoid. I think there's three core lessons for me that I learned.
One is really be open. And what I mean by being open is, you know, everyone says to be a great leader, you need to listen. And that's part of it. But it's also open to hearing problems that come from different areas that, you know, a lot of people say, oh, that's not something I should deal with.
That's not under my job description. But a lot of, if you consider yourself a marketer, which to me is really around creative solutioning. And especially in a startup where there's so many different little problems that can really start to roll into a bigger problem, almost like the Indiana Jones, the ball that comes down, right? Like you see things chasing you and you're like, oh my God, how did it get so big?
So for example, in operations, we had a problem with titles. So the way that trade rep worked is that when a car was purchased from a, from a, in our auction, so from a seller to a buyer, the seller had to hand over the title to the buyer in order for the buyer to do something next to the car, sell it, do anything they want with it. In the meantime, the seller, the buyer would put their money into sort of an escrow account, which would sit with trade rep till the title's handed over. And what we started to see was that the money started accruing in our titles account to almost like $5.5 million at a given month.
That's a lot of money just sitting there. But more importantly, what happened was buyers were getting pissed off because they couldn't get their titles in time. So then how did we fix that? So we came up with this creative solution where we actually mailed out a mock check that looked like a real check to the sellers to say, you know, you could, like it was like right now for like, let's just say $1 million.
And then the seller would open and they'd be like, oh my God, I checked for $1 million. I said, you could have this money so easily by just doing these two easy steps. We were able to reduce that $5 million bucket to down to $2 million within one month. So we started to see really the effectiveness of that.
So the first lesson I learned was really about being an organ and all that comes with that. The second thing is be humble. So as I grew into trade rep, you know, I was the marketing lead and my team grew from just me to almost 15 people. And during it at a given period, I was also just, I wasn't, I wasn't, I got to myself, like I thought my ideas were the best.
I thought it was all about me. And I had it really take a step back at a certain point when my team was around three or four people. And I just had to ask myself, what kind of leader do I want to be? I don't want to be that kind of leader.
And I had to take away the ego and really just really listen and that changed the whole process for marketing. And it even helped the way that I dealt with certain departments. So sales, for instance, like, you know, sometimes, you know, you hear things from sales guys and you're like, oh, they're just sales guys. They don't know what they're doing.
But maybe the core, the big solution they came up with isn't, isn't, isn't the right thing. But there's a problem there. They've identified. And if you, if you don't listen to that, it can easily sit away, which, you know, kind of advertise back to being open.
So they were very connected. The third lesson I've learned was how to be lean. And this was a big one for us in marketing, you know, we're known as spenders. And being lean, not only refers to the way that employee count, I really can be employee count to as low as I could as long as I could.
But at a certain point, you know, there's a lot of work that needs to get pointed down. You know, you can imagine an organization that's going from like 70 to 800 people. You can imagine the needs of marketing kind of, you know, flows within a certain capacity in a positive correlation. But the other thing was that as we're being lean, you know, you need to be lean with the budget and then that.
But there's also things that you need to start doing to say, like, how can you be smarter and being lean? So how can you use data to make things more efficient? How can we do this? So we started to really look at things as this, this philosophy of being lean and it really helped.
Like even marketing campaigns, I started to, we figured out a way to tie revenue directly to every single dollar spent. And you know, whether it was 100% accurate, it was pretty accurate, you know, and that's a problem with that sometimes, you know, but we were trying to be lean in every capacity. And that really helped our organization grow and help really the marketing to sell with the organization. That's super cool, man.
So when it comes to being lean, like, as a marketer, right, like you're working on a lean budget, you want to work on that lean budget, how do you balance kind of what's worked to also like new things that are coming down in the pipeline a year, two years, maybe something that's happening now? How do you balance that? So when you say balance that, do you mean like when I know what's coming down from a product perspective? Yeah, like as a marketer say, like when you look at new technologies that are being through like artificial intelligence or even stuff through voice, like how do you look and be able to determine how can we start to maybe test in those certain areas without being like too crazy, but still kind of focusing on what working is working now.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's a great question, man. So my philosophy, which is, you know, digital, more so with digital approach and not just traditional. I think there's a time and place where with digital marketing solutions, the great thing about it is you can turn it on and off very quickly and you can start to move dollars.
So let's just say, for example, we had a $100,000 budget for campaign A, we would invest, you know, in the stuff that we know that works like 70 to 80%. And they're media team and our media partners and people that I would talk to would throw us some ideas that saying like, hey, why not invest 10, 20,000 here? And if it starts to work, we can actually ship dollars around. So I think, and just to tie to this too, I also think it's a lot of marketers are scared sometimes or just worried about perception and right or wrong on my end, I really worried about that because in the day, if you're starting to release solution and win, you know, with the campaigns and whatever you're doing, it's going to speak for itself.
So I always believe in taking risks at first and as long as they're calculating, you could easily rectify without losing much money, I'm very happy to take a risk. And that's what we did with every campaign that we did, which, and most of our campaigns live very digitally. So we were doing things like hyperactive geofencing strategies, which is, you know, because we were dealer focused, we needed to figure out how can we get to a dealer because we don't want, you know, the mechanic in the dealership, we don't necessarily want the sales guy, we want the dealer principal. So it was like, not only we were looking for the needle in the haystack, we were looking for the hole in the needle to thread the needle through the eye of the needle.
So we were figuring out ways how do we get that and we figured out a geofencing strategy which was based on qualifications. So we would send a dealership and add that would require them to be there from nine to five, at least five days a week. And then we tacked on something else which was sites they may have visited. So if they visited vacation sites or like, you know, they went to buying tickets for games or something like that, we started to think, okay, at least this person might be in the right direction and we would serve them the ad then and that worked really well for us, but it was a risk, right?
Like, how do you reach these people by not going through some of the tested and tried methods that the rest of the industry is using like print advertising, which is a big one for the automotive dealer to dealer industry. Yeah. Yeah, no doubt. I mean, the automotive industry, I was in the automotive industry for a bit.
So I kind of know that the odd, the auction business and the online auction and at least when I was in it, probably four or five, maybe, oh gosh, six years ago, it was crazy to see how kind of old fashioned all of these dealers were. Yeah. Yeah. 100%.
And my philosophy is like, let's do it brand new, just because it's been done, doesn't mean it always works. No doubt. And there's new owners being there and they're willing to try new things and a lot of car dealerships are, you know, a father will own it, a grandfather owned it, their son will own it. And now the owner taking over is going to be more prone to trying new things as well.
Yeah. So very cool. So as you move into to ready when, right? Like now, like you said, one of the things that really interested me in, which I've heard from a lot of other people is kind of this process of going as working from a marketer say or in sales to actually like taking a leadership role.
What are some things that have helped you become a better leader? A lot of the things that I mentioned to you, like being open and so forth is be humble applied to, I think, any leader and as I started to take on ready when, I think the biggest thing for me was around confidence, which was, can I take what I learned? Can I take not only what I learned, but my experience and can that translate into something that I could turn into something successful from ground up? And for me, one thing was I can.
And if this idea that I, the big idea that I had was rooted in, let's say, marketing or advertising, I think I could have done it on my own 100%. One advice that I've learned that was given to me was if you're going to go into an industry or any idea that requires you to sell or to build something, have someone of an expert there. And that's why I partnered up with my co-founder, Jesse Vaid, because he has such a, you know, being in the industry for 16 years, he has such a wide breadth of contacts, of knowledge that even if there were a competitor came up that tried to copy ready when, which I'm sure there's going to be, and I'm sure, I'm sure, like, I'm sure people are already kind of thinking about this, just with this current climate, right? Sure.
But unless you know the ins and outs, it's hard to really provide the journey that we're providing. And that was something that we really kind of, I'd write off the top, which is there's this opportunity to guide and give a little bit of peace, not only for the estate planner, but for the actual executor and for the family afterwards as well, we're creating a really nice path for them in the after-death mode, too. So we're catering to the whole process because I actually lost both parents, you know, about, I lost my mom in 2013 and I lost my dad in 2015. So having gone through it, I know how hard it was, and me and my brother, we held on to this paper checklist, like it was our lifespan when my dad passed away later on, and we had to go through the full estate plan, and it was so complicated.
There's things we had to research, you know, we never even knew what probate was until my dad passed. So the process is tattered, and it's hard. So with the right partner, we were actually able to form the right journey, which actually makes not only legal sense because we want to make sure we're doing this right, but it makes compassionate sense. And so that was lesson number one for me, which was just partner with the right people at first, you know, to make sure that you're jumping into a vertical maybe where you don't know, but they know.
So having a partner who knows that made my jump and my leap much easier. The second thing was knowing my experience and knowing, I think if I didn't have trade rev, I don't think I would be doing what I'm doing today because of the confidence. And I think everything for me, at least personally, it ties back to confidence, which is, you know, how seeing, you know, the errors we made in certain departments, you know, even quick ones that were like, you know, you know, high-sized 2020. So it's like, oh, money, one of quarterback, I would have done something different there.
But now knowing that what I would have done different for say operations or sales or this, I can apply those lessons here now and even marketing. I know what the mistakes I made. I'm not going to make those same mistakes now that I made back then. So, you know, it's just remembering and being very self-reflective of what you've been able to learn and apply it here to have the confidence to say, I can do this.
Yeah, 100%. Like, that's missing, I think, in a lot of new entrepreneurs, I'm sure you've seen this too, right? Like, I'm a believer that some of the best entrepreneurs have worked in companies as much as you have, because you're able to see how things operate. You have money to actually spend, like, you're actually applying these things as you go forward where a lot of people, they're starting off with zero, they've never worked in it.
And they're just like, it's like flipping a coin with 15 heads, you know? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So, it gives you that ability, and I think a lot of people, if you're looking to do that, I think one great way, and correct me if I'm wrong, is to maybe get in with a company to learn that.
Yeah. You know, I have a daughter, she's two. I think one of the biggest things I'm going to teach her is when she's ready to go on the workforce, I would highly encourage her to go through a startup, because even if you start in customer service, you will learn so much, just that process and the growth, and I really consider a trader at my, you know, my university, and advertising my high school. I learned so much about work ethic and how to do, how to think strategically, and how to work with different companies, and how to jump vertical to vertical, but a trader, if I learned really about how to run a business.
And I think that was what was missing for me from the advertising world, it's like, you are a partner to a business, but you're not the business. And being the business now and understanding how I would run marketing and sales, I actually have insight now that I can apply. Yeah. So, so interesting that you say that.
So now that you're kind of a young father and you have a daughter who's going to grow up, like the plan for university, are you going to push university or are you going to push more of like an application based learning? Ultimately, it's, I mean, my wife talked about it a lot, and I am a big component for education, but I think things have changed so much, like even if you look at the situation right now with COVID, I just read an interesting article the other day on the Globe and Mail where they're saying that between February to May of this year, e-commerce sales jumped 99.3%. And I think the ranks on the wall, whatever companies have plans for digital out, digitizing their own business, and let's just say the roadmap was, you know, three to five years, it's now. And if you're not thinking now, you're, you're going to fail and you're not going to move well because this is going to happen again and you're seeing the efficiencies that you can have through digital, digital chains and digital methodologies.
So it's, I think it's more important about skill set. So if I could teach her the, you know, coding, if I could teach her how to think strategically, I think those are going to be the roots of how to actually succeed in the future. So if I do that, and she, she bites onto it, who knows, she might want to be a painter at the end of the day. I don't know, but like, you know, if I could teach her some of the things to guide her in the right way and push her in the right way, I'm 100% going to do that.
Whether she goes to university or startup, you know, I'm not sure it really depends on the type of woman she becomes. I love that. Yeah. Education wise are there certain things you turn to.
And I read a lot. I wake up every day, you know, lately because of fear of my, being the startup. I'm up every day. Literally to vomit every day.
But I read a lot every morning till about six, 30, six, 45. And then I get ready. I get ready to get my daughter out of bed. And I got books or articles.
These articles. And the morning's always the news because one. I'm just curious, I'm worried what's happening with what the world is going to occur. Anyhow...
That you know, we haven't blown down the country, out of the sky at that point. I just want to make sure like I'm up to date and I read anything that I may have found and then at night I actually have like I don't know if you see right there. There's a stack of books Yeah, I'm making my way through that so I do read and then I actually lean on a lot of people so I wouldn't call them mentors as much as just important people in my life that I actually like listen to I listen to everybody who want me, but not everyone's right and I don't also feel like a lot Everyone's opinions is valid to you whether it might resonate with you But not me so but there's certain people that I've that I really listen to in my life about you know Finances about business and so forth so I always make time to learn from those people and I look up to them because it's success They've had and they don't have and part of the books I love to read his bios because I love to understand the choices people make because it takes guts to make the right choice Like you know I read the Anthony Kita's book and you know his life was going very sideways And he made a choice to be in a band. He made a choice to stick with it He made a choice and at the end days the Red Hot Chili Peppers And it was just interesting to see that and you know and I don't mean this as a joke one of the best biographies I actually ever read was Bernie Mac.
He was a comedian back and and he started very late in his life And it was interesting his persistence and his path and his determination to get where he ended up Which was being a comedian and you know being on a hit TV show But just those choices I just really love to learn about people's choices and how they ended up where they did good or bad You know like it's just those like journeys are so important to me 100% I used to see it for just relating this in sports I played golf so I was an athlete and the amount of people that you would see with the talent level There'd be certain people that could push through during those really tough times where you're in rough hotels eating absolute Crap some guys couldn't and it's interesting to see like just from those little small decisions Like their willingness to almost eat a little bit of that crap during that moment Yeah, that's a deciding factor ultimately for a lot of these guys on tour even a lot of the success that I've seen in business It's just their willingness to be okay with being at the bottom. Yeah, and it's a sacrifice right? Mm-hmm at trade rep. I was working on man like insane amount of hours like almost like I was working pretty much Before my my daughter was born in 2018.
I was working pretty much till midnight every night and on the on Sunday It was a pure work day. My wife knew I wasn't being bugged, but you know that that sacrifice led to some You know great wins for the marketing team great wins personally, too So I went take anything away from that But you know reading those books and understanding the fact that there's a choice to make where it's not always the easy path is Something that I took away that I hope to instill in my daughter But I've also instilled in like my friends and my family like my brother as well Like it's important for them to see that and the culmination of that was trade rep launched You know, we had a very we had a really nice office up in young and young but it was it was built for like I think 200 people or something like that and then in 2018 our office building was complete in downtown Toronto right at the corner of Right right across from Scotiabank Theatre. Yeah, and for me having being a part of the The process and being part of the senior management team and being able to now move into a company that had five floors And then part of Toronto the city I grew up in it was a very emotional moment for me like when the sign went up We did the school little time-lapse and I shared it, but we threw this party and I made sure to invite my wife and my brother because you know Family's important to me, but I wanted to show them what I was what I sacrificed time for That night and it was really it was an emotional moment for my wife when she's like holy like I didn't realize like how big this was And it was really cool cool night. Yeah.
Yeah, it's cool when you finally are able to kind of showcase everything that you've been doing, right? Yeah, that's tough when you're in it. Yeah, no doubt Well, such a man if people wanted to connect directly with you people wanted to reach out or maybe just learn more about who you are What you're doing ready when where's the best place everyone can go? Yeah, so people can reach me on my LinkedIn account such in ballot or they can go to ready when dot CA and Just hit up us on the contact page and I'll be sure to reach out right now.
It's me We're wearing so many all hats right now. Love it. Well, everyone go ahead and do that I'll share that in the show notes section and satram really appreciate you taking time out sharing a bunch of these lessons that you've learned and Helping a lot of people out today. Perfect.
Thank you. Thanks so much Colin. There you have it everybody We hope you enjoyed today's interview if you did hit that subscribe button share this episode out with one person Who feel like would truly benefit from today's podcast? We'll be back next week with another one as always until then keep on grinding