Why Staying True to Your Values is the Key to Success – Monish Luthra

In this insightful episode of The Quest for Success Podcast, Monish Luthra shares his personal journey of defining success, emphasising the importance of doing the right thing and maintaining peace of mind. Monish reflects on the powerful influence of his family values, especially the guidance of his father, and how these principles shaped his business decisions, particularly during the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Monish recounts his early career in technology, his transition into the cruise industry, and the hard lessons learned along the way. He also discusses the importance of instilling values like hard work and frugality in his children, drawing from his own experiences as an immigrant. Throughout the episode, Monish and host Dylan Pathirana discuss the evolving nature of parenting, the significance of leadership, and how Monish navigated the pandemic while retaining employees by focusing on growth and automation.

This conversation is packed with valuable insights on leadership, family, and overcoming challenges with a strong moral compass. Don’t miss out on Monish’s story of resilience, growth, and success while staying true to one’s values.

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Chapters:
00:00 Defining Success: A Personal Journey
05:01 The Role of Family and Values in Success
10:11 Career Beginnings: From College to Technology
15:52 Navigating Challenges: Early Life and Lessons Learned
27:28 Reflecting on Childhood vs. Modern Parenting
30:45 Key Lessons for the Next Generation
32:41 The Journey to Finding Love
36:57 Navigating Business Challenges
40:47 Thriving Through Adversity
46:12 The Impact of Leadership and Growth
48:55 Defining Success and Future Aspirations

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Transcript

Dylan Pathirana (00:00.11)
You drive your own success and I'd wake up at five in the morning and be in the office and I'd be in the office till 10 o'clock at night if I needed to. And COVID, cruising came to a complete standstill for about 18 months. know, and we let go of zero people. I am caddy daddy. That's a very special part of my life that I'm really enjoying right now. And that's made me a far better human being and a far better person in life.

than anything else I could have ever imagined.

Dylan Pathirana (00:47.278)
All right. Welcome back to the Quest for Success podcast. And thank you so much for tuning in once again. Today, we are really excited because we have a very special guest with us today all the way from America, Mr. Monish Sluithra. Monish, thanks for joining us. Thank you for having me. Yeah, really excited. So yeah, Monish and I studied together at Harvard Business School, doing OPM course together. And so I know Monish for the last two years and Monish is a regular visitor to Sydney.

And Australia, and he's got some business happening in Australia. So we can talk about all that stuff and nice to have you here. Thank you for having me. It's great to be here. So Monish, this podcast is all about understanding what success means to different people and really walking through their journey and trying to find the key ingredients lead to their success. So to kind of set the baseline here, I need to ask you a pretty fundamental question, which is what does success mean to you?

That's a great question. I don't know if I've given that much thought to it, but you know, I'd say success to me means doing the right thing and having peace of mind. I think money has never been a driving factor for me in things I've done. It's always been, am I making the right decision and will I be able to sleep well at night with the decisions that I'm making?

And can I get up and have a smile on my face and still do what I do? And if I'm doing that, I feel I'm pretty darn successful and good. Yeah. And when you say the right thing, what do you mean by that? Yeah, look, the right thing could be very good as just, you know, do I feel it's ethical? You know, my parents, feel, gave me great education on that. My father ran his own business and

He'd always tell me, you should always be direct and straight with your customers or with people that you deal with. You're better off being honest from the onset, know, so what you can do, what you can't do. If you're honest and you stick with it, you know, you're always, you'll feel better about it. So I think that's really what I have run my company, my business with is always that, you know, our pricing strategies, how we communicate with clients, how we communicate with employees. I'd rather go to an employee say,

Dylan Pathirana (03:06.754)
this is what I don't like and why I'm doing this or this is what I do like and why I'm doing this. So as long as I am honest and true, think it works well. So, in a way, if I may like kind of summarize what you're saying, if you feel like, know, whatever you're doing make you satisfied, right? And feel, it's giving other people

you know, something that they feel good, right? So is that how you define like, you know, your success? Like it's more true to yourself. I think it's more about, I don't want to be cutthroat in business. You know, I want to make the smart business decisions when it comes to, you know, hiring people, firing people or something like that. A great example I always tell everyone is, you know, in my business, we're in the cruise travel technology business and COVID.

Cruising came to a complete standstill for about 18 months. know, when we let go of zero people. Wow. You know, we retained all of our staff. That's definitely a success. We took pay cuts at the managerial level and the top level to make sure that we didn't let go of any of our staff. And that's now become a great story. You know, I'm very proud to say the decisions that I made during that time, they really were right.

And actually really helped me today making a lot of other decisions. Cause I remind myself, I'm like, look, we went through that. Yeah. You know, zero income suddenly disappearing entirely. And we decided to retain all our staff, build on that, grow on that, you know, and then in, you know, if I flipped that on the personal side, you know, that's more from a business standpoint, you know, on the personal side, how do you say, are you being, you know, truthful? Are you being right? You know,

giving the right things to my kids, spending time with my family, you know, that's what I look as, I'm doing the right thing or I'm, you successful in that. That's how I measure it. Being transparent and values driven. Yes. Yeah. So you mentioned a few things there and I think I want to unpack them. Yeah. But before we begin, if you were to introduce yourself to a stranger, how would you introduce yourself?

Dylan Pathirana (05:28.426)
hi, I'm Monish. That's it. Yeah, we need to understand what, what mean by Dylan. Who is Monish? do you do? you know, I mean, I know about you, what you're doing and, but how do you explain that to? Look, I think right now I introduce myself as I am Kadhi Daddy. That's a very special part of my life that I'm really enjoying right now. And I think everyone knows this about me now is

You know, my daughter who's 12 has taken up golf and she's sort of most just about two years now, three years that she's been playing golf. And more so the last 18 months have been a lot more serious of golf. And I spent about five hours with her walking and carrying her. And that's made me a far better human being and a far better person in life than anything else I could have ever imagined. And being

her caddy has really transformed me to be a very different person. So I say I'm a caddy. And that's a great, you know, I would say, adjective to have to yourself, I would say, I really like the personality. You're taking it very seriously as well. remember when I was in Miami last time, remember you said, I got to go and caddy my daughter.

So, know, that was your priority, right? No, no, I moved my business trips around that. Wow. I will move like last year when I was in Sydney, I literally came to Sydney for four days because I had to fly back so that I could be there for my daughter for a golf tournament. And I've missed quite a few golf tournaments when I am traveling and that's part of her upbringing as well, you know, and that's part of the coaching that I'm doing with her, which is, look, you got to start playing by yourself too.

And then when I'm with you and we'll train it as, and use it as a different sport, as a different thing. And then when you're playing by yourself, you apply what you and I discuss on a course, course management, things like that. So, you know, we have our ups and downs in it, but I'd say I like caddy, I'm a caddy, you know. That's such an awesome story. We'll definitely have to go into it, but I want to understand what you do.

Dylan Pathirana (07:47.734)
your business. You mentioned a few things about software and cruising. So tell me a bit more about what your business is. Yeah, look, a great way to say it would be, you know, so I'll start with how I got into it or how I got into technology altogether. Right. So when I went to college, I went and did communication. And it was December 1999. You know, everyone's worried about Y2K, blah, blah, blah.

I was in New York doing my first 10 days to work. My boss from the summer had hired me again to do some work. I'd go every evening, hang out with a friend and we'd go to pub crawl in New York City. One day I show up to his place and he goes, I can't go. My designer just quit. I have a big meeting with an investor to raise some capital and I need to build this sort of website type thing or something. So there we sat at about eight o'clock in the evening, we started.

with Macromedia, Dreamweaver or something and built a pop-up website for him. You click a button and it opens or something. And at about four o'clock we were done. The next day he raised a few million dollars. So I never looked for a job. He basically said, when you graduate, come find me and I'll give you a job. And I went back to school. I had my last semester and I changed my entire curriculum. I went and said, I'm gonna do Java.

I'm gonna do a course where I make a video, I'm gonna do this thing, a website. And I switched out about 12 credits and I started doing everything around computing. And I walked out and I joined my friend's company and I worked there. And within three weeks, the COO that he had hired came to me and said, you're gonna run the IT division. I have no technical background, no training. I've just left college and the guy goes,

You're managing these 16 people, you know, and they were like DBAs, SQL guys, and they taught me everything. You know, they literally taught me how to write SQL scripts. They taught me how to do programming. And so we'd commute an hour every day on train and I would print out stuff and I'd be sitting in reading programming and how to write Java code or SQL and JavaScript and things like that. And then I wasn't very happy with the way my friend was running the company.

Dylan Pathirana (10:11.554)
He was doing everything I would never do with the business. And I decided in a year, I told him I'm leaving and I went and applied for a few jobs. I think it was one of those years where I applied for a job in the morning at about 11 o'clock. By two o'clock I had four interviews lined up. It was just crazy. I didn't know what was going on. Some fortune, I interviewed to actually work at the World Trade Center building.

You know, I didn't take that. I interviewed at another job which was in the same building that I was already in. I didn't take that. And then I traveled to the suburbs of Philadelphia for an interview. And I really liked the guy who interviewed me. And he and I got along very well. And as I was driving back from there, my parents were visiting from India and I called them up and I said, I'm gonna be moving.

They had not even offered me the job at this point in time. And I told them, said, he's going to give me what I want and I'm going to be moving. And two weeks later I was there, you know, in the suburbs of Philadelphia, I had moved and I joined a cruise travel agency that sold cruises. And when I joined them, they were one of the first in 2000 to have launched an online booking platform that allows users to go and book cruises online. But

the way they were structured or whatever, this company had a hundred FTEs doing about 25 million in sales, 0.0 % automation, would say, 0.07, something ridiculous, like very low. They had all this, but their automation rate was just terrible. So I went in and I sort of took six months to understand what everyone does in the different business units, things like that. And then we started writing code.

And I hired a couple of the developers to help me write stuff. And six months later, we did our first rollout. And a few weeks later, the CEO came to me and said, Monish, are you sure there's nothing wrong? We must be missing something. It was such a smooth rollout, right? There must be something that's being missed. And I was like, no, no, I've been checking every day. Everything looks great and everything like that.

Dylan Pathirana (12:31.564)
And two years into it, we were at about 85 % automation within the company. Our paper usage had gone down dramatically. Like I think we were using less than 10 % of the paper that our teams were using prior to that. were you doing there, Monish? What was your role there? Head of IT. IT. Yeah. Everything technology from running the call center, tech stuff to everything. I don't know how, but I fell into it. You know, Jack of all trades. Yeah.

So when it came to technology and really I learned a lot, but also it was one of those, right? You drive your own success and I'd wake up at five in the morning and be in the office and I'd be in the office till 10 o'clock at night if I needed to, to try and figure out how to make the call center work or how to make this technology work or that technology work. But business process automation is what my specialty became. I realized that if I saw processes for it long enough,

I would automate them and I would figure out how we should spend less time doing that. You know, this company went from a hundred FTE to about what? 12 FTEs. Wow. Doing more business. Doing more business, less people. Less people. You know, and it was all based on just us plugging in automation and online tools for people to use. Which is what actually gave me the idea for starting Adesia solutions.

And, you know, I had been thinking of it and actually my first stint of trying to start Adesius was within Cruise 401, the CEO, myself and the VCs, they all wanted to try and do something there. But again, I did not like the way they were running the business. They wouldn't give me money for technology, but they'd have people for selling the technology hired, which made no sense. They were paying somebody over a hundred grand.

and bringing them in to sell tech that I had not developed yet. Like they were literally selling vaporware, you know, and I didn't like my name being attached to it or anything like that. And then suddenly the CEO up and left. So the VCs decided to shut the whole firm. And I got copied on a wrong email. was visiting, funny, I was visiting Kellogg that day to do an interview for the executive MBA.

Dylan Pathirana (14:55.038)
Because I was thinking of doing that at that point in time. And I got copied on the wrong email and I called one of the board of directors and I said, am I reading this email right? He's like, you weren't meant to be on it. But the conversation was to shut the company. And it was going to happen like Monday. Everyone who walks in would be given a slip saying thank you. You know, and then suddenly on a Saturday morning, I got a call saying someone's looking to buy cruise 411.

Can you come in and help? I was like, yeah. So showed up there on Saturday. Actually that guy who bought it runs one of the largest cruise agencies today in America, World Travel Holdings. And the owner and I are still friends. They're actually a client of Fidesius now as well. But he always remembers when he meets me, he's like, you were just there and you came and helped us. You're in the right time, right place in the right time. Knowing I wouldn't have a job.

Yeah. You know, I still helped everyone else to retain their job. And actually it wasn't that knowing I wouldn't have a job. They wanted, they didn't need the IT team that we had. And I had a couple of the guys that were on H1B visa. I didn't have the same problem. So I told them, keep those guys. And if they need anything, they'll call me. Don't worry about it. I'll find myself something. And that's sort of how I started Desius. know, so when was that?

That was in 2005, July. So we just completed 19 years. guess what? I started my business 2005, July as well. yeah. What day? Sixth of July. July 15th. one week. A week apart. Yeah. That's crazy. And I would definitely dive a lot more into your business endeavors. But one thing we found in our conversations is people's trajectories.

are often shaped by their early life. Yeah. And so I want to go back to your early life. Can you tell us a bit about it and how you think it's shaped who you are today? early life. we growing up, my father always had his own business. you were born in not in US, right? No, I'm born in Bombay, Mumbai, as they call it now. It was still Bombay when I left. So I still call it Bombay.

Dylan Pathirana (17:19.768)
But born and raised in Bombay and then I moved to US for college. But my father ran his own business and he was a salesman where he used to sell hardware items to the Middle East. So like brass hardware, gold hardware, know, these hinges on doors or these things. It's funny, you know, in the Middle East they needed to be brass or gold.

Yeah, exactly. And that's what my father sold. So I picked up a few things from him and I always still remind and I always tell him even today that he's probably taught me more about everything of what not to do and what to do in life and in business, you know, in that. So I would attribute a lot to my father and my mother in that, you know. But my dad would always be home because if he, because he didn't actually...

own the manufacturing plants or anything like that. Somebody else ran all that. So all he would do is tell them, this is the order, make this much and go and monitor it once in a way. And other than that, if he traveled once in three months to visit people, short of that, he was always at home. So you're almost like a painful process because your father's always around. know, you're a And your mom's always there because she's not working. She's the homemaker from there. And you're like...

Great. Our parents are always home and you we talked to other people and their dads would not be home all the time. So like, you know, you could get on the phone differently, you know, back in those days, it felt like that. So, but today, you know, when we started working later on in our lives, we were like, wow, our dad was the luckiest person in the world. He was always home. He could spend time with his kids. They didn't want to spend time with him. My kids don't want to spend time with me, but you know, they...

They could see him all, like, you it was just like, wow, I can do nine to five. Or as I said, I was working from five in the morning to 10 at night. I mean, and my father was just home. So like, you know, that was the thing when I started my business, I was like, I have to make sure that I can run the business such that I can also spend time with my family. Yeah. You know, that was an important part of it, you know, and then he always taught me about ethics, pricing models, how to think of when you're giving pricing, don't give,

Dylan Pathirana (19:42.702)
pricing to customer A and then go and give a different price to customer B just because they're smaller or bigger. And stick with your pricing. You should have a name in the industry that says, when he says something, that's what it means. And so that was a great insight of what he taught me from those early days. I think like all of those little nuggets that we picked up, growing up like 10, 11 years old.

He'd take us for dinners with his clients when they're visiting from the Middle East and you he'd have those business conversations. And now I feel like, wow, I was so lucky to be sitting in those rooms at that point in time. was like, whatever you're running around, you know, it was little exposure that we got that really helped. You had any siblings and what was your childhood like? You you had a pretty good childhood playing with your...

Brothers and sisters or? I'd say, you know, I'm the guy whose class is always full. So I've always had a great time in life. have a brother, older brother, he lives in London. My younger sister lives in Vancouver, but my younger sister is almost like a daughter to me. She's 10 years younger than me. And so when she was still young, when we left India, I think she was about eight when I left.

And then at about 12, she moved to the U S when I joined cruise four on one and started my journey in travel. my sister moved to U S and lived with me and she trained for tennis. So I actually took on the responsibility of having her there, having her trained for tennis, help my parents out with that process. So my mom would live with us and then my dad would commute back and forth during those years. And it was about six years that,

she spent with me before she went into college. Sorry to interrupt. I just wanted to jump on quickly and say a massive thank you for all of the support so far. But I also wanted to ask a favor of you guys. We want this podcast to reach as many people as possible so that we can share all of the incredible learnings that we've had so far. But in order for us to do that, we need to grow our following to beat the algorithms. But the good news is, however,

Dylan Pathirana (22:04.29)
There is one simple thing that you can do to help us reach that goal. So I ask you if you could please follow or subscribe to us on whatever channel you're listening to this on. It'll help us grow the channel, which means we can get on bigger and better guests for you guys. And with that, back to the episode. All right. So when did you actually move to US? How old are you then? I was 17 when I moved to US. Any particular reason that you thought?

going to US? I went for college. I went, my brother was already there. All right. In 95, my brother had already joined. He always wanted to go to US to study. I had zero interest. I only study. I always say this to my mom. said, I only studied because of you. She wanted me to. But I only did college because she wanted me to. But I bet you were excited to go to US, right? Yeah, very excited.

You know, was selling, we met some friends yesterday and was selling Sandy when we left. I was sitting at the airport and when I gave my mom a hug, I still remember, I can still picture it. And I told her, I said, I'm moving homes now and I will, this will no longer be my home. US is now gonna be my home. So before I took that plane, I knew that. You know, I could feel it. The gut told me that that's what's gonna happen. And you know,

The first few years in US, I'd say we had fun, but they were tough, right? You had to come and find a job. We're not used to it. Coming from India, you're used to people helping you. You don't have to go and work now. Suddenly you're going and working as a bus boy, clearing people's dishes. Not natural to you, but you know, we made our way. We'd convert currency all the time. I love this story. I tell everyone, you know, the first time there was wings night and you get 10 wings for a dollar.

And it's 10 cents a wing that means. So somebody tells me, hey, you it's like this. And I try and find people to split the $1 so I could afford to buy wings. Because I would have to convert that to Indian rupees and I'd be like, that's so expensive. I can't spend that. But those were college days. The first two years in college were a lot like that. You'd be sitting in converting and not wanting to spend a dollar. Or in the summers when I'd go and look for a job in New York City.

Dylan Pathirana (24:30.57)
I'd buy a bagel and cream cheese for a buck in the morning and eat half of it for lunch and half of it for dinner. Because that was the budget for the day. Couldn't spend like if there was a deli that was selling it for a buck 25, I couldn't afford it. I would go to the deli, go 20 blocks in the wrong direction to the deli that sells it for a buck, buy it and that would be the meal. Yeah, yeah. I know exactly what you're saying because I had the similar kind of background as an international student.

I remember once I was using one tissue box for a whole year. Yeah. And I was very carefully taking one tissue. know, the lessons that you learn, right? Going through that experience, lessons that you learn not to waste. Yeah. Right. Like, know, every the value of the money. Right. When your parents paying, giving you food and everything, you don't really have to do it. Right. that. You don't really realize how much effort to get that.

that meal, you know, so. 100%. Yeah. mean, you transform, you transform into a better person, Yeah. Appreciate things. And especially appreciate your parents. Right? Yeah. And do think that goes like beyond those years into your later life as well? I'm still very frugal with my money. You know, I count down to the penny. I'll make sure what we are spending on that set for the food. I make sure I always have a good meal, but that's something I did.

After three, four years of being in U.S., the one thing I always cherished was a meal because of some of those hardships that I had in my early on. was like, no, I got to have a drink and a meal and that has to be a proper sit down meal. It can't be always on the go and everything like that. But I try to teach my kids the same thing, you know, make them earn their way if they make mistakes in that or they lose stuff. Or my daughter on a golf course, if she'll forget her range finder, she has to buy it herself from her own money. That's not cheap.

You know, those things cost between 300 to $500. And once she's done, had to pay, she's now learned how to put it back in the bag every time, how to put the covers back on because if she wants to cover back. So I think I pushed that down as well. So I think it is very much there, you know, that we do need to be frugal. And I love reminding myself of these stories and sharing these stories as well, because I think it helps the kids, but I do sometimes say my kids are very lucky.

Dylan Pathirana (26:57.87)
I'm sure you feel. Jam can say the same thing for what he's given to you, Dylan is, know, wow. mean, you know, our kids, the way you guys are living, you know, we in Miami, like couldn't afford the house or, know, my parents couldn't afford a house or giving me that kind of a lifestyle, you know, but whatever they gave me was fantastic. You know, I love them for it. I have a question on that. Do you ever think about

Would you rather be in your kids shoes now or do you value the experiences that you had and the hardships that you went through? So I'm not a Kudashitavada person. You know, this is the, you know, it's been late, the bed's been laid. You know, this is who I am. This is what it is. I do not want to be in my kids shoes now, especially given the social media these days and the gadgets and everything like that. I actually love what I had before as a kid, you know.

You open the door and you go out and you figure out how to have fun. know, whether it's riding a bike, playing cricket, you know, or playing volleyball or whatever, or badminton, you know, but that was the only choices you had. You know, there was no such thing as, let me go on my iPad or my phone and do things. No. In fact, when we grew up, TV had maybe two shows that would come on only at certain hours in the evening. It wasn't even 24 hours. Yeah. You know, so.

I wouldn't trade that for a thing. I wish my kids could. And we even today control how much tech time we give our kids and everything because of that. Because we feel like, and we can see it, it consumes them. You remember we used to write letters? These guys don't even know what that means. I remember I used to write a letter to my parents, my friends back in Sri Lanka, and it take two, three weeks to get there.

And then they're right back straight. So you're talking about month and half to get a respond back and you're waiting, you're checking your mailbox every day. You know, once you get that, that feeling, these kids never going to have that. Yeah. The excitement, feeling, you know, it's all these emails and text messages, know, streaming instant gratification now.

Dylan Pathirana (29:18.474)
Yeah, it is. Well, you know, and I'm a big believer in instant gratification when it comes to having the new iPhone or some tech gadget that I want or something. That's fine. But yeah, you know, like we used to write letters to our parents and the parents used to write letters to us in college. Like I remember, forget that's even, I would have a fixed time on a particular day on a weekend that I would call my parents and I could only speak to them for two minutes because it was $3 a minute of phone call. You know.

Today, that same thing with FaceTime or WhatsApp. My mom messages me every day practically if she wants to, and she'll get a message back. like, wow, for her, that's instant gratification for her now, WhatsApp messaging. So I think in some ways that's great, what it's done for us and everything. But I wouldn't want to be in my kids' shoes. And I think it's good for them. And I see that as progress. If I look at my father came from a village and look at what he's done.

and where he's put his kids. And all of them are settled internationally, in fact, very far away from each other and from them, you know. And we are giving our kids the next line that this is what you have to do. All I can hope for is that my kids will take that and extend that further, you know. And that's all I can hope for them. absolutely. And you talked about, you know, you're trying to teach your kids, pass on some of your knowledge.

Are there any other key lessons that you're trying to leave to your kids? Key lessons. Look, lessons are taught by themselves. I don't believe at this age I can teach them a lot of lessons. I can just hope they listen and they'll remember this 10 years, 20 years later, because I have repeated it enough times in different ways that it got embedded in their brain. Because there's no way otherwise they would do it. Only if it becomes second nature, you know.

to them and it becomes the thinking that's the way it is. I think, it work? So all I can do is remind myself that I have to keep doing the things repeated. And most importantly, like I tell my wife, expect nothing in return. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So Monish, talking about your wife that you mentioned, just take us through, like, you know, when you went to US, you studied and how did you meet her and like, you know,

Dylan Pathirana (31:45.326)
Yeah. So I, you know, I always say this before I started Odysseus, I was actually interviewing for a job. I would have joined a hedge fund. My ex-boss from Cruise Forward One had joined a hedge fund and was recruiting me to bring in and I would have become a principal with him and everything. And I gave up that job. I mean, this guy was guaranteeing me $300,000 a year back in 2005 with a commitment to go up to a million dollars within a couple of years.

And I said, no, I'm to go start the Desi EstiLations, my own company. And it all came from, I interviewed some with one of the principals of the firm. And when I spoke about certain things, he said, Monique, you sound so passionate about what you've done and certain things. You're going and joining a hedge fund. We're giving you a job. There's nothing for you to do here. You're not going to build any rocket science in this finance industry. And he's right. You know, I wasn't going to be able to change.

how the Bloomberg or how the, you know, those guys read all that, you know, it would be what it is. And it would be a little bit of automation here or there, but it wouldn't be something I could be passionate about. But I say that because that kept me in travel, because I met my wife through travel. so through Adesius, as I built my firm, you know, in 2008, one of my clients, more on the flight side said, hey, American Airlines is launching a flight from Chicago to Moscow.

send me your passport because we are going to Russia. So I was in San Fran, but I always fly anywhere with my passport and I send him my passport and he arranged for the visa and I flew a few weeks later in October, October 17th. I still remember the day, 2008. I flew to Chicago and there was a group of about 15 of us going to Moscow.

And Anna, my wife was one of them and she was part of the group who he had brought on so that she arranged all the apartments in Moscow for us. She wanted to have nothing to do with me when she saw me. She said, hello. She looked away and she walked away. On the plane, we may have said hello once to each other. And I was partying with everyone else. You we are all flying business class, American Airlines footing the bill. We're all going to Moscow.

Dylan Pathirana (34:10.062)
We spent a few nights in Moscow, long story short, you know, I made a few moves here and there, but we are going to the airport. And once we get to the airport, she's checking in on one side, I'm checking in on the other side. And I look at the counter girl and I said, can you have her sit with me? And these two girls are talking something in Russian. She's talking something. And I said, why are you laughing? What's going on? She goes, before you asked.

She asked to put you next to him. My wife had the same thing. And so we sat on that 10 hour journey from Moscow to Chicago. We sat next to each other. We probably spoke nonstop and here we are. After that flight, you became boyfriend and girlfriend. We knew within a week we had met. Then we actually stopped dating for a bit. then, cause we didn't want long-term long distance relationships. She was in Atlanta.

I was in Miami and then one of the times she messaged me randomly and she said, know this, and I said, I'm going to London. I'll be in London that week. She's like, I'm going to Russia. I'll meet you in London on my way. And we met in London and I think that was the writing on the wall when we met there. A few weeks later, flew up to Atlanta and drove her and all her stuff down to Miami and we moved in together. That's how we started dating.

So we started living together from like practically day one of being together. And then I flew my parents out that summer and I said, look, you want to come meet this girl? Cause I'm going to marry her. And you know, here we are two kids later. That's it. Now we have two kids, two girls, two daughters. Yeah. 12 and 10. One's about to be 11 next month.

Wow. And already into the golf. That's awesome. Yeah. My 12 year old is into golf. My 10 year old is into running and lacrosse. Wow. So I'm really looking forward to her continuing with the running thing so I can maybe run some marathons with her. So I am a marathon runner myself. I've run New York, Chicago and London. I just applied for Tokyo. I'm hoping next year in March, I'm going to run Tokyo. Should come and do the Sydney Marathon. Yeah, know. One of the days I will. That's awesome. That's awesome. And I...

Dylan Pathirana (36:27.682)
Looking back on your journey, do you think there's any pivotal mentors that you had along the way? Yeah, for sure. mean, look, my parents, for sure. You know, if I wanted to bounce something off, I've always had a lot of friends and it's, I'm not shy. I pick up the phone and I'll ask them a question or something like that. You know, so I have a couple of friends that when I need some advice on or something like that, I'll find my way to go to them. And then

Amazingly, I just sort of read how someone like Steve Jobs or, you know, Mark Zuckerberg would handle some of these things. And I sort of follow a lot of that, you know, and I find that reading what they did, how they encountered certain situations, how they did that, how they managed it helps me. And that's what I do. That's really interesting. And I suppose when you first started your business,

I'm sure it wasn't easy going. How did you kind of get through that period? I think I was still going through it. Is running a business ever easy? Yeah, it's always a roller coaster. I think small businesses, small problems, big businesses, big problems. That's my friend of mine said that, you know, he's like a small kids, small problems, big kids, big problems. And I translate that to business, I would say.

Look, when I started the company, if somebody told me, Monish, you're going to have 150 people working for you and this is what you're going to do, I would have said, you're kidding. There's no way. I think in fact, some of the friends, when I started the company, they were like, do you really think you can even compete with some of these companies? And I was like, I'll try. I've always believed in there's no harm in trying. The worst you can do is succeed or fail. And as long as you're learning from that failure.

So when I started, was all about, I want to have fun. I want to travel the world. And I did that. So I would literally be in my house in Miami for maybe two weeks in a month. And the remaining two weeks, I'd be traveling somewhere across US, globally, go and work from anyone's house, go and meet some friends, go meet some family, work from there, run the company like that. We were literally...

Dylan Pathirana (38:51.874)
you know, four people working out of their own homes here and there. And I was managing the business like that. And then I met Anna and then I had to sort of reduce that travel a little bit. And then we had our first child and then I had to further reduce that and change that. I was like, wait a second, I need to grow the business a little bit more. So it's actually, my kids have been fundamental to the growth of the business. It's funny because it was my first daughter was born is when I

expanded my first, took the first step in expansion. My second daughter was born and I was like, man, two kids. I gotta really get my act together. And actually did a course at Harvard at that point in time, a four day course on just how to navigate your small business. It was called Leading Your Small Business. we did the same concept, case studies, meet in a group.

discussed them, but was only four days, but I met some really smart guys. felt, wow. And that changed my thinking completely. And I went to India and I said, get three times the size of the office. Even if we don't fill it now, we'll fill it two years from now. But even then, my manager there, Rignesh, one of my favorite people in the world who helps me a lot with my company, he and I spoke and I was like, don't worry, we'll never grow more than 50 people.

I mean, and then we sort of then said, okay, we're going to expand more. I mean, expand more. And then pre-COVID, we were about 70 something people in the company. When I decided not to fire anyone. then post-COVID, we were 150. Wow. So, that's how much... Like we've actually taken when COVID hit and having business to go ahead, we actually grew. So I want to ask you a question on that.

It was such a challenging time for most businesses, especially in the hospitality and travel industry. How did you come out of it on the other side more successful? What was, what did you do differently? Well, I didn't fire anyone. So I kept everyone there and I think they all gave me a lot of good wishes and they prayed for me, that we were successful, in that. look, we made all the right decisions, you know, maybe we made mistakes.

Dylan Pathirana (41:16.632)
But we picked up from those mistakes and we said, move on. So we sort of buckled it and said, this is where we can control costs. We can't let go of people to control our costs. And we're do that. And I'd be up till two, three in the morning calling bankers in India, trying to figure out what kind of loans I could get if I had to get to that level, what properties I had, how much leverage I was willing to take. I had put all of those things in line and said, this is what we're gonna do.

have everyone and we're gonna sort of go back to our business and say, are things that we do manually today that we can automate so that when the clients come back, we can turn them on faster. And that's sort of what we did. We took our own internal processes and we started automating them.

So you your resources more into looking at the future and... Exactly. And we did that. And like today when we have a new client, mean, you know, my competition can't even come close to how quickly I can launch a new client. You I do it in days and weeks, they do it in months. And all because of what I did during that time. You know, we just went and said, this is what we're going to do. And everyone's going to stay here and we're going to focus on improving that. You know, and it was a really tough time, especially India. India had some really...

bad, bad brushes with COVID. You know, I remember one of my trips to India during COVID and this guy came to meet me and he said, Monish, in India, the difference is when you meet someone, either they have had COVID and been in bed in the hospital or someone in their household has done that, you know. And if these two haven't happened, they've lost somebody from the household.

And that was so true. You spoke to anyone. One of these three was a hit. Yes, my aunt died. My grandmother died. COVID. This one died. Or I spent 10 days in the hospital and I didn't even have a bed. Like this guy was telling us his story about how there were like 20 beds in the room. And he said, this bed, somebody would, whoever went in that bed was dying. And when they were trying to move him there, he's like,

Dylan Pathirana (43:29.58)
That bed I'm not going to go because while I've been here for 10 days, you've had four people go there and they've all died. You know, I mean, but that's how they were. know, so it was quite a gruesome story every time you heard something like that. So I felt pretty good about what we had made the decisions on from a business standpoint and a personal standpoint. You know, we gave everyone whatever time they needed. You know, we said, hey, you're sitting at home and work. You know, you're getting paid. I can't tell you to work overtime, but you want to, you can.

and we'll make everything better as things get better. And we did, you know, a year later when things started to pick up. You know, and during that time, we also made a lot of smart moves in terms of how I reached out to certain clients to see. I made a pretty big move with a pretty large client where I said, hey, you you guys have your own tech. Maybe you guys want to look at us. It could be a cost savings for you.

You know, and crews for big OTAs is, you know, travel agencies or online sites. Like, you know, over here you have flight center and, or webchats is the other one, right? The big OTA here, right? And if you look at what do they sell mostly? Flight, not as much crews. So where would they spend money on? Flights. And that's, that's what I did. So I basically started reaching out to in US companies like that and said,

Cruz is your ignored child. It's my only child that I focus on. Let me focus on that for you. And I actually signed some really good deals because of that. I mean, it took two, three years to happen, but you know, as all good things do, they take time, but you got to lay the seeds down. And we did. So that's sort of what we did during COVID. We sort of laid a lot of seeds out and said, and it was, you know, in a baseball strategy, a baseball saying.

I'm batting a hundred. Like literally it was insane. Like literally if we laid down five seeds, all five started growing. we got lucky too. Because there's competition as well at that time. Everyone's kind of giving up, letting people go and chaos. But then you look that negative situation into a positive. And then you took the full advantage. Yeah. Yeah. It's amazing. Amazing story. Yeah. Thank you.

Dylan Pathirana (45:52.66)
Do you ever look back when you said like, we'll never get to 50 employees. Do you ever look back on that now and think like, wow, like you're for me, supporting the families of 150 people. That's an incredible achievement. Do ever look back on that and think the impact that you've had?

Yeah, I don't like giving myself credit for things like that because they help me more than I help them, I think, to get to where I am. So I'm not going to take credit for something like that. I mean, yes, I'm very lucky that I am able to employ that many people and have that much that many team members. I like to think of them as employees. They're better as team members. Do I think I'm naive?

that I said that or did that? No, because that was my knowledge at that point in time. So I can't really say I did something wrong. Was I short-sighted? Maybe, but I could only have seen what I allowed myself to see. And do I give myself more room to think a little bit bigger, better now? And I think I attribute a lot of meeting guys like Jam and our team from HBS. That's helped me.

You know, that's, think is the biggest takeaway would be it allows me to sit back and say, do I need to put myself in that box and how wide can that box be? You know, it did help with that. no, don't, again, no, Kudashara Voodha. You learn from your mistakes. I told myself 50 was the max I'd be. 150 is the number 300. I don't know. Do I want to get to that? I don't know. You know, I don't go by that. That's not the number I want to hit. You know, do I want to be

successful in what I'm doing and how do I rate that? I want my customers, when they meet me and I have that relationship with them, they enjoy meeting me. They're not going to sit there and complain, will they raise certain issues because someone hasn't done something? Of course, you know, that's business. But for the most part, I want them to have a positive feeling of what we've built for them and how their teams use it. And as long as that's happening, I'm happy. know. And so we've talked about,

Dylan Pathirana (48:03.82)
your incredible journey, but what's next for Manish? Yeah, I see myself focusing a lot more on the caddy role. you know, and I call myself the caddy for my business now as well. I'd like to be a caddy in business too. so right now I'm implementing EOS in the business and, that I'm very excited about because now I'm grooming the next leadership group in my team to do that. And I'm their caddy.

And I want them to be the executioner while I'm literally just sitting on the side and enjoying the benefits of it and spending more time on a golf course. I love that. I love the, it's real life and also an analogy as well. So that's fantastic. And my last question for you is, think I already know the answer, but do you feel successful? Yes.

Yeah, absolutely. I spend a lot of time with my family. That's what I define as success. know, I'm relatively well to do, you know, we have a good life. We travel, we see the world. That's all that matters, I feel, you know, and I sleep well at night when I do sleep, you know, and those things are very important to me. And that's what I tell everyone. I'm like, money comes and goes. Peace of mind. That's super important, you know.

So throughout our conversation, I've been jotting down a few things, which I think have been a core to your success. And so I want to share them with you. The first one I think is you're very value driven. And you spoke about your definition of success, like doing the right thing, being very ethical. And I think everything that you do is very much aligned with your values. During COVID, you could have easily let go of those people, but you you wanted to do the right thing by, by.

your values. And I think that's, that's incredible trait to have. The other thing is you, you take opportunities as they come. Like you, you said you were studying communications and then this opportunity came up to go into technology. And a lot of people would have, you know, dwelled on that for a while, but it seems like you, took that by the horns and then went straight into it. And I think taking those opportunities as they come up is,

Dylan Pathirana (50:20.194)
something that gets you further down the line. And then I think for me, one of the biggest ones is your optimism. I've only known you for like an hour and you have the smile hasn't left your face. And throughout our conversation, you're always looking at the glass is half full or it's full. It's full, it's always full. And I think especially in that COVID example, so many people would have seen this is it for me. This is the end of my business.

But you saw it an opportunity and you can tell the consequence of that obviously is shows how positive being optimistic is. And another one is you're very all or nothing. Yeah. I think, and maybe a better way to say that is intentional. You know, when you're with your family, you're with your family, you're caddying out on the golf course. When you're at work, as you said, 5am to 10pm, you're there and you show up.

Yeah. All the time. And then the last one is, is family. You're a family man. And you, you don't forget what your, priorities are. And I think that's, that's really important. Yeah. And also, talking about, hanging out with friends. Yeah. When you're hanging out with friends, you're always giving you a hundred percent. Manish is a very, Manish is a very popular guy in our, our, group, and, party hard as well and, enjoy, I mean, work, work hard.

enjoy life as well, you know, so can I enjoy life? What else are you working hard for? It's like I work out so I can have alcohol and carbs. Otherwise, what am I working out for? It's a privilege to have you Manish because it's a journey. mean, it's a wonderful journey and you're very humble person as well. You don't want to talk too much about your business success. I guess you're running a global business and very large organization like what you've done.

similar to background-wise, not so much like success. I our success in a different ways, I guess, but coming from India and Sri Lanka, going as international students and finding a partner in that country and building a business and serving that new home, I guess, like the found home. And I can relate it to you and I can, mean,

Dylan Pathirana (52:46.2)
Thank you for sharing your story. I think Dylan and I learned quite a lot from this story and we kind of get to know you more as well. You know, feel like I know you now very well. Yeah. And hopefully we can share this with everyone else. Yeah. Yeah. And thanks for your time. Thank you, Brahimi and Dylan. That was very well summarized. That's fantastic. If you're able to do that in that much time. Wow. That's a great, great, great asset for you.

Thank you. I appreciate that. That's fantastic. How you put that together in that little time. That's amazing. I think it comes down to the guest as well. You are very open and you shared a lot of knowledge in there. So it's, it's easy when the guests are as open as you. So thank you so much for, for joining us today. And on that note, if you guys aren't already, please consider following and subscribing to us on whichever channel you're listening to us now and head over to the quest for success podcast.com.

and fill out our success survey so we can hear what success means to you guys. And on that note, we'll see you guys in the next episode.