Follow Your Heart

Follow Your Heart

Ruchika Goel

Devin Miller

The Inventive Journey

Podcast for Entrepreneurs

12/11/2020

Sponsored by findcourses.com

Also sponsored by Cereal Entrepreneur

The Inventive Journey

Starting and growing a business is a journey. On The Inventive Journey, your host, Devin Miller walks with startups along their different journeys startups take to success (or failure). You also get to hear from featured guests, such as venture firms and angel investors, that provide insight on the paths to a successful inventive journey.

ai generated transcription

so follow your heart follow your conviction because you you're the person who knows why you uh you're the person who knows why you started the business in the first place it's always good to pivot right and take real feedback and change i'm not asking you to be rigid but i think if there's one thing you can be rigid about it is telling people hey i'm going to follow my condition i'm going to follow my heart so that if i lead a life and fail i can always get up and change quotes and be successful but i never want to live with the regret that i didn't start in the first place because i think that's the number one reason when people are on their deathbed i why did i listen to people more and why didn't i listen to myself right i would say just listen to you you have a short life it's just 60 70 years of quality life go pursue your dream that's the best thing you can do to yourself and to the community because you are creating something that will impact people [Music] hey everyone this is devin miller here with another episode of the inventive journey i'm your host devin miller the serial entrepreneur that has built several businesses to seven and eight figure business or companies as well as the founder and ceo of miller i p law where he helps startups and small businesses with their patents and trademarks and on that note if you ever need any help feel free to go to strategymeeting.com and are always here to help you with your patents and trademarks now today we have another great guest on the episode and i'm i'm still nervous i asked how to pronounce her name but i'm still worried i'm going to mess it up but brew chica is i think pretty close to what er to the name um and ruchika she has um a year before she was graduating from her mba program she was kind of doing an internship internship didn't feel like it was fulfilled learned a lot but didn't want to do that for a career and had some mentoring shift and opportunities took some different classes and once she graduated went to i think the canada had an offer from dell which is you know a name recognized company and a big company and decided not to take it and decided to go a different direction and go to where she's at today so she'll give a whole lot more background but with that much of an introduction welcome on to the podcast wow thank you devon i think you already summed it up very beautifully i don't think i have to say anything more yeah all right then we're done we'll just walk out on the high note now so i gave this a brief introduction but maybe kind of walk us back to you're in the mba program kind of going through that and how the internship played in how you kind of figured out where you're getting going and the mentoring ship and we'll have a good discussion from there yeah awesome okay so as you just said i interned with dell during my summer of 2019 so that's a mandatory internship that you have to do between your first and second year of mba it was beautiful i learned a lot personally and professionally i got a couple offers from the company um and and then i came back to join my second year of mba while i had a couple offers i was really thinking about what i really want to do in the future right like where my sweet spot is and that's something that i've always been um uh i would say passionate about you know finding out and i was like yeah although the internship felt successful i think i need more fulfillment from what i do long term now and let me dive in just a question and follow up on that because so because it's you know and i would put it and i there's a lot of different ways that you can tackle fulfillment right fulfillment can mean hey i'm not getting paid enough and i don't feel like i'm undervalued it can mean hey i'm getting paid fine but it's not the type of work that really excites me and gets me out in bed it can be hey i found out and you know i did a both an mba degree and a law degree and i had a lot of friends that were in in law school they graduated and said i don't want to be an attorney i don't like being a lawyer anymore they actually went a different direction so when you talk about fulfillment and you know kind of doing that because i think there's a lot of people that say i'm not fulfilled but i don't really can't really put my finger on why i'm not fulfilled i'm just not excited so maybe you know kind of when you dived into that what was it that wasn't fulfilling or what kind of prompted the you know hey i don't want to go back and do that yeah that's a great question so i would say money was not a problem i was in fact if i had joined the company i would be getting paid enough compared to what i'm getting paid now starting my own company right because businesses take time to ramp up and i loved my mba journey and i i think i have i mean i was an engineer before but if i had been given a choice i would have really gone into business right from my bachelor's right so that was not a problem at all of thinking about oh i did not want to pursue a management degree or anything like that so second the second point that you said was exactly the reason why i said i did not fight fulfillment and that's because uh although i had first and third i just felt like it's not the kind of work i want to do for the future right since i was in my undergrad i had always wanted to be a social entrepreneur impact and you know uh making a difference in people's lives was always number one thing i'd want to do in fact i was looking for an internship where i had an opportunity to do that upfront and when i thought i could create a career for myself where i could give myself an opportunity to do that if companies are not then why not i just pursue a courier right and i think that's that's the reason i said i i did not feel fulfilled in the work that i was going to do in the future and i want to do something that i felt strongly about i've always been that human where you know i have followed my conviction over my conventions or over the conventions of society and that's the reason uh yeah you know and maybe this is a side note one i think is interesting as well because if you look at some of the studies for a long period of time you know job was if you're to take the you know the baby boomers the 1940s 50s even 60s and more recently they they were they would go to work for one company they would be a lifer and they'd do that then you had a transition to hey we're going to have a few different careers we're probably not going to stay with one company our whole career but we're still going to kind of look to move up the ladder what's been interesting i think if you go read some of the studies on that is that now you're actually getting for a generation to where they're willing to take a lower pay but want to have that fulfillment but you're also having bigger companies and bigger businesses that are struggling to figure out how to provide that fulfillment such that they'll get the best talent in the sense you'll have you know a lot of tech companies if you go to silicon valley they'll try and have you know free food and ping pong tables and dual monitors and all the fun things and they're finding that you know that gets people excited for a little bit of time but then people are still leaving because they're not fulfilled so i think it's an interesting dynamic shift the people are now saying i'd rather have an impact and be fulfilled even if it's not as high a pain that's true and dell is a great company really i mean if one had to pursue a corporate mba job it's a great place to be in right but it's not something that drives me for me i think money is a second or third motivator the first motivator is finding the job that i want to do and since i'm a people person i really find fulfillment in roles that allow me to interact with people and change their lives day-to-day the role intel was not probably giving me that chance day-to-day right i mean i i was in a management role and i did not have full authority over what i could do to day and how i could impact lives i'm sure i would be doing it at a corporate level but doing it at an individual level means much more to me so now diving now so now you kind of moving forward but you have this realization right you know this one's not going to be for me i'm not i'm just not going to get the fulfillment long-term and i could then the career that i won so then you know how did you did you say okay i made or you had that realization let's jump right into doing my own startup or how did you kind of move from okay maybe dell's not the right thing was it hey i'm gonna you know i might as well do my own or did you look at other companies how did you kind of make that transition to if this dell isn't gonna be the right or big business isn't gonna be fulfilling this is what i'm going to do right great question so uh to answer your question i did not interview for a single company that came on campus for the second year so it was not just uh there was amazon and there was microsoft and there were like all the way companies that come on campus and my friends were actually pushing me to recruit they were like why don't you just sit for an interview and see how it goes and i'm like i don't think i want to work for a corporate job right i don't want i don't see myself being there and i don't want to be pushed so i want to try and establish my own startup so what i did was uh instead of spending time practicing recruiting and spending time talking and it working right which is a very important aspect of mba recruiting what i did was i started taking courses and creating courses with my favorite professors and researching more about this area where i'm now right like how do i launch my company and how do i launch my company in the mentoring sector so i spent my entire second year of mba doing that and i saw i was making progress and more than that you know there were a couple of things that i think further propelled me to pursue this career first i had this wonderful opportunity to be a mentor an mba mentor to first year foster mbas in my school itself so i got a real hand or a first-hand opportunity to see if i like it or not right and i loved it whenever i used to mentor my students my first year uh classmates i used to lose sense of time i was like i set up a meeting for 30 minutes and i'm going on for like one and a half hours wow i mean this is something really neat and i think where i want to be in right and and then the second thing was um i mean let's just stop let's just stop at the first thing because i think that that was the prime motivation where i was like okay this is my sweet spot i have tested it out i love it i don't want to recruit and spend time there i rather would spend time forming the company and learning much more so i did a lot of info interviews with people in my industry and learned the ropes of it i would say yeah so you basically you did cut the cord just said hey i'm not gonna go interview for anybody i'm gonna i am gonna do my own thing now walk me through because you kind of you know how did you land on where you're at with the business today of hey this is where i'm gonna do it you know how did you how did you figure out that was your passion because i mean i think that's the struggle that some people have right is saying okay i'm not fulfilled i don't want to do this but i also don't really know what i want to do and so how do i you know so i guess i better keep working in the job that i'm at now until i figure out where i want you know what will fulfill me so how did you kind of you know you touched on it how did you kind of find this is where i will be fulfilled or this is where i want to put my time you know time and effort on because i think you'll provide that how did you kind of come to that realization or arrive at that sure yeah so for me i was lucky to have been chosen as an mba career coach to foster mbas and uh where i could as i said could test out if i really loved it and the second thing was since since i was young i had always wanted to be a teacher and if i not in my mba actually i would i would have wanted to pursue a degree in psychology right so when i was doing this mentoring thing i there were three things right i realized like i could really be a teacher in the way that i could mentor not not i would not advise but help a person understand themselves better right so i could be a teacher i could be a psychologist because uh being a mentor being an mba mentor gave them the chance to really you know dive deep into a person and help them find the answers for themselves many times students struggle because they kind of don't know what the strengths are right and a lot of latent strengths to to their personality and allowed me to do that and so while i was doing the struggle i found like wow i have always wanted to be a teacher i wanted to be a psychologist for some time and this really gives me a chance to fulfill all of those innate uh i would say innate uh drives inside me right and so and i i as i said i was losing sense of time i was loving it so why not just go ahead and do everything or do things that i have always wanted to do in a field that i have loved since a year since i was doing it for a year right and it gives me uh or it gives me the power to be in a place where i can directly as i said directly influence life so be a change maker because i said i wanted to be a social entrepreneur always i just didn't know which area i wanted to be in i got this wonderful opportunity i found the right fit that wasn't a sweet spot i use i was using my competencies i was using my passion and there was a dire need in this area and so i was like okay let's just go ahead and build it so yeah i did have to struggle a lot to find where i wanted to land so no and i think that that you know i think that it's oftentimes would glide or gloss over that too quick oh yeah it took me a little while and i figured out this and i've loved it ever since but it's it is that struggle that i think everybody goes through that you know if you find a job that you're excited and fulfilled with great for a lot of you know that it took me a while and i love what i do now and it's been i love running my own business i think it's been a great opportunity but i think you know it took me a while to figure out my career exactly what i wanted to do and i think that's a struggle but now let's say we figure it out we say okay this is where i want to put my time money and effort this is where my passion is going to be how you know so now you dive into it you start building it you start working that out was it all you know all fun times and games and everything else and everything went perfectly was it still a bit of a struggle and figuring it out or how did that go once you kind of said this is where i want to focus on right so it's been a long journey i think i started um august september of last year so it's been almost one year and three months uh while i was in the mba program until april of this year i was doing it part-time right and it was all occurred i was learning i was doing a lot of interviews to learn more about this area i was a mentor and i just loved everything april came and i finished my mba program and i had decided i would not go for a full-time job so i kind of you know turned that down and then i focus full time to develop this business when i say that i mean writing out the business plan uh building the website from scratch along with along with the help of my husband and all of that right and again it was not rosy it was a lot of hard work but i think uh i pulled it off and i was very excited to just launch it right and then august came august 13th 2020 i launched it now when i launched it i realized well building a business or starting a business is quite easy compared to running a business i had to think about a lot more things beforehand that i probably did not because the first time i was doing or i was an entrepreneur and so there were definitely challenges i would say after i launched for example the biggest challenge that i feel or uh that i encountered or i wish i could you know have to have done that better was finding a team so i was a one-woman show and i thought i could just run with it and soon i realized no being an entrepreneur means being pulled in 10 different directions or 15 directions every day and if i'm doing all of that by myself i'm not making a good progress in any one direction than i needed to so those are some of the challenges and we can talk more about that if you would love if you would like to know that but yes i would say starting a business is very easy guys running a business takes a lot more no and i like that just i mean and i would kind of have you know put that even one step so i work with you know intellectual property turning patent and trademarks i work with a lot of startups small businesses inventors and one of the things that you find is you know there are a lot of people that have great ideas and you know to have the idea contrary to i think what a lot of people think having good ideas isn't that hard i mean you if you spend some time you can probably come up with a decent idea executing on the idea and actually building it is where the difficulty comes right so you can figure out hey this would be i think this would be a great business and it probably is a good business but now how you execute how you build the business how you get the team how you get the funding is not that easy and that's where i think the difference between people that build something successful versus those that are always kind of someday type of and mentality changes but the one other question i was going to ask is you know one of the other fears that people have as they dive into doing their own thing and kind of where crossroads you you'd have had is you know if you're looking at dell and going back to him or any of those bigger opportunities that's a secure income right you know you're going to have a paycheck you know money's going to come in was it a bit scary or nerve-wracking as you did dive into your own thing and start to build it to say until money starts flowing in this is a net you know i'm putting money in i'm not getting a paycheck how did you do with that fear how did you kind of overcome that as your do or you know as you were dealing with getting the business up and going that's a great question i'm glad you asked that devin i think a lot of people abandoned their ideas for that fear and if you ask me you can never overcome that fear i think you have to live with it and i wouldn't call it fear it's a challenge like you have to learn as an entrepreneur you have to learn to see challenges as opportunities and not fear right for example doing an interview and even doing this podcast i would say i was not nervous initially not you know thinking about it but you kind of have to run with it and be like oh this is a great opportunity for me why don't i see it like that right so for me uh there was a blessing for sure that my husband is a full-time employee and he's a software engineer so income isn't was not a deal breaker for me i was not the one who was you know running the family or had to right so that was definitely a peace of mind there but even though i had something or i still have something in place in terms of my finances there's so much pressure as an mba to start earning as soon as possible not from family but from relatives and friends and society expectations right and so that's a difficult thing to deal with so i would say uh a couple of fears that people have uh are first is rejection rejection of the idea rejection of what people would tell uh you know tell about your idea what would people talk about you behind your back right and there are times when i've heard people uh just believing me and being like hey you can try it for some time but you know you'll have to come back to the corporate job because it's it's not easy to be an entrepreneur right and i think i'd even add on not to hijack it but i think that there's also a fear that if you fail everybody's gonna say see i told you so like you couldn't do this like you you you did fail and you made the mistake and you have to kind of you're always a bit living with that fear that at some point people you are going to have that i told you so type of mentality that you're going to have to go and deal with people kind of almost that shame that you alluded to exactly and see uh i mean in in a business i would say money does not come real quick and that's not the purpose of doing the business because every business has an underlying need and until you totally fulfill that need and you you know are you advertising people are aware of it it takes time but once it runs and is you know afloat i think you would probably earn more money than you would be earning in a corporate job but then it needs a lot of patience and people should be willing to you know wait for it it's not an overnight success i mean businesses are never in overnight success people would call it when they see it successful but it takes so much of sweat and hard work and passion to kind of continue to follow it so i would just say like um don't listen to people i mean people will always talk about you whether good or bad you have to believe in yourself and you have to always go back to the why why did i start this right was there a real need was i really passionate about this and if you have that why with you i think you can continue the journey and you don't really have to worry too much about money coming in because it will come someone told me this they said don't worry about money money will run after you if you do a good job and i think i totally believe in that and uh yeah and i'm in a happy place i would choose a job any time no i think that's cool and i think that even sometimes you do fail sometimes your first business does is but you learn a lot of things and a lot of times you say okay i found i did fail i can pick myself back up and i'll go to the next thing or i have to pivot and you know kind of overcoming that failure if sometimes you know you do you do fail and it's okay and let's get back up and keep going at it is you know it's a good lesson to learn and i don't know you know i've i've been doing my own own businesses for a while i don't know that fear ever completely goes away you always kind of you know every time you have to make payroll every time you have you know a new client that comes in or an old client that leaves or anything else you always worry hey is it you know is this the day that it's going to kind of all fall apart and i think is you know just part of the things that you have to embrace as being your own businesses hey this is going to you know there there's always a degree of uncertainty that you're just going to have to accept but i almost think to your point is you know i always looked at it as you know there's a false sense of security with the big business in the sense that you can get laid off they can downsize they they're not indestructible either and so just because you work the big business doesn't mean that you're you have a secure job and to some degree if you do your own business then you can at least captain your ship you can control whether or not what happens much to a much larger degree than working with a big business and i could go we could go on about that for forever but now if we were to jump you know so let's jump forward so now you've found where your passion is you built that you've got the website up you got things going kind of where do you see the next six months twelve months kind of where's the direction the company head and where do you see it going right so i i intend to take this in a couple of directions not sure which one will work out the best but right now what i did was i did hire a couple people in my team i mean i took a lot of time to hire because i think that's one of the most important decisions you can make as an entrepreneur right having your first few employees or team members as the best that you can find so i did that and with them i think i've built a lot more momentum momentum now so a couple of directions um that i see myself going are the first is talking to these mba business schools in the u.s and seeing how care on the raft can really replace their traditional recruiting system right so we all have career services in in our mba schools and there is a pattern that career services follows in helping mba students recruit i really want to get the raft to replace that because i think getting the raft does it in a very authentic way helps people uh you know identify their strengths that they perhaps had never had the opportunity to identify bring their whole cells to the interview process and feel very comfortable in their own skin and these are the things that i really feel like in a traditional mba recruiting system so i see get on the raft really you know replacing um as i said replacing this whole process in mba schools and the other direction that i see uh you know going in the future maybe this is a long-term plan but also uh influencing how hr's recruit from companies one reason that students do recruiting the way they do is because there's a lot of insane pressure to do it that way to stick to the norms right to to do it in a cookie cutter approach and that's not really helping either party the company or the candidate so i really also want to impact the way recruiting is done from the company and setting the right expectations then and there no i that's certainly a good direction to go and certainly make sense so well as we now you know always more things i could die you know it's just a fun and it's kind of a little bit of a kindred spirit in the sense that i did mba school and you know i think i always laugh because you know i did one it was an interesting dichotomy i did law school which is very analytical you have to support your evidence you have to lay out the case and then i go to mba school and i'd say oh this seems a lot more fluffy like it's a lot more kind of esoteric high level theoretical kind of here's you know things to think about and so i always joked you know i figured that about 50 of nba school i thought was useful in the other thought or other i felt like i could throw away and then a law school was kind of the same thing and 50 was good and the other like the way but in both cases i think that until you actually get out and start doing it you know one of the other things that you always hear is that people say that they you know i don't have an mba degree i don't have a business degree i can't go start my own startup and i'd say hey you know mba mba school is great and i learned a lot on the other hand there is no replacement for going out and starting it on your own because you learn a whole lot more doing it that way whether or not you have a business degree then you'll learn in school so well as we wrap up and there's always more things to talk about and trying to talk about it we'll jump to the last two questions i always hit on at the end of the podcast so first question i always ask is within your journey what was your worst business decision you ever made and what did you learn from it huh interesting um again like i honestly i don't want to call it divorce decision because i think every failure puts you in the direct path of success had i not undergone that phase i wouldn't be where i'm today so i would say as i maybe touched upon it earlier having a team i wish i had known that i would need a team to run this and this is not going to be a one woman show right i wish i had hired them before i launched so that i would have the right set of people to work and take this on and maybe ramp it up uh tenfold so i wouldn't again say it's worse because if i had not gone through it i wouldn't have loaned because i learned a lot more things along with it so no decision is bad but if i had gotten the chance to do something or undo and redo something i would have yes hired a team up front and launched with them it's a you are your team right so it's a big strength to have that um no i i i can i i tend to agree and i think that that you know the hard thing is being an entrepreneur at least for me and i'll speak for my own experiences you know so you always think you excuse me you always think you can do everything the best you know you you're the one that can needs to get it done because you'll do the best you'll get it done right and it's always hard to bring on those team members no matter how much value and they can add a lot of value they can grow the business you can't ever get everything done and you can stifle the growth if you all do it on your own and yet it's so easy to um you know not not bring on the team members either because you don't you know you feel like you don't you can't you don't have the money or you think that you can do it best or it's going to take more time to train them than than you know then it's worth type of a thing and i think that you know with that um you oftentimes hinder the company because you don't bring them on soon enough so i think that's a good lesson to learn and you know if you're to call it a mistake or at least a learning lesson so now we jump to the second question which is if you're to take you know take someone that's just getting to a startup or a small business what would be the one piece of advice you'd give them um i would just say listen to your heart don't listen to people i mean people will always always talk about you right and if you keep caring about what people think about you you will never be able to live a fulfilled life uh and struggle takes i mean getting up a business takes time there is a lot of challenges i would say struggle a lot of challenges but you're always learning and you're learning many full compared to what you would do in a business oh sorry in a job right so follow your heart follow your conviction because you you're the person who knows why you uh you're the person who knows why you started the business in the first place it's always good to pivot right and take real feedback and change i'm not asking you to be rigid but i think if there's one thing you can be rigid about it is telling people hey i'm gonna follow my condition i'm gonna follow my heart so that if i lead a life and fail i can always get up and change quotes and be successful but i never want to live with the regret that i didn't start in the first place because i think that's the number one reason when people are on their deathbed i why did i listen to people more and why didn't i listen to myself right i would say just listen to you you have a short life it's just 60 70 years of quality life go pursue your dream that's the best thing you can do to yourself and to the community because you are creating something that will impact people no i think that's a a a great takeaway for people and it's interesting you know i've been doing i think we're on 120 or so episodes and probably the number one and piece of advice in some form or fashion is just dive into it get going try it out and you know you'll overcome a lot of fears and it'll be you know it'll it's not as it's not as bad as you think of your head and there's not as many risks and it'll be a lot more enjoyable so i think a lot of variations but i think that that's always a great takeaway for people to take in her to take away and to get started on something well as we wrap up if people want to find out more about what you're doing they want to connect up with you they want to be they want to use your services they want to be an employee they want to be an investor they want to be your next best friend any or all of the above what's the best way to reach out to you and connect up with you sure so i think my email id which was joshua.gov get on the raft is the best place to start with i'm also establishing a lot of social media presence which is in the works but always i would say reaching out personally on my email or on my linkedin uh would be the best way to you know be in touch quickly and take the conversation forward with uh yeah which people can visit if they have questions but email i think or my phone number right phone number i think is the easiest way to get in touch all right so maybe if you want if you want to share either what your website is or what the email is so that people know where to reach out to you that would probably be helpful to people sure uh let me go about spelling it slowly because my name is not a common name here in the u.s so my email is r u c h i k a dot g o e l r card.gov at getontheraft.com get on the wrap is also the name of my uh website so yeah and yeah i think that's the best way all right well perfect well i certainly and people encourage people whether it's email or going to the website or a combination of both to check it out use your services and find out more about you so with that appreciate you coming on the podcast it's been fun to have you on now if you're a listener if um if you want to uh if you have your own journey to tell and you want to come on the podcast feel free to go to inventivejourneyguest.com apply to be on the podcast we always love to hear everybody's exciting journeys they take if you're if you a listener as well and you want us to make sure to click subscribe so you can get notifications as all new the new awesome episodes come out and last but not least if you ever need help with patents and trademarks feel free to reach out to us at miller iplaw by going to strategymeeting.com and we're always here to help thank you again it's been fun to have you on and wish you the next leg of your journey even better than the last thank you devin it was being both a pleasure and an honor to be here i wish you the best with your entrepreneurial journey and let's stay in dutch thank you my pleasure hey if you enjoyed this episode of the inventive journey make sure to go and check out startups magazine they're an awesome magazine and podcast centered over in the uk and if the magazine is a digital and print magazine where they focus on tech startups and entrepreneurs and they also have a focus on female founders and women in tech so if you want to check out their magazine neither digital or print it's startups magazine startups with an s magazine.co.uk and you can also look up their podcast which is called the serial entrepreneur so go check them out they're awesome and definitely if you like this episode you'll like them you English (auto-generated)