Dilip Saraf is LinkedIn's top career coach and a FC Advisor. Founders Click interviewed him on Aug 20, 2015 in his Silicon Valley, California office. Q: As a seasoned career coach and mentor, what have you enjoyed most when you coach professionals and entrepreneurs? Dilip: In this, my fifth career, I have coached about 6,000 individual clients in 23 countries during the last 15 years. The interesting thing about my coaching experience is that each client is different and brings a different problem to the coaching process, yet all these problems fall into just a few categories of needs clients have. As a result, I am quickly able to see the patterns in what they are struggling with and predict the outcome of what can happen if they do something and if they don’t. What I enjoy most is when they light up after giving them my insights on their challenge and after they call me when my predictions come to be true one way or another. Some even think that I have these special powers to predict things, but the interesting fact is that whenever it involves humans of any cultures working in an organizational setting they exhibit certain behaviors that can be codified and dealt with in a proactive way. Helping my clients navigate successfully through these “unpredictable” waters is where I derive most joy. The other area of joy is when I am able to see in my clients what they themselves cannot see. I remember one instance where a promising young client felt stuck as a senior manager in a large corporation. He wanted to move up in his career, but saw no opportunity at his own place and felt exploited because he was not one of “them.” I saw the potential in his leadership abilities and with some work and positioning he was able to get a Managing Director role at a large company’s India operation within that year. He is now back in the US as an executive at yet another large corporation. I also work with many entrepreneurs, who have launched their start-ups. Helping them through their early struggles and showing them what to do and what to avoid is something highly rewarding when they are able to navigate fearlessly and succeed in their endeavors. Q: Have you found trending themes that come up with Entrepreneurs versus established companies when it comes to Team building dynamics? If Yes - what are they. If there are distinct differences, please highlight them? Dilip: Team building in a large, established company requires a different mindset from the one that helps you build effective teams at a start-up. Although, each case is different the common factors are that in a large, established company how a team functions is more governed by the already established culture—sometimes even calcified—and the organization of that company. In such settings teams have to be governed by the norms of the company and organizational constraints. There is a broader spectrum of team capabilities and how team members share their assignments. As bureaucracy creeps in team effectiveness suffers because of the way things are done. All these factors drive team building and how these teams go on to become productive in their own realms. Although start-ups as a group cannot be lumped as a single stereotype, their stage of growth is a critical factor in team-building considerations and how the teams evolve to help the start-up segue to its next stage of growth. A properly designed team can help greatly accelerate this process. I have also seen instances where the very team that helped a start-up’s early growth got in the way of its later success because of a mindset that prevented the company’s scaling. So, because of the growth dynamic of a start-up the composition of the team and their mindsets contribute greatly in advancing the start-ups agenda to its next phase much more than what a similar situation can do at a large, established company. Since founders of start-up are a part of the team they must know when to surrender their roles as the company grows. Large-company teams carry much inertia; start-up teams must be built on resilience, agility, and quick pivoting—two very different mindsets. The skills required to survive during early phases of any company are quite different from managing growth at steady state. If the goal is to increase valuation and grow as opposed to an exit, it may sometimes be in the collective fiduciary interests of the founders to synch up and proactively bring in incentivized select specialists who share their vision (if not their entrepreneurial spirit) to reach higher growth horizons. Q: In your opinion what are the top three critical success factors for a person thinking of starting their own business? Dilip: I often see clients coming to me wanting to start their own business, including a start-up venture, because they hate their current job or their boss. This is also further catalyzed by some success they witness of their friend who went into their own venture and “suddenly” became rich after the venture’s exit. These are all the WRONG reasons to enter into your own business or venture. I believe that almost everyone yearns to be an entrepreneur. Nearly 80% of my corporate clients have something going in their garage or with their spouse. Entering into this realm requires many considerations: Where you are in your life/career; how much runway (financial, emotional, and spiritual) do you have before you need to pivot back in yet another direction; what idea do you have and what is the market for that idea when converted into a product or a service; who can join you in early stage as a co-founder to complement you; among other factors. If you limit your success factors to three here is my list: 1. A clearly defined idea that has been fleshed out for its market impact, customer base, and business potential. “Fleshed out” includes not just a PoC, but having initial customers that are excited about what the product does. 2. The underlying technology Magic (capital “M”) you bring that makes your venture unique, together with the business model that will make the business tick. 3. A commitment to the venture, knowing when to hold and when to fold, with an ability to pivot as you navigate through the uncharted waters. Q: As someone with a strong technology background what inspired you to take the path you have forged for yourself today as a top career and management mentor and coach? Dilip: As I was growing in my own career, first as an engineer and then as an engineering manager in the Silicon Valley, I was fixated on a linear career path with visions of landing as some corporate executive of a Fortune-100 company. Although I succeeded in becoming an engineering executive at a F-100 company’s large division, I was suddenly laid-off when I was 48 because the company closed that division. This was my wake-up call, when I realized that this can happen again later in life. Although I saw no problem getting a similar technology executive job back in 1989, I asked myself the hard question of what would happen if I were laid off again at 59 or 69 and I did not have an answer to that question. So, I decided to change careers on my own—there were no career coaches then—and became a technology consultant in Biotech, showing those companies how to do product development in much shorter times (from four years down to two). At that pivotal moment I also decided that I was not going to stagnate in just one career, no matter how promising, and constantly seek new paths of growth and challenges. After successfully showing biotech product acceleration and getting to market in half the time I changed my career direction again after five years and became a marketing consultant working with large companies such as Hewlett-Packard, Motorola, Good-Year Tire & Rubber, among others. Here, I worked on some novel ways to build customer and account relationships for these client companies and understood what type of leadership it takes to change the culture to become customer-focused. This was an eye-opening experience for me. After doing that for five years I changed my career again to become a leadership coach to show top executives how to become an effective leader. This brings us to the year 2000, when the Silicon Valley suddenly imploded. For me this was the perfect opportunity to become a career coach. At this point I had already changed four careers in four different industries on my own and learned how to do this as a working model. I had conquered career re-invention. Having an engineering background helped my transition as a career coach because thousands of engineers were being laid-off in the Valley in 2000-2001 at companies such a Hewlett-Packard, Cisco, Sun, and others. When they saw my own success they felt that I was credible. This is where I decided that career coaching was what I wanted to do in view of my own experience until then. My early experience with these clients helped me author five books that I published soon after I started my practice. I also appeared on some local and national TV shows. I must say that LinkedIn’s coming into prominence just as I was launching my career coaching practice has much to do with my being ranked as #1 coach. For several years LinkedIn continued the practice it started of ranking professionals in 23 categories (from Architects, Career Coaches, to Veterinarians) based on the number of unique Client Recommendations they received on their profile. Throughout this period I was ranked # 1 Career Coach (among a global pool of thousands of career coaches) because I had the most client Recommendations on record. LinkedIn stopped these ranking in 2012, but that record left a legacy of my ranking as the # 1 LinkedIn Coach, which I don’t mind. This was just fortuitous. Q: What is your target client profile? What are the strong value propositions you can provide to them? Dilip: As a part of what I told you before (I do not want to stagnate in what I do) I do not limit my client profile to any particular description. Although a majority of my clients are professionals of all types in all industries across the globe, nearly 75% of my practice stems from high-tech/biotech companies of the type that are in the Silicon Valley, including many start-ups. The companies my clients represent are global, so I get to work with clients from pharmaceutical companies to corporations that run restaurants and landscape companies. I recently helped a client become CEO of a large multi-million dollar landscape company. My clients range from physicians, neurosurgeons, to those in show business and music industries. I am currently working with a famous Bollywood actor that wants to break into the US scene. So, I take on all types of clients, who think that I can help them. Learning how to help these diverse clients is what gets me out of bed each morning and keeps me learning new things. Q: What is the most interesting part of your job? Dilip: Since I work with clients that range from students, interns, to CEOs across the globe, I get a glimpse of what is REALLY happening on the ground as they tell me their woes during our sessions. I recently helped two students in their college admissions (one at Carnegie Mellon and one at Princeton) for the Fall session. Many of my clients are from right here in the Silicon Valley. The stories they tell me about what is going on in their companies greatly interest me. Also, because this is where the latest and greatest in technology happens I get the front-row seat learning from my clients what is happening that is going to change our life in this domain before it actually does. This is very interesting to me and I get this delivered to me every day in a very personal setting. Getting paid for it is a dream! Q: What is obvious to you that you find it difficult for others to see? Dilip: Having now worked with 6,000 clients across the globe helping them overcome their career challenges what I find difficult to understand is why do professionals even question the value of a good career coach. As I have mentioned throughout our conversation here how much benefit clients get out of just a few sessions. Yet, I find many resorting to trial and error in managing their careers. What many do once every 5-10 years I do many times each week with expertise honed to a razor’s edge. Trial and error is a very expensive way to learn what is right and how to do it right. Even when they succeed on their own the price they pay in lost opportunities for it is incalculable. “Real” opportunities in your career are generally far and few in between and even those are not a given, in terms of panning out as you desire. If you are so fortunate to encounter even one such, be fully prepared to rise up to the challenge with the requisite diligence it deserves. So, my advice is to find yourself a good coach or a mentor and stop doing trial and error to advance your career. It can change your life!