Sri Kaza, serial CEO (most recently of BriteCap Financial) and author of Un-Convention: A Small Business Strategy Guide, joins me to share how unconventional thinking and the Trust Equation Framework can transform client relationships and small-business strategy. Sri explains how he discovered entrepreneurship through his own career, from Y2K programmer to global sales executive to CEO, and why developing people is at the heart of his personal “Why.”

We explore Sri’s memorable experience selling software in Japan—where karaoke, izakayas, and takoyaki roulette taught him more about trust than any sales manual—and how David Maister’s Trust Equation Framework — credibility × reliability × intimacy ÷ self-interest — later helped him make sense of it. Sri also unpacks the principles behind his book Un-Convention: why small businesses can leverage their proximity to customers, nimbleness, and purpose to outperform bigger competitors, and how to avoid “empty-calorie” expansion by focusing on the right customers.

Good day. Dear listeners. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint podcast, and my guest today is Sri Kaza, a serial CEO, most recently of a FinTech company called Bright Cap Financial. But importantly, he is the author of Unconvention: A Small Business Strategy Guide. Sri, welcome to the show. 

Thanks for having me, Steve. Appreciate the opportunity to chat. 

You have a very fascinating story. So let’s dive in. But let’s start with my favorite question. What is your personal why and what are you doing to manifest it in your businesses and in your practice? 

So, you know, my personal why is I love developing people and getting the most out of myself and helping them get the most out of themselves and it’s kind of led me to down the path of writing this book and getting out and working with small businesses because, you know, entrepreneurs are a fantastic, I’d say, lever for me to help somebody kind of build something or get the most got to themselves. To me, giving back in this way is something that’s just, feels almost natural, feels like something that I can really feel good about and do more of.

Okay, so why are entrepreneurs so close to your heart? 

Well, you know, I didn’t realize it until much later in my career, but I, you know, I learned that I’m kind of an entrepreneur myself, you know, looking backwards. It’s pretty easy to tell that, but I wouldn’t have known, or I wouldn’t have thought about it that way, you know, growing up and when I look around and look at the people I’ve mentored or worked with today, I get most inspired by the people who find ideas and kind of make the most out of them when they put ’em into entrepreneurship. 

Well, awesome. So you have been running different companies. I mean, you, you talked before and I learned that you traveled around the world as a sales executive and, and CEO. So what’s the most memorable story from your international travels that you could share with us? 

When I was really young, I’d started my career as an engineer. I started out as a, I thought I’d be a chemical engineer. It turned out I was gonna be a programmer because it was around the time of Y2K and every business in the world wanted to kind a rewrite their software to do something different, get out of the big Y2K bug. I flipped that early career being a programmer into sales. When I learned that, you know, an important piece of selling software was to get somebody credible in the room who could explain how the software or the technology worked. I did so well that my superior said, ‘Hey, why don’t you, why don’t you go out to Japan? We’re about to have a product in Japan and we need somebody there to help us sell that product.’ So, of course, you know, at 20, I don’t know, 22, 23, I really didn’t know much about anything. Of course, I thought I could do whatever they asked and I’m perfectly capable. What?

Learn a foreign language and live in another country for a few years and, and sell millions of dollars of software to people I don’t know. Sure. Why not? Right? Of course I can do that. So, you know, the stories from there and I’ve gotten probably more than we could possibly share in the time that we have. But then the source from there. One of the first things that started to sink in is I got immediate credibility showing up because I was a foreigner. And at the time, and I don’t know that this is true anymore, but at the time when I showed up coming in from the US, coming from California all of the people I interacted with, you must know a lot about technology because you’re an American and that’s where all of this, you know, you’re from the San Francisco. That’s where all this technology stuff is happening. And you know, maybe I knew a little bit more than the folks around me, but it’s not like I was some genius or it’s not like half of what I was saying was stuff I had I hadn’t learned like days earlier. But nonetheless, yeah, I could really talk to people and, you know, hung on every word about what our technology could do. But what was wild was we got there and the software that was on its way still wasn’t ready.

So for folks who don’t know back then in like the year 2000, 2001 computer languages, mostly all the code that was written for American companies, it would share language itself, the English language in single byte characters. So you’ve got 256 bytes that you could, or different combinations of bits and, you know, bits to get to a byte. That means 256 different letters, capital letters, lowercase letters, period, all that wonderful stuff in Japan. You couldn’t represent characters that way. You needed a double byte, right? You need two different bytes, so way more accommodations of possibilities. And just like pre Y2K, there was these issues where, oh wait, the calendar dates for the century weren’t there. Here, the data structures weren’t there for just common language translation. My engineering team at the company I was at was working hard to kind of put that in place, but it took six months to a year to kind of sell some of this expensive software, these big enterprises. So they said, get out there, sell it, and by the time you’re done selling it, we’ll have it ready. So, I’m out there and I’m meeting people doing some, you know, conversations with businesses and mostly I’m showing them slides ’cause there’s no software to show. 

Right, right.

And half of the meetings didn’t even have slides, just, you know, talked. But what I really found interesting was most of the time I’m interacting with my potential prospects. We weren’t in meeting rooms, we weren’t having meeting discussions on what the software did or anything about their plans for how they might use the software. We were sitting in bars or izakayas or karaoke places, drinking, and the thing that really stuck with me was it took me almost six months to get the first big deal done, right? We drank with these guys twice a month, maybe three times a month. And slowly progressing through their organization, like getting to the next level of decision making. The next level as a super maker, you could tell you were seeing success when the drinking party started to get bigger, like we’d go drinking, we wouldn’t even have a meeting. The next day we’d go drinking again. Okay. We’d have a meeting, you know, three weeks later, four weeks later, we’d go drinking. But now there’d be a new guy, more senior guy who joined. And you’d slowly like, oh, we’re getting there deeper into like the real decision maker.

We’re navigating the organization. But really, quite honestly, it was just a lot of drinking. Fun stuff, fun stories. We’d go around and the first time I’d had something called Takoyaki which is this little grilled dough ball with octopus inside, tasty Japanese treat. But a fun game they’ll play when they’re out drinking is they’ll order Takoyaki roulette, which is a Takoyaki balls all look the same. One of ’em has a big chunk of wasabi in there, so when you bite into it, woo yellow wasabi. So, I remember going out, you know, eating with them and you know, we get this order. I’m looking at the table saying, oh, that looks good. Let me grab one, eat it. Great. Everyone’s staring at me and I’m like, did I commit like a faux pa? Did I go too fast? Eh, it seems like I’m okay. I’m okay. And then they all watch me and they watch me eat it and I’m like, huh, this is interesting. And then I, you know, I finish it. Then of course the next couple of guys grab some and then one of ’em like spits it out and like, gross and everybody’s laughing and I’m like, what? Why are you laughing at this guy? He didn’t like it. But I, you know, this whole time I’m going out to meet these guys and all they really want to do is ask me about what my life is like in California, what I think of Japan, what I think of Japanese girls, like nothing to do with work. And just like, you know, goofing off six months in. Right?

Finally, what our biggest, biggest meeting comes up and we get the meeting, it’s in like a week or two, and everybody in the office is celebrating because the Japanese partner I was working with realized that actually, because we have that meeting with the boss man who actually is gonna make the decision, the deal’s already done. And I’m thinking to myself, you know, I still haven’t demoed any of the software. We still don’t know like what’s the pricing? What’s this? And the partner I was working with explained to me is, look, this is about relationships, this is about having a relationship with the companies where they really know how to work with each other, where they, they trusted to kind of bring the right software in this whole six months of these interactions, it wasn’t about trying to convince them that your software is good, right? Because the software is good. It’s about convincing them that the partnership is good. And so to me, that really sunk in. I was like, okay, so I haven’t demonstrated any software. I haven’t really put very many slides together. I know I grew my liver by a few ounces, but other than that, right? What did I really do? But it was this kind a building the relationship. It was really just getting to know them, showing up, being there every time they wanted to go do whatever, being there, right. And so, you know, to me, you know, it’s kind of backwards. I mean, even after that, I didn’t really mature to realize what that meant, but to me it felt like kind of backwards way to go do sales.

It’s very interesting. So just, just wanna stop for a minute. So, you know, it’s very known that in Eastern Europe people do business. So if you go to Russia and you come down in a bottle of vodka, then you, they’re not even gonna negotiate with you. Right? Yeah. And I always thought that this was more about compromising people and putting them in a position where they do stupid stuff and, and humiliate themselves. But it’s very interesting that you say that this was the trust building process. So, let’s switch gears here and let’s talk about this framework we touched upon last time, which is David Zechmeister, who’s genius when it comes to professional service firms and how to build one and how to run one well, and he came up with this framework and you introduced it to me. It’s called the trust equation. So please share with our listeners what it is and how is the whole story is relevant to this trust equation. 

Sure. You know, I again, at the time I didn’t really understand any of that, the framework, what I understood was hit his commission, and I don’t mind drinking beer. But what I learned later in life after business school, you know, after years as a consultant, I read this book called The Trusted Advisor by Zechmeister. And in it he talks about developing trust using a framework and a formula. It was kind of foreign concepts to me and many people saying, well, you can’t put an equation behind trust. But his equation was,

trust is a function of your credibility, your reliability, the intimacy that you have with the co party and your self-interest, how much you're worried about yourself
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Hey, so how do you wanna solve the problem with this tool?’ Or, ‘what are you thinking about for your own growth purposes, et cetera.’ Those conversations really. Shift down and shift away the self-interest and more to the, I’m actually interested in the party I’m working with. So when he lays this equation out, you know, I said to my, think to myself, wow, you know, this explains a lot of the struggles I personally had when I was in sales and, and when I’m trying to close service deals. In that, you know, I always worry about my credibility, right? I always am trying to show that I know what I’m talking about, that I’m, that I’ve got all this data, they’ve got all this experience, and what I’m failing most often on is letting the individuals I’m working with know who I am, right? And that I’m a normal person like them. I have the same kind of challenges and issues, I believe the same way they do. So when you come back, what was I doing in Japan with all of that drinking? And again, I was a kid, I didn’t know at the time, but you can break it apart nicely with this framework and you say, well, they’d already given me a big thumbs up on credibility. I was the foreigner. I was from Silicon Valley.

They kind of bought what I had to say. What they didn’t know was what kind of person I was and would I be there? Through thick and thin. So of course we’re getting tested and we’re going out and we go drink, can drink like me, what’s the stories, you know, let me learn. And I think the compromise, you mentioned compromise. I think the compromise is actually quite important. I know something about you. I know something about you that you might not want everybody to know. I’m not suggesting you threaten it, but when you hold that. You now have a tighter bond with that person. And you feel like you know how they’re going to behave. You feel like you understand them better. So when they hear that, yeah, you know, I really can’t handle too much, or I, you know, I was good with my sake and my beer, but if they, when they learn that, you know, I’m struggling to chat with the girls who come up, you know, everybody wants to come and practice English, and I’m struggling to kind of make the connection, they find that funny. They love to know that I’ve got a few weaknesses, and that makes a big difference in trust. And of course if you’re out there saying, ‘Hey, I don’t wanna keep screwing around and going out to the bar, I wanna actually close a deal or move on to the next deal.’ Sure. They’ll see that. They’ll notice that and they’ll understand that. Yeah. Okay. Well, you know, on your timeline, you know, we’re not gonna work, but it’s in our timeline, 

Transaction oriented person rather relationship oriented. And you see them as a means to an end, as opposed to the end. You know, it was really interesting. I was talking to this client and he’s going through some tough times, and his cash flow’s not very good. And, you know, he tries to negotiate and stuff like that. And, and I tell him, well, listen, this is what I do. You know, I make sure that you hit your numbers. I make sure that you don’t get distracted by shiny objects. I warn you, then you are about to make a bad decision. And he says, well, well, you really care. And I thought, wow. Yeah. So if that comes across, then maybe it’s valuable. And this is how I feel as well with my vendors. I work with a guy who’s been my graphic designer for 25 years. He is on the other end of the world, and I’m very loyal to him because I know that he cares. Yeah. And if I need something, he is gonna pick up the phone, he is gonna respond and he’s gonna help me out and that’s very valuable.

And if you think to yourself there are relationships or there are clients or there are vendors where you don’t feel that, right? You don’t feel this, like this structure that Maister gives us to say, let me think about this relationship in its components. It helps you recognize where you need to invest,  It helps you say, ‘You know what? I get that.’ ‘You know, my reliability hasn’t been great. I get that’, he needed me last year and I was busy because I had three other clients, I couldn’t get to him. And you know, I didn’t think too hard about it at the time, but now I’m looking at it and I realize that he doesn’t think he’s important to me, and I may need to do something to show, first of all, that I made the mistake or I apologize, maybe show some vulnerability, but most importantly just recognize that that’s where the deficiency is in the relationship. That’s not an easy thing to do because we always like to believe that we’ve got the trust because I trust myself. Why wouldn’t you? Right?

But it’s always from the perspective of the counterparty, the individuals that you’re dealing with, you have to ask yourself, what can you do to improve?

You always want to know what deeper relationships and the other part of that kind of trust equation and, and how you deploy this trust.
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Yeah. I’m also thinking that there’s another way to relate to this framework, and it’s more of an emotional approach. So if I invest more emotion in a client relationship, and I’m thinking more about how to help them and feel their situation and, and what would help them in this situation. What can I do that would make things easier for them? Or be keeping an eye open if I see something that may be unrelated to what I’m doing, but it would be really helpful to them, then I make that a connection of the recommendation or introduction. It really goes a long way and. And the thing is it really helps the advisor as well because it’s going to increase your self-esteem. You’re gonna be much more confident because you know that you are doing what is best for them. So you trust yourself more actually. 

Yeah. Oh, you should. With empathy, with good empathy, right? Yeah. Right. Understanding where they’re coming. It also, you know, back to the equation, it also helps you reduce your self interest. Right. This isn’t about me. It was another challenge for me in my career as a consultant, me being more interested in the impact and making sure my right answer got implemented as opposed to what is it that the client’s really trying to solve for? And there’s another big eye-opener for me, I don’t see the world really through the politics or the career ambitions of my clients. I kind of just see, saw the world in, in terms of where’s the impact gonna be? How much EBIT can we improve, et cetera. This is good ’cause most people should just agree. But it turns out, you know, executives, business leaders, they often have more than just that in mind. Even small business owners will have other personal drivers behind their business.

You can go in and start making some cash or pricing recommendations and say, ‘Hey, take the price up. ’cause you can, you’re not gonna lose customers.’ And they’ll say no. And if you don’t understand the profit margin wasn’t the only thing they were solving for, then you’re not gonna be a good advisor. You got to understand, okay, well the profit is there, and I get that you don’t feel comfortable telling people about the price, but tell me more about why is it that this is better for the business than not? Tell me what is it you’re trying to accomplish by having a lower price? If it’s not, just kind of make sure you hold onto your customers. Maybe they’ll tell you, look, I’d rather have people evangelizing the great deal that they got than I would taking the extra $2 a transaction. Right? Get that out there because then you’ll be a better advisor. Understanding what their real motivations are and helping break it apart makes you a better advisor.

That’s very well said. It’s easy to assume that it’s all about the profit and the valuation, but ultimately the profit and the valuation serves a purpose, right? Why do I want to sell my company? Because maybe I want people to respect me to love me more. I want to please my partner, my parents, my children, whatever, myself. But ultimately, if I do it in a destructive way. Then I’m going to be self-defeating, so I’m gonna be a billionaire, but everything’s gonna hit me. Then what’s the point of all that? 

Oh yeah, absolutely. And sitting down and being kind of thoughtful about that purpose, right? Early in your conversations with your clients and just being on the same page as them. It’s okay. And in fact, that’s that intimacy because what if there’s more? Right? Actually, the whole reason I started this business is I wanted my kids to be proud of me. Instead, they don’t really see me that much, and I thought I was gonna hand it to them when, when I built it up and it was time for them to take over. They want nothing to do with it. Now I’ve gotta sell it. So when you hear that, you’re like, okay, now I get why you’re bitter about this whole process. Why don’t we reframe it around? How do you then go celebrate the sale with your kids? How do you then turn this transaction into a vehicle to go get that engagement with your children. Whatever that might be, you know,

really understanding and drilling into those things makes a difference in terms of can you accomplish the thing that you've been chartered to accomplish.
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Yeah, this is very useful reminder for me personally, this conversation that, yeah, I have to do more, thinking about the emotional side and what the client is really trying to achieve. Maybe they are saying something or, you know, sometimes what happens is they think they are chasing whatever is at the end of the rainbow, but really they are not. They’re just saying this because their neighbor has done that or their friend has done that, or their peers and they feel like this is what they should be doing. But they feel comfortable with it. So really the underlying desire is something different. And by good questioning and good listening, you can go after that and get better and maybe sometimes, help the kind deed. Sometimes they don’t see it themselves. It was super valuable. But, before our time is up, I’d like to ask you about your book, because it’s kind of a counterintuitive book with a counter title, a little bit like the trust building process that we’ve been discussing. So the book is called, Unconvention: A Small Business Strategy Guide. So why did you write this book? Where does the title come from and how is a small business strategy guide different from a large business. 

Good questions. Alright, so let me start with why’d I write it. I don’t have the personal capacity or time to go and advise hundreds or thousands of small businesses. I’ve been doing a lot of work that helped them through the lending programs and through the tax credit programs and a couple other businesses that I’ve run. I wanted to hit as many people as I could with what I had learned, and so there’s 32 million small businesses out there. I thought, here’s a way I can share kind of as much as I can, and help a lot more of these entrepreneurs kind of scale up and have impact like we talked about in the beginning. What I love to do is help people get the most out of themselves and out of their endeavors. And, in the small business, there’s a really good opportunity to do that. They’re, they’re, they’re driving businesses. They have something that they’re focused on doing, and how, how do we make them better at it? And, you know, I was inspired by a lot of the stories of the business I had worked with as, uh, the CEO at Forward Line. And what I tried to do initially was let me go and take a look at all of the success stories and all of the failures, and bring a lot of data and analytics insights in to show them, here’s my bias and my kind of hypothesis was to show them that you’ve gotta follow rigorous structured strategies and formulas to be successful.

And, you know, the data just kind of didn’t prove me right. Part of it was ’cause I, you know, the way we captured data and the way we structured all of their strategies, you know, it’s how a big business should think about it. It’s purely on the profits, the margins, the growth strategies, the targeting. And instead what I discovered was there’s a lot of these small businesses that survived despite what looked like kind of weird or odd decisions, unconventional decisions. That’s kind of why we called this ‘Unconvention’, is that it didn’t seem like it would fit with what I thought a traditional strategic choices would be. But as I dug even deeper, I got a lot of stories out of it. I learned a lot. I saw a lot of what the outliers did. I was able to reframe, said, look, this is classic business strategy. They still have to deal with the same rules and forces of anybody else, but they have a couple of advantages. They can, because of these advantages, they can do things differently than the big businesses can.

This is what was unconventional about it from everything from how they choose to differentiate to how they price or how they optimize their operations.
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I learned many different business frameworks, and I’ve included ’em all in my book on how big businesses have to approach these problems. The way I lay it out in the book is I say, look, as a small business, you have a few advantages that are consistent. You have your positioning, you are differentiated, you’re focused, you have a customer base that you serve, and there’s actually a boundary on the customer base that you don’t have to serve or don’t need to serve or don’t want to serve Focusing on the customer base that you serve actually allows you to execute these strategies successfully. The same frameworks that these big guys use. You bring your differentiation, you bring your positioning in, you can succeed. The other big advantage you have is your proximity to the customer. Like you just know how they think. You don’t, you don’t go slow. You don’t have to sit there thinking about what’s going on with your customers and what some survey and gimme some data. You know them, you know them well. You know how they’re gonna interact, react. You can empathize with some upcoming changes about to hit them. Make adjustments before it happens or when it happens. Right. And, and then finally, this purpose, we talked about purpose a, a moment ago. You’re not locked in on the profit maximizing outcome.

All these other businesses, they have to pursue the profit maximizing outcome. And there’s fantastic literature on pursuing the profit maximizing outcome could actually be, a death trap for certain businesses. One of my favorite books is Clayton Christensen’s Innovator’s Dilemma. Right. The big guys have to pursue the profit every time, and they miss out on the innovations, right? Why? Because they know the big innovation. They probably even bought one of the innovations like, but it’s gonna kill my profit, so I’m not gonna do it. As a business owner who has a different purpose, if you’re trying to bring something to the world, if you’re trying to, if change something, you can forsake the profit to make the right choice, the personal right choice, or the right choice for your mission that these big businesses can’t. So what I, what I liked is capturing it all and saying, ‘Hey, look, this should be pretty inspiring.’ For somebody who’s gone, a business who’s been around and thinks that they can make some good decisions from their gut, say, no, it’s not. It’s not because you’re doing it from your gut. It’s because of these three principles. And you should understand these strategies and the strategic frameworks that the big guys use because they still apply to you, but they still do apply. And so you can’t just trust your gun on every move. You can’t just go and apply whatever you think because you’re small. You really still do have to play by the rules, but you can leverage these principles to win in these cases. 

And then the business is a lot simpler than a large business. So it’s easier to make decisions, it’s easier to pivot. Your stuff is much more nimble. You are in control of the decisions of the business. So there’s a lot to go for a small business. And there’s no wonder that big businesses often get disrupted because they just can’t get themselves to do, to disturb themselves. So they wait until someone else does it. While a small business has the freedom to not be burdened by the legacy, bad decisions of a big business and, and get faster, 

That’s right. But the small businesses that don’t succeed because they’re chasing these big business strategies actually fail the same ways the big businesses do. Right. Go after marginal customers that don’t really mean anything to you, but it’s a kind of an empty calorie expansion. You know, you don’t have loyalty. You don’t have resilience, and you’re overextended. Serve the customers that actually value what you do. 

Love it. Love it. Well definitely check this book out. So when is it coming out? The unconventional.

September 23rd. So it’s probably out already in bookstores and, uh, online at Amazon. 

Well, we are going to publish this earlier. It’s not gonna be out. We are gonna come out probably the second week of September.

Yeah. Oh, okay.

Get ready for the launch. Is there gonna be a pre-order copy? 

Oh, yeah. It’s pre-order on Amazon too, so you should be able to, you’ll find it, it’s ranking pretty high in pre-order sales already, so, should be easy to find. 

So, so check out Sri Kaza, Unconvention: A small Business guide. I already started reading it and it’s fascinating. So definitely check it out. So, Sri, thanks for coming on the show and sharing your ideas and experience. So, if people would like to not just read the book on Amazon but would like to reach out and learn more about what you do, where should they go? Where can they find you? 

You can find me on my website. I’ve got sub stack, and I’ve got a website. So you can come to me on my website, sri-kaza.com. You’ll be able to download the primer on the principles, learn a little bit more, just a couple of exercises, kind think about your own business there. And then, you know, I post a lot of blog posts about today’s environment for small business, things like tariffs or pricing or online advertising, all kinds of different topics for small businesses. 

So very interesting. So do check it out, sri-kaza.com and read Unconvention. Sri thanks for coming to business, to come to talk about your business and your ideas on the podcast. And if you enjoyed the show, stay tuned because exciting entrepreneurs keep coming to the show every week. Thanks for coming, Sri and thanks for listening.