Visionary Digital Studios has been a 7-year journey so far. Sanjay started out building a small Animation company, selling cheap Animations to small startups, while he traveled Tim Ferris’s “4-hour work week” style. That was super fun, but got old quickly.
As Sanjay started to love the art of business, he developed Visionary into a marketing agency and then niched down to full-service B2B marketing.
Today they have had clients in 8 countries. The content that Visionary produces is seen by an estimated 1 million people per month as they produce digital content for impactful clients and then scale viewership through online advertising.
For more details, visit their website here.
Here we sit down with Sanjay to talk about his journey as an entrepreneur and get some insights.
Q. Tell us a little more about your journey as an entrepreneur – how did you get started? What inspired you?
Sanjay: Before entrepreneurship, I was a corporate IT consultant over a successful 10+ year career. At my peak, I was running high-profile technology teams for Deloitte, one of the biggest consulting companies on the planet.
It was enjoyable, I learned A LOT and I made plenty of $$$. But one day I realised that if I continued along that path I would end up living my worst nightmare – no control, no passion, no creativity – just the corporate abyss, “pretending to be happy while secretly falling apart.” At that point, Facebook served me a perfectly timed Ad, as it tends to do: “Start a freedom business in 8 weeks and travel the world.” Instead of ignoring the ad, I clicked and found myself in an AMAZING marketing funnel for a Mastermind called “Secret Society Mastermind” – it was a business-building course that cost me ~$9k while quitting my job.
That felt like a lot of money to spend “on the internet.” But taking that risk – which felt CRAZY at the time – was one of the best decisions I ever made. Everything else is history.
Q. What entrepreneurial tricks have you discovered to keep you focused and productive in your day-to-day busy schedule?
Sanjay: Here are a few random “tricks” that come to mind and have made a massive impact on me:
- Learning the art of “flow” and optimizing my business – and now my entire life – around it.
- Blocking off the first 4 hours of the day for no meetings + deep work.
- Taking that further .. . Making Monday, Wednesday and Friday meeting-free (as much as possible). That forces me to fit meetings into Tuesday and Thursday afternoons.
- Optimizing health, training, diet, and hormones around improving my mind.
- Modafinil (used VERY RESPONSIBLY, and in small doses to combat side effects).
- I spend my time with focused and productive people – both in real life and online, so it’s a normalized lifestyle.
- I used Toggl to audit my time recently and found I spend over 50% of my time in Google – docs, sheets, Gmail, search, etc. So I used Jeff Su’s epic YouTube content to optimize my use of these tools and learned all the keyboard shortcuts.
- Using Toggl I also worked out that Gmail and LinkedIn were my biggest “flow breakers”, but also 2 of my highest leverage activities. So I’ve used “Inbox When Ready” and “Newsfeed Eradicator” to optimize my use of the tools.
Q. How do you stay organized with such a busy schedule?
Sanjay: I leverage the “Theory of Constraints” to organize everything and stay focused on the highest leverage activities. I learned this from Eli Goldratt’s book, “The Goal”. I use the theory to identify the tasks that will actually move the needle – not just for my business day-to-day, but even for strategy selection, information selection, “fun” focusses, health focusses … everything.
And of course – at the risk of being too cliché – all the principles in “The 4-Hour Work Week” are still life-changing for me. I still listen to the audiobook every year, and each time see a noticeable impact on productivity and being organized.
Q. What would you change about the world if you had a magic wand?
Sanjay: Nothing. My perspective is that the world is always perfect – you need the negative to drive the positive. Evolution is making perfect progress and always has been. Broadening your perspective to the context of millions of years of known evolution, and millions of light years of known space. It’s silly to think human intervention is required. But, to get off my soapbox and keep to the spirit of the question, here’s what I’d like to change:
1 – If business owners mixed the cutting-edge of spirituality with the cutting-edge of business, that would make a profound impact on the world.
2 – Educate people on how to use social media and tech. These are the most powerful influences on humanity and have the potential to make unbelievable positive impact. But when you don’t know how to leverage them from a position of positivity, they can also be very destructive – just like most other powerful human inventions.
3 – Teach people all of the “societal forces” that make them unconsciously serve the wishes of the economy – rather than going after the authentic dreams they were born to create.
Q. If you were to write a book about yourself, what would you name it?
Sanjay: I would name it “Make all decisions based on ‘gut feel’.”
Q. What motivates you?
Sanjay: It’s difficult to say. There’s a deep drive in me to chase the wildest dreams I can imagine. But I’ve found, these “dreams” come and go. When achieved they are “wilder” than I could’ve imagined – while at the same time no big deal.
Once one dream is achieved, the next “wildest dream” always arises in my gut and generally surprises me. And the cycle repeats. Unfortunately, being honest, I can’t say that I have a single entrepreneurial driver like “take humanity to Mars” or “put a dent in the universe” …
Q. What is one of the best or most worthwhile investments you’ve ever made?
Sanjay: Masterminds – I’ve been in 3 so far, and just signed on to my 4th. All were “business-defining”, so evolutionary and in many ways life-revolutionising.
All seemed very expensive at the time and it was challenging for me to force myself into the decision – but all delivered 10X+ what I paid for them.
Q. What key activities would you recommend entrepreneurs to invest their time in?
Sanjay: Fitness and spiritual self-development:
- The fitness of the CEO, and the management team, is one of the biggest strategic advantages a company could have.
- The “happiness level” of the CEO and the management team is arguably the biggest differentiator for a company to be able to have – both in financial success and the longevity of the business. I believe the importance of both of these will expand even further in the era of AI.
Q. What is your ‘one-sentence’ piece of advice you’d like to give to someone who wants to become an entrepreneur, coach, or business owner?
Sanjay: If you work 50+ hours per week, read 1 book per week, and always have a coach/mastermind… success is pretty much guaranteed.
To keep up to date with Sanjay and his journey, connect with him on LinkedIn.
