Rani Dabrai is a Certified EOS® Implementer and the only one currently based in Ireland. She is a seasoned entrepreneur who started her first business at 25 and went on to lead ventures ranging from a global virtual assistant company to coordinating international trade missions for US governors and senators. After a successful exit, Rani served as Director of the World Trade Centre in Dublin, driving FDI and international trade. She now sits on UNICEF Ireland’s advisory council and is a Senior Partner to the Monaco Foundry.
Here’s a Glimpse of What You’ll Hear:
- [2:44] How Rani Dabrai’s entrepreneurial grandfather shaped her values and outlook
- [7:02] The emotional impact of Rani’s father’s struggle with alcoholism
- [10:20] Selling nightclub tickets as a teenager without ever entering the club
- [15:09] Inspiration behind founding Miss Moneypenny
- [17:51] A drug dealer’s lesson that transformed Rani’s business model
- [20:30] What are some extravagant, bizarre requests Miss Moneypenny handled?
- [25:32] Transitioning into EOS implementation and the influence of fellow implementers
- [27:16] Why emotional intelligence and reading the room are essential in leadership today
In this episode…
Understanding what lies beneath the surface of a team is one of the most overlooked aspects of leadership. Missed cues, unspoken frustrations, and unaddressed conflicts can quietly derail growth and morale. How can leaders better “read the room” to unlock stronger communication, trust, and results?
Seasoned entrepreneur Rani Dabrai emphasizes the importance of emotional intelligence and the ability to tune into what’s not being said. Drawing on her entrepreneurial journey — from founding a global virtual assistant company to coordinating international trade missions — Rani highlights the value of identifying gateway products, facilitating difficult conversations, and staying present with her teams. For her, long-term success depends on a leader’s willingness to address hard truths, adapt to change, and leverage human connection even in an AI-driven world.
Tune in to this episode of the Smart Business Revolution Podcast as John Corcoran interviews Rani Dabrai, Certified EOS Implementer at EOS Worldwide, about the power of reading the room in business. Rani shares how her upbringing shaped her emotional intelligence, the origins of her concierge company Miss Moneypenny, and how a drug dealer helped her discover her best marketing strategy. She also discusses EOS tools, team accountability, and the human advantage in the AI age.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
- John Corcoran on LinkedIn
- Rise25
- Rani Dabrai:LinkedIn | Website
- EOS Worldwide
- Entrepreneurs’ Organization
Special Mention(s):
Related episode(s):
Quotable Moments:
- “He used to say, ‘You make one, you give one.’ That philosophy shaped everything I do.”
- “I was selling a dream I’d never experienced, and that’s where I learned entrepreneurship.”
- “Fat Will said, ‘You need a gateway drug.’ That one sentence changed my entire business.”
- “People are outsourcing their feelings to AI, and that terrifies me.”
- “Real leadership starts with figuring out what’s not being said in the room.”
Action Steps:
- Learn to read between the lines: Pay attention to nonverbal cues and what isn’t being said in meetings. This ability helps uncover hidden problems and foster more authentic team communication.
- Use a gateway offering to attract clients: Start with a simple, relatable service to build trust and create opportunities to upsell later.
- Normalize difficult conversations: Team health hinges on addressing accountability and performance issues head-on. Embrace these talks as a leadership strength.
- Prioritize emotional intelligence in leadership: As AI takes on more tasks, empathy, intuition, and emotional awareness become key differentiators for great leaders.
- Trust your entrepreneurial instincts: Even unconventional or unstable beginnings can shape instincts that give you an edge. Don’t discount your personal story.
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Episode Transcript
00:00
All right. Today we’re talking about how to read the room, both on a macro level and a micro level, and turn that into opportunities for your business. My guest today is Rani Dabrai. I’ll tell you more about her in a second, so stay tuned.
Intro: 00:14
Welcome to the Smart Business Revolution Podcast, where we feature top entrepreneurs, business leaders, and thought leaders and ask them how they built key relationships to get where they are today. Now let’s get started with the show.
John Corcoran: 00:30
All right. Welcome, everyone. John Corcoran here. I’m the host of this show. And you know, every week we have smart CEOs, founders and entrepreneurs from all kinds of companies.
And if you check out our archives, we’ve got Netflix and Grubhub and Redfin, Gusto, Kinko’s, YPO, EO, Activision Blizzard, lots of great episodes for you to check out. And this episode, of course, before we get into it, is brought to you by Rise25, where we help businesses to give to and connect to their dream relationships and partnerships. How do we do that? We do that by helping you to run your podcast and content marketing. We are the easy button for any company to launch and run a podcast.
We do three things: strategy, accountability, and full execution. In fact, we invented what some are calling the Wix of B2B podcasting. It’s our platform Podcast Copilot. So to learn more about that, you can go to our website, Rise25.com and learn all about what we do. All right.
First, a quick shout out to a couple of friends of the podcast. Cesar Quintero of
The Profit Recipe, and also Brian Breaux of Legacy of Significance, both past guests on the podcast and, I think, icons of entrepreneurship. Two people that I really look up to. And the reason I’m thanking them is because I wouldn’t know today’s guest if it weren’t for both of them. And so let me tell you about today’s guest.
Her name is Rani Dabrai. She’s a certified EOS Implementer. In fact, she’s the only one in Ireland, a country that I absolutely love. I spent some time in, studied there during law school. She’s a serial entrepreneur, started her first business around age 25, and she’s lived in different international places and worked in different international places. Great perspective that she brings into the work that she does as an EOS implementer today. And she’s based out of Ireland. Well, today she’s in beautiful Menorca, right? Is that where it is?
Rani Dabrai: 02:12
I am, and the sun is setting. So forgive me if the light is fading.
John Corcoran: 02:16
Oh, no, it looks beautiful. It looks beautiful where you are. All right. So you have an amazing background, Rani. So you were raised in India by your entrepreneurial grandfather.
You were born in London. Your dad was Indian. Your mom was Irish. So you’ve got this international kind of background. And your grandfather.
Let’s start with him. Amazing guy. Just started bringing sacks of sugar up to peers in Bombay and turned himself into something. Tell me a little bit about him and what you learned from him.
Rani Dabrai: 02:44
Yeah, yeah, he was just my grandad actually growing up. I was raised by him early on. I always thought he was my dad, so I always called him daddy. He is just the most amazing man I think I ever met in my life. He is hugely entrepreneurial, very kind, very generous.
He had such an entrepreneurial mindset. So he started out bringing the sacks of sugar. And then he eventually had, like other small businesses. And in the end he ended up being a microfinance lender to other business owners in the area, trying to get the, you know, get everything up and running around him. He was very, very giving.
And he had a really interesting philosophy in life. And he used to say, you know, you make one, you give one with a process. So he would like the price of the rupee and the price he’d have every time he’d make something, he’d be very philanthropic. He’d also give the same amount away. So he was really, really highly regarded in his neighborhood in Bombay for being a very solid, very pure, very gentlemanly, and very successful man.
John Corcoran: 03:37
Sounds like a Tom shoes model or a Warby Parker model. A buy one, give one away type of model.
Rani Dabrai: 03:43
Yeah, yeah, he just did that instinctively. It’s just who he was. Very generous. Huge spirit of generosity.
John Corcoran: 03:49
You said that you thought he was your father. At what point was it explained to you that he wasn’t your father?
Rani Dabrai: 03:54
Well, see, my, as soon as I was born, I was sent to India. I think I was six, five, six months old. I still don’t know the full story. Kind of strange.
John Corcoran: 04:03
Never explained it to you.
Rani Dabrai: 04:05
They’ve tried in various ways, but just like it’s just been a bit of muddled upbringing and I’ve decided to stop asking. Just accepted how. And I’m grateful for how I grew up. They. So I think I was about five, six months old, sent to India and then I didn’t come back.
When I first came back, I came back to London and that was when I was, I think I was about five and I knew I was getting visits. My mum then came at some point when my dad was visiting, but you know, it was I’m 45, so this was a long time ago. It was before there were video calls. It was one phone call a week, even if that. And I remember hearing when I was younger, actual tape recordings of me saying the alphabet over the phone to my parents so they knew I was learning how to read. But that’s all I know. And I’ve got lots of photographs, actual photographs of me growing up in India. So for the early years of my life, I just assumed he was my dad.
John Corcoran: 04:54
And at 5 or 6 then. Did they say, okay, now you’re going with these other people? These are your real parents?
Rani Dabrai: 05:00
Yeah, well, they knew, like I mean, I think I knew on some level, but I was it was I remember being shocked. It’s one of the earliest memories I’ve got actually, was being in the little flat my parents lived in, in a kind of a down and out area in London, in Croydon, and watching Trevor Nelson on the news, on the News at Ten, and that was my first ever memory is as a European coming here. And I just remembered that the change in life was huge. It was massive. Yeah.
And I knew like, I think as I was growing up, I knew that they were my parents. But I always never stopped calling daddy. Daddy. He was always more like my dad. And I think there’s I read a lot about attachment theory, and I’ve really delved partly because of what I do as well, deep into psychology.
And, you know, I know that what happens to a child pre seven is super important who they form bonds and attachments with. And for me it was my grandad for sure.
John Corcoran: 05:52
And your grandmother was also kind of a secret entrepreneur because this was a time in India when it wasn’t, you know, women weren’t supposed to work, and she was secretly actually getting paid for little side gigs. Talk about that.
Rani Dabrai: 06:04
She was. Yeah, she was running. And I only found this out recently by accident. She was running. She was mending clothes.
Which is ironic because I wouldn’t have a clue what to do. I definitely did not inherit that skill. She was mending clothes for people in the same building, and my granddad was out working. And she. My dad was an only child, and he had long, you know, he had long left, so she had nothing to do.
But she was mending clothes and she was making quite a decent living out of it. And my granddad, when I think he was supportive when he found out, but I think that she was. I understood that she was afraid to have told him, but she was quite successful, quite privately, in her own right.
John Corcoran: 06:41
So as you grow up, you eventually end up back in London. Did you at some point realize you wanted to become an entrepreneur, or was your grandfather inspired you to go into this work or. well, back on it now because I know it was something you actually ended up kind of getting into this nightclub world, which we’ll talk about.
Rani Dabrai: 07:02
Yeah, that was actually later. So something that did happen earlier that I think you and I haven’t discussed before is that round about the age of. So my parents and I’m very open about this. My dad was an alcoholic. He was quite a bad alcoholic. And my mom’s Irish side.
John Corcoran: 07:19
The non-Irish side. Yeah.
Rani Dabrai: 07:19
That’s worth qualifying.
John Corcoran: 07:20
For. Right.
Rani Dabrai: 07:22
Right. No, no he. But the Indians, they love their whiskey. Yeah. My dad was an alcoholic.
And again, a very generous man. Very nice man. But he always thought he was entrepreneurial and he wasn’t. And he had the opposite of the entrepreneurial gene. So instead of whatever he touched turned to gold.
Whatever he touched turned to dust. And my parents bought a hotel there. I mean, you’re old enough to remember Lockerbie. They bought a hotel in Lockerbie where the plane crashed, and we were there when the plane crashed.
John Corcoran: 07:51
And how far away was the plane crash.
Rani Dabrai: 07:54
Oh, it’s like two miles. It was like we were just on the outskirts of the town.
John Corcoran: 07:58
It missed us by, I don’t know, this was I want to say, was this 1999 89 around that?
Rani Dabrai: 08:03
Yeah. Late 80s. So it was. Yeah. Panama aircraft. And so I was old enough to remember that. And then partly the plane crash, but partly my dad’s I think my dad’s issues. I mean, you know, you put in an alcoholic, they bought a hotel, a hospitality venue. So you put an alcoholic in charge of a bar and go figure. Right.
So that hotel went bankrupt. And I remember from a very young age that going bankrupt had a huge, huge impact on me. We had to leave the hotel. We moved to this place in the north of England, this awful house. It was just that we went from relative wealth to complete poverty.
What felt like overnight. And actually I remember I think it was nine. I remember as a nine year old saying to myself that I would never. I always wanted two things in life: a house no one could ever take away from me. I’d never wanted my house taken away again and the ability to be completely financially independent. I didn’t want anyone telling me what to do, and I never wanted to find myself in this cycle of losing houses, losing businesses.
And then sadly, actually, as I was growing up, even more after that, my dad kept trying different things and kept failing at them. And I mean, he tried. So ironically, I learned what not to do, and it probably made me a bit more risk averse than the average typical entrepreneur. You know, I don’t think I’ll ever have. I had a Miss Moneypenny. I had 120 staff at one point around the globe, but I’m amazed I even let myself get to that because I am quite risky.
John Corcoran: 09:30
Also a staffing model, which we’ll get into. So yeah, I imagine it’s not like a startup where you hire a bunch of people in advance of getting the revenue like you had the clients. So then you hired the staff, I imagine.
Rani Dabrai: 09:42