Yeah, yeah. And it was a contractor model as well. So I was always like leapfrogging. So I always baked in safety. So I was always a safe girl. Yeah. Well, a lot of those reasons.
John Corcoran: 09:53
A lot of entrepreneurs are hugely risk averse, actually. The irony is people think.
Rani Dabrai: 09:58
Yeah.
John Corcoran: 09:58
Being risk, risk taking. So one of the first things you did around age 16, you started selling tickets for a nightclub in the home of rave music. So a town that was kind of known as the birth of rave music. Yeah. And the funny thing about it is that you were too young to actually go inside the nightclub. So you’re selling tickets for this product that you’ve not actually experienced yourself?
Rani Dabrai: 10:20
Yeah. I was desperate to go into this nightclub. All my friends looked older than me. I always had a baby face. They were able to sneak in and I wasn’t.
And anyway, I. I’d have been killed if it had been discovered. So I found out that a man who owned the nightclub and I were begging and begging for a job, and he refused because he said, I can’t even let you in. So he said, look, eventually I wouldn’t give up. I just, I literally would hang around outside his car.
I will finish college. I would go and wait outside the nightclub at four in the afternoon. It was embarrassing, actually, but he agreed. He gave me a job and I was selling tickets on the street outside in the freezing cold. Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday nights to a nightclub.
I hadn’t even been inside. I wasn’t even inside the front door. I didn’t know what it looked like, never had the experience. And I’ve always said that. I think that I was probably where I learned entrepreneurship, because I was selling a dream that I’d never experienced myself, and then I ended up selling the most tickets.
I ended up being the best salesperson. So as soon as I turned 18, I did that for two years. As soon as I turned 18 and I was allowed in, I was immediately given tons more responsibility, heaps of other things to do, and within a couple of years, I really quickly ended up doing an awful lot more there. And that, you know, really propelled me into the whole music world, nightclub space.
John Corcoran: 11:33
You end up going into music journalism, actually, and writing about it. How did you end up going into that again?
Rani Dabrai: 11:39
Quite by accident, because I realized that there were a couple of big ones. For those of you, your listeners who are familiar with the UK, back then in the 90s, there were a few big magazines, there was Mixmag Ministry, there was some really iconic magazines and I was reading them, and I realized that there was people reviewing these nightclubs, and I put two and two together in my head, and I figured if they were reviewing the nightclubs, they must be getting in for free. And I was working, but I was a poor student. So I contacted all of the magazines and said, hey, I don’t want to be paid, but I’ll review your nightclubs for you. Just get me in for free.
And they were like, well, of course we’ll pay you because they were struggling to find people in some of the areas. So I said, I’ll travel anywhere, I’ll go anywhere. And I ended up working under pseudonyms for all of the different magazines because I was running one of them, the main one, and then I had to use different names because they didn’t want it to seem like no one wanted to say it was the same reviewer. So I started getting all of these gigs, basically getting into nightclubs, partying, having a photographer with me and getting paid for it was amazing. And I got to bring a friend, so wherever I’d go, I’d get a hotel.
I go to all the festivals and it was before the days of the internet, really. So I have this actual stack of physical magazines at home, still from 20 years ago, with all the evidence of my partying. And it was published in print. And I was paid a pound a word. So every weekend I was making, you know, three, 400 bucks every single weekend as a student. Pounds. It was huge money, and I have none of it. I spent it all. So I don’t know what the hell I was doing. It was awful.
John Corcoran: 13:06
And you, you have a story about hanging out backstage with Snoop Dogg at one of these events? What are these parties?
Rani Dabrai: 13:12
Yeah, yeah. So there was. I’m trying to remember it was a festival. I think it was Creamfields. There was.
I mean, so all of these things involved accessing all area passes, getting backstage, being with all the DJs. So I was, you know, before Tiesto was as big as Tiesto is now. I think it was like 1999. He was there. So I think it was Snoop Dogg who was at one of the festivals.
I’m pretty sure it was Creamfields and he was just in the green room. He was backstage and we just sat down and chatted and smoked and it was great. Really cool guy. Very funny, very funny.
John Corcoran: 13:45
Yeah.
Rani Dabrai: 13:45
It’s funny. Yeah. And there was another it was, there was another nightclub where Chaka Khan was doing a live set, and it was actually one where I was being paid to cover it. And the, the, the theme of that night was I had to get every get the whole night for £20, and a journalist would follow me around, but I wasn’t allowed to pull any strings. And there was a picture of me.
The photographer got a picture of me. Sorry. The photographer was following me around. Got a picture of me and my friend running past the bouncer into the nightclub. So we sort of broke into the nightclub, only to find out that Chaka Khan was playing and doing a live set. So we were kind of sitting down and chilling.
John Corcoran: 14:23
Let’s get to the origin story behind your business, which is Miss Moneypenny. So you have been living internationally. We talk about your international upbringing, lived in a bunch of different places, and you eventually decide you’re going to move to Ireland, but you kind of had this idea that it would be easy for you to get a job when you moved there, after having moved around a lot. You want to move back to somewhere that you felt comfortable. But it didn’t work out.
You ended up working in a bunch of different places and this is where we get into what we previewed at the beginning, which was the idea of looking ahead, seeing trends and things like that. You had this idea that you could start a business helping people with remote working, but you weren’t able to sell that to people.
Rani Dabrai: 15:09
No, no, it just didn’t take off in Ireland. People didn’t get it, didn’t understand it. They didn’t have a very I knew it was big in India and I knew it was big in America. But the concept of virtual assistance, which is why I thought it would be great. And as I was temping, I had this idea of working remotely for one of the people I was temping with and they didn’t like it, didn’t love it at all.
So they invited me to leave. It wasn’t a, it was just had to do it and I just ended up tail between the legs for a while, and I ended up saying I wasn’t going to. I just didn’t want to go and get another job, didn’t want a boss, wanted to be financially free, and wanted to be free and lots of other ways. So I decided that I would just try and do this myself. So I came up with the idea of virtual assistance, which and I.
The only reason I came up with the name Miss Moneypenny was because I thought to myself, what is the most famous assistant ever? And it was Miss Moneypenny. So I bought the domain name, not realizing how important that would have been at the time. And we and I just, you know, just set up. It was just me and trying to sell virtual assistants, but it was too soon. It was too early. No one got it.
John Corcoran: 16:14
And I actually came to Ireland in 2005 or. No, actually, I think this was earlier. I did come in 2005. That was the year that I came around, the year that I came to study abroad, but I think I was in 2002. I came, which I think was shortly after the EU or Ireland had joined the EU.
Rani Dabrai: 16:32
Yeah. And when it changed to the euro.
John Corcoran: 16:35
Yeah. And I remember how dramatically that affected the country, because then there was suddenly this influx of new Labour that were coming in and suddenly Ireland had become this country which had always exported people. People had left Ireland. Gone to places like the United States. And then all of a sudden there was an influx of people coming in because of the Celtic Tiger.
Rani Dabrai: 16:54
Right. And the Celtic. Yeah. The Celtic Tiger was interesting because it was this huge bubble and people living like Hollywood celebrities for a finite period of time. And then it was the opposite.
So when everything crashed, when Ireland was really badly affected by everything in 2007, 2008, which also coincided with when I was trying to get my business off the ground. And it was just funny to see the two, the two changes, like the two extremes of culture that you know, emerged since then and then construction particularly was really, really badly hit. And all the work I’d been doing had been in the construction space. So yeah, it was huge it was. Yeah, it was a funny, funny time to launch a business. But good.
John Corcoran: 17:37
You’re struggling to explain to people the concept and the value of remote working. And tell us about fat Will. Fat Will is a drug dealer who helped you with a bit of an epiphany in your business.
Rani Dabrai: 17:51
He did. He did so because of how I grew up. I lived in, I don’t know how many different places, and not all of them were salubrious. As I said that we’d gone from extreme wealth to extreme poverty. And when that happens, you end up in some of the nicest places.
But I like to stay in touch with people. And one of them was a drug dealer. We were in a fairly rough area and there was a drug dealer among one of many. But fat will. His name was Fat Will.
I never knew his last name. And long after I left, I left that chapter of my life behind. I said, I’m never going to set foot back in these areas. But he would always stay in touch randomly. He’d ring you and I would never be able to contact fat Will.
He would always contact me. And this is just how he went about his business. And one day he rang me and he was like, oh, what’s up girl? And I was like, just trying to get my business off the ground. It’s not working.
And he said to me, you know, what’s wrong with you is that you haven’t got the appropriate gateway drug. You’re trying to sell a high end product, but you haven’t got the right gateway drug. So when I’m trying to sell my high end products, I need to find a low end gateway drug to give people for free, to bring them into my ecosystem. And then I graduated them and I was like, oh, good concept, wrong commodity, but good concept. So he just said, what’s your gateway drug?
Well, I’ll leave you with that. What’s your gateway drug? And he got me thinking, and I realized that my gateway drug for virtual assistance was call answering, because in Ireland, no one got virtual assistance. But they did get a call answering. Everyone understood that it was really simple.
Straight away I introduced a call answering service, which was me, and I had this. I did theatre studies at A-level, so I was quite good at doing accents. So I said I had all these staff, but it was just me with one phone and answering the phone and I got one client, then I got two, then three and then seven, and then I was able to upsell to virtual assistants and then the rest was history.
John Corcoran: 19:39
So you had people call like these different businesses they’d ring in and then you would know which call they’re there. Yeah.
Rani Dabrai: 19:46
So I used a system, a very basic system in the beginning called a whisper prompt. So you would hide one phone and you would hear it, would tell you the person on the other end would still hear ringing, but it would tell you who the company was. It would tell you how to answer. And then I could hold. And then I was able to make enough money to buy two phone sets. I got an internship and then I really, really bootstrapped it. But yeah. So I would, like, put people on hold and then put on a different accent and pick it up and I’d be someone else. And it was.
John Corcoran: 20:12
And then you said the name Miss Moneypenny was relevant for you, because then you started to attract people who thought they were like James Bond, and they had these crazy requests for you. So tell us about that.
Rani Dabrai: 20:23
Yeah. Yeah. We always mean, 80, 90% of the client base was male. They were, you know, entrepreneurs, people who some of them had started to happen and some of them had assistance already, but they had things that they needed to get taken care of that they didn’t necessarily want their assistant to know about. So one guy in particular, he had five mistresses and it was a logistical nightmare for him.
So he engaged my company to handle all the calendars and, you know, no judgment. So we’re just gonna need to pay the bills. And we started to attract higher end people with more disposable income. So then it was instead of, you know, the the busy solopreneur who wanted us to answer his phones and book a train ticket, it became, you know, someone a high net worth, ultra high net worth individual who needed gold to be moved or needed a private chef to be found, or, you know, needed a poodle to be flown from one country to another on a private plane. The problems became slightly surreal.
John Corcoran: 21:22
Really, to.
Rani Dabrai: 21:22
Say.
John Corcoran: 21:23
Any other crazy ones that come to mind that you can think back on that were kind of some of the craziest requests you got?
Rani Dabrai: 21:29
Well, we had to, yeah, we had to find the only man in Europe who could prove that gold was what it was. There was another one where we had a gentleman who owned a lot of precious artwork that was safely secured. But he wanted proof for the artwork, so he needed pictures to be taken of the artwork. But he was quite particular. He didn’t want just this to be any old picture, so we had to find a photographer who was good enough for her, like a high end photographer who was good enough to go and take a picture of a picture and then turn that into something that he could put on the wall.
And the amount of money that was spent on that particular project was insane. There was another one where this guy had bought the I. This is apparently a very big deal to men. I kind of get it, but he bought the perfect pair of boxer shorts in 2007, and he’d never been able to find the same ones. I think they were, I don’t know, Armani or something, and he spent so much money on hiring my team to find the only pairs of them all around the world. I don’t want to tell you how much money was spent on that particular project, but it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter. It was just crazy, crazy stuff.
John Corcoran: 22:37
Wow. So somehow this leads to a project with naturally US senators and governors. Some US senators and governors. Kind of. The word on the street is that you need to find Miss Moneypenny in Ireland, and she will help. And then that leads to helping with these trade missions. So talk about the evolution of your business.
Rani Dabrai: 22:56
So we ended up doing one project for an existing client who was a friend of or they were working kind of indirectly with a, with a US senator, and they were doing a trip with one of their first ladies, and they were coming over as a group, and they had to do like a mini. There was a trip to Ireland, a trip to London. They needed everything organized end to end. So we agreed to take that on and that went really, really well. They went back.
There were two senators on the trip. They went back and they went talking to their buddies, and the next thing we were getting calls from, you know, governor’s offices asking us, would we? They heard that we were the best at trade missions and would we be interested in helping them? And of course, Entrepreneurially, I was going to say no to anything. It was always yes.
So I was like, of course, yeah, sure, that’s what we can do. And so things escalated really quickly. All of a sudden we were dealing with the Secret Service. We were dealing with the governor’s office. It was just a whole different level.
And then we started to get these really cool trade missions coming over. And when you’re doing these trade missions, you have to do them twice because the Secret Service comes first to advance. And so, you know, they get really complex. They get really lucrative. They are really fun. They’re really enjoyable. Yeah, they’re really international.
John Corcoran: 24:07
These international trips can be weeks or months in advance. So when I worked in the Clinton White House, I did one advanced trip where I went because that wasn’t my job. I was a writer. But, you know, staffers could help to advance. And so I did one project that was domestic, where I went a week or two before the president went to Michigan.
And, you know, I think I was on the ground for a week and then was helping with logistics and everything. And this was before nine over 11. After nine over 11, it got more complicated, but just an amazing experience to be involved with. The kind of the mechanics, the machinery of all that stuff that happens behind the scenes.
Rani Dabrai: 24:46
Yeah, it’s a delicate dance that people don’t realize, and just little things like how the label, how the rooms. Yeah. How they like just the rooms. Like, we got a lot of training from the Secret Service, just even on how you might enter a room where you would sit. And it just makes you paranoid in a way that once you see some stuff, you can’t unsee it.
And it was just really fun, really wild, really intense. You know, it would take you away from home for days on end. And there’s a lot that you can’t talk about. And it was just really interesting. But it was great to try and, you know, tie in that with making business happen as well. Because ultimately that’s the purpose of a trade mission.
John Corcoran: 25:25
Right? Right. So let’s get to EOS. How did you discover EOS and decide to become an EOS implementer?
Rani Dabrai: 25:32
So I discovered EOS because you’re an EO, so you probably know Julia. She’s one of the trainers. So Julia is also an EOS implementer. And Julia and I went back quite a long way, and she kind of tapped me on the shoulder at one point, because I’d told Miss Moneypenny I’d completed the exit, sort of as I wouldn’t say it was at a loose end. I was doing well.
I was there for a period of three years. I was executive director of the World Trade Center in Dublin, and that was sort of what was happening as well. We were doing trade missions. That was the last part of my business that we’d I’d move over to, and Julia tapped me on the shoulder and said that with my blend of experience from an entrepreneurial perspective as well as so it’s like, as well as having worked with other entrepreneurs. So over the course of Miss Moneypenny, I think I worked with just over 1600 entrepreneurs and being behind the scenes of their business.
And she just I asked her one day, I said, wow, you have a really cool life. Like, what’s this about? And that’s how the conversation started. And that was back before it became a franchise. So it was really an interesting time to become an implementer.
And that was, you know, that was five years ago now. And I’ve loved every minute of it since. I really love working with teams, I love EOS, I love the community of implementers. Cesar obviously is one of them. So just meet the most amazing people, my teams that I work with, as well as all the rest of the implementers. It’s just a really incredible way to spend my days.
John Corcoran: 26:58
And talk about such a varied background. But talk about this idea of reading the room, seeing trends, understanding what’s going on, you know, behind the scenes. Yeah. Talk a little bit about how others listening to this can implement that a little bit more for themselves.
Rani Dabrai: 27:16
Yeah. So I really do think that as leaders, our job is to figure out what’s not being said, because we can’t build businesses without the teams and teams inevitably bring with them a level of dysfunction, disharmony. We need clear communication and not everyone is great at that. So my job as an implementer is to go in and facilitate sometimes difficult, often difficult conversations because you’re talking about things like accountability. You’re talking about things like right people in the right seats or wrong people in the right seats, or right people in the wrong seats, that kind of thing.
None of these things are easy, but we need to be able to, you know, bubble them to the surface and figure it out. And I really think that people doing well in business, people progressing in business. I think the further you get is in direct correlation with the amount of difficult conversations you’re willing to have. And if you can read the room, if you can be truly present with the person or people you’re around, if you can figure out what’s either coming or going on in the background. I think it just puts you at such a huge advantage.
Even everything from, like I said, working with the Secret Service, walking in and seeing actually physically reading the room, who’s sitting where and what’s going on. Growing up with an alcoholic dad, you really learn how to translate silence because not everything is said, so you figure out how to survive through that. You add all of this stuff has come from my history and I think it’s all I couldn’t be doing a better job, really, with my time because you bring that into the session room. And I think as leaders, if we can be more emotionally intelligent, if we can be more tuned in and really try and understand what’s going on beneath the surface, beneath the missed deadlines, you know, beneath the I didn’t do this because beneath the emails, beneath all the stuff that we’re trained to look at underneath the surface, that’s where the real stories live. And I think that that’s where the power is, and that’s how we transform our teams. That’s how we transform our businesses, that’s how we get what we want. And that’s how I think.
John Corcoran: 29:14
With, you know, the coming disruption that’s happening now with AI affecting so many different businesses. Yeah, even more important today is that people and companies have these challenging conversations and be emotionally intelligent about what they want to do. As businesses evolve and adapt to the changing landscape.
Rani Dabrai: 29:38
Absolutely. I mean, actually, I wrote a piece about this just this week that I really think that there’s two things. First of all, as you said, with AI and what’s happening, people are starting to completely abdicate their ability to think. And, you know, they’re telling me to do this for me. You know, it’s one step away from feeling this for me.
This I mean, one of my friends even just said that she was copying and pasting her WhatsApp text messages from this guy. She’s trying to date ChatGPT and saying, figure this out. And I’m there’s a part of me that’s saying there’s something really messed up about that. Like, when did we lose the ability to feel it’s happening? It’s happening around us.
And I think that so there’s that. And I also with AI, I think we need to be even more attuned to humans because it’s really all that’s left that I have. I’m starting to wonder what is left that I can’t do. Like I am taking over everything right now on some level, but it’s never going to take over our feelings, our senses, the stuff that’s between us. So we have to be able to do that.
We have to keep a hold of that skill. And then the second thing is, I think that we’re in a generation that has been taught how to suppress feelings proactively. And I kind of, you know, I blame the whole Kardashian, the Hills. I blame all of that topical culture. I mean, actually, just today I was at lunch and I saw these two girls meeting.
I think they were in their 20s. And when I would meet my girlfriends for lunch, we’d give each other a big hug. You could visibly see us smiling. We’re excited. These two girls walked in, circled the table like sharks.
They were very good friends, apparently, but they barely showed any emotion. And I think if you watch the kind of entertainment that we’re being exposed to in our young people are being exposed to what what we’ve learned is to have this very kind of numb, no expression, keep everything quite frozen and it and I think that that’s outside in people are starting to behave that way. Society is turning into a weird place to be for that reason. And I think it’s so important that we retain our ability to read human beings and communicate humanly.
John Corcoran: 31:44
Yeah, that’s great advice. Well, I know, Rani, we’re almost out of time here, and I usually warn my guests beforehand, but I’m a little rusty right now because I haven’t done an interview in about six weeks. Took a little bit of a break for the summer. But my last question is my gratitude. I think you’ll be fine.
I love to ask my guests, you know, are there some people that they’re grateful to, especially peers or contemporaries or mentors who are still in your life? You mentioned Cesar, who’s I know has been impactful for both of us. So anyone in particular you would want to just acknowledge as we wrap up here?
S4: 32:19
Yeah, I mean.
Rani Dabrai: 32:20
Definitely with Cesar because he’s front of mind right now for lots of reasons. You know, I just finished MP was home for four days and went and spent another week with Cesar because I did forum training with him. Julia I just mentioned Julia as well. Actually, Julia, for lots of different ways and lots of different reasons. She’s been an angel in my life.
Julia. She’s another. She is an amazing EOS implementer, but she’s more than anything, an amazing human being. She’s always looked out for me, and she’s been there for me at different parts of my life, in different stages. And she’s a friend. She’s I’m just so grateful for her. She’s just awesome, Julia. And that’s who I’m thinking of right now.
John Corcoran: 32:55
Very cool. Okay, Rani, thank you so much. Where can people go to learn more about you, connect with you, and reach out if they have any questions?
Rani Dabrai: 33:02
So my website is ranidabrai.com, it’s getting a bit of an overhaul but LinkedIn is where I’m quite active. So Rani Dabrai is just my full name on LinkedIn. That’s where I am.
John Corcoran: 33:12
Rani, thanks so much.
Rani Dabrai: 33:13
Thanks, John. Thanks for your time.
Outro: 33:18
Thanks for listening to the Smart Business Revolution Podcast. We’ll see you again next time and be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes.