From the Slums to Global CEO: How Divakar Vijayasarathy Is Disrupting a $160B Industry | Ep. 202

0:00Hey, everyone. Welcome back to Founder Story. Today, we have Divakar. Vijay Sarthy and you are the founder and CEO of DVS Advisory Group and Devakar I really like this title here Thought Capitalist and I know you've authored 16 books on taxation and you have offices around the world both in the U.S. in the Middle East and Asia and I really like to understand and your thoughts on building a global company. Normally, we just kick it off with your background. But before we do that, I want to understand what is a thought capitalist? Okay. I mean, let's get to the thought part of it later. Let's start with the capitalism part of it to begin with.

0:50I'm sure we are in the mickle of capitalism, U.S., right? Now, what is capitalism? that if you are a product of the American society, right? We see the capitalist as a culture, as a cult, as a religion. Now, to you, what does capitalism mean? Are you asking me? Yes. Man, that's a good question. If I was to think of a non-definition, my own definition, that's people being able to be entrepreneurs and thrive and make money and have the freedom to work where they want to work. Absolutely, right? I mean, so you're talking about people being able to be themselves, express themselves and create value.

1:31Now, where does this value get created? On what basis? You look at someone like, okay, who is the richest man on the planet? Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or Whomsaver. Where does their value come from? Where does the wealth come from? Shares, price of their shares. There is a thriving stock market which either bases, it's not only a function of what Elon does, it's also a function of what he believes and whether I resonate with what he believes, whether what he produces, it's not only about whether it's of utility value to me, is it something which I believe can sustain over a period of time. So ultimately, if you look at capitalism, there's a huge element of human quotient behind it.

2:19Be it the belief, be it the perception and be it the real utility. Now when you pull all of this, we call it as value. This is what capitalism was all about. And thought capitalism is actually seeing through it. You see through what ultimately drives capitalism. It's not what you do. It's not why you do. it is how whatever you do is being perceived by the society or economy. That drives your value. It might sound really crude, we can speak for hours and days on this, but that's the ultimate core of thought, capitalism. Going to the depths of what drives capitalism. it might sound strange, but it's ultimately perception which drives capitalism.

3:17It reminds me of the phrase perceived reality. That's really what it is. It might not be what it actually is. It's how people perceive it to be something, which is why it's so important to write books, to do things, to build up the perception about you in the public eye. Thank you. That was deep, man. That's the deepest thought we've ever had on this show right as we started, by the way. So I appreciate that. And I can tell that you are a very deep thinker because before we started, we were talking about all these books that you're reading. and I'm very fascinated by your thirst for knowledge.

4:00So take me back in your life. When did you realize that you have this thirst for understanding and this thirst for seeking out knowledge? I mean, first of all, thanks for the kind words, but it's more than a thirst for knowledge. It's a search for truth, we could say. Now, I started, I mean, I literally grew up in slums in India. so at that time I passed out CA which was at that time one of the most toughest examinations in the world we used to have a parse percentage of 0.3 percent meaning for every thousand people who you who write three people will qualify the exam that that used to be the parse percentage and then after all this I worked I was not happy I quit my job and started DBS in 2007 and in 2008 I went to Mauritius and that's where my real search for truth came in it was a small island nation in Indian Ocean and there I saw firms which are like 10 by 10 in their size offices they were doing millions of dollars of revenue whereas back home in my country even if you were doing say 200-300 thousand dollar revenue you were a large organization I was like wondering why why is it that the same function or same activity delivered in a much smaller economy, carries much larger means of prosperity.

5:27So that's when I realized prosperity is not a function of effort. Then what is it a function of? Then came the quest for search. It was entirely about trying to understand what it takes. And the more deeper you get into it, the study of trying to get to what it takes took me towards spirituality, towards religion, towards economics. And at the deepest of all what it takes, there was an answer which I was refusing to believe. Just to give you a simple question, why should oil be sold in dollars? Why should there be a gold standard? Why not any other metal? Why not the silver standard? Why not platinum standard?

6:11Why not aluminium standard? Now, why should, even if you're talking about Bitcoin, okay, why Bitcoin? Why is the non-fungibility of Bitcoin be an attribute which mankind should believe in? So you get to the depths of all of this and start questioning the why. At the deepest level, there's just one word beneath all of this. Illusion. When you actually understand that's what it takes, the game is so different. it's absolutely different and this was a journey which took almost a couple of decades in life to unravel which took me from a sole proprietary practitioner across three bankruptcies trying to figure out what it takes to scale an industry which was so fragmented globally so so fragmented in the us you have six and six and i mean 650 000 cpas in the us 45 000 cpa firms only about a Thousand firms have done more than$10 million of, less than that, more than$10 million of revenue.

7:18Why is that so? On a$160 billion market. So now, get to the deepest part of it, why the industry was so fragmented. I found one word. Fear. It was entirely the fear of the unknown. The fear of being cheated. The fear of not knowing how to engage with people. the fear of getting into a bad partnership. That dominated the spirit of accountants world over. So they did not, they said, okay, I'm happy being in my own well because I at least know I won't lose. But they also never had a chance to gain big. The accounting fraternity all along was only playing to not lose. They were never playing to win.

8:05That's why they were fragmented. They were so small in size. they were dispersed despise the size of the opportunity that is what we are trying to solve for in dvs if that makes sense i like the illusion part by the way the illusion i think we could insert perception for the sake of this conversation right uh you know it's creating creating a perception around your organization around you as the founder CEO. And then the fear part. I think if you ask, you know, you know, there's over 3000 stated billionaires right now on the Forbes list. I'm sure if you asked all of them, what's one thing that differentiates them from others is they had no fear and they were able to take the leap and to do the things that no one else is willing to do.

8:59And I think that's very hard. So I'm, I am very fascinated that you took many years through religion, through seeking, through doing all these things, through traveling, and you figured this out. And then you realize this group of organizations in this industry, the successful ones are this, A, and unsuccessful ones are B. And now you want to solve that. I mean, this is a it's a big solve to to say I'm going to help companies within an organization succeed versus just solving a problem for a consumer. You know, it's way bigger when you're like, I'm going to help hundreds of thousands or thousands of organizations scale and exit.

9:46So let's talk about the scaling part. So you figured all these things out. You understand the industry. You see where the problem lies. how do you start helping these companies scale so dan let's assume you're a cpa right you're you're running a two or three member firm and you're let's say about five million in revenue now what's your way out you've spent 25 years of your life building up this practice the normal way is for you to sell out at one or 1.25 times your revenue and again you will have to stay for three four years to be to be in the game now similar to what dan does there is let's say an an attack company which has spent 20 25 years built a portfolio of customers to build their expertise they're able to go either they're able to go public being part of a larger organization they're able to sell it for a larger multiple but that's not possible in the accounting industry because it's not been done.

10:42So what we do, we come on board as growth partners. We invest in your company. You get an exit on day zero. Anywhere from 60 to 80 % you want to exit. Ideally, we recommend take 60 % cash today on today's value. And we bring in our team, leadership, cross-sell, technology, smart shoring. You call it, we bring that. We help you with growing your own practice by merging smaller organizations below you. If that's an option, if you're entrepreneurial, we are more than welcome. Then we make this 5 million firm into a 10 or 12 million firm in a matter of two years, three years. We've done that. We've got numerous examples of where we've been able to grow businesses from three, four times in three years to as much as 10 times in two years.

11:29The moment you liberate them, the scale what they will be able to achieve is enormous. And the promoter still owns up to 40 % stake in the company. it's like owning 100 % of a lemon versus a 40 % of a watermelon right the game is so different the game is so different that's how we try and solve for it because the biggest challenge in the in the in the accounting industry where i come from is the accountant is the head of he's the head of hr head of finance head of client relationships head of execution head of technology, head of operations, you name it, it is one man who studied one particular course but manages 10 different profiles.

12:13Right? That's the problem we are solving for. We declutter the person's profile. His head first, then his profile, and then his organization. The outcome is phenomenal. It's magical. I mean, just imagine then, rather, if you enjoyed podcasting, right? but if you had to sit and edit you had to market you had to reach out you do a zillion things around it you end up spending 80 % of your time around the function rather than on the function alone it's such a suboptimal state of existence that's what we relieve a CPA from and that's where the real value creation happens this reminds me of the book The E-Myth have you ever read this book?

12:59no, no E-Myth Okay. This is like the first, I mean, this book is old, 30 years old. And in the beginning of the book, it talks about somebody who wants to create a bakery. And they create the bakery, but they realize that not only do they have to bake, they also have to provide customer service. They have to provide front desk. They have to check people out. They have to do a million other HR. They have to do a million things that they didn't want to do. They just wanted to bake. And then they go out of business because they realize it's or they can't scale. Like you said, it's impossible because they do every job.

13:39What you said is like almost every service company that I know or service industry falls into that same trap of starting with one person who wants to do one job and they're stuck. They can never scale past that. And then, like you said, the multiple is very small when they want to sell. So many of them just close. I forget the number, but it's like 50 ,000 or something businesses. I'm making that number up, but it's a huge number of how many businesses just close every year because they can't sell or they can't exit or it's too complicated and they just want to retire. So I love what you said.

14:18I'm very fascinated. So you go through this human transformation in your life. You realize how things are in the world. you then realize what's holding people back in this industry you start to provide the abilities for people to scale which is genius like this is this might be one of the most genius business models and we've interviewed over 600 people this is incredible what you're doing so you're helping these people um they must be um like what's after a few months or a year when you've been working with these people, I mean, how do you, what's the, what's their personal transformation that happens in that time?

14:59I mean, it's a great question. So typically, Dan, we have a very simple three-step process. If you want to scale, someone joins us, even before they join, we go through this process. The first change is in the mindset. We need, the person needs to understand what took me here won't take me there. Marshall Goldsmith, I'm just borrowing his terms. If you're From a 1 million to a 5 million or a 5 million to a 15 million, the game is completely different. It's like imagine driving a car with a 80 horsepower capacity with a car with a 200 horsepower. You could get a Toyota at 200, but you would need a Lamborghini at 500 horsepower.

15:36It might say just two and a half time, but it's 10 times the price. That's what it takes because the engineering is required to scale to that level of a different orbit. So the first change has to happen in the mindset of the promoter, of the partner. And what I'm saying is universally applicable to all service industries. Second phase of change is visioning. You should know what you want in life. I mean, a simple question then, which I ask many people, what is your dream? They would say like, I would want a big house. What does a big house mean? It would be a massive boss. it could be 5 ,000 square foot, it could be 50 ,000 square foot or 500 ,000 square foot based on what your definition of big is.

16:24But that needs to be defined. So the visioning exercise is a serious part of what we do. There are three steps in visioning and then we get to what we call the action. We get to the numbers part of the game. Okay, what does it take from here to the vision and then we solve for it. That's a process. changing mindset, visioning, action. And once we do that, the outcome is actually magic. What comes out is the unadulterated human spirit in motion. It's a real force of nature at that time. If you are an accountant, you could be great at doing your tax returns, but you may not be the best person to be managing HR or people or whatever.

17:11Now, if you are only put to manage tax from managing thousand you could even be managing ten thousand. It gains energy for you. We keep saying know your energy gainers and trainers. So we identify in the mindset part. The second part is know who you are. So in that know who you are, we really get down to the person in terms of what that person actually is made for. There is no judgment here. It is a discovery of what it is. And then when you end up doing what you are actually born to do, what your real purpose in life is. You are a beast beyond belief. So that's the stage. Mindset, which will also include discovery.

17:55Visioning, where we reduce your aspiration to clear numbers. And action, where we move from point A to point B. That's the game. That's the process. Man, so many things that you said in there resonated well. Unadulterated spirit. see this i'm very fascinated with that and then uh the ability to scale and grow because you're not doing the things that you don't love you're only focused on the thing that you really love doing i've heard so many people like you know don't follow your passion because your passion may not make you money but i think in the end of the day um if you are allowed to do something it's because we can't do it, right?

18:44Like you're saying, you normally can't do the things that you really love in business because in business, you have to do all the things. And many of them we know, like most people don't like to do sales. That's what I've noticed. Or marketing, right? Or branding, or they don't know how. They just want to open the business and they want people to come to them and they want to do taxes or whatever it is that they love to do. They don't want to do the other things. And that's the way most businesses fail, I believe. Um, and they're definitely, I would, so like in the U S only a few percent is 7 % or whatever, 6 % of companies will ever even reach a million dollars in revenue.

19:22It's very small. Um, so I can totally like, I'm just, um, I'm thinking of like, wow, this could be applied to so many industries, this model of business. It's, it's incredible. So now I want to talk about the exit. I've never personally had an exit with the company that I had started, but I would love to. And I think that's very interesting. So you're putting in this work. I think every entrepreneur, the goal is to exit some someday, at least in the U.S., outside the U.S. many times it's legacy and they pass it down to their kids. But the U.S. at least, most of the time, I think most people want to exit.

20:04So how does this how does this play out? you're seeing success you're doing all this stuff and then what so once you grow with us you've got two options i mean three of three options i would say one is we ourselves will buy you out if that's something which you don't want to your dan you've run your distance three five years and then now you want to shift or you want to retire you just want to chill in life or you just bored of what you're doing right i mean that's something um which is new to the uh i mean that's the that's the innate sense of the US market. I mean, people retire in their 20s, 30s and 40s or 50s.

20:40There is no retirement age because they just want to exit. In such circumstances, we can buy them all because by now, yours is not a business. It's a function. Transition is so easy. If you are the hole and soul of your venture, transition is impossible. But the fact that we've been able to come and work on you So what you've been doing is now reduced to a function which can be replaced. That is what gives value to what you've done also. Now it is not just a business based on your expertise. It's a business which is an engine what is being built. So we ourselves will do a full buyback. Or if you're buying a home, you want to sell 5%, 10 % of your business, we can do a fractional buyback.

21:30And the third, which is a most lucrative option, we are going in for a public market listing in 2027-28. You can convert your shares for public stock and you can always exit at your convenience. These are the three models what we offer. So what does a company need to get to be in order to exit? Is there certain things in place that need to happen before it's viable for any of these types of exits? So once they come on board into the DBS platform, we work with them. There's a nine stage process what we take them on, where we study each and every function of theirs. We figure out what we can automate, what we can productize.

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23:28Indeed.com slash Founders Story. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring Indeed is all you need. because the biggest challenge and i'll give you an example is there's more simplest activity when a client comes on board sending a letter of engagement is a two to three week activity in the u.s with most cpa firms this is i'm speaking from personal experience now it's because that it's a very simple process because what is the fees and iterative experience just look at the amount of energy which goes to conclude a letter of engagement between the client and the that's the least of the areas where you would want to spend your time on right we have automated that it might look like a small automation but it has saved three to five hours of every transaction which someone gets that's a significant chunk this is how we just try to simplify each and every element of the game and over the first 12 to 18 months the game is completely automated or structured at that time a cpa's business is something which we can do 100 by out because by then the first 12 to 18 months your role in the organization from being the fulcrum it becomes a function and that function can be replaced by another person who is passionate about doing what you want to replace.

24:52And then we do and go in for a complete exit. Or you want to grow your ambitious, Dan. You're saying, okay, I can go and build my empire. I can go and conquer. I just need support. I need capital we can give you. I need leadership we can give you. I need technology we can give you. We can support you to whatever limit you want to grow. Because ultimately, everyone is going to bring in, every growth is going to make the platform richer at the end of the day. gives more options for clients to engage with us, adds additional levers of growth. So that's the game we are playing in. We firmly believe that one plus one is infinity.

25:33It's not more than two. It's not more than three. It's absolutely infinite possibilities which can happen. It's what you can imagine is the height of your growth possibilities. That's what we firmly believe. So I'm going to go to sleep tonight thinking about one plus one equals infinity. and tomorrow when I wake up, I feel like I'm going to have a different mindset. Talking to you today has given me a mindset shift and I'm not just saying that. As you were talking out, I was thinking about a lot of things and it's really a complete mindset shift. It's amazing how a service business gets held up because of the proposal process.

26:14Like you were saying, I can tell you so many times where somebody never got back to me and I was ready to spend money. Like it happens all the time where I'm ready to spend money or even even in businesses that I've owned where I didn't send out that proposal or it wasn't in the way that I thought it was going to be. And that was the holdup. And then we didn't do business together when on the phone call, we were like, wow, this is going to be great. But that follow up process fell through the cracks. And I can totally understand what you're saying. That might be the most important part of what happens.

26:52Exactly. Exactly. I mean, there's small, small things. I mean, there are a zillion things they can keep. All these small, small nuggets. These are not rocket science. Absolutely not rocket science. I mean, last week I was in the World Economic Forum. And most of the large organizations have at least a thousand cyber attacks on a daily basis. And you know there is one simple solution which can eliminate 99 % of the attacks, cyber attacks. It's the most basic solution which all of us know but rarely use. Multi-factor authentication. The moment you use a multi-factor authentication, you have eliminated the possibility of 99 % of cyber attacks.

27:38We don't do that. because all what it takes to succeed. One thing I've again realized is nothing flamboyant, just one word, discipline. That's all. Discipline plus direction is success. That's something we firmly believe. Once you know your direction, just stay on course. Success is a question of time. Wow, I need to read your books. I feel like you can have, you should have a book that's not just about CPA or taxation. every phrase that you have said today, I think you can apply to a book. Man, this has been very interesting, fascinating. I'm really inspired by what you're doing. And I feel like we can leverage that in many different points.

28:23So people want to get in touch with you. I think many CPAs need this service. Like you said, maybe even hundreds of thousands of people can leverage this. And then I think other people in other industries can also learn from you. So if they want to get in touch, how can they do so? I mean, of course, LinkedIn is the easiest way, but I can always share my email, dv at onedvs.com. Well, amazing. Thank you so much for joining us today on Founder's Story and all the wisdom you shared. I'm going to come back. We need to reconnect in a few weeks. Let's have you back on and let's talk through the meaning of life because I feel like we could break this down.

29:03We could figure it out together. We're multi-thinkers, but I super appreciate you sharing everything today. And I think the audience is going to learn a lot. Thank you. Thanks, Dan. Wonderfully chatting with you.