Career Coaching Secrets

The Real Talk on Startup Success and Career Growth with Raj Khera

• Davis Nguyen

Share episode

In this episode of Career Coaching Secrets, we're joined by Raj Khera, a serial entrepreneur, executive coach, and three-time CEO who has successfully built and exited multiple SaaS companies, including MailerMailer and WealthEngine. Raj is now on a mission to help 250 entrepreneurs become multimillionaires through his ventures like MoreBusiness.com and MakeMEDIA. He shares powerful insights on navigating the startup journey, building scalable businesses, and developing the leadership mindset needed for long-term success. Whether you're launching your first company or planning your next big career move, Raj’s experience offers invaluable guidance to accelerate your growth.

You can find him on:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/rajkhera/
https://makemedia.ai/


You can also watch this podcast on YouTube at:
https://www.youtube.com/@CareerCoachingSecrets

If you are a career coach looking to grow your business you can find out more about Purple Circle at http://joinpurplecircle.com

Get Exclusive Access to Our In-Depth Analysis of 71 Successful Career Coaches, Learn exactly what worked (and what didn't) in the career coaching industry in 2024: https://joinpurplecircle.com/white-paper-replay

Raj Khera:

Google still gets 372 times more searches than all of the AI tools combined. So yes, while people are going to Perplexity, ChatGPT, other tools to get some answers or generalized questions, they're still going to Google and Google's got its AI answers also. And so the goal is to just such valuable content found by so many different places. Now, another thing that we're seeing, and this happened in just the last couple of months, is that LinkedIn's posts are actually getting into Google's answers.

Davis Nguyen:

Welcome to Career Coaching Secrets, the podcast where we talk with successful career coaches on how they built their success and the hard lessons they learned along the way. My name is Davis Nguyen, and I'm the founder of Purple Circle, where we help career coaches scale their business to seven and eight figures without burning out. Before Purple Circle, I started and scaled several seven and eight figure career coaching businesses myself and consulted with two career coaching businesses that are now doing over $100 million each. Whether you're an established coach or just building your practice for the first time, you'll discover the secrets to elevating your coaching business.

Rexhen Doda:

Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of Career Coaching Secrets Podcast. My name is Rexhen, I'm your host, and today's guest is Raj Kara, a serial SaaS entrepreneur with three successful exits to public companies and the founder of MakeMedia, a revolutionary platform that helps executives and teams turn simple conversations into powerful marketing engines. With background in engineering and deep expertise in SEO, content marketing, and go-to marketing strategy, Raj is reshaping how thoughtless is created and scaled. It's my pleasure to have you on the podcast. Welcome to the show, Raj.

Raj Khera:

Rexhen, thank you so much for having me. Looking forward to our conversation.

Rexhen Doda:

Yeah, I'm looking forward to it too. And it's a pleasure to have you on. Tell me a little bit more about what inspired you to become a coach.

Raj Khera:

Well, I had a coach for many, many years. So my journey started out as a semiconductor electronics engineer. Got the itch to start my own company after being an engineer for a long time because I got bored of engineering, actually. And then I went into business and I started a company, built it. We ended up scaling it fairly quickly, zero to 100,000 users in about four years. And we got acquired by a publicly traded company. This was during the dot-com boom days. So, you know, I'm an older guy. This was a while ago. And I started another business to provide email marketing software to companies. And I was struggling with that one. And so I actually joined a group called Vistage. So it's a group of coaching group, professional coaching group for executives. And I learned so much just through the peer interaction, through the head of the chapter that I was part of. And it really provided a a lot of guidance for me. That was actually my first exposure to executive coaching. So when I sold that company and did another one after that, I decided that, you know, there were a lot of people who were asking me for advice about how they could really understand ways that they could be better for business. So it was a little bit of an advisory coaching type of experience that I was offering. And so that's how people started coming to me because of the network that I'd built. And I started my executive coaching career, which I've since tapered off a little bit because I'm really excited about the next opportunity to build another company. So I think that's where my heart really is. But for many years, I was an executive coach. Very valuable experience.

Rexhen Doda:

And if you were to talk about these, I think, were they four to five years as an executive coach? How would you explain the journey of you being a coach and then where you are at today, which is like slowly shifting off to your other business?

Raj Khera:

It's a good question because executive coaching is very rewarding. There is the challenge of constantly getting customers, clients, you know, and so I think many coaches can relate to that. You know, being an engineer I never stopped tinkering with things and AI really changing the game for the way we do just about everything today in business. It just felt like an opportunity that would be missed if I didn't hop in and try to do something. So that's where I've kind of tapered off the executive coaching side of things and really leaned into building a tool that actually helps people turn what it does actually turns simple conversations into very high quality, engaging, rankable content that drives business. So the tool that's being used by executive coaches, but it's also also being used by executives to help them lean into marketing in a very strategic way for their business group.

Rexhen Doda:

So this tool basically utilizes AI to generate content from simple, like I said, simple conversations from the executives. Is this also another like software that you're in the future trying to exit?

Raj Khera:

Maybe we'll see how that part goes. Here's one thing that I think a lot of people struggle with, and that is you can get a lot of content written by ChatGPT or these other AI tools, and you just type in a prompt. There are people learning more about how you do the prompts and it'll come back with an answer. The thing is that content is fairly generic. It takes generic AI training data and then comes up with content. And if you just swapped your name with someone else's name on the same content, you wouldn't know, right? There's nothing authentic about it. There's no stories from your experiences, your expertise, the way you've guided people. That's an authentic thing that just AI misses. AI cannot create authentic content. So the other challenge is very time consuming. Every coach I know just struggles with that as they enjoy the inner interactions with their clients, but just taking time out to do all the marketing is a real pain. And so what we've done is looked at that problem and said, well, how do we solve that problem? And it's through conversations. If I said to you, hey, go write a really nice blog about how to set company culture and the things that you need to do to monitor company culture, which is an executive coaching topic that executives would search on. You might struggle with putting that together. And if you've got AI to write something, it would be very generic. And by the way, Google knows when it's got a generic content, it will not rank you. On the other hand, if I said, Rexhen, how about we we have a conversation. Let me ask you some very specific questions about company culture. You'd be able to answer that off the top of your head because you have that depth of experience. You would be able to bring in stories from your clients' experiences and so on. You don't have to name clients by name, but you would be able to share the stories. That suddenly becomes extremely authentic and very unique. AI training data does not have your stories. And so what we've done is combine human authenticity with AI efficiency to build this tool, MakeMedia, where you simply have a a structured, interactive conversation just by voice. You don't need to type anything. It'll ask you questions. You just talk. And then it will then create a very well-structured SEO-friendly, because there's a lot, one of my expertises is search engine optimization. It actually builds that in to the content that it creates for you and simultaneously will generate a lot of very engaging LinkedIn posts with hooks, strong middles, calls to action to start to get engagement. And that, by the way, getting on LinkedIn is one of the best ways to get coaching clients.

Rexhen Doda:

And And since you mentioned how this tool works and how it also incorporates SEO is basically the coaches that you're working with are trying to get traffic from Google with the content that is produced from the

Raj Khera:

tool.

Rexhen Doda:

Is that

Raj Khera:

correct? That's correct. So let's talk about the journey of how an executive finds an executive coach. It's not always somebody typing in executive coaching into Google or just being in the market for executive coaching. Sometimes they don't even know or realize they need a coach. What they realize is the culture example. For example, they might say, you know, one of the challenges I've got is how do I deal with a very difficult person in my team who is an extremely high performer, but doesn't get along with people? That's a real issue. And as an executive coach, there's a good chance you may have already guided people through how do you deal with difficult people, those conversations. Now that could be something that an executive is looking for. And so if you created content around that, like how to have a hard conversation with a high performer, that kind of content is stuff that people are looking for online. If they see you post about these types of issues on LinkedIn, they start to look at you and say, wow, that person really knows how to navigate these conversations. And there's an endless array of topics that you deal with. Just think about your last 10 customer conversations with the executives that you coach, and you'll already have a whole list of topics that you talk about. So the way you talk about these and the keywords that you use, which can then, by the way, get inputted into AI Answers, because it's not just all about getting ranked on Google. It's also getting found within ChatGPT and other places, and then creating structured LinkedIn posts, all that collectively makes a really big impact on your ability to get clients. So there's more to it. And I'm happy to go into all the details on how you align that. But I've been talking for a little bit. I'll let you have a question.

Rexhen Doda:

Yeah, I was just thinking because I also in my early career was doing SEO. And I just wanted to ask you from your perspective, because now you're putting a lot of time onto this with the tool as well. How do you feel like this might be something that also the people are going to watch this be in interested in if they wanted to utilize SEO for getting clients. How has the SEO changed in AI era, like recent years? Obviously in the past, a lot of people just go to Google, get the information. How do you think that has changed? Is it just shifting that people are using ChatGPT, but still going through the resources?

Raj Khera:

So that is an excellent question. It has changed a lot and people now refer to SEO instead of just search engine optimization. It's almost like search everywhere optimization because people are getting content from all sorts of places, including ChatGPT. Now, I will say there's some new data that just recently came out. Google still gets 372 times more searches than all of the AI tools combined. So yes, while people are going to Perplexity, ChatGPT, other tools to get some answers or generalized questions, they're still going to Google and Google's got its AI answers also. And so the goal is to just such valuable content found by so many different places. Now, another thing that we're seeing, and this happened in just the last couple of months is that LinkedIn's posts are actually getting into Google's answers too. So if you actually go to Google and you type a search query, you'll actually see some LinkedIn posts that are very high quality posts. Google is not looking to see how many people click like on the post. They're actually looking at the post to see, does this answer the question that the person is typing into Google for the search results? So what this means for anybody trying to get more clients, the more high quality, authentic content that you publish, wherever you publish it, it could be creating YouTube videos just hop on your phone make a quick recording to answer a question that someone might have had or linkedin post or actual full articles on your blog all of that is making an impact on your ability to get found so it definitely has changed but authentic content is the starting point and record the conversations and then like tools like ours will just turn that into a machine

Rexhen Doda:

i really like that how you just explained because us working from working in digital marketing often feel like because we use ai so much we feel like oh i Everyone might be using AI so much. They are. And they are, like I said. But you just mentioned a statistic that based on a study, there were over 300 times or that are still Google. So that is interesting. Right now, it just has shifted. It's more complicated. It's not just Google. It's multiple where the traffic could flow from. Is the goal to get them to the website or is the goal to just get them to read the content initially and get to know about

Raj Khera:

it? The goal is to start a conversation because likes don't generate business. Conversations... generate business. And so the whole point is to really get someone to understand that you have the Google content guidelines are the following. It's called EEAT and it stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. And you can Google that to find out more details. But the bottom line is they don't want people using something like a chat GPT to just generate content about a topic when they don't really know enough about that topic. They're just using a content generator to try to get found. So what Google wants to do is to find people who actually know what they're talking about, who have the depth of experience, like you as an executive coach would have, because that adds to the authoritativeness and the trustworthiness part. So there's a couple of tips I'll give you on what you can do in your content. If you're publishing it on a blog, at the very bottom of your blog, put a little author section. So about who you are, and then maybe a link to your LinkedIn profile. So that way, when Google traces all of the links, it will then make its way to your LinkedIn profile and see, oh, wow, this person actually does have the depth of experience, the authoritativeness to be writing about this topic. That little simple thing can start to advance some of your online rankings. By the same token, it will go and see what kind of content you're publishing on LinkedIn as well. And so the more you publish, and I strongly recommend executive coaches, leadership coaches post twice a week on the low end. I publish daily. I tell you, it has made a massive difference in people finding me, reaching out to me, engaging. Yes, you'll get people who try to sell you the moment they see something and just ignore those, you know, and the more popular you get on LinkedIn, Every now and then you might have a troll. So my policy with trolls is I just block them and I'm done. I don't even engage. 99.9% of the people who start to see your posts will start to see you as an authority on different topics. That's how people found me for executive coaching. I would post about all of these different leadership topics. So there's actually a stronger approach that I recommend for people. And that is to start with a buyer persona about who you want to reach. Oftentimes an executive coach would say, Say, well, I want to reach executives. I want to reach CEOs. Well, narrow that down just a little bit. It could be I specialize in helping healthcare coaches or some other type of niche. But when you come up with a persona, you understand what that person's goals are, their challenges, what kind of problems they might be dealing with, what their values are, how they get information, who influences their decisions, and the best ways to message them. Those are all the components of a buyer persona, which, by the way, our tool creates for free to actually help you create a buyer persona and you get a really solid persona. Now, once you have that persona, you look at, well, what is the path that person, that persona would take to find me as an executive coach? They go through stages. People don't just wake up one day and say, oh, I'm ready. I need a coach. Usually there's an awareness stage that, oh, I've got to solve these problems. Like my company culture is not what I want it to be. How do I fix that? Those are problems, awareness problems. Then there's consideration stage, the next stage, and that how do I start to actually make an impact on the problem that I have? And then the third stage is the evaluation is, it looks like I need an executive coach? How do I pick the best one? And so everybody who goes through that journey, they might be at a different point along the way when you first engage with them. What you want to do is think of all the questions they might have along the buyer journey. So now you've got your persona, you've got the buyer journey, the questions that that person might have along the buyer journey. And then you look at what are the keywords that map those questions. And then when you align all three, the buyer persona, journey questions, and the keywords, now you've got the makings of a content plan. And so when you create content around all of those things, you'll be able to have all the topics that people are thinking of in the different stages. So when an executive coach that aligns with your buyer persona is thinking about things, all of your content just talks to that one person. It's magic because that's when content starts to rank high. That's when if you're publishing constantly on that stuff on LinkedIn, people who are like that, who are like your ideal persona, they will start to find you. It takes a little bit of time to just get the gears moving, but it's like starting a bike. You start pedaling a little slow, but then before you know it, you got that momentum going and it really starts to attract a lot of people. So the other thing that we did in MakeMedia is we actually have something called the Content Plan Maker, Content Planner, and it does all of this for you. I used to take three to four weeks of painstaking work to build these types of content plans in my prior businesses. So our tool actually does all of this in about five minutes. And so it's very simple. You just talk about who you are, what you want to provide, and it will generate a lot of this stuff for you. You can make some edits, but you end up with this endless idea list of excellent content ideas that will help you penetrate the market you're trying to reach. And then when you're ready to create the content, You click a button, go through the interview, it creates the post for you, it creates the SEO friendly articles for you. So it makes life so much easier. It's a tool I wish I had when I was building my prior company.

Rexhen Doda:

I really like that. And is the tool also, I believe you were able to train it to speak to your own voice too, like the way you talk in your own style. Is that something to train on so that you can use your language?

Raj Khera:

Yeah. And so for the LinkedIn posts, here's what we do. Sometimes there are special ways to create a hook and maybe our own voice may not know exactly what that hook is. So think about, you know, when you look at LinkedIn, what gets you to stop? Scroll stopping hook. That's a very curious opening that gets you to stop and then click to read more. That's what you want. So what we do is every time we do an interview about any given topic to create the content, we create about 10 different styles of LinkedIn posts. And so there's conversational style, bold, tactical, narrative. So you can actually look at these different styles and then just pick and choose, make some edits if you want. It's AI. It's not going to be perfect right out of the box. So take the content that generates based on your conversation so all the content is very authentic it's got your stories all that but it's polished with a way to engage and then test those on linkedin and see which types of styles actually interact engage your audience more so that gives you a little bit of a broader ability to reach people it's still your stories it's still your content just written in a way that gets people to stop the scroll

Rexhen Doda:

and for anyone like obviously you have worked in this area for a while now with your tool as well for the coaches who are going to be watching this, mostly are going to be executive career and leadership coaches. Would you recommend that they start first with content on LinkedIn or start first with content on a website to rank on

Raj Khera:

Google? I think LinkedIn is probably going to be your best bet because it's relatively straightforward to do. The biggest fear is judgment. I'll tell you, I was talking to several executives and executive coaches who just don't post on LinkedIn. So why don't you post? You're like, yeah, I've read all this stuff here. It's really good for business. I'm like, it is. It really is. And so they don't post. And so why? It was like, well, I don't really, you know, I don't know how people will react to my content. And so there's certain types of things that you can post that are very, I will say, neutral and in fact, engaging that should help you overcome your fear. So here's a couple of ideas that your audience might like. Think about the last coaching conversation you had. What was the struggle that that person was dealing with? Was it a difficult employee? Was it figuring out how to balance family time? Because that's also a struggle that people have. Was it having too many things to do and you just aren't as organized? Prioritization. So talk about what that's struggle was, how the conversation went, and then what the outcome is or what the recommended steps are to help overcome that challenge. Now, that's something you don't have to identify a client by name. Obviously, keep that confidential. The story behind it, feeling behind it is something that everybody on LinkedIn can relate to. We can all relate to work-life balance. We can all relate to company cultures. We can all relate to difficult people. And so those contents will help build your personal brand. And executive coaching is all about building your personal brand. LinkedIn, if you're trying to reach executive, the number one place

Rexhen Doda:

right now. So we get a

Raj Khera:

little philosophical for a minute, Rexhen. What am I going to wish I did do? So I think those are the things that for me, I think about over the next couple of years, like what is it that I want to accomplish? And so I enjoy conversations with people, which is why I got into executive because I love helping people. And so for me, having an impact on as many people as I possibly can to elevate them, help them achieve some of their dreams, that's going to be valuable to me. And that's actually one of the reasons I started this other company, because I felt that for me, my executive coaching work, I was definitely able to help people one on one. And I feel like with this I can actually help a lot of people at scale, help them earn more money, help them lead more fulfilling lives. So for me, that's my next one to three year journey is to just try to help as many people as I can really achieve their idea of success.

Rexhen Doda:

For anyone who wants to find your tool, they can obviously go to Google, search Make Media and be able to go to Make Media AI. And then that's where they would download the tool or work.

Raj Khera:

Yeah, you just log in and just start using it. And so, you know, at the time of this recording or podcast, it's in beta. Maybe by the time it's released, it might be full. Thank you so much, Raj. Is there any final advice you'd give to other executive coaches who are looking

Rexhen Doda:

to scale their impact? Executive coaches

Raj Khera:

also, like executives, wake up every day and say, well, what is the best use of my time today? And so part of that could be be attracting clients. It could be providing the value that you have with the way you navigate conversations. And so just talk about your journey. Talk about the experiences you're having every single week. Talk about the conversation anonymously that you have with clients. And just when I say talk about that, LinkedIn, you can write articles about it. All of that will help build your personal brand. And then by the way, when you create all this content, if you look back and done it consistently for say six months, guess what? You've got a book in the works. You've already written the content that will then reshape into a book. I'll say from my own experience, when I wrote my first book many years ago. It was the number one marketing tool that I've ever had because what would happen is people would reach out to me and I would offer them a copy of the book for free and then I would sign it. Now I would mail it to them. Nobody throws away books. You just don't do that, right? And if the book is autographed to you, you won't throw it away. So what happens is that book then becomes this wonderful thing on someone's bookshelf that's a perpetual business card they won't ever throw away. So I strongly recommend just getting started. And if you've had ideas that someday I got to write up, the easiest way to get there is to start small Starting small LinkedIn posts. You can use our tool if you'd like to help. And then it will help you find your path about a cohesive message that your clients, prospective clients are looking for. And that's going to help you really attract the right audience. It's going to make you a lot happier too.

Rexhen Doda:

I really like that. And you just answered, I was just thinking of a follow-up question, which is, where is AI today in helping you write a book? Is it there yet? You can give me that answer, I think, better.

Raj Khera:

So I've actually seen people claim that this is their book. And when you start looking at the preview of the book, you're like, oh my God, AI generated this whole book is terrible. Right? So, you know, when I describe writing content around the buyer journey, around something, problems that an executive might have, you could actually use that content plan as the chapters of your book. For example, if you create a buyer persona using our tool, it will instantly generate 15 content ideas. And then it's also got a button where you click, it'll just generate endless number of content ideas for you. All of those ideas are relevant for that buyer persona. So if you're writing a book for that one person, coming up with what goes into each chapter might be a bit of a challenge, but our content planner will help you create that. And then you can use each of those ideas as a chapter. Thank you so much, Raj. And I want to repeat

Rexhen Doda:

for anyone who wants to find you and connect with you, they can find you on your LinkedIn at Raj Khera. And that's where they also will be able to try Make Media. There's a link on your profile where they can click on it and they can also search on Google for Make Media and they will be able to find the tool that way as well. Thank you so much, Raj. It was a pleasure having you on the podcast. And thank you again for taking the time to explain to us. explain everything to

Raj Khera:

us. Thank you for having me and wishing all of the executive coaches on this all the best.

Davis Nguyen:

That's it for this episode of Career Coaching Secrets. If you enjoyed this conversation, you can subscribe to YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to this episode to catch future episodes. This conversation was brought to you by Purple Circle, where we help career coaches scale their business to seven and eight figures without burning out. To learn more about Purple Circle, our community, and how we can help you grow your business, visit joinpurplecircle.com.

Unknown:

Thank you.