Exclusive Audio Interview with Pearl Kapur

Richard C. Wilson: My very first question is, if you were to look back over the course of your success, what was the major turning point or action or choke point you acquired that really increased all of your momentum from there on out?

Pearl Kapur: The fact that I’m relentless when it comes to learning new things and the ability to sell. This is a huge competitive advantage. There isn’t always a single turning point, to be honest, but rather a series of strategic decisions and movements that contribute to overall success like identifying lucrative market opportunities, making bold investments or acquisitions, developing innovative products, building strong partnerships, and networking.

There have to be reasons that you want to get up in the morning. What really inspires you? Why do you want to live? What do you want to live for?  You have to be excited about the future to drive you. Also, age plays an important role. Now, is the time to take risks. As you get older, obligations increase, and once you have a family, you start taking risks not just for yourself but for your family as well, it gets much harder to do things that might not work out. And now is the time to do that before you have those obligations. So, I would encourage you to take risks right now to do something bolder. I’m pretty sure you won’t regret it.

Richard C. Wilson: I have to say, after all the dozens of billionaire interviews and 75 books I’ve read that are written by billionaires, the curiosity, voracious reader, constantly learning thing comes up again and again. It perhaps is one of the top three most common themes across all of the billionaire insights that I have consumed to date, so I love that you brought that up as well.

I’d like to move on now to the second question. What is the most valuable strategy that’s worth far more than a million dollars that you wish someone had provided to you earlier on before you started your business or earlier on in your career?

Pearl Kapur: I would likely attribute my success to a combination of strategies rather than a single one, however, one valuable strategy that could potentially accelerate my success earlier on would be the concept of leverage. Learning how to effectively leverage resources, whether it’s through people, technology, or capital, can significantly multiply the impact of my efforts and investments. The most important thing that I learned is proximity is power. If you want to grow, you want challenges in your life.

You get challenges for yourself to grow. If you want to do well, get in proximity with people playing the game much higher than yourself. And the idea of surrounding yourself with people who have already achieved your goals or people who you admire and people who are maybe playing the game at a higher level than you, in simple words, it’s like a simple act of whom you spend your time with is who you become.

Richard C. Wilson: We often say at our investor club events that Family Office Club should be a perpetual learning machine for you. Just going down the rabbit hole of trying to study every mental model you can and strategy you can that comes from a billionaire, I think is just a fun adventure to go on and kind of a never-ending path.

So, I’d like to get to our third question here just to respect your time for today, and that is, what’s the number one costly mistake that you have seen? This is something that maybe business owners make or you’ve made in the past. What’s a mistake that you’ve seen that’s really costly, that could be easily avoided perhaps?

Pearl Kapur: One of the most common and costly mistakes I’ve seen investors or business owners make is not understanding the importance of due diligence. This includes not fully understanding the market, failing to access risk, and overlooking critical details in partnerships or acquisitions.

Also, making crucial decisions on investments, the right timing of investments, and hiring the right people. Another costly mistake is letting your emotions drive decisions, instead of relying on data or analysis.

Richard C. Wilson: What I’m hearing is just having a lot of strategic due diligence, research, careful, thoughtful actions on who you partner with. Obviously, who you hire makes or breaks obviously the entire company. A single partnership I’ve seen catapult a company to tens of millions of revenue that before was not even on the radar of other competitors. And all of us know hanging onto a bad employee or having the wrong CEO can completely ruin a company and take it off track.