Ivan Temelkov

Ivan Temelkov [00:15]
What’s up everyone, you’re listening to The RAS Project. My name is Ivan Temelkov and I’m your host. On this podcast we discuss entrepreneurship, personal development, family, tech and marketing. Why should you listen to this podcast? This podcast is for those of you who are looking for life changing advice and ways to thrive digitally with your business. As always, all content is 100% real raw and unfiltered today I have a special guest on the show that I’m pretty excited to chat about. His name is Shahid Durrani. 

And a little bit about Shahid. He is a leader and entrepreneur with business and medical advertising and manufacturing. Also online was able to launch successful businesses without having any knowledge and experience. He has also created a unique program for multidisciplinary clinics to grow their practice. He’s also the co-founder of mygoto.io which is an automotive site where people can post their vehicles to sell and has a membership component. I’m working. He’s currently working on creating digital programs to help them make money online and he’s also an IG influencer. Shahid, welcome to the show.

Shahid Durrani [01:28]
Thank you, Ivan. Thank you for having me.

Ivan Temelkov [01:31]
Awesome, man. Awesome. So I know we were chatting a little bit about you know you before we hit record here and the conversation will starting to roll and that’s what I was like, Whoa, timeout let’s let’s record this. Let’s get it on the podcast. This is good info right so let’s start out with what I want to know is let’s spend a couple of minutes you know, talking about your background. 

So like before you became an entrepreneur before you started building businesses before you built my go to.io Let’s go way back and tell us a little bit about your background like what led you up to doing what you’re doing today.

Shahid Durrani [02:06]
So as a kid, I don’t know, I don’t want to start all the way back from the kid time, but I’ll try to make that portions as short as possible as it can. I always wanted to be in business. My dad, I was really close to him, he would always travel because he was his engineer for textiles. So he would always try to travel and a week to a couple weeks to a couple of months, sometimes when I was younger, I was because I was really close with them. 

I wanted him to be with us, right, especially me. So I always envisioned you know, having that freedom having that power of having a business and I still look at business. I remember just looking at it on my own that one day, I would just be daydreaming in my head. And then you know, I got to just knowing that and then and then you know, in high school, I was a big kid. So I got bullied. I didn’t really under So that then I kind of realized that my size was was intimidating so I kind of fall back and I need my place you know.

I tried to kind of stay away from trouble but it was there and then from high school onwards I you know I wanted to be in business so I tried a different different types of businesses back then almost anybody had a wish for me or or or somebody that knows I see design and package for me I would jump on it and i would i would I just kept doing kept losing kept doing kept losing a lot of lost a lot of money.

And then you know, my dream was to I wanted a family because I was just I felt very lost right? 

And I put my mind to ignore that next year I need to get married two years maximum right so i i don’t know how you can find that kind of stuff in places that you will tradition goes I just my cousin’s wedding and then I met her and got married. At that, by that time I was like full of debt like I was in bad bad position, bad condition. I ended up at my my brother’s basement studio apartment. It was basically a room a bathroom and a kitchen all in one. 

We just had like a new baby. He was like, under a year at that point. And then, you know, I would just I would just see that space. And I was like, What the hell’s going on? Like, I can’t, I can’t do this is not what I was vision. Especially for my wife. She was like very claustrophobic and she still is. But I said, You know, I need to get out of this. I need to kind of find my way.

And I kind of lost it one day and I was in a bathroom, I remember and I was just thinking about the fact that you know, he’s think for maybe two feet of space that he’s kind of crawling in my son, right? 

So I said, This is not good. Like I need a better, something for me. So what happened was There I started taking a made a decision. I mean, I actually wrote a note, I wrote a note to myself a promissory note that this is what I’m going to do, I need to get there. And I started taking massive action. So I started taking like all sorts of action like I just kept going, but not stupid ones that I was I had experienced by them, you know, I was trying to you I can’t just go for pretty package you know, I gotta make sure I research and all that. I was still struggling.

 So a friend of mine got me into a huge grocery chain at their head office, work there as an analyst, you know, didn’t know what I was doing much. So I had to kind of learn everything in that in that field. But I was good at that. I changed my career so many times because I was never happy, right? So I kept changing, finding opportunities, working hard, failing, getting a job trying to recover, right so it was like a vicious circle that I was going through. 

At that grocery chain, I had kind of developed a side hustle, mobile application development comm so I was developing applications iOS and Android for businesses to market themselves to kind of stand out in the market back then, right? I did pretty good. I had a whole bunch of restaurants and I had some IT companies that were developing some apps that gave us some components to do. But then I hurt my back really bad. 

So once I heard my back, I was looking around for different facilities. I went to a couple and I noticed that the practitioners are amazing, though all skilled, well trained, everything was great. But if I’m paying out of my pocket for a service, I need to feel that experience I feel when I go to a restaurant or a five star hotel, I’m a consumer I’m paying I need a special label treatment. When I go somewhere right back then we used to go out right but not right. Yeah. 

So I wanted to To create, I said, what’s missing here is in experiences what the patient wants and deserves when they’re going for care. If they’re in pain, they shouldn’t have to kind of be treated in a way that you’re just a number, right? It had to be there has to be a unanimous. So try three different facilities have made a decision. I think this is my way to help people that I was wanting to as well. And it’s a service industry because you know, a lot of people baby boomers and who else is going to be it’s a growing industry. 

But the problem was, I had no idea what to do. So I just started going on, on on websites and trying to find opportunities to see if I could maybe buy into some, some business, right. So I found this location in Scarborough, Ontario here in Toronto. And it was a foot clinic, though so the foot clinic I took over with my brother so I went to a brother took over this this for pen they kind of revamped it. They’re all Excel based. 

So I had to kind of reach change change all the systems in the processes. But I was still relying on the traditional way of word of mouth that clinics work on. Most clinics work on, like you had a good experience out of my facility will tell you family members equal there, they treated me good, you know, you can get your services done there, whatever products that you need. And it was it was just a handful, right? You can’t really make good money just relying on that. 

I spent a lot of money on just putting Google ads. I felt like it was a waste but just because of my whole environment as a clinic was a generic concept. Critic put a board up saying you have physio, massage, chiro, right? You have all these services, and then you feel like it should be coming now. Because that’s that’s what I did. Like a lot of healthcare providers you study. You open it up, but you you feel like you can actually bring in the business just by opening but it’s not really true. You need to cut off at the business side of it, the system’s behind it right. 

So from here I started developing this program called take the absolute patient experience. This program basically in a nutshell, it provides experience the moment that a patient will find us to the moment they’re discharged, every single touch point has been articulated and designed to make that patient feel like like amazing, right? So from there everything was I created everything from the paperwork like what you need to forms intake. Everything is designed in a way that everybody plays your part in the facility. So you know, the admin has their own dance, right? The practitioners have their own dance the PTS and after. 

So everybody kind of works together to provide that experience with the patient that became so successful that our patients started coming from different areas and even they would travel for an hour, an hour and a half or a different city, maybe 60-70 kilometers away, you know, they would come for treatment to buy our facility. As you know, every puzzle has a clinic, right? So it’s, you know, for someone to travel from far away to come to see us we’re doing something right. And we created some plans where basically the patient is happy the clinic is happy

 Everybody’s happy, because the cash flow is higher because the tape program provided some program of care that they can they can buy ahead of time right and and get care for it and you know, afterwards so it’s like a pre play paid plan for their treatment. So that is all designed that was bringing in good cash flow. So everything was put together in a way to kind of to provide that that uniqueness that they will they will basically become raving fans of the establishment during this time when I was at the clinic. 

I met my my partner Dwayne, and then we he has this concept he’s been working on since 2008 for automotive industry, he, I jumped on it because it was a really good opportunity. So we were developing that since 2016, we kind of had to put a brake on it right now because automotive is not deemed essential, right? But our clinic right, it’s not deemed essential right now. 

So, so both things are kind of on a hold, working on on creating, you know, this program and talk about how to create it in a digital format. So for clinics that they can purchase this, learn it or if they want plug in play, we can give them pumpkin plated, they just have to easily insert it. We also provide the marketing component of Facebook and everything because we are we have spent thousands of dollars testing what works, what doesn’t work. 

We have all that data so anybody can kind of come in anywhere in the world. We can get them set up and they can use our data to come Go there clinic as well. But they have to kind of follow the entire ecosystem that was developed to undertake. So that’s what I’m working on. I’m also working on a on launching a podcast that we were talking about before we started recording. And hopefully we’ll talk more after the interview as well.

Ivan Temelkov [12:21]
So, first of all, amazing story. And I want to touch on a few points there because this is literally the emphasis of this podcast. So as you’re sharing your story, and taking us all the way back, the very first thing that stuck in my mind is you are a visionary. And the world needs more visionaries. You see, someone like me as an Eastern European, I grew up majority of my life, basically following the yellow brick road, being told what to do, you know, go to school, get your education, you know, go to college. 

Get a job, buy a house, get married two kids, all this stuff right now very much like you were from a very early age, you know, I knew that I wanted more out of life. You know, I had these, these visions, you know, even though High School was a very dark place in my life, because that was the time that my family immigrated to the United States. I’m originally from Bulgaria. I was bullied all through high school because, you know, I was the kid with long hair, the glasses. 

You know, I was a cultural mess fed. I was a very antisocial In fact, for a long time. Most people used to think that I was an introvert. And I was never really an introvert. I was an extrovert at just that. I was afraid to express myself because of the judgment that people will pass upon me. So as you were talking about all these things, you know, I could really resonate with my own story because I went through a similar experience. 

Now, as an entrepreneur, though, as you were talking about all these experiences from your childhood, into, you know, high school and then you know you were talking about being the fat kid, you know, I think as entrepreneurs, we are a completely different breed. Yeah, we are risk takers. We sacrifice. We are visionaries, we see opportunities where most people don’t are living in this kind of bubble in a comfort zone. 

In the reality of things the world needs more people like you and me because we are the at the frontlines. We’re the innovators of tomorrow. We’re the people who are going to leave, take leaps of faith, to help change the economy, to help drive the economy, to create more jobs, to create new businesses to create new things into the world that the world needs, not just necessarily business related. And so when you were talking about All these things, you know, the thing that was going in the back of my mind was, this guy is a true visionary. 

This guy is a true entrepreneur, because also entrepreneurs, like I said, we, we take risks, we sacrifice, we, we try things that most people won’t try with the hope that something’s gonna come out of it. Right. And so I think from with your, with your two businesses that you were talking about, you know, I, it sounds like they’ve been very successful. And that’s great to hear, because I think a lot of people in society, seek instant gratification behind everything. 

And also entrepreneurs, we kind of like when you got into your medical business. You didn’t know in the beginning that this was going to be successful. You were just taking a giant risk, but you took that risk because you had faith, you knew I can do this. And in the long term, something’s gonna come out of it. Now you were talking about the essential side of it right now with COVID-19 and everything that’s going on. You know, I’ve probably spent the last three or four episodes just circumventing, you know, around COVID-19 things, right and talking about it. 

I think there’s two types of people right now, US entrepreneurs are seeing COVID-19 as a huge opportunity to plan to plan to refine our craft to become more efficient, to become more productive to build more relationships. And there’s the people on the other side who are just fearing. They’re like, Oh, my God, like, how am I gonna come out of this? Well, the reality of things is that every day, right, I mean, this guy could fall down every day, right? You could get hit by a bus in 15 seconds. 

So living in fear is not a good way to push forward. And this is why I wanted to elaborate upon this because this podcast really focuses on the entrepreneurial side because very much like you, I’m a father, I’m a husband. You know, I have two kids, you know, I have a business And I’ve risked a lot, a lot. I’ve lost a lot, a lot. In fact, I’ve gone bankrupt over stupid ideas. And to this day, most people will say, why don’t you get a full time job? 

Why don’t you go back to doing this? So many counterintuitive things. And you know what? The more and more that I stay in business, the more I realized that it’s extremely important to be true to yourself. always true to be be true to yourself, no matter what you do, because you’ll always have the world telling you that you shouldn’t do something, or family or friends or colleagues or whatnot. But at the end of the day, if you set your mind to it, and you’re confident that you can accomplish that, that’s what you should do. 

Yeah. And so, you know, believe you have to believe, you know, so I just wanted to touch upon that. So, okay, we talked about the podcast, right. I want to spend the next couple of couple of minutes kind of talking about because you had a really interesting idea about your podcast. And let’s spend, you know, just a couple of minutes talking about, you know, what do you want to do with this podcast? And how do you want to influence the world?

Shahid Durrani [18:16]
So, what I wanted to do is I wanted to create a podcast about something that I’m, I think about, and I believe in, I breathe, and I visualize and I’m always like, I wake up important. I wake up in the middle of the night just with ideas and right, like, I’m so passionate about entrepreneurship and business and seeing things come out with results, right? 

Like, I’m very, like, I’m gonna do this certain thing, what is the result? So I see the result if it’s good, and you kind of keep going with it, right? So knowing that, number one is that I wanted to kind of interview entrepreneurs that are needed and kind of find out What’s their superpower? What’s their power? Now? How do they get to where they need to get like there’s always that one thing that you know, you might be resourceful like you’re crazy resourceful person, right? 

That’s what I find myself to be as I, I’m very resourceful. Right? So there might be something that he they might say that our listeners will hear that might trigger a thought in their mind that they will always always had it in them, but they never realize, right. So bottom line is by a podcast is to create a bigger and bigger audience to help more and more people. I’m trying to, you know, I’m trying to serve and make an impact as big as possible, right? 

So I’m always thinking about medias too long this time. I never even wanted to be on social media. I never you want my face up. Go solo, like, you know, shy like I didn’t want to actually come out like that right and I create an Instagram feed. started posting motivational stuff right high quality content. I did put one piece picture of myself air in there. Now I do a lot more of that of my own pictures and stuff. 

I know I grew, grew it, you know, through relationships through to through other influencers and to kind of combine and grow the page, you know, so I spent a lot of effort and create that page that I have right now. And from there, I’m feeling that I have the context to get these kind of entrepreneurs to that channel to kind of be a guest on the show, but really, the main main thing I would feel is to, to get the fact that I can help people and also not just them learning, I’m learning. 

Right, right, because he has nobody, we don’t know everything, right. So I’m a big believer in self education. I don’t believe I believe in finding resources learning even if you have to pay for it online. You buy these things. Because they’re proven these people that are selling it, they’re not selling a lie, you’ll know really fast. If it’s a lie just in their sales funnel, you’ll kind of figure out what they’re doing is a lie, right? You can read about people. 

But there’s nothing wrong with with spending money to create an economy, right? So you find some spent tons and tons of money, thousands and thousands of dollars worth of money spent on courses I’ve learned. I’ve learned from you know, like, I’ve done courses with Dean Graziosi and Tony, right, like I learn, I did, like I spent, I kept spending my anytime in my success time, I’m always spending on self education. So that’s why I have this podcast, you’re gonna see things that that are going to help me and help the masses. That’s the that’s the vision about the entire pot. Yeah.

Ivan Temelkov [21:56]
The reason I wanted to talk about the podcast is because you mentioned a couple of things. So I don’t know if you caught yourself in that is that one of my mentors said my lead talks about is this that if serving is below you, then leading is above you. What that really means is that so you were talking about when you were sharing, basically the theme behind the podcast, you mentioned about serving about impacting the world about changing it. 

Now, the best entrepreneurs that I have met, are the people who are here to serve to help others impact the lives of others in some form or fashion. And I know one of the things that you know you were talking about with your podcast is basically extracting the superpowers of these entrepreneurs because every entrepreneur has a superpower, believe it or not, yes, because us as human beings, we have something unique that we all possess that we do better than anybody else. 

It’s like our one golden nugget. It’s our one golden goose Stuff like, you know, maybe maybe it’s it’s luck, or maybe it’s tactics or maybe it’s a winner.

Ivan Temelkov [23:09]
Exactly. And so I think you’re the reason I wanted you to talk about it is because it’s great to hear to see another entrepreneur like you who is wanting to impact and change the world because we can never have enough entrepreneurs out there. And what’s really actually cliche about what’s happening right now with COVID-19. And how the economy is struggling, is this side, you know, with with the businesses now that I’ve closed, some of the bigger brands are going to be able to sustain because they can sustain this kind of financial blow. 

Now, in the US, specifically, small business is the backbone of the economy. But guess what, when COVID-19 happened, who’s suffering the most small businesses because they’re incapable of sustained A huge blowback like local restaurants, local businesses, you know, Mom and Pop brick and mortars are unable to sustain because they don’t have the volume. They don’t have the demand that these big conglomerates and major brands have. 

So, I think this is amazing. And now more than ever, you know, a lot of people are turning to podcasts, for perspective, for ideas for insight, it’s one of the best ways to get creative and also entrepreneurs. This is exactly what we’re doing you know, during this time is really honing in on Okay, what can I do differently to become better? Can I sharpen a skill and I need to learn a new skill you were talking about? Self education, which I’m a huge believer on because I’m 100% self taught myself and everything I know. 

But using this downtime, to learn a new skill, improve your craft because you know what, in about a month So, when everything opens up for business, guess what? You’re gonna have the sharpest knife, the sharpest tool in the shed and being able to execute more more effectively more efficiently than everybody else. So, a shithead I know that this convo can go endlessly and I’m looking forward to following up with you and talking about the podcast but before we close things out.

Can you tell the audience how can they find you on the internet if they want to connect with you, social handles, website, throw some links?

Shahid Durrani [25:36]
Okay, so the best way the quickest way for me to communicate is on Instagram. So if you go and search an Instagram is called @officialshahiddurrani. So, I’ll spell it.

Ivan Temelkov [26:00]
I’ll make sure. There whatever. I’ll make sure I include that in the caption too because I know I have your your Instagram handle to make sure that people can connect with you out there on Instagram. I do want to thank you for the amazing conversation. I truly truly enjoyed it and I look forward to chatting more about podcasts.