Leading with Purpose, Individual Authenticity, and Community Impact with Alok Chanani

This episode focuses on Alok Chanani's journey from military service to becoming a CEO, emphasizing leadership principles and their application in business.

1. Leadership by example is crucial for setting organizational standards.
2. Building trust and accountability within teams is essential for business growth.
3. Adapting to challenges while maintaining a clear vision is key to leadership.
4. The right team dynamics contribute significantly to a company's success.
5. Integrity and humility are valued traits in team members.

1: Introduction

Overview of Alok's background and the focus of the podcast. Includes a brief introduction by the host.

• TX Wa: "Welcome to today's episode where we dive into leadership with Alok Chanani."

2: Military Influence on Leadership

Alok discusses how his military experience influences his leadership style.

• Alok Chanani: "Leading by example sets the pace and tone of your organization."

3: Challenges in Startups

Conversation on the specific challenges faced in startup environments and stakeholder management.

• Alok Chanani: "Managing multiple stakeholders with competing interests is a critical skill in a venture-backed startup."

4: Building High-Performing Teams

Insights into what Alok looks for in team members and the importance of cultural fit.

• Alok Chanani: "Curiosity and attention to detail are important traits we promote at Buildops."

5: Future Visions and Advice

Alok shares his long-term vision for impact and offers advice to aspiring founders.

• Alok Chanani: "Be authentic in your endeavors and focus on what truly motivates you."

1. Set a personal example to foster a punctual and organized team culture.
2. Develop trust and accountability within your team to enhance performance.
3. Stay adaptable and communicate your vision consistently to overcome challenges.
4. Prioritize cultural fit when hiring to maintain a positive and productive work environment.
5. Focus on your passion and the impact of your work rather than monetary gains.

This episode of Pour Over spotlights Alok Chanani, CEO and Co-founder of BuildOps, a comprehensive solution dedicated to empowering commercial contractors to operate profitable and efficient businesses. In our conversation with Alok, we explore the unique characteristics of his leadership style, which were shaped by his time serving in the military. Alok discusses his inspiration for venturing into the realm of commercial contractors and shares valuable lessons learned as a startup founder, as well as the specific traits he seeks in team members to foster a successful working dynamic. The significance of mentorship emerges as a key theme, as Alok emphasizes its pivotal role in his personal and professional growth. The episode concludes with Alok offering advice for individuals embarking on their journey as founders, encapsulating the wisdom garnered from his own entrepreneurial endeavors and making it an essential listen for both aspiring founders and business enthusiasts.

People

Alok Chanani, TX Wa

Companies

Buildops

Guest Name(s):

Alok Chanani

Content Warnings:

None

Welcome back to pour over a coffee chat style podcast from Fikaventures. We talk a lot about leadership on this show, as we believe every entrepreneur, every visionary has a unique narrative. It's these narratives that can inspire and transform the way we think about business leadership and success. Your host for today's podcast is Fika co founder and managing partner T XWa, who is joined by special guest Awoke Chanani, the co founder and CEO of Buildups, a comprehensive solution dedicated to empowering commercial contractors to operate profitable and efficient businesses. Awoke's inspiration to establish build ops traces back to his military service and subsequent engagements with developers and contractors in southern California.

Initially trained as a combat engineer, he later commanded a unit responsible for transporting large amounts of us currency from 2006 to 2007 in Iraq, funding critical infrastructure projects such as water purification facilities, schools and hospitals. This impactful experience ignited his profound passion for the commercial trades as he embarked on an entrepreneurial journey where he launched multiple businesses in the fields of development and construction. Ultimately, Elok was inspired to launch a platform to serve contractors running tremendous businesses on little to no technology. Today, Buildops has expanded its team to include over 200 dedicated professionals, and its commitment to innovation and quality remains unwavering on a daily basis. Phillips lives its mission by delivering an end to end scalable platform to commercial contractors, empowering owners to establish enduring and prosperous businesses.

We are thrilled to have Alok here with us today to talk about his leadership journey. Hi everyone, my name is TX, one of the partners here at Fika and Im joined by one of our amazing CEO's, Alok Chainani, CEO of Buildops. Welcome TX. Thank you so much for having me and it's super exciting to kind of chat a little more today. Maybe we'll start with a couple questions around your leadership style.

T XWa

How did your role as a unit commander in the US army shape the way you lead teams? I'd say the first thing is probably frontline leadership. I think just leading by example is something that's really important to lead from the front and setting the pace and the tone of your organization. People do what they see and they believe what they see, and that is incredibly important for trust and accountability and credibility. And I think that holds true in a nonprofit world.

Awoke Chanani

I think that holds true if you're in a military unit in a high stress situation. I think absolutely holds true in a startup environment. Let's just say you have a Zoom meeting and you're a couple minutes late every single time to the Zoom meeting. What you will inevitably see is the rest of your leadership team or people in that meeting will start becoming a couple minutes late, and then a minute becomes two minutes and become five, and then you have a disorganized meeting that is not punctual and not effective. And that's just a simple example of how your behavior will trickle down to the rest of the organization.

So I would say it's just very important to be self aware of the interactions that you have as a unit commander, with your soldiers, or with your team members, as I lead teams today at buildup. And I think the second thing is this idea of no man left behind, even the idea behind, no man left behind, not just the actual action of it, of loyalty and camaraderie, but the idea behind it. It creates a sense of trust. And this idea that we can achieve greatness together and we're gonna have each other's back. That type of trust and accountability is really, really valuable as you're scaling and organization and you're growing, and you often have to work long hours and you have to do things that can be perceived as close to impossible or next to impossible.

And to mobilize a team to be able to do that, there has to be a high degree of trust. And then I would say the third thing is probably adaptability and vision. So you've got this big, beautiful vision, you've got this mission. You have to go accomplish it. At the same time, there's that Mike Tyson line, which is everyone's got a plan until they get punched in the face, right?

And you get punched in the face every day, every week, every month. And that could be on the personnel side, that could be that the co founder that you signed up for was not what you expected. You may even have a board member that can create significant havoc in your organization and does something unexpected. You really can't over communicate that vision enough. There might even be a sense that you're kind of hammering home this idea, this concept, this vision, almost too much.

But in my experience, you can almost never over communicate that. What was different for you about being a startup founder? I know you've led big teams in the past, but was there something new and novel about being a startup founder? There's a lot of different stakeholders involved, because if youre a venture backed founder like I am, you are thinking about venture capital, you are thinking about certain key KPI's. You may or may not be thinking about what is taking you to the next financing route.

I think managing this larger ecosystem where you have all of these different stakeholders is one that was something thats new that I havent experienced in the same way, and then working closely with the board, and then also simultaneously just remembering and focusing on what the underlying core mission of the business is, which is to build an incredibly successful business that is serving your customers and putting that always out at the forefront of all decision making while you're still simultaneously managing multiple stakeholders, oftentimes with competing interests. And people in the industry always talk about buildups, having an amazing team. I think specifically they talk about every employee being very motivated and they talk about the quality of talent that you have on the team, which is a amazing testament to your leadership. Maybe if you could talk a bit about what key personality traits and characteristics you look for when you're building teams and how have you managed to motivate your employees even as the company grows? Great question, TX.

I think it's something that both myself and my entire exec leadership team and leadership team take super, super seriously. There's nothing more important than building a high performing, highly motivated team. A lot of that comes down to the hiring process, I believe, and bringing in the right folks. One of the first questions that we ask people is, are you comfortable being at a hyper growth, venture backed startup? This may be very different than a large publicly traded company, and this may be very different than an organization that's just growing at five or 10% a year.

At the same time, we all fundamentally believe in the underlying core mission of buildups. And are you excited about empowering the blue collar community, both in the United States and Canada? And if you're just doing this for the money, there's probably a better place to go if that is your sole purpose. I would say curiosity is something that I don't think people talk about enough in hiring and in motivating their teams and bringing the right folks on. People want to be around people that are intensely curious about themselves and they are able to communicate and connect with those other folks and people that are just sort of narcissistic and compulsive, obsessive with themselves.

I think those personality attributes, especially over time, are unable to connect at the level of depth and have the success rates that the people at buildups have had because of their innate curiosity about other people and their businesses and their lives and what they're working on. And then I would say the other thing in terms of personality traits and characteristics that our team members and we really believe in is attention to detail. Those are some of, I would say, the key personality traits and characteristics that people on our team look for and promote as a culture. I think it's pretty consistent with kind of what we see in venture. We did a study of our best founders, and our best founders have very strong attention to detail, and they're very responsive, not only to us, but to their customers, to the rest of their board.

T XWa

Maybe looking at the opposite side of the coin, are there certain traits that are immediate red flags for you? If you meet someone who's about to join the team, you're like, hey, this would be disruptive to the existing culture or what we have built, and I just can't tolerate this. As a founder, one thing that I develop less tolerance for, that I think, if I was just going to speak super candidly, that I had higher tolerance for was arrogance. And I used to think, okay, if this person is truly best in class, they're highly referred, they're tier one in every component or dimension, but they're arrogant. It's something that I was willing to live with.

Awoke Chanani

I think there's more obvious questions around, if there's any integrity questions, or what I would call more obvious fundamentals, because we have a lot of very high performing people that are humble. And so when they see someone coming in that may make even subtle, condescending remarks, but they start to perceive this sense of condescension or arrogance, it would impact the organization in a much more significant, negative way. And so that's something that is just an immediate red flag for me. Maybe switching gears a bit, let's talk a bit about what inspired you to get involved with commercial contractors. It seems like going for the military.

T XWa

Was it something you're excited about for a long time? How did you get involved with the industry in the first place? I did some time overseas in Iraq and 0607, and that was during the surge. A lot of the work that I did was involved transporting us currency. That funded some pretty significant infrastructure projects, and that includes reconstruction projects, water purification projects, families of the deceased.

Awoke Chanani

And for me, that was really exciting, because that was my first time, albeit obviously in a war zone, but working with contractors and getting to see the impact of the work that they did, we were super, super fortunate. We were able to bring everybody home back in one piece and back to the United States in late zero seven. And then after some time in business school, when I came back to Southern California, I actually got involved in working with trade contractors and contractors. But I just really believed in the impact that they were making. And I think this is true in the military, and I think this is true today.

I've always wanted to serve the blue collar community much more than any other community that I've met. And so the opportunity to kind of solve a very real problem and to build a world class platform to help a lot of people that I was personally connected with, that drove me then, and it drives me today. What is something that people wouldn't know about you, whether it's a personality trait, whether it's a quirky that you feel defines you as a special CEO in your own industry? I don't know if this defines me as special or that people know this or don't know this about me necessarily, but I'd say two things that are becoming increasingly important for me personally. Being really real and not subscribing to a particular dogma or a way of thinking, regardless of how popular, conventional it may be, but always retaining my own independent thought and thinking.

And it's very useful and productive, I think, to have benchmark data at which to make decisions as a company and as a team, we need to do what is in the best long term interest of our customers. And if we can't break it down into the simple underlying causal factors and get to the underlying root cause of why we're making a certain decision, the fact that seven other companies do it that way should not be the driving factor of really get to the underlying causal factors of why certain decisions are being made that are in the long term interest of the business. So I think that is something that I think about a lot, and I talk about a lot, and I think the reason that a team would buy into those decisions that may not necessarily be very clear or obvious or conventional, is through overt, explicit communication with the team, especially in a distributed environment. So how do you think about finding mentorship for yourself? Are there people who have shaped the way you think?

T XWa

Are there good support groups that you turn to whenever you have a problem or you just need to talk about a certain issue. So right now, I'm actually in a YPO group, and I'm also envisaged the groups that I'm in specifically, really, really wonderful people and people at different stages of their life and career. But that has been incredibly impactful. And both the groups of, call it eight to twelve CEO's from all different walks of life, some on the publicly traded side, some still private businesses, some early stage, some later stage. And I think that has been incredibly helpful for me in terms of just maybe one person specifically that comes to mind is an uncle that I had that recently passed a few months ago.

Awoke Chanani

I think I had a lot of time at his funeral and spending time with my cousins, his family members, the rest of the family. And just thinking about the impact that he's had. He helped raise me and he actually named me as well, a lot. But he was born into what I would describe as extreme poverty, like third world country poverty. That's like a whole different level of poverty over there.

Ten family members lived in basically a slum. 40 or 50 people use one urinal on a daily basis. And he was able to lift his family out of that through extraordinary academic performance. And every year he would save money and then bring another family member over from India and then brought them to the United States to include my dad. And then he ended up being a hippie, rocking bell bottoms, getting his PhD at Berkeley, and then spent the next three decades of his life as a aerospace engineer and then moved quickly into management at Northrop.

And he loved f, he loved fighter aircraft and he loved the US and he loved the US military. And no matter what type of adversity that he faced in his time here, he still believed that it was one of the best places, not the best place in the world to raise a family and to have incredible economic opportunity that you don't necessarily have in some other places. He always had this optimism and this excitement and this spirit about him that galvanized and motivated the people around him, especially because of where he came from and what he was able to achieve and then how he was able to lift his community around him. I look at him and then I look at some of the challenges that I'm dealing with. It's always inspiration for me to look at what he was able to accomplish and hopefully be able to have even a fraction of the impact that he was able to have on the community around him.

T XWa

Thats an amazing kind of person you can look up to. And his character and resilience, its truly wonderful having him shape the early years of your life. Maybe its changed over time, but how do you define success for yourself? I dont think theres a quantitative metric, but id say from a more qualitative standpoint, its impact. How much impact do I have on the community around me?

Awoke Chanani

Call it 2025 years or 30 years from today. And then I would say in tandem with that is helping people see the value of mentorship. Folks that would not normally perceive themselves to be mentors or have a lot to give necessarily to other folks, they're able to contribute to the next generation. So I think that is super exciting for me. Maybe the last question we have, I know this is a pretty common question about advice you would give individuals who are just starting their journey as founders.

T XWa

But if you could almost bring that to life with kind of the important lessons that you've learned through a time at buildups, that's a very good way for our listeners to take away some tangible advice from this podcast today. I would say the first thing is just be super real. Don't try to say the right thing. People are really tired of that. I think everybody is super tired of sterile, generic commercial advice that you could hear on any podcast or any startup journal or any website.

Awoke Chanani

Just think deeply about your convictions and your beliefs and your worldview and be really real and authentic. And not only will you be happier on a personal level, probably have happier relationships, but you can have way more impact and also be wildly more successful. Because I think there's just a national allergic aversion to people just pretending to try to say the right thing because it sounds like the right thing to say. And then don't be compelled to take popular positions and constantly measure yourself against someone else because there's always going to be smarter and better, wealthier, more successful than you are. You're charting your own path, your own journey, and take a lot of pride and excitement in that and people will appreciate that you are you.

Second thing I would say specifically for startup founders is be super, super careful about your early hires. They will make or break your company and they will set the culture because they are going to be heavily involved in the subsequent hires. It is a cascading effect. And so those first five to ten hires are incredibly important for the culture and scale of the organization. And then the last thing I would say is don't do it for the money.

Life is too short. Do it because you love it and do it because you're passionate and excited about it. And that's going to get you a lot further on every metric than being driven by things that don't have the depth and aren't going to motivate you when times get tough, because inevitably there will be some very difficult times. Thanks a lot. That's wonderful advice.

T XWa

We so appreciate you spending some time with us. We know that buildups will continue to be a great success and I think the whole team at buildups is very fortunate to have you as a leader driving that success. Awesome. I really appreciate the kind words. Thank you TX thank you.

You've been listening to pour over presented by FICA Ventures. FICA is an la based early stage venture fund investing in B two b companies across North America. If you enjoyed this podcast and have suggestions for future guests or general thoughts and feedback, feel free to email us at infoeca BC. Thanks for listening.