Everybody has a dream of making it big, following the rainbow that will lead us to that pot of gold, and enjoying the riches we find at its end. Achieving great success is never an easy thing to do, if it was everyone would be doing it! The reality is it takes a lot of time, effort, and maybe a bit of luck to make our dream come true, and for many of us it remains just a dream. Despite this, there are those among us who do make their dreams of success come true in their lives and maybe there is something that we can learn from their triumphs that will help us to create our own success!
A wonderful example of a successful person who made it happen for themselves is Sabri Suby, founder of King Kong agency, a guy who started with nothing and who is now worth millions of dollars! What can Suby teach us? Let’s find out!
Suby came from humble beginnings, but was born with an urge to hustle. He was hired for his first sales job at the youthful age of 16, and by age 24 he had incredibly made his first million- which he then lost and had to start all over again! That setback was short-lived and the ever resourceful Suby went to work on formulating a new plan. “In all these businesses I had started”, Suby tells us, “I was always responsible for solving the number one problem: how do I get more customers? That’s when I decided to start King Kong.”
All Suby had to start his new project was $50 and an old laptop. He spent $35 on a Logitech headset, then $15 on a VoIP account which he used to cold-call over 150 businesses every day to ask them if they needed his marketing expertise. On the third day he got a bite and was back in business, and King Kong was founded. “It wasn’t all smooth sailing off the back of that,” Suby relates “I then was running that business from my bedroom for the first 12 months and then had convinced my wife to leave her corporate job and come and help me in the business – which she did.” Suby and his wife began another round of cold calling trying to find businesses who needed expert help with marketing.
Suby and his wife Shalini went to some pretty comical lengths to build up their new King Kong business’s reputation. They even went so far as to speak in different accents when people called to sound like they were multiple operators! Suby thought that the subterfuge would bolster their image, no one would ever guess they had reached a young couple working out of their home and not a busy call centre! “We kind of put the façade up that we were bigger than we were. As a start-up, you have to do what you have to do. We did that for 12 months!”
Their charade paid off, and now the company is worth over $70 million! The secret sauce to Suby’s amazing success is his promise to guarantee his good results, or his clients would pay nothing! That sounds like a risky proposition, but always confident Suby told us that less than 1% of clients have asked for a refund!
Today, King Kong is one of Australia’s fastest-growing companies and has generated more than $8 billion in sales for its clients. King Kong earns more than $25 million a year and has around 400,000 customers spanning 1070 different industries in 139 countries!
Suby wanted to leave us with this advice: “Greatness belongs to those who are willing to go to extremes for it.”
