‍S2E3: The Power of Mindset and Purpose: Redefining Success with Ranil Piyaratna

Seth Waters (Co-Host): Well, welcome to the Purposeful Prosperity Podcast. I'm Seth Waters, and I'm here with Jack Smith. And you know Jack. Jack is an entrepreneur, founder, investor, and world-changer. Excited to be with you, Jack.

Jack Smith (Host): I'm excited to be here too, Seth.

Seth Waters (Co-Host): Today, yeah, absolutely. Today we have a great conversation with Ranil Piyaratna and super excited about it. It was a good conversation.

Jack Smith (Host): Absolutely. Well, Ranil is another Inc. Master. So he's been down to Modern Elder Academy. I think you guys have heard me talk about that a few times now. So he went down with us and some of the Inc. 5000 founders to Baja, and really kind of doing that soul searching and I think tied right into some of the journey that he's been.

Seth Waters (Co-Host): Yeah. And you talk about a lot of great things in the conversation today. One of the things that you talked about was connecting the right people with the right jobs based on their skills, their shape, and abilities, not just filling a spot.

Jack Smith (Host): Absolutely. It's all about connecting people to purpose. And that's, that's really like, if you unpack all the things that Ranil said, his pursuit of Eastern medicine, His pursuit of Jeet Kune Do and, in particular, Qigong, which is very fascinating. I'm definitely going to be looking that up when we dig in. It's all about connecting people to purpose rather than just a transaction. You'll find that they did high-level commodity-type jobs, manufacturing jobs. There's a lot of people doing the same work. And they're still trying to find that purpose in those repetitive roles. And that was really fascinating. That's all about people for us, right? That's what purpose and prosperity really is. If you take care of the people, they'll take care of customers and the rest of it takes care of itself.

Seth Waters (Co-Host): Yeah, that's really interesting. Well, you know, one of the things Ranil talked a lot about also was managing stress as a purposeful leader. I'd love to hear you share about that.

Jack Smith (Host): Absolutely. Well, all of those Eastern medicines, one of the thing that's a foundation of all of that is that the control of your breath and the meditation, um, we use meditation. I sleep to a meditation app every night, and even use it during the day. Heck, I have some special glasses I bought that play in my ears so that I can listen to inner balance while I play golf.

Seth Waters (Co-Host): It's a good thing while you're playing.

Jack Smith (Host): It keeps that smooth- well, I'm not a good golfer, so I need all the help I can get. But it is, it's in that mental, it's in the game of you that you really win in life. If you can manage your mindset, you can manage your personality and how you respond to the triggers and the actions of the world, that's how you succeed because only you can control how you respond to the world. And through that, that management of the mental mindset, that's how we lead. And then we teach others to be, you know, like you said, by Bruce Lee, you have a mind like water.

Seth Waters (Co-Host): Hmm. That's good. I am looking forward to this interview. Let's dive right into it. Here is Ranil Piyaratna.

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Jack Smith (Host): Welcome everybody to the Purposeful Prosperity Podcast. I'm your host, Jack Smith, and I'm excited today to have my friend and fellow Baja Inc Master, Ranil Piyaratna here today. He's Co-Founder of Human Bees, 2001's fastest-growing company in the entire United States, and CFO of PulsedIn. Welcome to the show.

Ranil Piyaratna (Guest): Thank you, Jack.

Jack Smith (Host): Excited to have you on. Um, so tell me a little bit about yourself. You are one of the most put-together humans I know. You're constantly sharpening the sword. You're polishing who you are as a human and kind of improving and growing and developing. And I think that's kind of core to what you are today and kind of your journey. So maybe you could tell me a little bit about that.

Ranil Piyaratna (Guest): Yeah, I believe life is about kind of improving yourself constantly here. I got that mentality from a lot of my Eastern practices. So I'm using those practices in the entrepreneurial world. And, you know, when I first started in learning all these philosophies and everything, I never thought I'd apply it to anything else outside of that. And most people don't until I became an entrepreneur and started using it. And then, you know, once it's kind of like, the easiest way to say it is when you're a white belt in anything, you're kind of just learning everything as it comes here and take everything as it goes here. Cause you know nothing, right? And that's the journey of an entrepreneur. You know nothing. When you jump in here, you just think you have an idea of how companies work, how the world works and everything's going to work well here until you get punched in the face and you start to learn what it really takes to succeed and how to roll with the punches.

Jack Smith (Host): I love it. Rolling with the punches. That's a great analogy for my friend who's a black belt. Can you tell me a little bit more about your pursuit of, is it Jeet Kune Do?

Ranil Piyaratna (Guest): Jeet Kune Do, yeah, sure. Jeet Kune Do is Bruce Lee's martial arts. So Bruce Lee took the best attributes of many different martial arts and made it up his own style and called it Jeet Kune Do here. So that's the philosophy I take here. And I've learned actually Jeet Kune Do and any martial arts actually late in life. I started learning in my mid-20s just as a hobby because my friend, my college roommate started teaching it. I'm like, “Hey, let me keep you company. Let me see what this is about here.” And he was learning, he knew traditional martial arts and karate and everything, but he started out learning Jeet Kune Do and needed a training partner to start within that pursuit. And I started joining him back in about 2006 here, and that led me in a path that you know, I wasn't expecting, you know, I'm not doing any of this stuff traditionally growing up. I just never knew about the past, the martial arts until I dove in and started to see all the benefits of it, and going through it's been quite the journey.

Jack Smith (Host): Well, can you tell us a little bit about that journey and maybe how that's inspired your entrepreneurial journey? Cause I think they're commingled and I think are birthing a book, if I recall.

Ranil Piyaratna (Guest): That's right, that's right. So basically, how it started was we started learning, teaching, he started teaching in a small facility and started gathering a bigger and bigger group here. And I was part of that from the beginning. So I started learning from him, step by step, and learning the martial arts got me also into meditation even more, I came out, to give a little more about my background, you know, I was born in the United States but my family is from Sri Lanka. And from the ages fo three to nine, I went back to Sri Lanka to live. My dad had a business there and basically living in Sri Lanka was a much different experience than America. It was, it's very much more religion-focused here. Buddhism is a primary religion, which I grew up with. And that philosophy was kind of do good to others. And this is how kind of you operate in life here. And that has a lot of aspects of meditation as well in there, but it was in the background here. So I actually didn't get back into meditation or any of that stuff here until I learned about martial arts, which led me to learning more about meditation. And then I kept pursuing further paths further and further from there.

Jack Smith (Host): Yeah, so much better. You're a doctor of Chinese energetic medicine. Tell me more about that. What is Chinese energetic medicine and how does one become a doctor?

Ranil Piyaratna (Guest): Got it, got it. So basically, like a couple of years into learning Jeet Kune Do, getting better at it, I found Qigong. So Qigong is energy skill. And basically, Qi is energy, Gong is skill. And there was a teacher that was close by to where I live in San Jose that was teaching it. And I started to learn more about what it was here. And he taught Qigong and Tai Chi. I was like, “Okay, hey, what is this? Meditation is just breathing, right?” That's what I've learned in Buddhism and my upbringing. I was like, hey, it's just focusing on your breathing. There's different types. That's it here. That was kind of like the deep end. So most people, when they see meditation, it's kind of like, “Hey, try it. If it works for you, it's good. But most people try it and fail.” So that was always the problem I saw here. Learning Qigong, they showed me a whole different way of, hey, there's, you know, before you dive into the deep end here, here's all the strokes you need to learn here. Here's what you need to kind of float and get by. So like, those are the things that I didn't know existed. So to name some basic things here, it's how do you kind of relieve stress in the moment, as opposed to focusing on the breath here? How do you focus on what's wrong here? Leave different types of anxieties and have an actual method of calming yourself down. So you're resetting for the next moment. You're ready constantly to take on the challenge of the next thing. Cause you have a way of getting rid of that stress quicker.

Jack Smith (Host): Wonderful. Well, how has the, so it's like kind of like the beginner's mind, right? So like you got the tool set, right. It's kind of the operating instructions and then you're kind of learning how to put it all together now, right.

Ranil Piyaratna (Guest): Yeah, so basically, like, when you're thrown in, most people like, “Hey, I quit meditation, because I just don't have the time. I just don't know how helpful it is.” This way got me to be like, “Hey, wow, there's a benefit of doing this here. And there's, there's a deeper meaning behind it that you could access in a step by step way here.” So I was able to kind of take that step by step, learn more and more. And it got me more into the meditation more to understand myself. And turn my attention inward a lot of times we're so focused on the outside world here pleasing others, doing what tasks are in front of us, we never look back and we never even stopped to think like hey, there's a way that. we could turn our attention to ourselves and feel our body. And the craziest thing was the first first couple months of me, you know, even trying the Qigong meditation here. It's a standing meditation and you basically turn your attention inward and scan your body, right? And like I was scanning my body once just as he was guiding me through it. And I started to get dizzy. I was like, what? How could you get dizzy? You just focusing on yourself here, but, you know, and I just had to sit down. So, and then I'm like, “Hey, what just happened here? I'm just standing.” There's, you know, nothing wrong with me. Why am I getting dizzy? I started hearing buzzing sounds in my ears. Like, it's like, you're here and you're feeling your body for the first time. You don't, you don't understand that you're not ever doing that. And it was just such a profound thing that it just got me hooked. And I just had to keep learning more and more from there.

Jack Smith (Host): I love it. You've got me interested. I'm going to be checking out Qigong, in particular. For sure. So I appreciate you sharing that with me and, and with our listeners as well. So, um, so that inward path that you took, it really led you to find your own passion through helping connect others with theirs, if I understand.

Ranil Piyaratna (Guest): That's right. That's right. So basically, after all this time of working at Qigong, I loved it so much here. It was a three-year course to become a doctor of a medical Qigong and start healing people with it. So basically, you learn to first turn your attention inward, learn your own energy, and control your own energy. Then from there, you are able to help others and, you know, work on their energy for them. So I was like, wow, I thought this was very esoteric. But with the step-by-step way they had it, it's like, well, This is a way to actually help people and this is showing you that it's real. It's not just in your imagination. It could be something palpable and feeling.

So once I got that, I'm like, wow, I could really help people this way here and at least help myself first before I could help others. You know, in Human Bees, we, you know, just to give some background on how we got to Human Bees here, Gitesh and I were college roommates and best friends since college. And once we got out here, we started living together. And Gitesh has always been the the best recruiter I've ever seen, even though he was informally in recruiting at first year, he went to dental school and just didn't find that that was his passion here. So he fell into recruiting and became one of the best recruiters I've ever seen. And just in working with people, right? And, you know, how I started to work with him was, I was a science major as well, and I hated the lab. I was in a lab job. I didn't want to go to med school, so I'm like, okay, let me see what the industry gives me, and I ended up in a lab. I really hated the lab. I was like, this is not for me. The upward path to mobility was long and hard. Unless you have a PhD in Science here, you're not creating experiments, you're not really making the game-changing. You're just kind of a technician that's going to kind of help the PhD get their experiments together. So I'm like, well, I need to go to business school. I need to stop. I need to figure out a way out.

So I quickly went to business school and in business school they make you write a thesis for your, you know, before graduating and our thesis was a business plan so i'm like well you know what test keeps talking about how great this is here and recruiting you let me create a business plan to create a recruiting company right what's it going to take here. What are the pitfalls and all that stuff so I put together a structure of how that would work here and you know presented that - didn't get a great grade, you know, it was kind of like hey there's a lot of holes that the professor was like “Hey you know what, I don't know if this is possible, really, make money for every hour someone works.” Okay, well, find the people, figure it out here. I think it's harder than you think here. Okay, well, let me show you. After I graduated, I spoke to Gitesh. I had to convince him. I was like, hey, look, I have this together. We can make this real. All right. He's like, all right, well, you could show it. Show me. Let's go.

Right, and we were off and running here. When we first started, we focused on life sciences, pharmaceutical, and medical device companies, kind of our science world here. And at some early success we did we did all right, right? But the only problem was it's very transactional. You get a couple of jobs here, you fill the job but there's no long pipeline here, and you can't kind of reliably have a pipeline for the next business until you get much larger. And so we were kind of stuck here for a couple of years. And eventually, we're like, hey, you know what, let's open up the platform. Let's just do all kinds of business here, as opposed to just focusing on the life sciences world here. And so we opened it up and we're like, we don't want to do it under our brand here. Let's start a new brand here just to focus on everything else here. And we created the Human Bees here.

Human Bees was focused, you know, we opened up to anything, but we found early success in the manufacturing worlds here and the production worlds where they're low margin business here, businesses where people didn't pay them a lot of attention. You know, your minimum wage blue-collar workers here, they've often gotten neglected or abused by the different staffing firms who barely paid them. And even the clients that the staffing agencies focused on here didn't get great service. So we're like, hey, you know what? This is standard. So we applied our consulting methodologies of, you know, just kind of caring about the person, right? And hey, let's assess the person and then play some of the client who also we need to assess their needs the right way here, and make sure there's a right fit here. So we're looking for win-wins here. And it turned out that was a novel concept in this industry. And we got some quick wins and kept going. Obviously, we had some pitfalls early on in learning a new industry, learning the challenges of managing dozens to hundreds of people. And then we started to kind of find a formula that worked here.

We went through all these challenges getting people into place here, but the consulting methodologies of looking for the win-win was finding the passion of the candidates, of what they wanted to work for. Because now we had hundreds of openings where we could put them in many different companies here. But what worked, it wasn't just throw them anywhere, which like every other staffing company did. It was what is going to be good for them, what's going to make them feel fulfilled so they stay longer. So they understand that it's going to work for them and they're going to stick around. And with that mentality, we actually turned around an industry average of about a turnover rate of about 40% and we reduced that all the way down to 20%. And that alone kind of kept getting us more and more traction with more clients. They're like, hey, if you could deliver and make our people stay, that's a game changer for us. Because our people stay and the training time and all the time wasted in our turnover kills our productivity in our business here and a low margin business which most manufacturing companies are as well. It's like, hey, every point counts here every piece of efficiency they could get they're looking for it and we were able to provide that and kind of have win-wins across the board.

Jack Smith (Host): I dig it. That is very cool. The what's in it for them, right? Connecting the people that you're employing to purposeful work that they get excited about every day, which is not an easy to do in, in these manufacturing jobs. So, um, can you tell us a little bit about how you were able to, to do that maybe in these kind of forgotten jobs, right?

Ranil Piyaratna (Guest): Yeah, I mean, a lot of people, you know, when they get in place to these jobs, kind of just get kind of, hey, this is the type of job, go do it. Right? And they'll take whatever job there is here until they go in. But like, hey, I don't like that job. I don't like catching chickens. I don't like, you know, doing with some, you know, folding clothes or whatever it could be here. It's a lot of different things where what we did was we gave we kind of broke down what each job entails here, showed them kind of slideshows of exactly what they're going to be in for when they start the job here so they could choose if that's the right one for them. If not, there's other jobs we could do, or just wait till we get the right job for you. And, you know, we made sure it's good before we send them out. It's just not like send them out no matter what.

Jack Smith (Host): That's awesome. So you're making sure that both the job is a good job and that the candidate is prepared for and wants to do that job before they ever walk in the door.

Ranil Piyaratna (Guest): That's right. Right. And, you know, for people not in the traditional, like in the regular job market, that seems normal, right? It's like, Hey, yeah, you like the job, you like the company. It's good. But this industry, it wasn't like that, right? A lot of it is immigrant population who hasn't been, you know, who doesn't know how to navigate the system, who has maybe doesn't have the highest level of education. So they're taking whatever they can to feed their families to get by, right? So living paycheck to paycheck, or any little thing counts for them. Helping them thrive instead of just survive. Yeah.

Jack Smith (Host): That's right. Great way to put it. I love it. Um, and that's really kind of leading you to write this book, right? Um, path entry, the spiritual guide to business mastery. It's that connection to purpose and, you know, kind of the confluence of your Eastern medicine practices with your business success and your leadership. Right?

Ranil Piyaratna (Guest): That's right. That's right. You know, I really attribute a lot of our success to turning our attention inward and really having that mentality of continuous self-improvement, right? Like taking things as it comes is not a challenge that's happening to you. It's happening for you. How do you take this challenge and grow from it so you're stronger the next time here? That's, you know, a lot of things we learned early in business, business, we had challenges. We were trying to figure it out here, not getting paid by clients, everything. But how do we work through that here? And we applied that when we started Human Bees, we like to move a lot faster because we didn't take that as, hey, we just didn't do as well. And before we took it as, hey, we are going to take all this that we've learned and grown stronger from. It's like weights basically take to give it a good analogy. It's like we, it was weightlifting where we were lifting small weights in the beginning here and got bigger, bigger progressively. And now we're lifting some heavy weights here, able to handle the logistics and the management needed to handle a larger and larger organization.

Jack Smith (Host): Excellent. So can you tell us a little bit about what we'll learn when you're finished with the book?

Ranil Piyaratna (Guest): Yeah. You know, it's just that concept of how do you kind of take Eastern principles or just, you know, general meditation, everything. And how do you use it to alleviate your stress? First of all, here, how do you change your mentality from everything is a problem to - and you had to fix it - to, hey, you know what, there's creative ways to look at the world here. You can look at it as all problems kind of beating you up here, or look at it in a greater context of, hey, you know what, this is just a challenge I need to overcome, and I'll keep going here. And if it's not working, really ready to pivot. The pivots are the biggest thing here is like, hey, don't stick to your gun if everything is showing you it's not supposed to be this way. Change and have a beginner's mind so you're open to the idea there's something better and there's a better way of doing it. Don't just keep running into the wall and thinking something's going to change because you keep doing that.

Jack Smith (Host): I love it. Well, I, you know, the mind is a pattern recognition engine, right? So if you tell it that the world is full of opportunities, your mind will see those patterns of opportunities. But if you say it's full of challenges or problems or not enough money, you'll find that too. Your brain is that pattern and recognition engine looking to make your thought processes real.

Ranil Piyaratna (Guest): Totally, totally. That's it. The reticular activating system of the brain is exactly what it looks for. When you're trying to buy a new car, that's what you see, right? It's like, hey, I see that car everywhere. I didn't think that was there. Right, Same thing. You program your mind to see a greater vision of you succeeding here. And there's going to be challenges in you even coming up with that vision. How do you even allow yourself to think bigger? How do you say, you know, get rid of the victim mentalities or the world, you know, or the people around you that may be saying, hey, that your vision is too crazy? It's too big, what you're doing. You should think more realistic. It's like, hey, realistic is what you know. It's like, hey, if people were thinking more realistic when they were building a car, they'd be like, I just want a faster horse. I don't need a car. What is that? That's too far.

Now, you think further and further ahead. Hey, I can make this happen. the next thing happened that people haven't envisioned before. And that's, that's the mentality I want everyone to have here in starting business. Hey, let's, let's have the vision of where you want to be here, and then map yourself where you are here. Where's your identity? Currently, every business has a business plan, which is basically the identity of the founders and the founding team at that moment here. How do you take that identity and evolve that identity into where it needs to be, to be a successful business, your endpoint vision, right? And there's going to be obstacles in between there. There's going to be goalposts out where you should go here. So mapping each goalpost where you need to be at each time here and pivoting yourself if you can't make it to roll around the obstacles, figure out what's in the way of your path here and get around it and, you know, maneuver as fast as possible to get there.

Jack Smith (Host): I dig it. I think your story is a great example of something that we say here at Fortuna and on the Purposeful podcast all the time, is that it's not the person with the best plan that wins, right? You didn't get the greatest doctoral degree, but it's the one with the nimblest feet. And you went, you took that plan that had all of those holes in it, and it had the holes because you didn't need to fill them. That's what was important there, right? It's more important to begin. We say a lot, you know, the difference between an entrepreneur and a wantrepreneur is the willingness to act. Right? Cause you can have the perfect plan. You can wait till you have the perfect plan and then you'll never get off the starting box. But if you go ahead and begin and you start that process of learning and getting those failures and those early lessons that you told us about, even on your journey, then you can go from zero to a hundred million dollars in four years. Ranil, that is absolutely stratospheric. There's no doubt why you made number one on the Inc 5000 list. Just really appreciate you sharing your time and your story with us. Is there anything that we didn't get a chance to share that you maybe would like to share with our listeners?

Ranil Piyaratna (Guest): Yeah, I mean, just I guess the next step of what we're doing here, you know, we did well in the manufacturing space here, but we want to also kind of continue our journey here. Our passions have always been kind of in science and the healthcare world, just being kind of science majors. Like I said, Gitesh went to dental school. So we're now kind of turning our passions into the nursing space here. And we started a social network called PulsedIn. Basically, it's like a LinkedIn for healthcare and nursing, where we help kind of them form a community kind of- the biggest problem right now, and in nursing is the turnover, right? There's a huge shortage of nurses here is supposed to be half a million. Half a million nurses are short by the year 2025 here. And every year there's a turnover rate of about 20% of nurses leaving the profession because they're just getting burnt out here. There's not enough support here and everyone's just being overworked. And we're trying to solve that by creating an ecosystem for nurses to first jump into the profession. How do you get there? How do you get educated and credentialed to there?

So there's a credentialing aspect where we get people off the street. And say, here's a pathway for you to become a nurse here. And here's how to, if you're already a nurse to level up, continuing education, increasing credentials, finding specializations that they want to work in. We have all of that. And then we plug in the job-matching aspect as well here. We in Human Bees have interviewed over a hundred thousand candidates and, you know, we kind of created a formula called culture as an algorithm, right? So how do you kind of get the algorithm that we found that got us the lower turnover rates and use, you know, use that into a technology? So we took that algorithm kind of assessment on both sides and made it into a technology in PulsedIn, and used AI to kind of make that and spit it out so we could hire much faster in a platform. So it's less, you know, less dependent on a person. You know, it's not the system could make it work here. And, you know, we're really looking to solve that problem by having a high volume of nurses be able to find the jobs they need here, make it seamless, and help the whole ecosystem.

Jack Smith (Host): So calling all nurses, if you're a nurse or if you know a nurse, let's get them on this PulsedIn, and let's help connect them to their own communities. I think that's a great, great effort, Ranil, and a great way to kind of wrap things up. So I really appreciate your time today, Ranil. Thank you for your wisdom and for your story. Appreciate it.

Ranil Piyaratna (Guest): Thanks a lot, Jack.

Jack Smith (Host): This has been great.

Thanks everybody. We appreciate your time this week on Purposeful Prosperity. And, we look forward to bringing you another amazing entrepreneur next week. Thanks. Keep doing good in the world.

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