Grandmaster Azad – Successful Businesses Are Like Successful Families

“When I was starting Azad’s Martial Arts, I made every mistake in the book,” Farshad Azad chuckles. “I didn’t even have money to pay rent for the building; I had to get a part-time job just to cover that.”

Known throughout the martial arts world as Grandmaster Azad, he now uses those mistakes and successes in his business coaching, Azad International, Inc., which helps revision, restructure, and renovate other businesses in the North State and beyond.

Priorities – family is number one

To begin with, Azad emphasizes setting priorities. “Your family is your number one,” he says. “Your kids, your spouse, your loved ones – they are the core. You cannot sacrifice them for your business because everything in your business is for them.”
Grandmaster Azad is quick to acknowledge that being a business owner is an all-consuming career. While many employees can go home and forget about work for a few hours, he says, the myriad details of the business overtake an owner’s thoughts—like a human child’s wellbeing overtakes a parent’s thoughts—night and day.

“The mistake a lot of businesses make is they think business is number one and the family should come to support it,” the Grandmaster says. “But the business exists in the first place to provide for their family. If you don’t prioritize your family, your business will wreck your family life, and your family life will destroy your business.”

Measuring growth in dollars and impact

Like an infant grows into childhood and emerges into adolescence and adulthood, businesses also grow and change, Azad says. “Growth is the key factor whether you’re a $100 million company or a $10,000 company,” says Grandmaster Azad.
And, while dollars are the most obvious way to measure growth, he places equal value on impact growth. He reflects on the 15,000 students who have trained at his small martial arts school and considers how their personal development of confidence, strength, kindness, and other virtues positively impacts untold numbers of people around them.

Azad’s Martial Arts also regularly participates in community outreaches like providing backpacks for kids, Thanksgiving meals to families in need, and aid to those affected by surrounding fires. “A business doesn’t just have to grow monetarily or by the size of the building,” Grandmaster Azad concludes, “It can grow in impact. It is all dependent on the depth of vision of the owner.”

Strategic innovation — think like a parent

Many business leaders agree that continued growth depends on strategic innovation — the willingness to evaluate everything from your products to your business model and respond to changing circumstances or needs, much like parents respond to their growing children by adapting their parenting techniques to the child’s changing abilities.

“Often businesses complain about lack of resources,” Grandmaster Azad says. “They blame their company’s shortfalls on all kinds of things. However, almost always the issue is in lack of resourcefulness.”

To illustrate this point, Grandmaster Azad points to big-name companies that have become extinct, such as Kodak and Kinko’s. While these businesses began with innovative ideas and grew to have access to incredible resources, their inability to adapt to changing technologies stymied their growth and eventually ruined them. To avoid this, Azad says, “I help leadership teams break their habitual thought patterns and focus on new ways to grow.”

Setting goals and specific actions

If the growth of the company depends on the owner’s vision and ability to incorporate new ideas, what happens if the owner has become discouraged by past failure or feels stuck in the ruts of routine? This is when Azad can intervene to help business leaders investigate “new financial, procedural, and logistical possibilities for exponential growth — sometimes as much as 300 percent.”

Recently, Grandmaster Azad helped a local single parent revive her business after COVID-19 completely evaporated her client base. Within 30 days, the business had established 17 new high-paying clients — enough to provide a stable monthly income.

This incredible rebound came through setting goals and establishing systems to reach those outcomes. The size and age of the company gave Grandmaster Azad clues about what types of systems would be most effective, and as he became familiar with the problems the business faced and the obstacles the owner saw in her way, he provided specific actions to take, empowering the owner to move out of her fear-born paralysis and begin to generate revenue.

Innovative solutions — helping owners help themselves

With all of his clients, Grandmaster Azad offers a unique ability to evaluate the situation, recognize potential, and develop innovative solutions that owners can quickly implement to bring short-term and long-term gains. “I help owners help themselves,” he says. “Business owners are usually very good at what they do, but they struggle with the details of operation.”

Over the past 12 years, Azad International, Inc.’s business coaching has helped grow and support hundreds of local, national and international businesses, nonprofits, government organizations and more. “I am confident that my business knowledge and skills can change so many lives,” Grandmaster Azad says. “This is my passion: to help people overcome obstacles and get stronger.”

To contact Grandmaster Azad for business coaching, reach out to SuccessCoachAzad@gmail.com.