The Ask Avi Arya Show

  Samir Kuckreja, Founder and CEO of Tasanaya Hospitality Pvt Ltd. joins me for an interesting take on how the hospitality industry and restaurants can become more tech savvy. We also talk about their presence on various social media platforms. He puts forward valuable and quantitative points as to how to properly optimize the costs and be patient when it comes to marketing a new restaurant. We discussed an important question everyone would be interested in – If you are a young entrepreneur who is passionate about opening a new food outlet in your hotel, what should be your main focus? Samir suggests to focus on the basics and start with tech at the back-end for optimizing cost, menu analysis, staff productivity and various other aspects. Marketing your product on Twitter, Instagram or LinkedIn is also an essential part of the whole process. Zomato is one of the most successful platforms to start with when it comes to the food outlets even for the hotel industry. Learn more about the technological aspects and new advertising trends for entrepreneurs in this episode.

Chris Preston, CEO and founder of Preston Media and Success Diaries joins me today for an interesting conversation about social media. We learn some expert tips to increase followers and engagement on Instagram. Chris enlightens us about his own journey and how he has been able to acquire success on social media. He says first and foremost you focus on changing your profile picture and keeping it constant on all platforms. Next, setting a particular strategy and using a similar font and color in the posts will create personal branding and your account will be recognized anywhere. Not being random in your posts makes a lot of difference. For personal branding, one should also try taking more interviews and videos. My next question to him – What are some of things you found on social media along the way that have helped you in increasing the reach? – Staying to up to date with new trends. – Being a part of various groups and engaging with people over there. – One of the most important strategy Chris understood is – CROSS PROMOTION Resharing posts of other people and tagging them helps in making connections and increase your network. Sending people a DM and asking them if they would be interested in collaborating also helps a lot. – Don’t repeat the same hashtags. Try and use different hashtags in every post and using hashtags like “#like4like” can put you into the spam list or get you banned. – Building a community and genuine connection is very important. Chris also tells us how his wife has been supportive of him all throughout his journey and is truly proud of his success. She’s always believed in him and his vision. And I think that’s the most important part of anyone’s success – to surround yourself with people who support you and love you.

What’s your take on being confident? And how important is it to you? Today we discuss the same with Lucas Mattiello who is a founder of Level Up Living and the official TEDx speaking coach. Let’s find out a bit about his journey of being a confident speaker and entrepreneur. Lucas tells us how he realised he was going through anxiety and decided to see a therapist. It was indeed a struggle but through various stress management techniques and also by talking about his experience through blogs. So how did you land your first client? How did it all started? A woman from Victoria on LinkedIn approached me and we had a Skype call. After that I started doing various workshops, almost every two months. Does being a confident speaker require a lot of practice? It’s not about years but rather more about inner confidence and years of experience. Lucas says – The hardest person to sell on your abilities is yourself. The real obstacle is not being bought into your own programme. In the end Lucas shares how the idea of helping myself was his driving force and turning what he went through into a positive experience. You can reach Lucas at LevelUpLiving.com or at Confident Communication for Entrepreneur on YouTube.

Calvin Wayman, author, keynote speaker, founder and CEO of Cobbes Media also known on social media by Curious with Calvin Wayman joins me in an exciting conversation about his journey from social media to being a successful entrepreneur. His journey started through an app called Periscope (a live streaming app). He used the app everyday and did live streaming of his life. He loved the change that Facebook live brought out later and then he just knew that he likes social media. But what sets him apart from most people? He doesn’t do Facebook ads, he creates his own organic content that gives people a story and is extremely necessary for any page. Calvin says that things can’t be done fast you need patience. But he did share one of his ways, which is called a Pucathon – a process where you sit for 48 hours without your cellphone and just curate your ideas. He wrote his book ‘Fish Out of Water’ within a month and a half with this process. What to actually do when you’re feeling low or discouraged? Shift your perspective and write down things you’re grateful for. Create a ‘things to do’ list and honour the negative things instead of ignoring them or stopping them. Calvin says – Always have faith and trust in yourself.

  Today, Michael Stelzner from Social Media Examiner joins me in a special episode. We discuss how to efficiently stay connected with people online and up your game on social media. First and foremost we focus on talking to people in a personalized way and to totally put oneself out there. This helps in connecting with the audience in a better way. Michael describes his own experience and journey towards becoming a big social media examiner, which helps us understand what makes his ways of marketing different from others. So how do you do it all? Constant improvement, analyzing everything you’ve done in the past and avoiding things that don’t work well at present. One of the things about social media is to keep evolving and changing. To increase the audience reach Michael has some new ideas that he would implement for his next conference. He enlightens us with his views on picking the excellent content creators and communicators instead of popular and known people. Learn more about his take on the virtual ticket for entrepreneurs and marketers in this episode.