for those of you who want to become entrepreneurs

Flipside to "Ten reasons to date an Entrepreneur"

2011-12-15T11:39:00.000+05:30

Conversely!

In recent times, besides Kolavari di, the biggest viral rage on FB has been Caroline Watson’s blog post called ‘10 reasons to date an entrepreneur’. I like what you have written Caroline, but I thought I should have some fun looking at the flipside as well. What happens if these virtues become vices? The numbered lines are quoting Watson, the unnumbered ones are my irreverential take!

1 – Their sense of possibility. To date someone who accepts no limitations means that there is no end to how much they are capable of loving you.

What happens if this becomes not how much they are capable of loving you but how many people they are capable of loving?!

2 – They see things in ways that others don’t and understand the power of thought and faith to offer an entirely fresh and inspiring view of a challenging situation.

I see myself and everyone sees me as an extroverted social animal, capable of taking charge in any situation. What happens if he sees me as someone so self-contained that I need no one, not even him? That I like to be surrounded but won’t lean on anyone? Will I still call it a fresh and inspiring view?

3 – They know the true meaning of commitment and persistence to an idea – a love – far bigger than themselves.

It is his meaning of commitment and persistence to an idea. What if that makes him inflexible, insensitive and oblivious to my meaning?

4 – They attract and draw into their world new people, experiences and opportunities that make every day of being with them a continual adventure.

What if I don’t like the roller coaster ride for breakfast, lunch and dinner? What if his very sense of adventure makes me nauseous and crave for the placid, the stable, the sedate and the sedentary?

5 – Their vision for the world extends to a vision of long-term relationships and family life no less important than their cause, but as equal to and intrinsic to working together to contribute to the betterment of humanity.

When I promised to love him and keep him, it was for myself. When did I ever say I will share him with the rest of the world? I did not bargain for him to be canonized!

6 – They have seen failure and know that it is never what defines a man or a woman. It is their ability to get back up, with integrity, humility and service to a higher cause that builds the character and loyalty necessary for life-long commitment.

An admirable trait for sure, but what if he refuses to see the writing on the wall every time he is repeating the mistakes ? Seriously can I applaud him that he dusts himself and gets up each time when my mind is screaming that he is an idiot and has made it a habit of falling ?

7 – They are passionate souls with tonnes of energy and a great love and lust for life…..and we know how important that is for the more, erm, intimate areas of a relationship…..!

Aah, how Mills and Boonish, I’m already week in my knees with unbridled passion ! What if all this great love, lust and energy has a tendency to lose its fizz, erm a little prematurely ?

8 – They know the value of partnership in getting things done, the power of teamwork necessary to build something of mutual value.

How noble of them, but what happens when they discard old partnerships just so they can trade the tried and tested for the new hottie?

9 – They know how sometimes you just have to hang in there, work really hard and keep trusting the original love for the vision/person and what drew you to it/them in the first place……and it will turn out with way more blessings than you can imagine.

You waited for the grass to grow. You nurtured the grass, so it could grow into a veritable savannah. But what happens if it is so obsessively fenced that the cows are dying?

10 – They are visionaries who understand the power of love over fear.

What if fear is good, it keeps you on the straight and the narrow?

Prof. Nandini Vaidyanathan

Always wanted to be an entrepreneur, but didn't know how?

2011-12-06T12:20:00.000+05:30

Ta da! CARMa Shala is the answer to all your questions then! CARMa Shala is a 20-hour online audio course in Entrepreneurship, with real-time entrepreneurs brought in to share their success stories and learnings.

It costs just Rs. 2,650, and includes a copy of my book Entrepedia too!

Wanna hear a trailer? Check it out on http://carmaconnect.in/carmashala.php

Go on, register today!

why do we become entrepreneurs ?

2011-01-02T12:03:00.000+05:30

Reprinted with permission from Entrepreneur magazine, December 2010 issue

Why do we become entrepreneurs ?

I was recently invited by TED as speaker. I met the most amazing people who are doing game-changing stuff. I spoke on Why do we become Entrepreneurs and this was the text of my speech. Of course I used some very interesting visuals that were developed by my team to go with it.. The videos will be streamed shortly.

Why do we become entrepreneurs? This question fascinates me. Why do we let ourselves be drawn by this Circe, this enchantress, who tempts us, beguiles us, captivates us ? Whether we actually end up seducing her or not depends on our wherewithal, but attracted we certainly are.

Over these past five years I’ve mentored more than 500 entrepreneurs. And I’ve heard all kinds of excuses as to why they became entrepreneurs. Please note, like Lawrence of Arabia, I’m making a distinction here between excuse and reason. Excuses have been many, some commonplace ones like : I like being my own boss or I like making loads of money. Some uncommon ones such as : I want to define my identity or I want to create meaning in society. Some bizarre ones like that’s the only way I can avoid getting married or I can ask for dowry without feeling guilty. Some passionate ones like : not being an entrepreneur is not an option at all. Some touching ones like this 67 year old woman who came to me four years ago, and said I’m barely literate, I’m the wife of a very big industrialist and I want to be an entrepreneur because before I die, I want to see respect for me in the eyes of my husband and two sons.

All excuses that converge into one and one reason only, that we want to leave a footprint behind and in leaving a footprint behind, we are seeking immortality.

In the past we sought immortality through our sons. The Sanskrit word putra, which means son, comes from the word puth, which means hell, so putra means one who saves you from hell. In other words, one who makes you immortal. In the annual death ceremony, the son makes offerings not just to his father but to eight generations of his forefathers. This certainly was a clever way to be immortal.

Times and climes have changed. Now we seek immortality by becoming entrepreneurs. Again, look at this beautiful Sanskrit word, Antarprerna. it means inspiration from within. That’s who we are, entrepreneurs, inspired from within, magical thinkers, like Prometheus who stole fire from the fire gods. And look at this sheer coincidence, both words look similar but their pronunciation is similar too, entrepreneur/antarprerna!

If entrepreneurs are inspired from within, does it mean they are born and cannot be made? I refuse to believe anything as profoundly impacting as this can be left to the caprice of a DNA. Can leaders be made or are they all born? I think both. Some are born others are made. So too with entrepreneurs. How do you make them? By giving them knowledge, by up-skilling them and in doing both you are vesting in them the confidence to develop the right attitude. It’s like swimming right, you’re afraid of water till you learn about the pool, till you learn how to move your arms and legs, how to kick, how to hold your breath, how to stay afloat. Once you’ve learnt all of this, fear goes away and a water baby is born.

Why do we become entrepreneurs when we know that the lows are so abysmally low? Even at the risk of sounding facetious, I’d say it is because the highs are so intoxicatingly high that anything else is less and unacceptable. I mentor women in Afghanistan and Ethiopia in building micro enterprises and to say that life has been unkind to them is an understatement. In becoming entrepreneurs, they have now discovered the language of empowerment and the way they see it, nothing will make them give it up. The women in Afghanistan became entrepreneurs when their husbands went to war over a decade ago. They haven’t seen them since. So one day I asked them : what happens if your husbands come back now and the answer was: Oh, we will shoot them! Not because they don’t want their men back but because they don’t want their old life back.

The first time I went to Afghanistan, it was for audit purposes, my client had disbursed micro finance and although the payments had started coming in, he was worried that the money hadn’t gone where it was meant to. After a couple of visits, it dawned on me that if I did not mentor these women, they may return the loan, but one or the other would happen. They would either lapse below the poverty line or remain livelihood entrepreneurs forever. I’m proud to say many of these women today have transformed their businesses from livelihood to opportunity based enterprises.

Why then aren’t more and more of us in India becoming entrepreneurs? I’ve figured it is because we don’t know how. It’s a strange paradox, the education system in India is such that it decimates creativity and independent thinking. To survive, you have to conform, and conforming means doing mindless, endless streams of activity by rote. And then suddenly when you’re done with your engineering or MBA and decide to become an entrepreneur, everyone tells you : Aaah, you have to be creative! So many challenges now, you have to be creative when they have killed your creativity, you have never worked in an organization but you’re expected to build one, you’ve just come out of school and you’ve not only no money but a hefty student loan, and you’re supposed to bootstrap your company, and you simply have no clue how to go about it. All you have is an idea in your head, passion in your heart and song on your lips, so what do you do?You find yourself a mentor.

Who’s a mentor? To me it’s someone who can bridge the inexperience gap, who can open doors, who can hand-hold you, with responsibility, with accountability. There are times when my mentees call just to hear my voice. There are times when they call just so I can hear their voice. Nothing earth-shattering but just the comfort of knowing that there is someone whom you can go to, whose experience you can benefit from, whose insights you can make use of, someone who is on the same side as you, shares your vision, your passion, someone who will not say : your company, someone who will say, our company. And most important, someone who’s so well-connected that you get access to pretty much everything and everyone.

That’s why we founded our company CARMa, which is an acronym for Creating Access to Resources and Markets, so we can connect entrepreneurs to their natural habitat, thereby change their karma. I’ve figured when there are more mentors in India, the head count of entrepreneurs will automatically go up.

Why did I become an entrepreneur? Let me tell you a story. There was this village school in Orissa that had introduced English language for the first ever time in class 5. The teacher was taking no chances so she had prepped her students for the final examination.. The question was: write an essay on the cow. So the teacher wrote the essay for them and asked them to learn it by heart. By some quirk, on d-day the question was : write an essay on the tree! Everyone was seen struggling with it. One creative kid decided to beat the system. He drew a cow and a tree, tied the cow to the tree and wrote : this is a cow. It is tied to the tree and my essay will be on the cow that was tied to the tree!

That’s me, my whole theory of entanglement is that everything in my life is to do with entrepreneurship. I spent twenty years in the corporate sector, pretty much on all inhabited continents and came back home five years ago. That’s when one of the biz schools invited me to teach and I thought, a little cockily if I might add, given the diversity of my experience, I should be able to teach pretty much anything. That’s when someone asked : why don’t you teach entrepreneurship, we never get anyone to teach that! And I said : why not. Even as I said it, believe you me, it was just another word in the dictionary. Little did I suspect that one day it would consume my whole being.

Why do we become entrepreneurs? So we can embark on this incredible journey of learning and discovering, not just of the world around us but of ourselves, of who we are, of strengths we’d never acknowledged, of weaknesses we never knew we had.

Why do we become entrepreneurs? So that when the white coats come to take us away, we can look them in the eye and say, hey! we’re the good guys, may our tribe increase!

Who is a mentor ? Reprinted with permission from Entrepreneur magazine

2010-10-17T12:37:00.000+05:30

Ram (name changed) is your quintessential inventor-entrepreneur. Even to this day, he designs all his products and sells them. For 20 odd years, he built and managed his company successfully which had now begun to experience entropy.

I was assigned as Mentor to Ram by the organization which facilitates investment access to entrepreneurs. For me this whole experience was exhilarating as managing Ram was a bigger challenge than managing his and his company's make-over.

When you have an entrepreneur who is egoistic, possessive and passionate, how do you mentor him? How do you tell him where he has gone wrong?

This was my biggest learning. That you don’t need to tell him where he has gone wrong.

So what do you do? What I learnt to do was get Ram to focus only on the future. We rarely spoke of the past, the good, the bad, the ugly and the indifferent. We almost managed to treat his company as a start-up without legacy issues.

As a result, Ram put together a very vibrant business plan, raised capital, and completely transformed himself from a being an inward-looking entrepreneur to a builder of a professional, catalytic, energizing, management team.

My take-away from this whole experience was some very interesting insights into the do's and don’ts of a mentor :

Identify with your mentee and his company. You have to impress upon the mentee that both of you are on the same side. So I learnt to say” “our company”. I never said “your company”.
Don’t do post-mortem. Don’t indulge in finger-pointing saying you did wrong up until now, because the sub-text here is up until now you were an idiot, now that you have me I will wave my magic wand and all your problems will disappear! NO !
Your mentee is likely to be very opinionated, especially if he has had a successful track record. You don’t add to the mess by being opinionated. Your personal opinions and thoughts have no place in the mentorship equation. Your advice has to be purely situational, contextual, not the baggage that you may have come with. Because if you don’t, your mentee will have to battle your baggage in addition to his own!
Mentors cannot have fragile egos. Mentors cannot tell the mentee : if you don’t do what I ask you to do, I will stop mentoring you. I had a mentee who would patiently listen to me, would never argue when I gave him my advice, and would go and do exactly the opposite. I learnt from him never to say “I told you so”!
Mentors need not know everything. Neither they nor their mentees should think they do. Both mentor and mentee are work-in- progress. It should be a journey of like-minded pilgrims, not Buddha and his disciples!!
It is very important to assure your mentee that you have no personal agenda, neither monetary nor psychological. It is this that inspires trust, and trust is a non-negotiable imperative on which the mentor-mentee relationship is built.

Even as I write this, it occurs to me that mentoring is a lot like parenting. It's built on trust, and by trust I don’t simply mean dependency but also honesty.

You should know what line neither of you can cross. You should learn to balance your opinion and your mentee's opinion with the exigencies of the situation. You should learn to step back, watch him make mistakes and remain nonchalant even as he gets ready to dust, pick himself up and continue onward. You should be prepared to learn alongside him, as there are times when there is a role-reversal. And most important, both of you should know all the time that his well-being is sacrosanct to you.

My biggest learning? Parenting and mentoring have made me a better person.

where have i been ???:(

2010-08-16T12:51:00.000+05:30

my god, i missed these pages, i'm blogging after ages, not good at all. so i thought i should make up, as many of you know, since March i have been doing a regular column for the magazine entrepreneur. so i thought i'll post the articles that have already been published here so even those of you who don't read the magazine (you should you know, its very good) will get to read the article.

so here goes, this was the first article printed in the March issue, reprinted here with permission from the Entrepreneur magazine.

When the devil wears Prada : what it means to be a ‘woman’ entrepreneur

Prof. Nandini Vaidyanathan

Why is it necessary to qualify the word ‘entrepreneur’ in gender terms? Does the fact that men are from Mars and women are from Venus justify or warrant it? Are women entrepreneurs really so different from their male counterparts?

The answer is layered. It is necessary to qualify not only because women bring different skill-sets to the table but also because society looks at women entrepreneurs differently.

Every act of creation is first of all an act of destruction (Picasso):

The first lesson in being a woman entrepreneur is that society does not take her seriously. A young mentee of mine recently had her company stall in an exhibition and she found that all the visitors to her stall either pretended as if she was part of the furniture or asked her if they could speak to her boss. Reason: the product was a hi-tech education software and no one believed there could be a woman entrepreneur behind it!

Therefore, the first mind-set that she needs to destroy is that women become entrepreneurs for time pass only, and that it is not a serious do-or-die career option for them.

Try? There is no try. There is only do or not do (Yoda, Jedi warrior):

The second lesson is that even though men don’t take her entrepreneurial aspirations seriously, in the event she fails, she is doomed forever. A mentee of mine was under tremendous pressure to raise capital for her company, without much success. In an attempt to de-stress her I told her that we had tried all possible avenues and she shouldn’t be so hard on herself. Her reaction was : ‘trying is not enough, we have to do it, if we don’t, my failure will become the pivot of every argument with my husband’.

Anyone can look for fashion in a boutique or history in a museum. Try looking for fashion in an airport or history in a hardware store (Robert Wieder):

The third lesson is that it is alright for men to build a business around an idea which may be a ‘me too’ in the market, but the woman entrepreneur’s idea has to be necessarily a prime mover. Ironically, a woman is expected to think different even if the idea is as ancient as time, bring a whole new perspective, and look for opportunities in the least likely places.

A bell is a cup until it is struck (Wire):

In India, women constitute 48% of the population, yet their contribution to GDP is negligible. Historically, if a woman became an entrepreneur, it was because circumstances forced it on her. Today with education and empowerment, women are becoming entrepreneurs out of choice, yet, the male-dominant social order believes that women have lowly management skills, lack motivation and drive to earn and therefore do not take business seriously.

It is interesting that these perceptions contradict empirical evidence which show that women are better at multi-tasking, have ‘web-thinking’ abilities, in the sense that they have tremendous networking and leveraging capability (Helen Fisher), have high EQ- all of which are key ingredients for building a successful business.

Entrepreneurship defines the identity of men and women as no job can. But the one reason to gender-qualify it is that for men, identity comes with the territory; for women, it has to be ascribed by men.

interview on world entrepreneurship day in yourstory.in

2010-04-16T15:05:00.000+05:30

http://yourstory.in/expert-talk/guest-column/3787-world-entrepreneurship-day-special-prof-nandini-says-entrepreneurship-landscape-will-change-phenomenally-in-the-next-five-to-ten-years-in-india#comments

look at the first comment from a reader, its a pity even in this day and age, people think entrepreneurship cannot be taught :(

a big thanks !

2010-02-03T16:03:00.000+05:30

hey all you guys who left your comments on my Tata Jagriti blog, a big thank you, and dont miss watching it every weekend on CNBC at 5.30 pm. it started last week and the Hyderabad panel on which i had the privilege of meeting the yatris is being aired on 13th and 14th feb, catch the whole series, i promise you it will be worth it, cheers

my article in franchiseindia

2010-02-03T15:16:00.000+05:30

when franchiseindia asked me to write an article on any aspect of entrepreneurship, i really hadnt applied my mind to what it was going to be. a couple of evenings ago, i met my young mentee, ramanan to discuss his biz plan and during the course of our conversation, he said we should write a book, or rather, several books. so i said, well, there is an article we can start off with!! and he came up with the idea of "Five slides to fame, how to pitch a biz plan" and in less than 24 hours it was published !

Much to our amazement, not a word was edited in the text, but for some strange reason, in the title, "Fve slides to fame" was removed :(

having sat through countless biz plan pitches in the last three years, i thought it was time someone demystified it :), here's the link, http://sme.franchiseindia.com/article.php?title=how+to+pitch+your+biz+plan, enjoy.

Tata Jagriti Yatra

2010-01-29T14:09:00.000+05:30

hey guys don' t miss the telecast starting tomorrow, 30th jan on CNBC at 5.30 pm on weekends. the hyderabad panel on which i had the privilege to participate is being broadcast on 13th and 14th feb at 5.30 pm, check it out.

TiE smashups event in delhi last week

2010-01-29T14:04:00.000+05:30

here's the link to our panel, we had such a blast, http://www.smashup.in/session9.html :)

TATA Jagriti Yatra contd

2010-01-03T16:02:00.000+05:30

just listen to their anthem, http://www.jagritiyatra.com/audio/2m30s_mixdown.mp3 and i watched them perform to this song yesterday, 400+ of them, with conviction in every pore of their bodies and a big WOW!!

TATA Jagriti Yatra

2010-01-03T13:25:00.000+05:30

Everybody has a 'wow' moment and if one is lucky, several of them during a lifetime. i'm possibly one of the few really privileged ones who meets amazing people literally most days of the year. which means i have a treasure chest of wow moments. but i can tell you this,- if i were asked to pick this one heirloom which i will want to pass on to the future generations, it will easily and uncontestably be 2nd jan 2010 at TCS campus in Hyderabad at the TATA Jagriti Entrepreneur Yatra. nothing had prepared me for what i was going to experience here. i will post pictures as soon as i get some of them from the organisers.

Jagriti is a foundation involved in a number of developmental activities but this train journey is the brainchild of Shashank Mani and if you want to know more about how and why he designed this yatra, just pick up his book : India : A journey through a healing civilization, published by Harper Collins.

In 1997, Shashank conceived of an idea to discover India beyond her sophistication (his words) and urbanity and experience her home-spun 'genius' (again his words). he called it Azad Bharat Rail Yatra. this was the germination of an idea which is all poised to open the floodgates for an upbeat entrepreneurial india. it has now morphed into a train journey for practising and aspiring young entrepreneurs from what they call the Middle India, middle not in the geographic or class sense but in the economic sense.

Shashank, Raj and Revathy (whom unfortunately i did not get to meet as she had stayed back in Chennai) are responsible for designing an experience for the entrepreneurs which will stay with them for the rest of their lives. This is an 18 day train journey through the length and breadth of india, where people from different climes and cultures travel together, discover reach other and in the process manage to hold a mirror to themselves. 400 young vibrant hungry unmolded minds coming together, meeting entrepreneurs of different shapes and sizes and hues, understanding the challenges of being an entrepreneur, not to be daunted by them but to convert them into a laundry list of do's and dont's. god what a moment!!!

let me start the story from the beginning.

a couple of weeks ago, i received mail from Ananth Krishna who introduced himself as the co-ordinator of the Yatra and invited me to be a panelist either in Kanyakumari on 28th december or in Hyderabad on 2nd january. i chose Hyderabad.

i had heard of this train journey last year and i was completely delighted to be invited to be a small part of it this year.i mentioned it to Hemant of NVI and he said he'd love to come for the event.

Hemant and I were in another meeting till three and at three thirty we walked into the reception of TCS at Hi-tech city. the security guard manning the reception just pointed to an area behind him and asked us to proceed there. we did and nothing had prepared us for what met our eyes.

we walked out of the reception into an open atrium built like an amphi theatre, steep and cascading, with stone steps going all the way down, interspersed with bushes and trees. on the steps were some 400 odd people, youngsters, bright eyed and bushy tailed notwithstanding the ardror of a train journey, waiting expectantly, as if they were in Woodstock, waiting for their favorite rock band to perform!!!

i got goose bumps just looking at them and believe you me, for a minute i was tempted to turn on my heels and run for dear life from there. what is it i can i offer them that will make their eyes twinkle more, what do i have in me that can make them hungrier and wilder? what can i say to them that will inspire them,- these were the big questions that came flooding my mind and for a moment i lost it and just wanted scoot out of there.

but the goose bumps took over thankfully!!! and hemant and i walked down the steps in awe, in humility, in anticipation. and our several wow moments began.

since last year Tatas and CNBC have been phenomenal partners on this event and on the panel were Dr Krishna Tanuku, ED, Wadhwani Centre for Entrepreneurship, ISB, Mr Mohan Rao, State Director for Small Scale and Khadi Industries Commission and myself. The discussion was moderated by Suresh Venkat, Exec Producer, CNBC. The subject for discussion : funding for small entrepreneurs.

i wont go into the discussion here, i will post the dates on which the event will be broadcast on CNBC and you guys can catch it live.

suresh turned out to be an intelligent, witty moderator, not one of those who talks more than those he moderates!!!and we covered a whole gamut of subjects. this was followed by a Q&A from the audience and i was astounded at the questions that were asked. my favorite of course was from an overseas participant who said : everyone talks of what investors look for in the entrepreneur. what should an entrepreneur look for in an investor!!! my answer to this i shall blog separately :)

once the discussion was over i was mobbed completely and can you believe it, they asked me for my autograph!!! on t-shirts, on paper, on their palm!!! i was dying of embarassment and i kept saying why do you want my autograph, i am no celebrity, i'm just a teacher and god no one listened.

at the end of it all, i was completely exhausted and completely, overwhelmingly enervated!!!

shashank, raj and ananth? how can i ever thank you enough? may your tribe increase.

TiE ISB Connect, slide 8

2009-11-19T13:54:00.000+05:30

the most irrefutable reason for an incubator is that it takes away regret from the ideating populace,. corporate businesses around the world have been built on myriad graves of ideas which might have been executed, could have been executed and really should have been executed, but weren't because there was no eco-system for it. Good incubators give the necessary push and thrust for ideas to come forth and see the light of the day. in the absence of incubators, many an idea is still-born.

TiE ISB Connect, slide 7

2009-11-19T13:48:00.000+05:30

just the way it is important for every entrepreneur to be unreasonably optimisitc about his biz, it is equally important to understand that sometimes even with the best of resources and efforts, the whole biz may fall by the wayside. to me, bankruptcy is as much written in blood as an entrepreneur's passion is. when you do the biz plan, the sub-text here is that if any of the assumptions go wrong, the tasks delineated may not lead to the milestones, and if milestones are not met, there will be a resource crunch, and if there is a resource crunch, the biz may come a cropper.

i do think it is the job of the incubator to keep the entrepreneur constantly grounded to this unassailable fact. not so it spooks the entrepreneur but impresses upon him time and again that he has to demonstrate as much passion for implementing the plan as he did for ideating it.

TiE ISB Connect, slide 6

2009-11-12T11:43:00.001+05:30

once you have successfully built the biz, it may sound romantic to say that you could do a lot of things because you didn't have money, but the truth is having money, if not all of it, atleast some of it, particularly in the early stages, either during product development stage or going-to-get-your-first-customer stage, ensures two things, one that you don't abandon the thought of becoming an entrepreneur and two that you do direct constructive energy on task at hand.

a good incubator should provide pre-seed/seed capital. unfortunately no incubator does this and even in international conferences, i have heard engineering professors from ivy league schools lament that they are not able to encourage entrepreneurship because the institution does not have funding. what use is an incubator without seed funding ?

in the incubators that i have set up at PES School of Engineering and New Horizon College of Engineering, the respective managements have committed a fund ear-marked for this purpose. This is a good way to start. going forward, the fund can be made into a sizeable one by leveraging alumni networks, international agencies that are interested in a foot print in india for encouraging entrepreneurship, international agencies specifically interested in the clean-tech space, funds that are set up only to encourage enterprises which have high and deep impact across the fabric of indian society, government grants, etc.

TiE ISB Connect, slide 5

2009-11-09T15:57:00.000+05:30

it is in the incubator that the entrepreneur learns how to see the bigger picture. it is here that he learns that there are other stories too, besides his own. and it becomes the responsibilty of the mentor to make him acquire this sense of perspective.

entrepreneurs are notoriously here-and-the-now people. rarely do they ponder over future ramifications. if a solution can mitigate a particular problem today, go for it, tomorrow will take care of itself!! this is the most common mind-set.

time and again i come across entrepreneurs who are in a hurry to distribute equity to employees because the way they see it, there is no imminent cash flow by way of payroll!! i'm always appalled by this short-sighted approach and shudder every time an entrepreneur comes to me with this proposal.

like i said a mentor is not just must have but can't not have.

TiE ISB Connect, slide 4

2009-11-09T15:36:00.000+05:30

unfortunately the association of entrepreneurs with heroism has become banal in the minds of non-entrepreneurs, sometimes even in the minds of entrepreneurs. i think it is very important for entrepreneurs to believe that they are the magical thinkers, the heroes, like prometheus who stole fire from the gods.

caught in the rigours of building the biz, many entrepreneurs give up on their madness and begin to live phantom lives and i believe it is the job of the incubator to make sure that this does not happen. only if the entrepreneur believes in himself can he make the world believe in him. however banal it sounds, he has to internalise that he is the hero in his script.

TiE ISB Connect Slide 3

2009-11-07T22:13:00.001+05:30

an incubator is one which hand-holds the entrepreneur to get his ideas off the drawing board into the market place. which means pretty much every single step, all the way.

a lawyer for incorporating the company, filing for patent, and drawing up the necessary contracts for biz partners, customers and investors;

a chartered accountant for managing the books of accounts;

partners who may be necessary for developing the product ;

an HR company for providing the right team ;

biz partners for sourcing the components ;

market specialists for reaching the product to the market place ;

communication experts for articulating the message to the market ;

investors for funding it all ;

and most important of all, mentors who not only make the above connections possible but also make sure that entrepreneurs show the same passion for execution as they did for ideation.

TiE ISB Connect, slide 2

2009-11-07T21:55:00.002+05:30

I then showed this slide and asked people what it represented. it was pretty much as i expected. no one knew. i would have been really surprised if someone had said i was talking about an incubator. and with that i rest my case.

no more validation is necessary that incubators in india suck.to me the three most important components of an incubator are mentorship, seed/pre seed capital and real estate. and necessarily in that order.many educational institutions comply on the real estate bit. they give work stations, computers with internet and telephone. many of them charge a rental for it.

no one provides capital. many entrepreneurs need some money even at the product development stage. not everyone is able to bootstrap. a good incubator should provide this. In Bangalore, we have set up incubators at PES School of Engineering and New Horizon College of Engineering and the respective managements have committed funds for this purpose.

many of them provide some form of mentorship but it's way below what's actually required. mentorship is about bridging the experience gap. today more and more youngsters are becoming entrepreneurs right out of engineering and management schools. they have no exposure to how organizations function, so obviously they have no clue how to build organizations that function effectively. this is where mentorship plays a crucial role.

mentorship is also about networking. as a young entrepreneur, the only thing he has going for him is the twinkle in his eye, the passion in his heart and the song on his lips. he needs someone who can open doors for him. he needs someone to play interference that he needs to be taken seriously.

mentorship is about knowledge. ask any entrepreneur whether he knows how to build the biz around his idea. and the answer will be no. right from writing the biz plan, incorporating the company, filing for patent, hiring the right team, going to the market, fully armed - doing all the right things at the right time,- mentors are a must have. not just good to have.

TiE ISB Connect, Hyderabad, 22nd Oct slide 1

2009-11-07T21:25:00.002+05:30

I was invited to speak on incubators. i started with this slide. i asked the audience to identify the product and pretty much everyone said, i was talking about shampoo.

dont know how dont know why !!

2009-11-07T16:38:00.000+05:30

i never realized that i had somehow disabled comment :( thanks sreeja for bringing it to my notice, here we go guys, comment box is open, let's have conversations!!

challenges in mentorship

2009-11-06T11:46:00.000+05:30

sorry guys, have gone awol again last three months, been traveling like travel will go out of fashion, as usual, that's the excuse, not the reason, latter being JPL!!! (just plain lazy for the uninitiated :))

as always, loads and loads of exciting things both on the teaching front as well as on the mentoring front.

like i said in my last blog, i was mentoring Solkar Solar, Chennai, as part of the New Ventures India initiative. it's an interesting concept , they shortlist several companies after a rigorous process of due diligence, assign a mentor from the industry, who will hand-hold the company for the next eight weeks and come up with a robust biz plan which will be pitched to the investor comunity at the end of the eight week period.

solkar was assigned to me for mentorship.

ragunathan who's a first generation entrepreneur started solkar 25 years ago as a project for his Master's at IIT-Madras, way before solar was even thought of as a viable industry. up until two years ago he had a good run because there were government subsidies and government aid and he built an amazing bouquet of products and services and an incredible name for himself.

in the last two years, subsidies and aid have become moribund and he has had to reinvent himself to compete in the open market.

ragu is your quintessential inventor-entrepreneur. even to this day, he designs all his products.

for me this whole experience was exhilarating as managing ragu was a bigger challenge than managing his and his company's re-invention.

ragu has practically been the prime mover in the industry and as such has written the script pretty much at both State and Centre in renewable and non-conventional energy. he has tremendous brand equity and every cell in his six foot plus frame reverberates with energy (pun intended).

in his head ragu and solkar are the same. like all entrepreneurs, even after 25 years, he refuses to let go of solkar to breathe independently. he sees it as an extension of his persona. which is all very well except that at some point you need to be able to say that what i can give it is not enough.

my challenge was how do i manage ragu's passion for the benefit of solkar? because believe you me, he has no life beyond solkar and i wanted to harness that passion and energy positively for the growth of the company. when you have an entrepreneur who is egoistic, possessive and passionate, how do you mentor him? how do you tell him where he has gone wrong?

and this was my biggest learning. that you dont tell him where he has gone wrong. because if you do you incur his wrath!!! and that becomes a show-stopper. actually you dont need to tell him.

so what do you do? you do the trapeze act :) what i learnt to do was get ragu to focus only on the future. we rarely spoke of the past. the good, the bad, the ugly and the indifferent. we almost managed to treat solkar as a new start-up without legacy costs. result, ragu put together a very vibrant biz plan, we have very fruitful final stage discussion with VC's currently, and we have ragu in a completely transformed mode : from a i-me-myself entrepreneur to a builder of professional, catalytic, energising management team.

and my take-away from this whole experience were some very interesting insights into the do's and dont's of a mentor :

identify with the mentee and his company. you have to impress upon the mentee that both of you are on the same side. so i learnt to say, our company. i never said your company.
dont do post-mortem. no finger-pointing saying you did wrong up until now, because the sub-text then is up until now you were an idiot, now that you have me i will wave my magic wand and all problems will disappear :) NO NO NO!!!
entrepreneur is already likely to be very opinonated, you dont add to the mess by being opinionated. your personal opinions and thoughts have no place in the mentorship equation. your advice has to be purely situational, contextual, not the baggage that you have come with. because if you do that, the poor entrepreneur will have to battle your baggage in addition to his own !!
mentors cant have fragile egos. mentors cant say if you dont do what i ask you to do, i will stop mentoring you. i had a mentee who would patiently listen to me, would never argue when i gave him my reasons, and would go and do exactly the opposite. and the results would be at variance with his expecation and then he'd come back to me saying, sorry nandini, i didn't listen to you and now i have messed up, help me sort it out please. with him i learnt to be forgiving and never to tell him i told you so!!!because for god's sake every entrepreneur has the right to make his mistakes and learn from them.
it follows from here that mentors dont know everything. neither they should think they do nor should their mentees think they do. both mentor and mentee are work in progress. it should be a journey of like-minded pilgrims, not Buddha and his disciples!!
it is very important to assure the entrepreneur that you have no personal agenda. neither monetary nor psychological. it is this that inspires trust, funnily enough.

even as i write this, it occurs to me that mentoring is a lot like parenting. it's built on trust, and by trust i dont simply mean dependency but also honesty.

you should know what line neither of you can cross.

you should learn to balance your opinion and mentee's opinion with the demands of the situation.

you should learn to step back, watch him make mistakes and remain nonchalant even as he gets ready to dust and pick himself up and continue onward.

you should be prepared to learn alongside him, there may be times when there is a role-reversal.

and most important, both of you should know all the time that his well-being is sacrosanct to you.

i've learnt one thing : parenting and mentoring have made me a better person.

OCC meet

2009-08-26T14:39:00.000+05:30

this sunday, that is 30th august, i've been invited to share my thoughts at Open Coffee Club, Bangalore. this is a very interesting group of tech entrepreneurs. i came to know of OCC about a year ago, when my good friend Hemu Ramaiah (the founder of Landmark chain of book stores) told me that in Chennai, OCC is very active and vibrant. i signed up in bangalore soon after and i must say i quite enjoyed all the mail parlaying that went on (even though i must confess i did not understand all the tech stuff that were bandied about :). (i unsubscribed some time ago).

what fascinated me was the sense of what sociologists call the 'we feeling' that was prevalent in the OCC community. any problem faced by a member was taken on board by the entire community in right earnest and there was a mechanism of collective problem-solving which was not only mind-staggering but i'm sure also contributed to the sanity of the entrepreneurs. just knowing that there are a bunch of guys out there who will rally around you even if they dont have all the answers, is a huge confidence-booster, and entrepreneurs in india need more and more such lamposts that they can lean on in their eco-system.

it's a very lonely journey through a very hostile landscape and some friendly faces popping up now and then can really be a balm. keep up the good work OCC.

i plan to talk about mentors and mentorship. in a sense, in india, it's a very old term. the vedas and the upanishads talk about father and guru doubling up as mentors. but in the entrepreneurial context, it is lackadaisically used, incorrectly understood and its scope under-leveraged. so i plan to go at it with my scalpel :) you're welcome to Ta'am, in koramangala, at 10 AM on 30th august.

New Ventures India

2009-08-24T15:34:00.000+05:30

in my experience entrepreneurship has more nay-sayers than benefactors, so i'm used to being a battle-axe, fighting for its cause. but when i met sanjoy and hemant of NVI, Hyderabad, i was like : where were you guys hiding all this while!! believe you me, they are the good guys, guardian angels of entrepreneurship.

all those of you who are in the green space and looking for institutional mentoring and enterprise support services, log on to newventuresindia.org

i'm a mentor with NVI and the company allocated to me for mentoring is Solkar Solar, based out of Chennai and Singapore. Ragu who's a solar veteran is the founder of this company and I'm sure in the next eight weeks my own learning curve will soar!

i'm visiting Solkar's plant in Chennai and meeting the team on 7 and 8th september, 2009.

i will share my journey on these pages and i'm sure there will be plenty of lessons for all of us.

my dream, finally!

2009-08-06T12:12:00.000+05:30

i haven't blogged on these pages for over six months. Besides laziness, the reason also was that i wanted to start a school for entrepreneurship. a few of us got together and spent a number of beery evenings poring over how to go about it, but unfortunately nothing came of it. It would be easy to say not having enough money to do it on our own was the show-stopper, but that would only be an excuse. as a friend of mine is fond of describing anything that has lost fizz, this too became "khuda fizz"!!

i wasn't ready to give up even though i did not have a definite plan in mind as to how i would do it. One day i was invited to run an entrepreneurship awareness workshop at New Horizon College of engineering, Bangalore. Post the workshop, they took me around the campus and i was stunned at the infrastructure that had been created. So I asked for a meeting with the Chairman.

I was ushered into Mr Mohan Manghnani's office in the next five minutes and even before i sat down i said," you have a very impressive facility, but tell me something, why haven't you set up a centre for entrepreneurship".

Mr Manghnani looked at me and said "will you do it?". So i said, 'sure i'll set it up for you'. He said "no, can you set it up and run it for us?". I said "sure" .

it was as simple as that. I was amazed at the way decisions were taken, my white paper on the centre was reviewed by the team he put together, consisting of HOD's and principals of the various streams, and in less than a week, we had signed on the dotted line.

this was in April and we decided to start the centre post vacation. I came on board on 20th july and here i am, sitting atop captive 5000+ young, vibrant minds and the Centre for Entrepreneurship Development is in biz!

they says it pours. a month after we signed up here, PES school of engineering, Bangalore invited me for a discussion to set up the Centre for Entrepreneurship. Dr Sridhar Mitta who is on their Board introduced me to Ajoy Kumar, the COO, a week later I met Jawahar, who's the Founder Chairman Mr Doreiswamy's son and within hours we had signed the deal.

so on 15th July, the Centre for Entrepreneurship was born at PESSE !!!

both are new age colleges, running professional, corporatized organizations, having created best in class facility and intellectual capital.

both see entrepreneurship as a very positive and viable career option to their students.

what we are offering in both the places is a full credit course in entrepreneurship for 36 hours, four hours a week, for nine weeks. The content is real time, pedagogy is experience- sharing by entrepreneurs, both successful and failed.

at the end of the course, the class has to do the biz plan in groups of four, and the best biz plans will be incubated in college, the entrepreneurs will be given seed capital, they will be mentored and hand-held to get their companies off the ground for the next two years.

WOWieeeeeee!!!

the response from students is amazing, i addressed a class of 110 students at PES (its open only for final year students) and 81 registered for the course!! and in New Horizon, so far I have met 84 students, out of whom 71 have registered!!

in both the places, we are offering it as a value-added course for a small fee of Rs 1000.

for this year, we are concentrating only on our students. Next year, we will open it up to all interested entrepreneurs!!!

if my life get's any more exciting, i'll develop and burst an aneurysm!!!

my beautifully articulated vision statement for my company, startups

2008-10-07T10:41:00.000+05:30

my friend vasanth, sent me this quote from Aldous Huxley which he found in 'small is beautiful'. i have shamelessly borrowed it as the vision statement for my company, startups. thank you vasanth.

the quote is : startups is involved with 'ordinary people doing profitable and intrinsically significant work, of helping men and women to achieve independence from bosses, so that they may become their own employers...'

many people have asked me what is my biz model, and i say my biz model is to facilitate your biz model. youngsters come to me saying they have a damn good idea, they want to be mentored into building a biz around it but they have no resources to pay me for mentoring. and i tell them i dont take any fee. because at this stage of my life i have the luxury of working with entrepreneurs of all shapes, sizes, and hues, without worrying about money because my driving force is to create a mass movement in entrepreneurship in india. with 1.2 billion people, our hedgehog concept is that every indian should be an entrepreneur, creating his own microsoft, britannia, body shop, landmark, zee and disney, as opposed to being employed in them.

so when potential entrepreneurs want me to mentor them in cleaning up their idea, writing a biz plan, structuring their company, evolving an understanding of who they are and where they want to go, if my involvement is episodic, i dont charge at all. if they want me to work with their teams on a sustained basis, commiting x no of hours of physical presence per week, then i charge my fee as a 2.5% -5% stake in the company. never so far have i taken cash upfront as a consulting fee. i work with 24 clients today in different verticals, different stages of incubation, different capex requirement, and the only thing common to all of them is i am available as a resource for them in whatever manner they need my help.

my dream is to make india become that famous 'land of opportunity'.

biz plan contd

2008-09-17T11:10:00.000+05:30

Section VI financials :
many entrepreneurs tell me that this is where they come to a grinding halt. the problems they face are two fold: one they are not finance guys, hence have no clue how to put this section together ; two, even if they have a smattering of finance, they find it difficult to project sales, costs and bottomline over a five year period.

Gone are the days when banks insisted on a 1+2 year projection; most funding agencies like to see five year projections of P&L, cash flow, capital deployment and return on capital deployed. their reasoning is very simple. all of them, without exception, like to exit within 3 years with minimum 30% return. very rarely do VC's hold on to their investment beyond three years. There has to be an overwhelming reason for them to do so.

if you have a clear idea of your biz concept, especially if you know for sure what is your target segment, extrapolating that from the universe is not a big deal. there are any number of MR agencies that have conducted demographic surveys and that data is available.

if you have clarity on how you want to go about creating your biz product and reaching it to the market place, then working out production and operational costs should not be rocket science.

if you have estimated your resources correctly, it should be easy to identify what your total capital outlay is, out of that how much are you bringing to the table and the balance that you need to raise. it is absolutely imperative in today's context that a certain percentage of the capital required is brought by the promoter himself. gone are the days of only 'sweat equity' that the promoter brought to the table either by virtue of his experience or knowledge. he cannot hope to attract external funding unless he has invested a sizeable amount himself.

the size of your biz determines whether you are going the debt route or the equity route. interestingly, if your capital requirement is large, VC's are your best bet as VC's will not look at anything less than a $50 million requirement. Larger the cap required, better your chances are in attracting VC's into your biz.

Irrespective of who is the funding agency, what everyone looks for in the biz plan are :
the biz idea
the management
the financials
and the logic in the thought and implementation process.

i have seen biz plans where the capex required is about 200000 INR, but the financials project breakeven after 2 years! i have seen biz plans which inflate topline so irrationally that even the promoter has a hard time lying consistently about it! I have seen biz plans which list risks so perfunctorily, it is almost as if they are listing them becasue they have to fill up the risks column!
the logical flow in the biz plan, from concept to implementation, is its biggest asset and nowhere else does it reflect so blatantly as in the financials.

Section V contd

2008-08-18T19:35:00.000+05:30

Particularly since the dotcom bust, funding agencies have started to scrutinise the management team. The first to come under the scanner are the promoters. If the company is promoted by a single entrepreneur, the upside of that is that the first round of due diligence has to be around him, his socio-cultural-economic background, the reasons for which he is planning to embark on this entrepreneurial journey, what are his psychological and economic drivers, and most important, is he planning to become an entreprenuer for the right reasons (there are people who become entrepreneurs when they are pink-slipped by their organizations, do not get suitable job offers post leaving and then take on something temporarily till such time a job of their liking comes their way. these are the wrong reasons).

the downside of a single promoter is that he has to hire the variety of skill-sets that are required to build the organization. and as we have seen earlier, most entrepreneurs make mistakes in this. they hire people who are available, not because they are the right people. when CEO's tell me that people are their biggest assets, i tell them: you are wrong; right people are your biggest assets, wrong people are your epitaph.

when there are plural promoters, the upside is that amongst the promoters themselves there is a variety of skill-sets that could be complementary and augur well for the organization. but i must caution all of you on one aspect. sometimes people come together to found companies because they are good friends or they worked well together in their previous company, or because they were all fired together and they became partners in adversity. whilst being good friends or knowing each other may be good, it does not guarantee a good bench-mark in co-founding. i have known companies that were promoted by best buddies and fell by the wayside within one year of operation because they discovered that being friends and being co-founders were two separate ball-games and the presence of one did not underwrite success in the other.

irrespective of whether it is one promoter or multiple promoters, one unassailable fact is that when you start putting the management team together, it is very important to get it right. the first who... and then what prinicple has to be followed religiously. you need people on board who are powered by the biz idea, who are energised by the other members of the team, who are invigorated by the thought of building a biz, brick by brick.

you need people who board the bus because they are attracted to the people already on the bus. where the bus is going is irrelevant, who is on the bus is most important. if people board the bus because they are attracted by the destination, mid-way through, because of changes in the eco-system if the direction has to be changed, they will not only be most unhappy, they will not let you change the direction. which could mean the death knell for the organization.

sorry for the break!

2008-08-18T11:12:00.000+05:30

i have been traveling, on work, for pleasure, i have been in the midst of writing a learn-it-yourself-guide to entrepreneurship, so blogging has taken a back seat. many of my students have been entreating me to resume, so here i am. we will continue with how to write the biz plan, watch out for the blog by the end of the day.cheers.

biz plan contd

2008-05-28T18:31:00.000+05:30

Section V Management team

it is very important to put together a good management team in place, right from the word go. most entrepreneurs tend to hire people with lesser competencies simply because they are available at a lesser price. what then happens is that when the organization grows and the people who have been hired cannot grow with it, two scenarios are likely :-
either they have to be left by the wayside in which case all the time, money and knowledge invested in them by the entrepreneur simply goes waste; or the fact that they fail to grow with the organization can actually stop the organization itself from growing. both are unhappy scenarios for the entrepreneur.

the second show stopper is when the entrepreneur refuses to delegate to people with better competencies than himself. most entrepreneurs tend to be very possessive about their ideas and their biggest failing is that they believe that firstly they are as good at implementing as they are at ideating, which of course is a big blunder. secondly they believe that since it is their idea, nobody can do it better than them. which is an even bigger blunder.

successful entrepreneurs recognise early on that they cannot be good at everything, understand what they are good at and stick to doing only those jobs they are good at, and hire competent people to execute those jobs that they are good at.

this is how an entrepreneur build his team. i have heard entrepreneurs lament often enough that they cannot attract talent as startups dont have brand equity. this is true. but what is also true is startups, more than others, need evangelists in the team, people who believe in the biz as much as the entrepreneur does. obviously in a startup you cannot attract talent by paying more because in any case you are strapped for cash; nor can you attract on account of your name or credibilty, because those are yet to be built. so the only way you can entice people to work with you is to look for such people who are moved by ideas, who are willing to give up conventional comfort for the sake of a tremendous idea. ideas should not only move businesses, they should move people too, all stakeholders infact, customers, employees and investors.

as i keep saying, ideas are the starting point of all businesses.

biz plan, contd

2008-05-05T13:24:00.000+05:30

Section IV Operations
in this section, it is important to describe in detail how you propose to create the product and reach it to your customer. if it has to be manufactured, you will have to mention location of factory, why you chose that location over other locations, - eg, is it cost beneficial or is it convenient from raw material perspective,- whatever your reason for choosing that particular location.

Eg George Lucas made Star Wars a profitable enterprise because he shot only a small part of the film in the US and bulk of the shooting was in UK, using local crew. at that time it was standard practice for Holloywood to move its entire crew from US to locations where they were shooting. and that used to add to the humungous cost of production.

Lucas did a number of inventive things to keep costs low because he was forced to. after nearly every Hollywood studio had turned him down, at the Cannes festival, Lucas had approached 20th century fox who agreed to fund the venture provided Lucas shot within the prescribed budget. Lucas agreed as he was desperate to make Star Wars because knew it in his bones that the entire series would be a runaway hit.

for instance, after the day's shooting Lucas would courier videocasettes back to Hollywood everyday for processing. even in movie distribution, they were very innovative. eg in Haiti and Mali, distributors were encouraged to sell movie tickets for vegetables as currency and then convert it to dollars! such out-of-the-box thinking led to almost 40% of revenue to come from outside US markets.

the movies were huge successes in Japan and Germany because Lucas saw to it that there was good quality dubbing. his logic was that the themes of the series were universal and were not culture-specific.

they went all out to convert to all home-viewing standards as there was no single international standard.

big time property licensing was initiated, eg Darth Maul, Princess Amidala, Jar Jar Brinks.

Pepsi printed the characters on its cans.

Tricon distributed the merchandise in its restaurants.

The Phantom Menace, which was a prequel to the trilogy was the first ever movie that was globally released in 1999. and by the year end, it had grossed $417 million in ticket sales, second only to Titanic.

all of these initiatives put together brought down the per viewer cost.

the choice of location could also be influenced by taxation laws, proximity to markets, availability of labour, government subsidy, etc. Eg the SEPZ may become the location of choice for the myriad benefits it offers to software exporters.

bio-diesel manufacturers may choose locations based on transportation access, warehouse convenience etc that may have a huge impact on the costs of operation and therefore their competitive edge.

in this section, you may also describe the entire logistics of reaching the product to the consumer. and this in turn is based on the sales channel that your company has identified for it, the length of this channel and access to the end user.eg Samsung sells its washing machines through dealer network which in turn sells it to the end user. Bingo snacks are shipped to distributors who in turn despatch them to retailers who in turn sell them to end customer. Dell sells its computers directly to customers on line.

this section basically deals with the entire process of obtaining raw material, manufacturing the product, and reaching it to the customer.

in my next blog,we will discuss Section V which is about management structure of the organization

a comment

2008-04-21T14:31:00.000+05:30

someone has left a comment that one area that has to be de-mystified is how to write a fool-proof biz plan. all i can say is, nothing in life is fool-proof, so why expect a biz plan to be?!! a biz plan mitigates the risks, from the unknown, the unpredictable and the unforeseeable. nowhere does it aspire to eliminate the risks completely. sometimes the best laid plans bomb in the market place due to the most innocuous reason. new coke bombed not because there was anything wrong with the taste or the marketing effort, but simply because the coke customers were inexplicably possessive about its original taste. sometimes products run away with the market for no apparent reason at all. in late 90's the success of stencil brand shirts is a good example of this. biz plan is a blue print, not a warranty for success.

biz plan contd.

2008-04-21T13:32:00.000+05:30

Section III, Part B Marketing Plan
Evolving the Marketing Plan consists of the following five steps:-
•Analyzing opportunities
this is a composite analysis in the sense you are looking at not just creating a market for your product but you are looking at every available opportunity to increase the size of the market. a good example is air deccan, by dropping airfares, it created a whole new market of air travelers, but by making air tickets available at unconventional places such as gas stations, it increased the market spurred by sheer convenience.
•Selecting target segments
target segment as i said in my previous blog is that segment of the potential market that has the money to buy, is willing to buy, has access and most important, is buying. it is very important for the marketer to identify this correctly. eg a cheese- laced snack to be launched in China. like Cheetos for example. there may be willingness, they may have the money, and the product may be accessible, but chinese people will not buy this product as most of them as a race, are lactose-intolerant. it therefore becomes important for the marketer to have already incorporated this detail from his Market Research findings in the product launch stage.
•Designing marketing strategy
This is an activity that refers to understanding the industry in which you are located, the competitive environment and your target segment, based on which you will develop your pricing and distribution strategy. you may want to 'do a maggi' to get penetration in the early days, especailly if you are a prime mover; you may consciously lower the price vis-a-vis competitors' in the early stages, especially if there are well-entrenched products and lowering the price may be the only way of breaking their strangle-hold; or you may consciously keep premium pricing, particularly with luxury products in the conspicuous consumption space.

you may also look at newer ways of reaching the product to the customer. a brand show-room, more visible theme shelf in super-market, unconventional outlets, mail order, etc.
•Developing marketing programs
marketing is all about creating, communicating and delivering value. all three have to be in sync. eg cheers detergent of P&G was a hugely successful product in the US whose value proposition was that it worked equally well in hot and cold water and caused tremendous sudsing. all their communication in the US reveolved around these two value propositions.when they launched in japan, they continued to use the same value propostions, but to their dismay they found that the communication seemed to be falling on deaf ears.

market research subsequently showed them the error of their ways: in japan people are used to using cold water only, so the value proposition of hot and cold water made no sense. second, in japan, they add fabric softener to water along with the detergent which prevents sudsing. so the second value proposition also made no sense! cheers had to be re-launched changing the entire communication platform.
•Managing the marketing effort
marketing has to be a sustainable activity if the company is determined to build the necessary biz traction. there are several aspects to marketing,- market, environment, both task and broad, and communication. it is also a dynamic activity, market shares change over time and space, market shares change with marketing program inputs, market shares change with definition of the market itself. eg in the early days, it was alright for coke and pepsi to define their market as cola market. but over time, there has been a need for them to redefine their market and today Robert Isdell, CEO of coke has the wisdom to say that it is not pepsi who is their competitor because it is not just the cola drinker who is their customer but anyone who drinks! which may include soft drinks, juices, coffee and tea, carbonated water and still water!

how the whole marketing mix is managed and how well it is managed is what has to be delineated under this heading.

we will discuss Section IV which is all about Operations in my next blog.

biz plan contd

2008-04-16T10:15:00.000+05:30

Section III Marketing

this section is in two parts: Section A is all about Research and Analysis .

you try segmenting your market, ie from the universe, you try and arrive at your potential market. typically for a marketer, potential market refers to that segment of the population which has the money to buy your product, is willing to buy your product and has access to your product. eg blackberry. this product's potential market is corporate executives and professionals who are on the move, who have to remain in touch, who can afford it because the price is not a factor at all, considering the convenience (in many cases, the company may provide it) and have access to it.

Available market, on the other hand is that segment of the population which has money, is willing to spend, but is denied access to the product. eg for the new pub in town, everyone who likes drinking draught beer is potential market. but youngsters under 18 years of age, even though they may have the money and may be more than willing, law denies them access on account of their age.this constitutes available market. and this market is as important to the marketer as it constitutes future potential market.

notionally, everyone who has money, is willing, and has access, is your potential customer. but it is not necessary that someone having all three will become your customer. eg bajaj pulsar motorbike. considering that it costs 50-60k , it would be fair to say that the potential market is young urban, educated men who have just started working, who are earning well enough to be able to afford Pulsar and who are consicous of making a style statement.

but not all men who fit this profile will actually buy Pulsar for the simple reason they may decide to buy a car instead on the grounds that it is unsafe to ride two-wheelers in traffic-congested cities. the target market for Pulsar therefore would be those who have money, are willing, have access and will buy.

it is therefore very important in the biz plan to segment the market in terms of three things:
potential market
available market
target market

Next is about the marketing environment. who are the players in the market, are you a prime mover, in which case your marketing communication has to not only talk about your product's value proposition but educate the market in terms of the concept itself. eg when sanitary napkins were launched in india. not only was there a need to elucidate product QSP (quality, service, price) but also address the issue of why a sanitary napkin was better than the conventional cloth.

an analsyis of the marketing environment will give you an idea about how big is the market likely to be, what can you expect realistically your share to be, and going forward, what the market trends will be. in technology products, for instance, the shelf life of the product tends to be limited and changes in technology makes the product obsolete and to remain in the market, constant innovation would be imperative for the marketer. eg mobile phones.

Market segment, size, share, marketing environment analysis, - all these have to be determined thoroughly well before launching the product. Large organizations have their own market research agencies or captive resources to conduct necessary market research. smaller companies, particularly start-ups will obviously not have such luxuries and can outsource market research.

the latest trend has also been involving market research agencies right at the product development stage so that customer feed back can be incorporated on the drawing board itself and product tweaked to suit customer requirements. the launch of divya bhaskar newspaper in ahmedabad is a good example of this. the dainik bhaskar group which owns this product decided on a census survey and the product, including its pricing, look, and feel, was the result of customer feedback. the idea bechind the census survey was to rule out any possibility of error as the newspaper market in ahmedabad was a well entrenched one with very strong dual players. interestingly, the marketing department had predicted that on the first day of the launch, they would be able to sell 250,000 copies and their homework was so thorough they actually sold 251000 copies!!!

in my next blog we will address Section B under Marketing.

components of biz plan

2008-04-10T13:14:00.000+05:30

Section I- Executive Summary
a brief introduction to the biz concept, and what is unique about it, the opportunity that gave rise to it, the skill-set of the entrepreneur and capital outlay. All of it should not exceed 800 words.

Section II - General description of the biz
this is elaboration of Section I. It gives the industry background in terms of size, competitors, maturity of industry, whether there is any government regulation, market characteristics, pricing, technology, what drives the demand, etc.

in this context, the biz that you are thinking of should be highlighted, what is your value proposition, is it in terms of product, price, or superior technology, or location economics (availability of the crucial raw material in plenty in a particular region that may drive down costs), what is your QSP (quality, service, price) commitment vis-a-vis the competitors, and how do you plan articulating the value proposition to the market place.

this is also where you will articulate your vision and your mission statements. who you want to be and how you plan to become who you want to be. and the milestones. milestone is a beautiful word in management. it gives you the opportunity to break into the short-term, the goals that you have set for your organization, long term. if your vision is to cross the million dollar mark in the first year, then it has to be appropriately broken into four quarters. each quarter, you can review your progress, if you are lagging behind, it gives you the opportunity to play catch up in the suceeding quarters. and every milestone that you reach gives you an opportunity not only to look back but to look ahead at the next milestone.

it is therefore imperative to set realistic milestones. not unachievable, yet not easily achievable either.

most important, this is the section where you articulate what is the value you are creating for the customer, how do you propose to deliver that value to the customer, and how you plan to communicate that value proposition to your customer,- all this in the backdrop of your understanding of what the customer wants.

it is important to understand what value the customer is looking for. Xerox when it enetered india offered excellent value to the customer in terms of copy quality, which was as good as the original, at Re 1 per copy. there were no takers because the market was not unhappy with the ordinary quality that it was getting from other copiers at 25 paise. the market simply was not ready for superior copy quality proposition. it took xerox three years to educate the market on the importance of good copy and how it enhanced company image and conversely how a bad copy adversely affected it. then there was no looking back.

we will continue with the other components in the next blog.

biz plan

2008-04-02T11:17:00.001+05:30

a biz plan is a written document that gives in detail everything about the new venture, product, industry, market, money, technology, people, growth, risks, returns. in other words, the entire story. as the entrepreneur sees it. in effect it is the entrepreneur's canvas and how he paints it as he visualises it. it is the most personal statement an entrepreneur can make.

the biz plan serves two purposes. one, in documenting his vision, the entrepreneur is actually ironing out inconsistencies, flagging problem areas, pre-empting road blocks, introspecting into his own competencies and skill sets, laying the cards on the table with respect to resources, re-visiting his own commitment levels, and communicating his conviction.

the second equally important purpose that a biz plan serves is, as a road map, once the biz kicks off.it is an excellent reference scorecard for the entrepreneur to keep going back to, to see whether the biz is on track as planned or has veered off track. the danger is not just in under-performance vis-a-vis the biz plan. it is equally dangerous to be caught in the throes of unplanned growth because it is only a matter of time before the biz starts floundering in the absence of processes and systems that have not kept pace with the growth. most entrepreneurs have a bad habit of convincing themselves that their company is too small right now and once the company grows, they will put systems in place. what they dont realise is that, that itself becomes a show-stopper for growth.

any which way you look at it, an entrepreneur cannot embark on his entrepreneurial journey without a biz plan.

i have known a number of entrepreneurs who say that they have a damn good concept and therefore they dont need the biz plan. my young friend ashish singh says 'i dont have a biz plan, i have just developed a site' !

i have known people who say: i am not borrowing money from anyone, i have invested my own earnings, so why do i need a biz plan.

i would say all the more reason, my friend, you need the biz plan as you dont want to lose your hard-earned earnings without one!

a friend of mine, vaidi almost got upset with me yesterday when i asked him if he has ever made a biz plan. he has been in biz for a decade now and is still plagued by all the problems that start-ups usually have to contend with. i was genuinely curious to know if he had put together a biz plan, because to my thinking, if he had, he should not have had so many problems in the first place!

the biz plan is known variously, depending on the context it is prepared for. if it is meant for funding purposes, it is called a project report, a loan proposal or an investment prospectus.

the biz plan document is a tool that makes the otherwise arduos entrepreneurial journey a little less hazardous, a little more predictable, a little less prone to luck and other inexplicable elements and a little more prone to activity-oriented result and result-oriented activity. it certainly does not eliminate all the vagaries of the market place. but it sure does give the entrepreneur a distinct upper hand in being better prepared for them.

the best prepared biz plans may mean nothing if the typical pitfalls are not avoided. the pitfalls are, unrealistic projection of sales and growth, unreasonable time frame in expectation of return,
sub-optimal resource utilization, lack of commitment on the part of the entrepreneur, no sense in mile-stoning, no market niche, no internalising of the basic concept and methodology of biz.

in my next blog, we will see what are the various components of the biz plan.

the opportunity plan leads to a biz plan

2008-03-20T13:49:00.000+05:30

once you have validated your opportunity plan and you are convinced that the opportunity can be translated into a viable biz, the next logical step for you is to write the biz plan.

the biz plan is a mission- critical document both for actualizing opportunity and for raising resources. it is also the road map for the entrepreneur to successfully manage the new enterprise, once it is off the ground.

"It is well established that you cant raise money without a business plan… a business plan is a work of art in its own right. Each plan, like every snowflake, must be different. Each is a separate piece of art. Each must be reflective of the individuality of the entrepreneur. Just as you wouldn’t copy someone else’s romancing techniques, so should you seek to distinguish your plan for its differences" – Joseph Mancuso

Joseph Mancuso draws attention to three things - one, that you definitely cant raise funds without a biz plan, because unless you are investing your own money, whichever agency you approach for funds, the first question that you will be asked is 'have you written the biz plan?'.

two, no two biz plans are similar, hence copying somebody else's biz plan defeats the purpose. even within the same industry, biz plans may be different depending on the skill set the entrepreneur brings to the table and the vision that he may have for his organization. hence all biz plans have to originally written documents by the entrepreneur.

three, there are agencies that speicalise in writing biz plans but this is an absolute no no because it is the entrepreneur's responsibility to paint his idea on the canvas as he visualises it and not direct someone else to do the painting for him. as he articulates his idea, not only does clarity emerge, but his passion will also come through and that is the most important entrepreneurial characteristic that needs to shine through the biz plan document.

opportunity plan

2008-03-12T12:51:00.000+05:30

we have seen that literally anything can throw up new opportunities. but not all opportunities can be converted into profitable biz ideas. therefore it is important to draw up an opportunity plan to see whether the opportunity under consideration is worth pursuing or not.

many times we get carried away by the imagined potential of an opportunity, either because there is some sentiment associated with it or we dont see the downside of it.

whilst evaluating an opportunity plan it is very important to be in possession of all facts pertaining to the biz idea, completely objective in analysing its risks and returns, and make a surgically precise decision without emotional overtones.

a typical opportunity plan should answer the following questions:

what gave rise to the opportunity?

because the answer determines the risk, reward, size of market and life cycle for the opportunity. eg when the Miss World contest was held in Bangalore, India, many years ago, overnight, there was a huge demand for over a 1000 chaueffeur-driven cars for three days. the reward was huge because no price was too high; the paegent organisers were willing to pay whatever was asked. the risk was very high too in that once the service was provided, the organisers would disappear; i know of one company that provided cars and drivers that insisted on payment in advance to mitigate the risk. the life cycle for the opportunity was extremely small and transient and the people willing to exploit this opportunity had to be really sharp on the uptake.

the next obvious question is: what market need does this opportunity fill?

are you the prime mover, in which case, perhaps some amount of educating the market is needed and therefore has to be incorporated into the marketing communication.

are you the second entrant? in which case you have to make sure that you do all the good things the prime mover did, not do any of the mistakes the prime mover did, and above all, offer an impeccable value proposition to make sure customers came to you and didnt stay back with the prime mover.

other questions that you will need to address are, will this opportunity give you a product leadership position or a category leadership position? eg, coke is a product leader, P&G's Pampers is a category leader because it created a market called pampers in the diaper market.

how to write a biz plan

2008-03-03T11:41:00.000+05:30

sorry, have not posted any blog for the whole of february, been traveling, am in the thick of the teaching term and a number of interesting clients in different verticals at different stages of incubation have needed my attention, so blogging took a back seat!

before we understand when, how and why one writes a biz plan, lets go back a bit and understand what is the starting point for all entrepreneurs. we have touched upon this already in one of my blogs, the starting point necessarily is ideation.

but strictly speaking ideation is not the starting point. what is the opportunity that gave rise to this ideation, is really the starting point of what may be termed the 'entrepreneurial process'.

opportunities are all out there, all around us, some of us spot them, most of us dont. those of us who do go on to ideate from these opportunities, build a biz around the idea and become entrepreneurs. many of us may be staring at the opportunity, but we dont ideate either because we have developed a 'rhino skin' when it comes to feeling 'opportunity vibes'; or we are too cocooned in our comfort zones to even imagine an entrepreneurial opportunity.

for those of us who can look at opportunity in the eye, there are four distinct steps that need to be followed before the venture is created :

identification of opportunity
evaluation of opportunity
writing of the biz plan
creating the biz enterprise

the first step, which is identification of opportunity, is perhaps the most difficult one. it means that your antenna should be ready to receive the signals, 24/7. because anything may throw up an opportunity.

it could be new technology. eg last year during the cricket world cup, cricinfo developed software whereby they could show cricket in animation as it happened on the field, real time.

it could be on account of market shift. airtel has become the largest retailer of music because more than 60 % of music are mobile downloads. digital music has halved the market for physical music.

it could be a change in government policy. the telecom policy in india for instance made it possible for mobile telephony as well as landline telephony being opened up to the private sector.

it could be competition. a matchstick manufacturing company in brazil wanted to export its products to japan and when they couldn't do it cost competitively in the matchstick market, they entered the japanese market with chopcticks and gave run for the money to local competitors.

it could be change in the consumer need. urbanization and concretisation of living spaces has reduced the greenery one can afford to have around one's homes, but artificial plants have managed to satisy the need for colour and zero maintenance. so a new need for artificial plants has come about and a new opportunity has been created..

in other words, anything can throw up an opportunity; the cause also determines the size of the market.

people are drivers of intrapreneurship

2008-01-29T12:22:00.000+05:30

thanks hari, you are absolutely right, it is a good first step for an organization to look at inducting new people who can look at the organization from the outside, which means more objectively, diagnose the problem and recommend solutions. you basically need fearless thinkers, fearless in the sense of those who are not afraid of trying out new things from fear that they could go wrong and get blamed. typically the new broom sweeps clean simply because it does not know yet, otherwise; as it ages, it starts coming up with more and more excuses as to why it cant sweep clean with nary an attempt at ensuring it.

not all organizations have the luxury of letting go of old people and bringing in new ones ; most organizations have to try and work around their existing resources, which means dealing with calcified mind-sets too.

Years ago I used to be the Marketing Manager for India's leading financial daily which had a small circulation base, but because the costs were low, they made profit just on subscription and did not need a rupee's worth of advertising. i remember the uphill struggle i had when i first recommended that we look at advertising from hospitality, travel, and executive lifestyle products, all the naysayers ganged up on me and said : these people wont advertise with you because all their ads are in colour and you dont have colour.

in all innocence i said, so let's have colour. and everyone reacted as if i had uttered something sacriligeous. colour? no way. colour means frivolous. our paper is for the serious-minded business men, how dare you introduce colour and make it into a girly newspaper!!

also a market research agency had conducted extensive survey and had come to the conlcusion that introducing colour in a financial daily was tantamount to committing harakiri. so colour was an absolute no no!!

fortunately i had a boss who wasn't exactly adventurous but probably wanted to be indulgent (she will see the error of her ways soon enough!!), so he said go ahead and launch colour, i will give you three months' time to make a success of it. if you dont, i would like you to put in your papers. i was young and brash and i took up the challenge.

in one month we earned our entire annual budgeted revenue. and the whole organization then woke up to the potential goldmine that they were sitting on. needless to say, colour was launched, it stayed, it succeeded to such an extent that today it is unthinkable that there was no colour just a few years ago in this financial daily.

and i left two years later to think more unthinkable things in other organizations!

I for intrapreneurship, I for implementation

2008-01-28T15:23:00.000+05:30

There is an excellent ad of IBM on television these days. The guy goes on and on about how I is for ideation, I is for innovation and I is for invigoration. and she says I is for implementation and he looks crestfallen and says I knew i forgot something very important....

No amount of ideation, innovation can invigorate an organization unless the ideas jump off the drawing board on to the market place. Implementation is the key driver. Every organization is necessarily led by sales and any intrapreneurial initiative in any aspect of the organization eventually translates to more sales. that's the way the biz works. and unless intrapreneurship is backed by implementation, which means that not only should organizations commit time and resources to implementing, but the whole team should buy in into its implementation, ideas and innovations will remain empty shells, like forgotten curtains, flapping in an abandoned house.

need for intrapreneurship

2008-01-17T12:28:00.000+05:30

thanks hari for the comment, here's my reply.

whilst the entire organization may feel that there is a need for intrapreneurship, it is only top management that can decide whether to go in for it or not, because as i said in one of earlier blogs, the top management has also to commit resources to introducing intrapreneurial measures as well as seeing those measures through to their logical conclusion.

before espousing intrapreneurship, one crucial decision that management has to take is, from the organization's perspective, what is/are the reason/s for doing so. is it that traditional methods of biz have lost their effectiveness, is it competition which is growing both in number and in sophistication, is it rigors of global competition in one's own backyard, is it new technology which is making the old production process redundant, is it that the world over, giant companies are right-sizing so as to improve productivity and therefore profits and for you to be left behind would be suicidal ?

what is your organization's reason is the first question that needs to be addressed.

the answer is easy if there are some visible manifestations of a down-trend. eg if profits have dipped, if more customers have 'voted with their feet" (an english phrase meaning customers have moved to competition), if the topline has stopped growing and has even taken a dip, if costs have gone up, and every input of capital is yielding less and less return.

many organizations are willing to embrace intrapreneurship as a course-correction tool when they are able to see such visible downturns.

the point about intrapreneurship is that organizations dont have to (and should not) wait for the southward trend to be visible before embarking on intrapreneurhsip. Anne Mulcahy, CEO Xerox said it is very hard to embrace any new intiative when nothing visibly has gone wrong, if it aint' broke why fix it, but that is absolutely the right time to do it, because things havent careened out of control and change management will then cost less both in terms of missed opportunities as well as resources.

hari, to sum up, your vendors have to do an introspection to first identify what ails them and why and if these two questions are answered it should not be very difficult to answer how to redress them.

so who are intrapreneurs?

2008-01-10T12:36:00.000+05:30

intrapreneurs need not necessarily be ideators or inventors but they are the ones who definitely turn ideas into profit. without ideas, there is neither entrepreneurship, nor intrapreneurship. ideas are the core in both activities.

intrapreneurs are necessarily a committed lot. they commit time, money , conviction and passion. it is not just enough that they have conviction or passion, it is equally important that they have the capability to infuse the same throughtout the fabric of the organization. in this sense, intrapreneurs are also 'team aggregators', they bring disparate people together and bind them with 'we feeling' with the organization, so much so that every employee begins to feel ownership, take responsibility, herald change management, and behave in a manner as if it is his 'own' company.

intrapreneurs also wear a number of different hats, from being functional specialists, they morph into 'project mangers', dabbling in macro management. by definition therefore they move away from a single functional responsibility, say marketing or finance, to a larger P & L role. intrapreneurs thus become strategy specialists and successful strategy implementation demands that they become macro managers.

is intrapreneurship same as TQM, continous improvement, etc

2008-01-03T13:27:00.000+05:30

thanks hari for 'commenting' on this, TQM or any other quality initiative is not equal to intrapreneurship, but one of the ways of bringing in intrapreneurship into the organization. let me explain. let's say an organization located in Brazil is manufacturing match sticks and wants to export to Japan because it is keen on having japan in its market roster. let's say this initiative is a non-starter as it cannot compete with local matchstick makers in japan in terms of cost. so the Brazilian company decides to manufacture, what else, but chopsticks! and it puts in place best in class practices, as a result of which it is able to compete very effectively with local chop-stick makers who up until now had the japanese market on a platter and hence had stopped innovating.

you get my drift? the Brazilian company heralded intrapreneurial initiative into its organization by using quality tools to check-mate competition in a new market. as a result of this intrapreneurial effort, the company now has a new market, a new product and a new, cost-competitive organization.

it is not necessary that intrapreneurial initiatives should be always macro, in the sense, in every aspect of the organization. it could be in product/service, it could be a new way of looking at an existing market, or developing an altogether new market, it could be in an employee loyalty programme, it could even be a simple administrative process. a company doing away with the idea of a telephone operator answering the phone and introducing IVR to facilitate communication with customers, employees and biz partners is as much an intrapreneur as let's say a company that re-orients its customer or employee focus, or introduces an altogether new and disruptive technology.

what is intrapreneurship

2008-01-02T10:27:00.000+05:30

it is pretty much the same as entrepreneurship, except that it occurs within an existing biz structure. entrepreneurship refers to a start-up, a new venture, whereas intrapreneurship refers to restructuring existing biz as a survival strategy. the organization takes the initiative and commits resources to create and empower a team which will think and behave like entrepreneurs (meaning as if it is their own company as opposed to them working 'for' a company).

The upside of this is that it is already an up and running existing biz with its own biz momentum, its own market, its own product mix and of course its own infrastructure, so intrapreneurial effort is focused on creating an empowered 'intraprise'. as with enterprise, ideas are the starting point of all intraprises too.

the downside of this is that because it is an existing biz, battling the entrenched dogmas ('this is the way we have always run the biz; it worked well for us in the past, so why should we change it now?") tends to be highly energy-consuming. and sometimes, thwarting. and most times, frustrating.

it is not true that companies look at intrapreneurship when they start doing badly. good organizations are those that are good change managers. and good change managers are not just those who 'react' to change; they also pre-empt and prepare for change. so intrapreneurship becomes an integral part of an organization's DNA, pretty much like its vision and mission statements.

are you afraid of failure?

2007-12-27T16:16:00.000+05:30

most of us dont venture out to become entrepreneurs because we are afraid of failure. being afraid has two implications :- one is the social stigma and the other is that once we fail as an entrepreneur, we become 'unemployable'

social stigma is a fact, one particularly hates the sympathetic looks, the seemingly empathising noises, not just with the entrepreneur but with his family members as well. this is always hard to take. especially after being in a good position in a good well-known organization. like everything else, one has to learn to live with it, develop what we call a 'rhino hide'.

the 'unemployabilty' factor is rubbish. it is a figment of imagination. years ago i was hiring a profit centre head for one of our biz units in the middle east and i had pretty much zeroed in on a gentlemen who had quit an MNC to become an entrepreneur and after struggling to get his company off the ground for nearly three years, had wound it up and was looking for a job.

my boss was aghast that i had short-listed a failed entrepreneur for such a key position and i said to him that my reasoning for short-listing him was that as an entrepreneur you learn in six months what as an employee you would take decades to learn. and that condensation in the gestation period of learning was going to be invaluable for us and therefore we should hire him. my faith in him, needless to say was vindicated.

believe you me, more and more people are beginning to see value in this truism that a failed entrepreneur makes for a highly successful employee!!

so stop worrying about failure, go out there, pick your idea and get the biz rolling.

who becomes an entrepreneur

2007-12-24T18:07:00.000+05:30

contrary to public perception, it is not only the passionate who become entrepreneurs. corporate history is replete with examples of people who had nary a thought about becoming entrepreneurs, yet went on to become highly successful ones.

the ones who are most likely to become entrepreneurs are those who come from biz families and grow up with the conditioning that they have to become one. it is highly unlikely that aditya birla's son kumaramangalam birla would have been anything but an entrepreneur even if his father had not encountered untimely death.

the ones who stumble upon an incredible idea go on to become entrepreneurs, even if reluctant ones. larry page and sergei brin were techies and even if they did not envision buliding a great company around google, the idea carried its own path-breaking momentum, so much so they went on to become hugely successful entrepreneurs.

sometimes opportunity has a way of throwing itself at you and making you an entrepreneur even if there is hardly anything in your DNA or your background to suspect an entrepreneurial streak in you. anita roddick built body shop into the huge cosmetics chain that it eventually became because she took the opportunity that came her way seriously.

and of course, sometimes one becomes an entrepreneur when no job comes by. you are pink-slipped, you are not getting any younger and jobs are hard to come by and out of desperation you become an entrepreneur. initially you may tell yourself that you will do something on your own till such time you find the right job; but if none comes by, there always comes a point when you have to face it and pay more attention to the biz you have started so that you get a living out of it.

whatever your reason for becoming an entrepreneur may be, it cannot be a half-baked attempt. you have to give yourself 100 % to it, if you lack commitment, that will show and cascade through the entire fabric of the organization. and no organization, however rock solid the idea is that it is built on, can survive that kind of monumental neglect.

what factors influence in becoming an entrepreneur

2007-12-21T10:29:00.000+05:30

in a way, this is the age-old question whether entrepreneurs are born or can be made.

and my answer is (which is vindicated by a cross-section of entrepreneurs of both hues) that some are born, many others are made.

what makes entrepreneurs? some of the factors that influence are culture, family background, government policy, infrastructure, teachers and mentors, peer groups and resources.

some cultures are pro-biz and some are not; those that are, are typically communities which have traditionally engaged in businesses and frown upon their members working for someone as an employee. typically these are family-owned and family-run biz and they tend to hire people from within their family network.

cultures which are not pro-biz typically tend to be less risk-tolerant and therefore encourage members to obtain secure jobs in sectors that are perceived by them as safe and non-risk. the spirit of entrepreneurship in such communities is stifled right from early childhood.

if you are born in a family of businessmen, chances are they will foster your spirit of entrepeneurship as opposed to those families where men have always been 'in jobs'.

sunil mittal as an entrepreneur as we know him today would not have been possible but for the fact that there was a change in government policy with respect to the telecom industry. privatising telecom not only created a superbrand such as airtel but an entrepreneur such as sunil mittal.

if you look at the mutual funds industry today, most of the equities that are performing well are linked to infrastructure. india shining has thrown up not just phenomenal need for infrastructural development but also opportunities for many to become entrepreneurs.

in my experience, the biggest influencers are mentors/peers. typically in a management school, a group comes under the missionary zeal of a teacher who exhorts them to become entrepreneurs and even after knowing that the opportunity cost is very high, some of them do veer towards entrepreneurship, even social entrepreneurship. i know a number of students who have given up cushy jobs to work in social technology space, micro-credit, etc

in the good old days of license raj in india, there was absolutely no incentive to become an entrepreneur because the ambient environment was most unconducive for the spirit of entrepreneurship. the political, economic and social framework actively discouraged freedom of enterprise. non-availablity of capital was the biggest show-stopper, for instance.

not any more, as you see around the world, trade barriers are collapsing, and economies have realised that the surest and fastest way to grow is by encouraging entreprenurship.

when should one become an entrepreneur?

2007-12-20T11:59:00.000+05:30

ashok, this one is for you! there is no such thing as a right age or right time to become an entrepreneur. i have heard from students that the best time is when you finish college. the logic here is that you are young, you do not have familial responsibilities, and you can direct all your energies to setting up and growing the biz.

it is good logic and i know many entrepreneurs who have been successful when they ventured on their own, under thirty.

the downside of this argument is that you have zero corporate experience and all your learning will come out of the mistakes you are bound to make in your company. some of these mistakes may prove to be too costly, or may slow down the traction of your business or may even dishearten you to such an extent that you may want to exit it.

the other argument is: work in good organizations for 5-8 years, gain invaluable experience, understand the way organizations work, markets behave, monies move, teams evolve, build your network, save some money and then become an entrepreneur.

good logic again, but the only downside is that you have become too calsified in your comfort zone, in your trappings of executive earnings and perks, in your life-style and in this whole persona that you have created of yourself as a successful, high-flying executive in an MNC. Giving up on all that, and starting from scratch, more often than not, becomes the show-stopper.

so my recommendation is dont worry about right age or right time, the moment an idea grabs your imagination enough for you to think that you can build a biz around it, quit and start. you could be 25, you could be fifty. what matters is the strength of your idea and the intensity of your passion to make it work.

let's start with basics

2007-12-19T12:41:00.000+05:30

the word 'entrepreneur' has a french origin and means 'go between'. in the early days, ie 16th century, the entrepreneur was seen as someone who would mediate between an inventor or ideator on the one hand and putting all the resources together on the other to commercialise a product.

since marco polo's time, the abilty to take risks has always been an integral part of entrepreneurship. many of us do not become entrepreneurs because we are risk-averse and seek compromise in our comfort zones.

it is not just the economic aspect of risk that is daunting; not just that there may be no pay check regularly at the end of the month as it happens when you are an employee. it is also the psychological aspect. even if you are a management trainee in a large MNC, you hand out your visiting card very proudly because the brand equity of the MNC is extended to you as well. when you become an entrepreneur, your new organization has no such brand equity and somehow that makes you feel less of a person.

one may overcome the fear of no pay check but very few are able to overcome the loss of brand equity. it calls for a lot of commitment and faith to be able to deal with this.

Startups' services

2007-12-18T17:48:00.000+05:30

who is an entrepreneur

2007-12-18T13:25:00.000+05:30

without any jargons, an entrepreneur is one who starts his own biz. so what does one need to start one's own biz?

firstly one needs an idea. what is the biz about? is it a product/service, both, new concept, franchise, manufacturing, assembling, what?

next, one needs to identify who the customer is, who will buy your product. then one needs to find out whether you are the first entrant in the market or there are other players.

then one needs to estimate what are the resources required. the resources are technology, people, money and raw material.

once the resources required are identified, one has to identify how to garner these resources.

then a biz plan has to be put together, incorporating all these aspects . very simplistically, the person who does all this in order to start a biz is an entrepreneur.

lets start a fraternity of entrepreneurs

2007-12-17T12:20:00.000+05:30

i do believe what india needs today is more and more of us leaving our comfort zones behind and venturing into territories where we will not only discover good things about ourselves that we never knew we possessed; equally bad things about us which we wont even admit to ourselves in front of the mirror. becoming an entrepreneur is embarking on a journey of knowing who you really are. cheers

hello!!

2007-12-17T12:01:00.000+05:30

i teach entrepreneurship at premier biz schools both in india and US. and yes before you raise an eyebrow, entrepreneurship can be taught!!

i also handhold companies, particularly start-ups which require management inputs and mentoring. management inputs could be in terms of biz strategy, market strategy, or even simply how to incorporate a company.

so you guys out there who are already entrpreneurs and could use some mentoring and who want to become entrepreneurs but need to talk it through with someone, you know where to come knocking!

cheers