dont know how dont know why !!

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

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

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

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!

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

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

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.