Why should big dogs bite ?

This is an open letter to all the big guys from the industry. My pranams to all of you.

Whenever we talk of creating a conducive habitat for entrepreneurs, typically the stake holders that we include are investor, government, and civil society. Rarely do we include the large and established players in the business, like yourselves. How come you are exempt from this key responsibility? Shouldn’t you be my role model? Aren’t you ideally in a position to be the best mentors for newbie entrepreneurs like me? I’m making out a case on two counts.

Firstly, let’s say I am a new entrepreneur and have an enterprise facing product. My customers are the big guns like you in the industry, both Indian and multi-national. I know I have a brilliant product and I am sure it will enhance the intrinsic value of your products. My product demo has been successful, and I’m sure we are getting the contract. My euphoria lasts only till I see the terms of the contract. Unreasonable SLA’s, impossible non-compete clauses, outrageous pricing and a completely one-sided, no-holds-barred contract. 

As a thinking human being, I should actually shred it into pieces and throw it in the dust bin. But as an entrepreneur, I do the most irrational thing, I go ahead and sign this preposterous agreement.

Why did I do it? I did it knowing that if I didn’t, I would lose you, my customer. And you have so much brand equity in the market that I simply can’t not have you.

As we start servicing the agreement, I realize that the biggest killer in the contract is not just the price but the payment terms. It says clearly that it is 180 days after delivery. So to make sure I keep my end of the bargain, I borrow on my credit card, cajole other vendors to give me credit, and generally drain myself and my fledgling company dry so that I can deliver the product on time. On day 180, when I’m waiting anxiously for my cheque, comes my first moment of disenchantment. The signatory has gone missing in Africa, the invoice has got misplaced, the person who was to have processed the invoice has left the company, there are audit objections as approvals were not taken before placing the order, and the nastiest of them all, that you are not happy with my product. But up until yesterday, you told me that you were delighted with my product, says poor hapless me!

To make matters worse, I am also told, very patronisingly I must say, that if i want to succeed as an entrepreneur, i have to be prepared for such delays!

Why should I? Why can’t you big guys be supportive of entrepreneurs like me and not make it your mandate to push me to a corner? Why can’t you have separate policies that are friendly to people like me? Why can’t this be your new diversity policy, maybe even your new CSR? Mind you I’m not asking for any favours. I’m only asking you to be reasonable because we are part of the same habitat where we are all interconnected and if you annihilate me today, you are going to die tomorrow.

My second case is that as a big guy in the industry, why don’t you be my mentor? Instead of either dismissing me as competition or ignoring my existence, why don’t you take me under your wing and nurture me? Not only will my chance of success improve dramatically but you are my best hedge against risks! I don’t want you to give me money, I want you to share your experience and learning with me so that I do all the right things to build a great enterprise. Won’t you be happy if I succeed? And won’t it be in your interest that I succeed? Can’t we all happily co-exist?

To misquote John Donne, no entrepreneur is an island, entire of itself. Every man is part of the main, a piece of the continent. Ask not for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

Yours humbly,

A rookie entrepreneur 

The Second Life!

I’m often asked why there aren’t as many women entrepreneurs as there should be. Over the years my answer has varied. Sometimes I say, it is because we play it safe. At other times I have said, it is because we don’t have enough faith in ourselves. But having mentored a number of women (as a percentage it is still miniscule), I have arrived at both a new explanation and a new solution. Before marriage, parents frown upon the idea of their daughter becoming an entrepreneur

(I mean a serious one), because god knows where her prospective husband is likely to be located and if she invests time, effort and money into building her business, who will run it when she goes away? So parents tell her that she should hold her horses till she gets married.

Then marriage happens. It takes her a while to settle into the groove and if in the meantime she discusses her entrepreneurial ambition with her husband, he, his parents and her parents will all tell her, have a baby first, then do it.

The baby comes. Five years go by, the baby is now in school, her ambition resurfaces. Let’s finish off with the second baby, says the husband. And   then you can do whatever you want, uninterrupted. She falls for it yet again. The second baby comes, five more years go by.

This is a time ideally for women to become serious business owners, but I think many of us don’t because of one nagging fear. We have pretty much lost a decade, the business environment around us has changed dramatically and we are not familiar with it. How can we bring ourselves up to speed and compete with youngsters?

If only there was a refresher business course that would help women like us on our feet, there would be more women entrepreneurs.

I have identified three market segments here. All women in their late thirties, early forties,who want to bounce back and would like a course that will help them reconnect to the business environment that has since changed dramatically.

One is the woman who says, I have lost a decade but I want to go back to the corporate and play catch-up..

The second category is the woman who says, I don’t want to go back to the corporate, I want to be an entrepreneur. Not a baker or a candle-stick maker but I want to build a Facebook.

The third category is the woman who says, I neither want to go back to the corporate nor become an entrepreneur. My husband is MD of an MNC, so when I go out with him to office parties, I want to be able to participate in the conversation and not be a wallflower.

Bingo, three categories of focused women, educated, enterprising and well heeled. Big opportunity beckoning for an online-offline course. Anyone listening?

How to propose to your prospective customers!

Seriously guys it is no different from the way you do it with your prospective bride,- on bent knees, candlelight,  ‘Wonderful Tonight’ by Eric Clapton playing in the background, a beaming moon playing peekaboo from behind the clouds, waves crashing, the diamond ring sparkling as you slide it on her finger! The whole nine yards!

I keep saying this, as an entrepreneur, it is not enough if you are hungry. You need to make your market hungry too. Your existing customers should be on tenterhooks, waiting for your new offering, because they know you delight them with your innovation. Your prospects should be restless, waiting for your product, because buying your product is aspirational for them. If as an entrepreneur you don’t do this, you will only build a ‘me too’ company like many others have. No way an Apple.

Let me share what happened to us recently, when we wanted to buy a learning solution platform.  We reached out to those entrepreneurs who were big names in this domain as well as those who were recommended to us by friends. We reached out by mailing them, giving a brief description of what we wanted and asked them to meet us at the earliest.

In an ideal world, what should we expect? That there will be a queue outside our door of service providers, clambering over each other to make sure they bag us. Right? Wrong!

In a world which is sadly complacent, this is what happened :

One service provider decided that meeting customer face to face was passé, very old world. So he sent his demo CD by courier, and our proposal, without even meeting us to understand our requirement in its entirety, to our drop box. My personal intervention saying we were in a hurry and could someone please meet us so that we can take it forward, went ignored.

Finally I threatened that I was dropping this service provider (how can we drop someone who had refused to be picked up in the first place!), and my colleague somehow convinced them to come to our office for a meeting. A full blown discussion happened, we explained exactly what we wanted and what we did not want in explicit terms and we asked for a proposal by the end of the day. When the proposal came (about 48 minutes late, but given our past experience, we did not mind it at all), it had all the elements that we had clearly stated that we did not want, the payment terms were everything that we had said that we will not entertain, and even the time frame did not respect our deadline.

What were we supposed to do? Write a sharp mail saying you guys are deaf or what? Or trash it and move on?

The second service provider came back with a proposal laid out in a fancy format (it was so obvious that this was templatized to meet overseas prospects’ requirements). Just when we thought these guys have got it right, came the bombshell. According to their proposal, the technology was going to cost us much more than our content!! And, here’s the interesting twist in the tale- it was supposed to be open source!

Again, what am I supposed to do? The answer was obvious, do away with platforms, go cloud yourself! 

Which is exactly what we did.

If I was to react just as a prospect, I will simply say, these guys don’t care enough to acquire their customer. But if I put on my mentor hat, I feel miserable. I know that both these guys are start-ups, and there is no way they can afford to be complacent. Yet the hunger to close the deal was missing in both. In fact with one of them, I even offered a percentage of revenue share higher than what they had asked for till they gained confidence in our product, in lieu of a monstrous upfront payment. Yet, they didn’t push themselves to getting the order signed.

When I was discussing this sad state of affairs with a friend of mine, he added an interesting perspective. He said with Indian IT companies, their hunger is only for overseas customers. They will drop prices sometimes below their costs, enter into an SLA with ridiculous and one-sided terms with their clients, much to their own detriment, suffer angst and anxiety abundantly, but will not respect and treat well a domestic customer who’s knocking on their door with cash in hand. Imperial hangover of the corporate kind, eh?

When are entrepreneurs in India going to realise that one, the Indian customer is ready and willing to be seduced and two, that he needs to be wooed too?

*Reprinted from Entrepreneur India. 

Chatterpillar

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The second life!

I’m often asked why there aren’t as many women entrepreneurs as there should be. Over the years my answer has varied. Sometimes I say, it is because we play it safe. At other times I have said, it is because we don’t have enough faith in ourselves. But having mentored a number of women (as a percentage it is still miniscule), I have arrived at both a new explanation and a new solution.

Before marriage, parents frown upon the idea of their daughter becoming an entrepreneur (I mean a serious one), because god knows where her prospective husband is likely to be located and if she invests time, effort and money into building her business, who will run it when she goes away? So parents tell her that she should hold her horses till she gets married.

Then marriage happens. It takes her a while to settle into the groove and if in the meantime she discusses her entrepreneurial ambition with her husband, he,  his parents and her parents will all tell her, have a baby first, then do it.

The baby comes. Five years go by, the baby is now in school, her ambition resurfaces. Let’s finish off with the second baby, says the husband. And then you can do whatever you want, uninterrupted. She falls for it yet again. The second baby comes, five more years go by.

This is a time ideally for women to become serious business owners, but I think many of us don’t because of one nagging fear. We have pretty much lost a decade, the business environment around us has changed dramatically and we are not familiar with it. How can we bring ourselves up to speed and compete with youngsters?  

If only there was a refresher business course that would help women like us on our feet, there would be more women entrepreneurs.

I have identified three market segments here. All women in their late thirties, early forties, who want to bounce back and would like a course that will help them reconnect to the business environment that has since changed dramatically.

One is the woman who says, I have lost a decade but I want to go back to the corporate and play catch-up..

The second category is the woman who says, I don’t want to go back to the corporate, I want to be an entrepreneur. Not a baker or a candle-stick maker but I want to build a Facebook.

The third category is the woman who says, I neither want to go back to the corporate nor become an entrepreneur. My husband is MD of an MNC, so when I go out with him to office parties, I want to be able to participate in the conversation and not be a wallflower.

Bingo, three categories of focused women, educated, enterprising and well heeled. Big opportunity beckoning for an online-offline course. Anyone listening?  

Lessons in entrepreneurship

Lessons in entrepreneurship | Entrepreneurindia.in

A once-in-several-lifetimes experience!

The Majestic Mt.Kailash

Just back from a trip to Kailash-Manas Sarovar.  I can do this article in many different ways. It can be a diary recording all that happened in the last fifteen days on a day-to-day basis. It can be photo-essay on the breath-taking landscape,- the brooding mountains, the snow that played peek-a-boo, the temperamental skies, the horizon that refused to stay put behind the artist’s canvas. But neither will capture and convey what this journey meant to me or how it transformed my life. So I will seek the coward’s way out and jut bullet my top-of-the-mind thoughts, randomly, faithfully and ruthlessly.

·         I had just immersed my father’s ashes in Paschim Vahini and come back home when I saw Joydeep’s post on FB about the trip. Something stirred in my brain. I signed up.  Strange because a trip of this kind was nowhere on my radar ever.

Joydeep and Me

·         Once I signed it seemed just the right thing to do. My faith in Joydeep when it comes to travel is such that I did not even do homework on what a trip like this entailed before saying yes. 

·         As I read the literature the organizers (Banjara) had sent us, one thing became very clear. This trip would challenge me in more ways than one. Not just physically as it was a hardy terrain but in terms of basics. I’m a creature of comfort and my idea of a holiday is one long perennial self- indulgence. This trip meant that I had to sleep in a dorm, pee and crap out in the open and do without water for cleaning up. Shudder! Shudder!!!

·         Even as I read some of the blogs, spoke to people who had gone on this trip before, the sheer magic of the place took over. I told myself that the prima donna me cannot go on this trip. I have to be left behind.

·         The me who would go on this trip was a ‘sponge’ who would simply soak up every single moment of the trip as ‘magical experience’. So the trip did not start when we left for Kathmandu. For me it started two months prior, on the day I signed up.

·         From that moment on, I looked at the world with wonder. Shopping for gear? My god, Decathlon! Just walking through the aisles of the massive store in Bangalore, looking at the sports-wise display of products, smelling the danger, sensing the adventure, blowing a big gaping hole in my pocket, proudly checking out if the hiking shoes were water repellent (they actually made me step into water!) and if they had a good grip (they made me try different surfaces!), I was like a child on its first Disney trip!

Swati, Me and Kavita

·         So sponge I remained. Six to a room? How wonderful to have company. Please if I snore, wake me up! Stinky loo? Let’s get a nose job after the trip! Crap in the open? Sure, first find space between two cars, wait till the pressure builds up, run, squat, poop in one pile and gleefully dab hand sanitiser! No shower? No problem, take half a mug of lukewarm water, dip a hand towel and wipe yourself down! Only time I freaked was in Paryang when Kavita said there were bed bugs! I was determined to enjoy every single experience, so much so Swati said at the end of the trip that she found it very hard to believe that not only did I never once complain, I didn’t frown even!

The Sexy Bandana that Kavita gave

Suited-Booted the Manas Sarovar way!

•       What were life savers during the trip? Wet wipes(they occupy a shrine-like place in my designer bathroom at home now, toilet rolls are out on their ears !), trekking poles, hand sanitizers, head lamps,   quick dry towels, blister socks, hiking boots, those sexy bandannas which Kavita gifted everyone (which not only covered your ears, they also formed a halo around your head),  water bottles, frost,  chap sticks (buy flavoured ones, they do the job and keep you smelling good too), deo,  thermals,  a 70+ sun screen, and a button-down rain jacket. You can even go to the Everest base camp armed with these!

·         On the way back we all had our ‘what do I want most right now’ list. Someone wanted hot shower; another, a kickass drink; a third wanted clean sheets to sleep on. I said I want water to clean my bum.

·         I now must be an evolved species as one of the nights I had woken up with a blistering nightmare that I had run out of wet wipes!.

·         Post script : As I took a dip in Manas Sarovar, and gazed at Mount Kailash draped in snow,  looking majestic and  mysterious, I did not feel insignificant or vulnerable or humbled. I felt strong and proud and special that the mountains saw it fit to take me on a conducted tour of their world. 

Photo Courtesy:  Joydeep Chakrabarty, for more pictures check out my Facebook page.