Team Work

It is very important that you have a great team in place when you start your own business. Of all the things, team is the top most important thing for the success of your start up. Whatever your idea is, the execution is important and it will be the skills of the team that will talk about your success.

All the great startups coming up in India have more than one founders. Right from Infosys to today's flipkart, it is a team which has started and stayed together. The team also has its responsibilities divided very finely between the people. And more than on any idea, the investors often put money on the founders. And even if you are alone at the top, you should have core team on which responsibilities & trust can be put. You cannot run a one man show and still be big.

Talk About Customer Interests

When you go to customer for your marketing/sales activity, he should be at ease with you or rather the atmosphere should be of ease. Rather than pushing your products, understand his concern. Talk about things that interest him and he will be in you and later in your products. I distinctly remember the incident described in book of Napoleon Hill where he tells us about one saleswoman who had come to sell some magazine.

Of particular interest was thing that she was not getting appointment. But somehow she managed to get an entry for 5 minutes and in that five minutes she was able to sell the subscription of magazine which he had no intention to buy. How did this happen? When she met Me. Napoleon Hill, she did not talk about the subscription or her magazine to start with. She just admired him for his work and later noticed other magazine and began to talk about it. This was of interest to him and he became interested in conversation. By the time it ended, conversation veered towards her magazine and then to the subscription.

Whenever you speak to your customer, speak about the benefits he will have. Of course you will talk about the properties of your products, but in the end you have to highlight the benefits.

Risk Vs Reward

Risk & Rewards are related to each other. Higher the Risk higher is the reward. Safer the bet, you stay where you are. This can be seen in almost all the fields. If you continuously look for safety, you might be living in your comfort zone. You will not be able to leave your comfort zone. If you are not leaving your comfort zone, how do you reach the heights? I remember reading about Ramesh Chauhan, the man who created the Brand Bisleri. When he first came with the idea of selling Bottled Water, distractors were laughing at him. They said that Mr. Chauhan is trying to sell Water in a country where it is available aplenty. How is someone going to sell water when it is availabhle everywhere? But he was not the one who would sit in the comfort zone. He was the one who created the brands like Thumbs Up & Gold Spot. In fact, when Coca Cola bought these brands from him, they tried to kill. But in the end they had to revive Thumbs Up. If Mr. Chauhan had been sitting there in his comfort zone without taking the risk to sell Water, India would not have known Bisleri the way it knows it today. Today Bisleri is a generic name for Bottled Water.  

If you too have to achieve success in whatever field you are, you should go out and take risk. It is said that the biggest risk is not taking any risk. The world is changing very fast and you have to be on your toes. Do you remember the Pager machine? There was one instrument just like mobile phone, which you could take with you and you can give messages on it. It did not change fast enough and it has become history. You should take risk - the only thing I would add is that you should have a complete vision about what you want to do and what is the risk. If you can know the depth that you can fall to, 50 % of the time, you will take the decision to take the risk.

Do Special Or Do It In Special Way

Whenever you start something on your own, you take your entrepreneurial journey, remember one thing. You have to Either Do Something Special - like Special/Different product or Service Or You can do some old thing in a Completely New/Special/Different Way. You can either focus on the product/service or the process or the customer satisfaction. Like the famous saying, Winners do not do different things, they do things in a different way. 

You can take the McDonald's Burger for example. If you consider the Recipe of Vada Pav of Maharashtra, it is similar to Burger. A Potato Patty sandwiched between two Breads. It is very handy. But you go to any McDonald's all over the world and get the same taste in a same way. They have so standardized the processes that you can bet with anybody that you will get the same quality of that Burger and it is famous for its similarity. So, you see that the Burger itself may not so great, but the experience, the taste that McDonald's offers is Special. And so we love it.

It is similar with Vada Pav. People have built buildings on a simple product like Vada Pav. How? They simply do something different with the simple Vada Pav. Some will vary the size, some will put different ingredients in the patty, some will give accompanying chutney. I have seen some stalls, where people like the chutney more than the Vada Pav itself. So, you see here that they are giving different experience with the same product.

Adjust Your Sails When You Cannot Change The Direction Of The Wind

There is one story. A story about a King who has some serious health issue which does not get healed despite different cures from various experts. One day there comes one Swami who tells the King that the problem is related to your eyes and that you should see Only Green so that your eyes feel soothed. The Minister orders everybody around that all things in the Palace should be Green. The Palace is painted Green, all the clothes are changed to green, all the food that was given to him was colored green. There was lot of expense that goes into this. After a while, the King begins to feel better. The Swami returns after many days and is stunned to see all the palace turn green. After hearing everything he gives the King a pair of Green Goggles and says that you could have saved all the money if you had changed the way you see it rather than changing the whole World around you.

Something similar happens in our Business World. As I said earlier, we have Circle of Influence & Circle of Concern. We cannot do much about the Circle of Concern. But what if we just change our position in the Circle of Concern so that you shift yourself to the Circle of Influence. When we have external hostile environments, you just need to adjust yourself so that you are always the winner in long term. 

If there is a situation due to which you have problems in business, just see if you can tweak your project so that your output or your customer or the process - something changes and you remain safe.

Even a Long Journey Starts With a Single Step

When we set ourselves a target, it may seem very far at the outset. We take a target which we think is 5 or 10 years down the line. Even so, if the target given is by external party, like when you are in pressure or as a challenge, the target may overwhelm you. But if you look at the consistent working, you will find that the results after a time period will be imaginative. You can look at how the Insurance plans or the SIP's (Systematic Investment Plan) are marketed these days. They do not say that you have to pay Rs. 20000 per annum as fees. Instead they will say that can you not afford to pay Rs. 55 per day for an insurance of this value. 

Or better still they will market the Rs. 500/- SIP as Rs. 17/day expense. But at the end of the year, it will be about Rs. 6500 or so. Instead if you had said, that take a plan of Rs. 6000 or Rs. 60000/- at once, there will be less takers. 

Similarly, when you look at your goal, do not look at it as one figure or single achievement. Break it down. And always keep it in your mind that every long journey begins with a single step. It is only that the steps should continue. But the thought of long journey often puts our mind off the journey and we procrastinate or do not take the step itself. Take that step and keep your eyes on your target. You will be enthused along your journey and will reach it far early than you thought. 

Getting Organized in Office

When you start up, there are not many papers in your office. But once you are settled, there are different papers that keep coming in. There are visiting cards, brochures, payment advice, duplicate delivery challan, request letters, introductory letters, magazines, etc.  If all these documents remain unorganized at your workplace, chances are that you yourself might be unorganized. As a thumb rule, the more organized you are, better the efficiency. This is because, you give subtle messages to your mind that you should be organized. The craze for getting organized might help you to sort out things either by giving some time in day or in week or doing it as it comes in.

For making your task simpler, you need to make up different categories. Like - Yearwise, monthwise, document wise, purchase, sale, transport copies, magazines, papers, etc. Once you have organized the category, it will be much more easier for you. Whenever something comes, you can just put it in that file. Have different files, or compartments or drawers for these things and let the things go into that very file, compartment, etc. This way you will save a lot of time in organizing the documents as well as retrieving them. You can use different colors, different markers, etc. At one place (at our customers place), I also saw one good thing. They have series of documents and for each series there are different box files. The total documents are like 7-8 box files. They are kept vertically besides each other, so horizontally a size of about A3 or A4 sheet is covered depending on number of box files. They could have simply kept numbers like 1, 2, 3,... posted on them. Instead, pictures speak louder. So they have this big picture of a car or a horse or house which is cut into 6-8 pieces and pasted on these box files. When you look at the cup-board, you will see one big picture and numbers posted above them.