Use The SmartPhone - Not Just As A Phone

Do you use smart phone? I guess, you do. But how many of you use the phone more than that of a phone use. I mean, do you use phone only for receiving and making calls and messages. Your smart phone can do a lot many things than that. Only if you use it. For example, do you know your phone has a calender. Yes. You know it. But do you use it? No. Why? Never thought about it. In business, there are number of things that we have to take care of. And in these things, we often forget things. If you call a customer - for anything like payment or order, he might tell you to call after a week. Immediately tell google to put a reminder to call client X. Suppose, you have to give call to a vendor regarding the follow up, put a reminder. You have an appointment with client, put a reminder. When you put reminders, your phone will alert you half an hour before and you will be ready for that work. 

You are going somewhere and suddenly you get some idea. You have a thought to do something which might be of some use in production. You check for pen & paper and you don't have it. You put it off till the next day and the completely forget about the idea. Welcome to the app - Notes /Evernotes, etc. There are apps which will be like post-it notes. You can go on the app, open new note or randomly scribble ideas on the open note. You can also put a reminder to read it sometime later. 

You have many apps like indiamart or tradeindia, where you can showcase your product. You have olx and quickr where you can put your product so somebody can look for it. You can also go through the number of furniture and other services offered for a small business. You also have different apps for business purpose. You also have camera with you. With it you can take photographs of your product and immediately post it to your customer. You need to become smart to use your smartphone smartly. Believe me, you will be very happy. Don't use youtube for general entertainment. Use it for inspiring and motivating videos. Use it for learning new things. 

Business Idea - Part Time Work At Companies

There are many small & medium businesses around us. Though they are less glorified, but it is the class of businesses which provide maximum employment. When we think of big businesses, their employee to turnover ratio is very low. They have many a systems that are in place for big companies and hence many things are automated. Against that small and medium businesses are more labor intensive. Main reason behind that being less knowledge of systems and availability of capital. High capital investment facilitates automation and systems. This is not available to the SMBs and hence they are more labor intensive. 

SMBs also are always production oriented and hence they hardly have any team, skill and view to have some systems. When these SMBs approach bigger companies for supply of parts, they are not prepared. Bigger companies have some criteria above their normal requirements. They look at the companies and see if they are quality conscious, whether they will be able to supply in the quantity and quality that they want. Behind all these, they look whether the SMBs are ISO certified. Iso certification will be achieved if systems are in place and the needed filework is done. For facilitating ISO certification, a particular grade of manpower is needed which might be costly. All SMBs cannot keep so costly people. They will be willing to keep a part timer. This is the opportunity which can be tapped by the Consultant. Instead of working at one company at x payment, these consultants can work with 7-8 companies for part time. Each company will be willing to give up to 1/2 x payment to a consultant. If you are able to tap 4-5 companies, you will be well off. You will also have more free time, as instead of working for 6 days and whole day per week, you can work for either 1 day per week or half day per week at the company. As you are consultant, your attendance will also be less important than your work. Once your work is done, you can leave. 

This is just one type of job. You can also think of accounting, HR, marketing, etc. You just have to get imaginative and have to have more confidence in your abilities to take over the role. You also have to remember that you need to give good performance and satisfaction to your customer, so that he is happy and not willing to let you go. This will happen only when you work so good that he depends on you. 

Should I Leave My Job & Start Up Something New

This is a question that quite often comes up. Many a times this happens when somebody has lost job or are looking at a flat career or they have got an idea and are looking to give it a shot. My first question is what is the motivation to start up. If this motivation has come because he has lost job and his next one is taking time, then it is a difficult one. When you consider to start up, the main difference to be considered is - whether you would be able to do without getting continuous salary. Though it depends from type of business to your speed in doing it, it may not be before six months that you would be able to draw funds from the business. You must have enough funds to tide over that period. 

Secondly, you need to locate the type of business that you want to do and whether you have that many funds with you. You either want to do business because you want to do something challenging or you want enormous growth in what you are getting. You have to decide that whatever you want to do, whether you want to do it full time or part time. If you just want some extra income, then rather than going full time, you might just invest in other's business by being a sleeping partner or you can invest in such assets where the growth rate will be higher. If you have discipline to control your expenses, then automatically your asset class will increase and you will become wealthy. And if you want to do something part time, then you must ensure that you would be able to give enough time daily to it. Because if you do not give any time to it, it will bring you nothing. 

Thirdly, if you are thinking of doing full time, then you are dead serious about the start up. You might need capital now. When you are ready, you must have enough capital with you not only for your project but also for your personal needs. Even if you have budgeted for x amount, you should have at least 1.5 to 2 times money. Once you have decided that whatever it takes, you will start up and succeed at that, then you will. 

Resources - How to make the best of them?

How does a David beat Goliath? Start ups have one thing in common. Resources or rather the lack of resources. Start ups always are behind the established Goliath's when it comes down to resources. When any small company is compared with the big company, it is the resources that comes into picture and that is often the reason why the big company is the favorite. You don't have to go decades back, it was only recently that Reliance showed all the mighty resources to launch the Jio. Such was the affect that it has changed the landscape of the industry. Before launching Jio, there was dearth of 4G smartphones. Due to the offer, the 4G handsets sold like hotcakes. There are talks of mergers among the industry. Someone will have to come up with good utilization of the resources if they have to tackle the Jio. 

History notes the fact that Shahji Raje, father of Shivaji Raje, fought with the Mughals and Adilshahi at a time and still defeated them twice. The one fight is a very famous one where Shahji Raje's army of 20000 defeated an army of 2 lac soldiers which were the combined forces of Mughals and Adilshahi. The battle is the famous Bhataudi battle. Since the army of 2 lac personnel required large amounts of food and water, they were located near the dam. Shahji knew he lacked the resources, but came up with a brilliant idea, which was in line with his Guerrilla warfare tactics. He engineered the cracks in the dam and broke the dam thereby drowning the whole army with the water coming out of the dam. This was amazing use of resource. This was real. 

What is not real but still a very good example of use of resources is the fight of Bahubali in the Kuntala kingdom where the army of Pinjaris attack them. It was a completely surprise attack and no one in the Kuntala kingdom were ready. Even then Bahubali used the resources available to him like the oxen and the dam which is ripped open apart so that the water drowns the Pinjari army away. 

If you are still not sure about the use of limited resources, then you must study the case study of Nirma vs Hindustan Unilever which now is converted to Ghadi vs Hindustan Unilever. Jyothi Laboratories had also used the resources well to sell their product - Ujala. You should not get disheartened by the fact that you have less resources. Remember that hard work and persistence will make you a king, just like it did for Dangal girls despite lack of resources.

Read The Books - Learn From Them

Other than word of mouth, it is the books that have transited the knowledge from one century to other century. If we know what happened 1000 years ago, it is because of the books which have the documented material. There is also word of mouth which mainly translates into a tradition sooner than later. This is because of the lack of proper communication through words of mouth. Previously also I did write about the game where word of mouth is transmitted and how the final delivered message might be completely different than what had started. I will leave that topic here. Lets go to the books. 

Books are things where people have written their experience, their thoughts, fiction, non-fiction, etc. and through this the knowledge has passed on to the other generations. There are religious books like Bhagwad Gita, Quran, Bible, etc. Then there are books written by different authors. In the recent perspective, there are many self help books and the business related books that are coming up day in and day out. Out of that there are some books which become an instant hit and run for generations. In my earlier days when I had just joined industry, I came through a book called The Goal written by Godratt. The book beautifully run a parallel story between a manager's personal and professional life. How his both lives were under ruins and how he sees a parallel of Theory of Constraints and bottlenecks working in them and then removes the bottleneck to increase the productivity and achieve the Goal. There is 'Think & Grow Rich' by Napolean Hill whose other book 'Laws of Success' is equally wonderful at more than 1000 pages. It takes you through the 16 laws which if you follow will give you success. The most famous law among them is 'Work more than what you are paid for'. 

Reading these kind of books will give you knowledge and insights into different things. Our world is so small that we cannot actually come across new things until we meet new people and read new books. We will come across new ideas only in the open space and hence it is necessary to update yourself with new books, new blogs, new magazines.  

Fulfill The Promises Made To Yourself

When we are happy or sad we make promise to ourselves or to our Diety / God. Or at times we think that if this happens, I will do this. If I get money, I will do this. If I am able to achieve this target, then I will visit this mountain. If I am able to close this deal, I will be going to the desired location / restaurant, etc. There are whole range of promises that we make. We make to ourselves, we make to our staff, we make to our family and we make it to our God. When you make these promises, you give a message to each that when such and such task is completed then I would be so happy that I will do this thing (to please you or in celebration). Many a times it happens that once those tasks are completed, we have already forgotten those promises. We even forget to acknowledge that we have indeed achieved something or that something has been through due to good luck. 

The first thing I would like to say is, promise yourself or anybody only those things which you will be able to fulfill, do easily. Never promise so much that it would be impossible for you to do and complete. Take an example now. You go to some vendor and tell him to do certain task. And you tell him that you would pay him after the task is completed. When he tells you that the task is completed, you refuse to pay him. After six months, you again have some work with the vendor. You tell him to do the task. Will he do it? No, he won't until you have given his last time's due. 

That vendor is the third person. Must you not hear your heart and fulfill the promises given to it. If you fulfill the promises you have given to it, your subconscious mind will be happy. Next time when you promise it something, it will use all its energy to take your task to completion. Do you find the logic as to why you should fulfill the promises you give. If you are not able to fulfill it, please do not make it in the first place. 

Unless The Only Option Closes, Other Options Won't Open Up

I am looking for ways to increase my sales, but I am not finding many ways. How many time it has happened that though we are looking for something, we are not able to find many solutions and it is often the only one or two options that we can come up with. Our mind is clouded by the different obstacles and we are not able to find the opportunities. Unless the clouds are cleared, we won't be able to find the opportunities. You might have read my earlier blog on perspective. How one salesman does not see any business for shoes in the village where no one wears shoes and how the other salesman sees 100 % opportunity for business as no one has shoes. The thing is the same, only the other salesman has cleared his clouds to see the opportunity. 

I want to share one experience of mine. Often my hair raise when I share this experience as this was one valuable lesson we learnt in our earlier stage of business. When we started our business, we were new and we did not have much exposure. The project was conceptualized when economy was great and when the project realized, everything had turned upside down. The American banks were in the dumps and the economy was shaken. No banks were willing to fund new projects and they were guarded against giving loans. Ultimately a stage came when we are short of funds and there were sure death signs for a business. Unless there are funds for raw material, you cannot make products & sale and ultimately your business will close. We had only one hope. We went to our biggest investor and narrated them how there was business but no money. Once / twice they did help out, but next time when we went, we were very clearly told by our investor / mentor. He was a successful business man and it was not that he could not help us. But he told us clearly that if I help you, you won't find another way. I won't help you and I am sure you will find your way to steer clear of the difficulties. 

And truly after that moment, we did not go to him. And we are still up and running nicely. IT is from experience that I learnt that unless the only option closes (because till that time we think that it is the only option), the other options won't open up.