Lessons from Entrepreneurship: 3. CARPE DIEM, Strike the Iron!

Disclaimer: I do not claim to know it all but I do hope to share it all. This is a series of 11 lessons that I have learnt dealing with Entrepreneurs and being one myself.

I think all my friends know that while I am a movie buff, I am a big time Sholay fan. This epic movie from ‘70s seems to have a dialogue written for all situations. There are just so many small anecdotes and simple dialogues delivered with so much style and passion that their messages become that much more hard-hitting. One such moment is when Thakur, Jai and Veeru are making their strategy to catch Gabbar. They get to know that an arms supplier to Gabbar has just arrived and is meeting him at a certain place to do the deal. Thakur, in his inimitable style says, “loha garam hai, maar do hathoda!”  (translated: Iron is hot, strike it).

Timing is everything. You cannot be too early or too late with your idea. You have to be ready with the answer when the question is raised. You have to grab the deal when it is on table. You have to put your body in, when you have got the foot in the door.

Sale Closure, learning from the job!

Ask any star sales man and he will tell you that the most important thing in a deal is the quick closure. These star sales men are always looking for that small window of opportunity to close the deal.

 One of the first things that I learnt as a sales person was to communicate really well but never in a hurry. Take your time in a meeting, in fact, take a lot of time. Tire the buyer and close the deal.

In my original business I used to go for meetings with customers setting up a big hotel, needing multiple F&B facilities. All bidders were mostly called on the same day for a series of meetings with a team of 4-5 people.

Having done a few of these meetings and their analysis I figured that the person who got the order was usually the one who spent most time in the meeting.  So my prerogative became to talk more in a meeting. I talked about my company, myself, my history, our history, about the hotel, the market, the project, the city, the food and while doing that I would find connections. My stories and connections built trust.

 In the mean time I would figure out the decision maker, influencer and nuisance makers. Having done that, I would wait for their issues, their problems and their fears.  By this time, they would be mostly convinced about my knowledge, our company’s capabilities and would have all the trust in me to do the job.  I had already fitted into the jig saw puzzle with the last bit of discount remainig. That would normally close the deal.

I heated up the iron and struck at the right time. Well the timing was not always right but then, lets say mostly!

Sachin Tendulkar’s debut

Here is a little story of the little master. This is from his debut series in Pakistan when another great Waqar Younis also made his debut. This incident was on the 4^th day of the 4^th match of this series being played on a green top Sialkot wicket.

India were 38/4 when the young boy named Sachin walked in to join Navjot Singh Siddhu. Shortly after, Sachin was hit on his nose by a Waqar bouncer. He was bleeding when even Imran Khan offered him to go to the dressing room and return later, “chhote chot lag gayi hai, chalo baad mein aa jana”. However, even at that raw age Sachin knew this is where he makes his mark, this is where he has to rise and this is where he seizes the opportunity. He told Siddhu, “mein khelega!” (I will play). Sachin made 57 in that innings and helped India draw the match on juicy green wicket.

A Star was born. Imagine had he opted to go back and nurse his nose.

Opportunity of a lifetime

There will be times when you will feel dejected and frustrated in your work life. You might even start to put pressure on your personal relations because of that. You will be clueless, looking for answers. Some of us turn to God, some to Godmen. Some to palmists and others even to past life analysers!

They may find some answers and be satisfied with it. However, the game is not about finding the answers or hoping for favourable circumstances but about actually making them.

This life itself is the big opportunity. Seize it. Set your goals. Stay Focused. If circumstances do not allow, change them. Look for circumstances you want, if you can’t find them. Make them!

Carpe Diem stands for “seize the day”. I first heard this term in another one of my all-time favourite movies called “Dead Poets’ Society”. There is this scene where Robin Williams, the professor, tells his students that they have age and opportunity on their side to change the world. He encouraged them to seize the day and make their lives extra ordinary. If they don’t then, once buried, all that would become of them would be a fertiliser!

The Lesson 3:

Life will give you opportunities. Life itself is a big opportunity. Seize it. Make something big about it. Opportunities will come to you in the form of a big problem or crisis. They will come when you want to win a sales order or close a funding deal. Opportunities will keep coming in your life, many times over. You have to be ready for them and seize them. If circumstances stop you, change them. Make the iron hot. Strike it!

Lessons from Entrepreneurship: 2. FOCUS, LAGE RAHO PINTOO!

Disclaimer: I do not claim to know it all but I do hope to share it all. This is a series of 11 lessons that I have learnt dealing with Entrepreneurs and being one myself.

If ever anyone told you how easy it was, smile and tell yourself, it’s not. It’ll never be.

In my life I have been a very keen sports lover and player. Sports have taught a lot of things to me. I draw a lot of inspiration from Sportsmen and their achievements. In this post and the next few I will share many such analogies and learnings.

The biggest learning for me has been the ability to lose. In every match you play, someone has to lose. If you lose today, do you get bogged down? Do you lose track of your vision or your goals? Or do you come back with a bang and launch yourself again? Hitting back with even more determination to win?

I am a big fan of MS Dhoni and what has made him a great leader is that for him winning is important but losing is not that important. He makes it a point to never lose moral or track with a loss in a match. He sets his goals and continues to work hard on them with plans that he totally believes in. He knows it takes time and that there will be hiccups.

It takes time! Stay focussed.

Rome was not built in a day nor was any business. Don’t lose your Focus. Break your long journey into smaller segments and win the marathon by achieving better results in each segment. Focus on a segment at a time. Make sure that each segment or shorter term goal is taking you to your vision and then Focus on a shorter term goal at a time.

I think that every business must be built in style of a Cricket Test Match. 5 days of determination and concentration on the field can be tiring and seem impossible for any great player but then the better teams win it by playing session by session. In business, once the long haul vision is in place, work on it by setting smaller goals. Write them down! Monitor them, measure yourself every week. Week after week. Get organised. Stay Focussed. Each week sow a seed, each day water it. One day it will become a big fruit bearing tree.

ACTIVEKARMA EXPERIENCE: What not to do!

In the beginning of this century I had set up a venture called ACTIVEKARMA in partnership with a very close friend of mine. It was about bringing concept of Active and Healthy Lifestyles. We started off with an idea of making a software that will have some kind of AI and will build a unique diet plan for all our users. We were going to set up offline centers of our own as well.  Activekarma was set up in year 2000, the year of first internet boom.

We got funded! We lost track. This was the time when the number of “eyeballs” was the measure of success for any business. We built a website and focussed on registrations online. Our website had a lot of content. Through the website, we were giving gyaan on stress management, diet plans, fitness, sports coaching and even fitness travel. We had tie ups with experts on meditation, yoga, nutrition, fitness. We had celebrated sports gurus on board along with dieticians and travel experts. We had an online diet management software called MYDIETMATE and we were selling holiday packages even!

We had a great team of seemingly very intelligent people. But we failed! The single biggest reason was lack of focus on our real Goals. We were trying to do too much and we were in a hurry. We did not build an ACTIVEKARMA center. We ran after eyeballs, way too fast.   

Obviously nothing worked! Desperation grew.

One day I woke up to realise that we had become a company providing services on website & software development, ticketing, event management all rolled into one! We were not doing anything actively about ACTIVEKARMA. We had lost track. We had lost!

We set out with the correct Vision. We had found the right gap in the market and we had right ideas. We had to stay focussed on them and should have gone slower.

PIVOT, What? Why?

Staying Focussed on initial goal does not mean to follow it even if you know that you are heading for doom. Change track. Its ok. However, don’t do it for reasons such has fashion!

Few hours of the month, I spend learning from the new age entrepreneurs. Reading about them, listening to them and investing money with them, hoping to grow with them.

Once I met Pintoo. He used the word PIVOT 3 times in his presentation and with a lot of pride. He had changed his business idea 4 times already and I wasn’t sure when the next pivot was going to come!  He was obviously in some kind of hurry to catch the bus and was majorly suffering from FOMO.

Okay, so I do not have a problem with pivot or with changing directions. For me it really means that you started off to do something but soon realized that you had made some wrong assumptions and judgments about the model or market. You were headed in the wrong direction so you changed your track. So you Pivoted! Nothing wrong with that.

If you lose, lose fast. Go back, change path, change direction, do the pivot, if you have to. However, find answers for the “why” , “what” and the “how”.  

If you started your venture to solve logistics problem but pivoted to become a “HyperLocal” grocery company then it better be for reasons of it being a bigger opportunity. Then make sure that you have the skill and passion to do it. Make sure that you have got your business model right this time.

However, if you are going to Pivot because that word is fashionable or that business plan will fetch you money or that is the new flavour of the month then you have lost Focus and you are heading the Activekarma way.

Don’t!

So the Lesson 2 for me is my biggest lesson. STAY FOCUSSED. It will take time. Just keep going. Keep moving. Slowly, yet steadily. It has taken time for each one of them. Even for the great Messi.  After all, it took him 17 years of hardwork to become an over night success.

In other words. Lage raho Pintoo!

Lessons from Entrepreneurship: 1. BHAG PINTOO BHAG!

Disclaimer: I do not claim to know it all but I do hope to share it all. This is a series of 11 lessons that I have learnt dealing with Entrepreneurs and being one myself.

Pintoo came home that evening, panting and puffing! Profusely dripping of sweat. He stood in front of the main gate crouching, head bent down, eyes closed and hands resting on his knees. He was tired but was smiling. His wife opened the door and asked him worriedly about his condition. Pintoo smiled back and said in a rather victorious and proud tone as if he had just won a marathon, “I saved 20 rupees today!”

“Nice, but how?” asked the wife, bewildered.

“You see when I was walking to the bus-stop, I saw that my bus was just leaving. So I thought of running after it to catch it. I ran but the bus was faster and went on going. I did not stop. I told myself, Bhag Pintoo Bhag. I kept running after the bus just to realise that I had run 10km and had reached home.”

“So you saved twenty by not taking the bus but running after it?” wife asked rather unimpressed. “I wish you had run after a taxi.”

“Taxi? Why?” Pintoo was shocked that his wife was not happy with him.

“Well, you would have saved two hundred rupees!”

Pintoo learnt a lesson that evening. If at all you have to run, run after a bigger goal. Make more money or save more money. Make your Goal, your vision bigger.

In one of his lecturers, one of my heroes, Niren Chaudhury (former head of YUM India) talked about the same concept. He said, while explaining the concept of BHAG, that once you have figured out how to achieve your goals, then just double them and see what you will do differently to achieve them. Ask, ‘can you?’ If they answer is yes then go ahead and grow you Vision, grow you Goal. Let it be BHAG: Big Hairy Audacious Goal.

I have seen many a times Entrepreneurs stop. And then fall. I have also seen Entrepreneurs run everytime and everywhere. And yet fall. I think there needs to be a balance somewhere.

LOW HANGING FRUITS:

As a player in the commercial food service equipment industry I often faced entrepreneurs without a vision. The whole model is around making the margin and not on giving a value! Quote for a project, use relations, clout and get the business pretty much based on low margins. Then go back and cut corners! Have low paid staff, have low tech machinery, use lower grade material and age old components, don’t pay taxes and then supply a low quality product at a low price. The frustrating part of this whole business was that even the customers, or at least most of them, did not care much! 

Everyone was trying to pluck the low hanging fruits.

Don’t get me wrong! There is no problem in going after the low hanging fruits. The problem is with going ONLY for low hanging fruits!

If there is no vision to climb the tree and there is a big block, a blinder that does not let you set your eyes beyond then you will never get to the top of the tree. Most of the players of this industry never grew out of their region, forget nation. Most of them never even tried to work on value creation and hence still continue to fight in the near commodity business.

May be it is a case of low aspirations or just fear. However, the problem with no vision or going after the low hanging fruits only is that soon your business model becomes a commodity business. If you never had great aspirations and obviously no vision, then you might still do well for yourself, but then you are not an entrepreneur! Imagine what if Dirubhai Ambani or JRD Tata or Narayan Murthy thought like that.

VISION ON THE CLOUDS BUT FEET ON THE GROUND:

Yes, vision needs to be high. But how high?

The problem with a huge vision that pushes you to the skies is that you can’t build a stairway to heaven, looking up! Just can’t! You have look at the road you are walking on, the steps that you are building and treading on.

Vision should be large enough to never dissuade you from your path and yet nurture your passion to keep pushing you hard to get you to your place in the clouds, one day. This can happen only if the vision is broken down into smaller goals. Annual, Quarterly, Monthly goals translated into weekly tasks.

I am a huge fan of weekly task sheets. It serves many purposes.

One, my weekly tasks are based on my bigger goals and hence I know that I am taking steps or strides towards them. Secondly it allows me to look at the goals broken down into smaller pieces. This helps as I do not get bogged down by the enormity of my audacious vision. At the same time, thirdly, it keeps me focussed on my goals.

Whenever I started a new business, a huge number of ideas came flashing in my brain. It was almost like opening a big bottomless treasure trunk.  There is a sinister voice inside me telling me that I can do this and that and that and then that one too. Well I fell for it. Not once! The voice never stopped but I kept on getting smarter at handling it. During one such “weak” moment I decided not to fall into this trap ever!  I made a policy for myself. I made my Monthly Goals based on my vision. Every Monday morning I look at those goals and make my weekly tasks. These tasks are like a checklist for each day of the week. The voice kept coming. I didn’t mind it. However, I started putting the ideas in what I call ‘the parking list’. Every once a month, I look at my Goals and the parking list and see if I can push my goals for the month. The voice continues. Grows my vision and gets me more passionate about what I do but I never let it dissuade me from my path.

So in short, one needs to have a bigger vision and a huge passion. In the words of Warren Buffet, “Passion builds enormous energy. Without Passion there is not energy. Without Energy there is nothing!”  Use your passion to build your BIG vision. Yet, have clear goals. Smaller goals. Achieve them step by step, stride by stride, leap by leap but never by a flight.

So yes Pintoo, BHAG or run. But not fly.