MARCh 2012
How To
Be a pro at public speaking Go to our Guidebook
Following Page 24
Stacking it up
The Magazine for Growing Companies
Stacking It Up
Here's how Mini Yadav changed Delhi's supermarkets and built a `70 crore business. Grocery shopping has not been the same since Page 28
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The magazine for growing companies
better leader Page 49
The way MapmyIndia plotted a 600% growth in three years Page 36
March 2012 | `150 | Volume 03 | Issue 02 A 9.9 Media Publication | inc.com Facebook.com/Inc
@incmagazine
Mini Yadav MD, Marche Retail
March 2012
contents
A Treasure Tunnel A slew of navigation products has taken MapmyIndia up a growth path.
36
The Journey’s End 28 Cover Story The Gourmet Diva
From desi masalas to a variety of cheeses, Le Marche sells them all. Mini Yadav, MD of Marche Retail, has made magic with three key ingredients—a price range that caters to all pockets, products that go from the basic to the exotic, and a shopping experience like nowhere else.
42 How We Did It Arvind Nanda and Gautam Suri
A knack for bringing new products has helped Arvind Nanda and Gautam Suri build Interarch into a `500-crore business.
Just putting India on the digital map was not enough for Rakesh Verma, founder of MapmyIndia. Over the last seven years, he’s plotted a brand for the company, along with his son Rohan Verma. as told to shreyasi singh
as told to ira swasti
by pooja kothari
60 I Wish I Knew Then...
Path Infotech’s Pankaj Ratra believes challenges like losing critical resources and clients add to the learning curve. He knows he’s more positive today. As he says, “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”
photograph by subhojit paul
as told to rohini banerjee
This edition of Inc. magazine is published under licence from Mansueto Ventures LLC, New York, New York. Editorial items appearing on pages 11-13, 21, 23, 26-27, 47-52 were all originally published in the United States edition of Inc. magazine and are the copyright property of Mansueto Ventures, LLC, which reserves all rights. Copyright © 2009 and 2010 Mansueto Ventures, LLC. The following are trademarks of Mansueto Ventures, LLC: Inc., Inc. 500.
on the cover
Mini Yadav, founder of Marche Retail. Photographed by Subhojit Paul in Gurgaon. Cover design by PC Anoop.
March 2012 | INC. | 1
contents
March 2012
26
18
22
05 Editor’s Letter
11
16 The Scuba Sutras
Strategy
Companies that make Mocha the perfect place for a cuppa
By Guhesh Ramanathan Sometimes, giving in to business currents can take your company forward
47 managing A less pricey alternative to business consultants: hire MBA students instead
09 Launch
18 Innovation
49 Leadership How to lead when everyone gets to be a “leader”?
21 The Goods
51 managing Up for a challenge? The benefits of innovation contests
06 Behind the Scenes
Viewpoints: The importance of changing with the times Good time to go online The Ticker Research Corner: Why employee tiffs get customers so angry The Inc. Data Bank A Skimmer’s Guide to All Business is Local, by John A. Quelch and Katherine E. Jocz
13 Get Real
By Jason Fried Often, the best way to start is from scratch
14 Passions
For Yogesh Bansal, iron’s good for health—especially if it’s the golfing kind.
2 | INC. | MARCH 2012
A tracker that helps you keep an eye on your car and home
3-D projectors Conference well with this sound station A slice of offsite adventures Tech Trends, by John Brandon: Forgot a file? An app lets you fetch it Things Suvir Khullar Can’t Live Without
Guidebook, No. 2
Be fearless when speaking in public. Here’s how. Following Page 24.
26 Balancing Acts
By Meg Cadoux Hirshberg Family sabbaticals are wonderful things unless the spouse and kids have other plans.
53 globalising Should India blindly ape western consumption patterns? 54 elevator pitch Lukup Media makes interactive telly ads. Will investors tune in with `30 crore? 56 the way i work Serial entrepreneur Vijay Shukla doesn’t adhere to the think-big credo. A “super obsession” with scale is distracting and unnecessary, he says.
inc.com
What’s Hot
the best of inc.com
Form IV
Statement of ownership and other particulars about the publication INC. as per Rule 8.
The Takeaway
Three Things That Motivate Employees More Than Money Ilya Pozin is the founder of the digital marketing agency Ciplex and a columnist for Inc.com. After realising he didn’t know how to motivate his employees, he hired a CEO who did. Here’s an excerpt from his recent post on what that new CEO taught him about bringing out the best in people.
1. Create role models.
Highlight your top performers’ strengths, and let them know that you want them to be an example for others. You’ll set the bar high, and they’ll be motivated to live up to their reputations.
2. Give recognition and small rewards.
Give a shout-out to someone in a company meeting. Run contests or internal games, and keep track of the results on a whiteboard that everyone can see. Tangible awards that don’t break the bank can work, too. Try things like dinner, trophies, spa services, and plaques.
3. Make your ideas theirs.
People hate being told what to do. Instead, ask them in a way that will make them feel as if they came up with the idea. “I’d like you to do it this way” turns into “Do you think it’s a good idea if we do it this way?”
See the rest of Pozin’s column, and advice from other entrepreneurs, at www.inc.com.
4 | INC. | MARCH 2012
1. Place of publication
Nine Dot Nine Mediaworx Pvt. Ltd. A-262, Defence Colony, New Delhi-110 024
2. Periodicity of its publication
Monthly
3. Printer’s name Nationality (a) Whether a citizen of India? (b) If a foreigner, the country of origin Address
Anuradha Das Mathur Indian Yes N.A. A-262, Defence Colony, New Delhi-110 024
4. Publisher’s name Nationality (a) Whether a citizen of India? (b) If a foreigner, the country of origin Address
Anuradha Das Mathur Indian Yes N.A. A-262, Defence Colony, New Delhi-110 024
5. Editor’s name Nationality (a) Whether a citizen of India? (b) If a foreigner, the country of origin Address
Anuradha Das Mathur Indian Yes N.A. A-262, Defence Colony, New Delhi-110 024
6. Names and addresses of individuals who own the newspaper and partners or shareholders holding more than one per cent of the total capital Pramath Raj Sinha N-154 Panchsheel Park, New Delhi 110 017 Vikas Gupta C-5/10 Safdarjung Development Area, New Delhi 110 016 Asheesh Kumar Gupta 103, Tower II, The Palms, South City-1, Gurgaon 122 001 Anuradha Das Mathur C-144, Sarvodaya Enclave, New Delhi 110 017 Kanak Ranjan Ghosh BH-44, Sector II, Salt Lake City, Kolkata 700 091 Helion Venture Partners India II, LLC Les Cascades Building, Edith Cavell Street, Port Louis, Mauritius TVS Shriram Growth Fund I JE JayaLakshmi Estate #29, Haddows Road, Nungambakkam, Chennai 600 006 I, Anuradha Das Mathur, hereby declare that the particulars given above are true to the best of my knowledge and belief.
Dated: 1st March, 2012
Sd/Signature of Publisher
editor’s letter
MANAGING DIRECTOR: Dr Pramath Raj Sinha Printer & Publisher: Anuradha Das Mathur Editorial managing Editor: shreyasi singh assistant features editor: rohini banerjee feature writer: ira swasti Copy Desk Managing Editor: Sangita Thakur Varma DEsign Sr Creative Director: Jayan K Narayanan Art Director: Anil VK Associate Art DirectorS: PC Anoop & Atul Deshmukh Visualisers: Prasanth TR Anil T & Shokeen Saifi Sr Designers: Sristi Maurya & NV Baiju Designers: Suneesh K, Shigil N, Charu Dwivedi Raj Verma, Prince Antony, Binu MP, Peterson & Prameesh Purushothaman C Chief Photographer: Subhojit Paul Photographer: Jiten Gandhi community team product manager: mahesh ravi assistant product manager: Rajat gupta associate: deepika sharma Sales & Marketing senior vice president: krishna kumar (+91 98102 06034) business development Manager: arjun sawhney (+91 95822 20507) assistant regional manager (south & WEST) rajesh kandari (+91 98111 40424) Production & Logistics Sr General manager (Operations) Shivshankar M Hiremath Manager Operations: Rakesh upadhyay Asst. Manager - Logistics: Vijay Menon Executive Logistics: Nilesh Shiravadekar Production Executive: Vilas Mhatre Logistics MP Singh, Mohd. Ansari OFFICE ADDRESS nine dot nine mediaworx Pvt Ltd A-262, Defence Colony, New Delhi–110 024 For any queries, please contact us at help@9dot9.in Published, Printed and Owned by Nine Dot Nine Mediaworx Private Limited. Published and printed on their behalf by Anuradha Das Mathur. Published at A-262, Defence Colony, New Delhi–110 024 printed at Tara Art Printers Pvt ltd. A-46-47, Sector-5, NOIDA (U.P.) 201301 Editor: Anuradha Das Mathur
A Bite Of Can-Do Ever so often, there’s a story I fall in love with. This time it’s our feature on Rakesh and Rohan Verma,
the father-son duo who are steering MapmyIndia, a digital map and navigation solutions company. Verma senior’s journey is exciting enough. Yet it’s the path his son Rohan Verma charted for himself that’s fascinating. Through his four years at Stanford, Rohan worked double shift—by day, he was an academic superstar and at night he had long calls with his father in Delhi to help launch MapmyIndia.com. His holidays were spent in the India office. Despite getting a job offer at McKinsey in the US, when it came to choosing a career, the 21-year-old opted for entrepreneurship and came home to MapmyIndia in 2007. Over the last three years, the Vermas have grown the company by 600 per cent to become a leading navigation solutions brand. Read about them on Page 36. Pushing topicality isn’t something we obsess about at Inc. India—gritty success stories are a great theme for every season. With this issue though, we seem to be just in time to celebrate International Women’s Day which falls on March 8. Mini Yadav, who you see on the cover, runs Le Marche, a chain of food stores in Delhi and Gurgaon. That she’s created a `70-crore business in seven years isn’t her only achievement; her stores have also templated a superior shopping experience. It’s a bonus that we got two determined women entrepreneurs in this story—our former editor Pooja Kothari, who left Inc. India to start her own specialty food business, wrote this cover piece for us. I hope you enjoy the story on Page 28.
Shreyasi Singh shreyasi.singh@9dot9.in March 2012 | INC. | 5
BEHIND THE SCENES
Companies at the Heart of Everyday Life
Food Storage Along with good coffee, a great cafe must get its crumpets right. Keeping the food farm-fresh is Continental (India), a commercial food service equipment manufacturer. Started in 1978 by R. Kumar, Continental is India’s largest supplier of restaurant kitchen basics like dishwashers and refrigerators. Wiith offices in Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Kolkata and Mumbai, the company has a cool list of big clients—Barista, Cafe Coffee Day, The Oberoi Hotels and Pizza Hut. The 200-employee firm also provides solutions to companies in the US, Middle East and Europe.
Tableware While you sip hot cocoa or coffee, take time to examine the cup. Chances are that you are holding a bit of history. Sensational Ceramics, the firm that’s responsible for creating the beautiful pieces of crockery used here is led by friends Anwar Hussain and Riyaaz Ahmed. Hussain’s family has been in the ceramics business for several decades. However, it was only in 1999 that the two buddies decided to start something bigger. Today, the company is worth `4 crore. And their client list includes the who’s who of Delhi’s dining scene including several five star hotels and upmarket, standalone eateries. The 15-people firm’s Okhla factory employs 130 artisans.
6 | INC. | MARCH 2012
Mocha (Greater Kailash), Delhi
15.02.12 8:30 P.M.
Design Located at the hub of Delhi’s bustling Greater Kailash market, the twostoreyed Mocha café-cum-lounge gives a clear overview of the alleys. But if the streets are too busy for a casual cup of coffee, then the calm and colourful interiors enliven your mornings. The casual, comfortable and arty interiors were designed by Amith Chhabra of Livin’ Colours Design or LCD, a Delhi-based firm founded in 2002. An “accidental designer”, Chhabra began by designing homes for his friends and family. Now, his firm is the official designer for all Mocha outlets. The five-employee firm has an impressive list of restaurant clients including Sage and Ink by Tabula Rasa, Chi, Saltz and The Kitchen Café. With their next project, they aim to go overseas.
PHOTOGRAPH BY Subhojit Paul
reported by Rohini Banerjee
News. Ideas. People.
launch
VIEWPOINTS
Changing with the Times
“ Whatever you can conceive and believe in, you can achieve.” Recently on Twitter, Ray Newal, founder of Jigsee, a mobile video streaming company, summed up the art of running a start-up—knowing what you will never do without compromising on what you are doing. It’s clearly a learning he’s picked up first hand. Till 2009, Jigsee was an ad recommendation engine for the American and European markets. During a backpacking trip to India around that time, he spotted a new opportunity. “We thought users here have a greater need for video on mobile phones. Mobile video is less of a novelty in emerging markets unlike other geographies where many other screen options exist,” he says. Jigsee now designs video streaming apps that can be downloaded to watch movies and television shows for free—even on low-bandwidth mobile phones with data connections as slow as 50 kbps.
Photograph by Jiten Gandhi
March 2012 | INC. | 9
launch
Good time to go online! Robust business for e-tailers in India
The Ticker
Though India is the third-largest internet market in the world with more than 100 million users, right behind the United States (240 million) and China (420 million), the internet penetration rate here still stands at a low 8.5 per cent (compared to 74% for the US, and 31.2% in China), according to India Internet, a recent report by Edelweiss Securities Limited. Also, only 11 per cent of India’s total internet user base is subscribed to broadband. But the report also finds that the future of e-commerce ventures sprouting in India has lots of good things in store. Here, we highlight some of the likely trends thrown up the above report.
100
8
Users
2010
2003
Penetration
2009
0 2008
0 2007
2
2006
25
2005
4
2004
50
2002
6
2001
75
2000
(mn)
10
Internet Users In India And Penetration Rate
(%)
125
Source: World Bank, Edelweiss research
India’s internet user base primarily (three-fourth) belongs to the 15-34 age group. This proportion is among the highest across all online markets and points to a long term opportunity for doing online business in India because it is likely to remain stable for the next couple of years. The main reasons for internet penetration being low in India— expensive 3G-enabled devices and data plans—are going to be a thing of the past. Broadband subscribers are expected to rise in India owing to reduced tariff rates, greater access to low-cost smartphones and tablets and a high government emphasis on increasing broadband penetration in the country. The government target is to achieve 175 million broadband users by 2017. Searching non-travel products online has seen an upsurge and is the second-most popular activity for Indians online, after e-mailing. Social networking and online videos is another segment gaining popularity rapidly and may go further up in the coming years. The shift towards non-travel related buys on the internet suggests good business opportunities to target the Indian consumer. India’s per capita GDP at $1,527 in 2011 had risen at a CAGR of 12% between 2008 to 2011. It is expected to cross $2,300 by 2016 at current prices. The increase in disposable income of the Indian consumer is expected to enhance his or her private consumption online and will be a key driver for e-commerce opportunities in the country.
10 | INC. | MARCH 2012
Does maths make your Maths Fun HeyMath’s mind tick? If yes, then Harsh Rajan (above) Teaching Tomorrow is and Nirmala Shankaran want teachers to bond. right up your alley. This online website is set to be launched by HeyMath, a Chennai-based education platform founded by Nirmala Shankaran and Harsh Rajan, for teachers as a social networking site…Some good news from the International Finance Corporation now, which is set to invest $20 million in the Pragati Fund India which invests in SMEs in lowincome states...And money’s flowing down south too as Chennai-based agro-firm Hindusthaan Eco Ventures has filed for an IPO to raise nine million shares for expansion…Also, getting a boost is India’s drug-maker Aanjaneya Lifecare which has acquired Hyderabad-based Apex Drugs, an integrated active pharma ingredient for `250 crore...Staying with the health theme, e-tailer Healthkart raised $7.5 million from Sequoia Capital, Kae Capital and Omidyar Network just nine months after it was founded...The e-commerce is full of action. Flipkart, run by Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal, bought Letsbuy. com, India’s second-largest online electronics retailer for an undisclosed amount. —Inc. India A Cushy Acquisition There’s no stopping Flipkart’s Binny Bansal (left) and Sachin Bansal (right).
FROm TOP TO BOTTOM: Photograph by AAHANA; photo Courtesy subject
A wrap-up of people news and investment deals
launch
Be Kind to Your Co-workers—Or Else When employees fight, customers get angry research corner
Most of us know firsthand how squabbling and sniping can erode a team. But new research shows that when employees are rude to one another in front of customers, businesses might end up making enemies of their patrons. The Findings
In a recent study, researchers found that when customers witness employees being disrespectful to one another— yelling, using profane language, or openly criticising another’s job performance—customers not only get mad, but they often try to punish the company in some way. Why does this behaviour get customers so riled? It has to do with their deontic logic, or personal moral beliefs about how people should be treated, says Christine Porath, a management professor at Georgetown University and co-author of the study. “It’s not all about the customer’s own experience,” says Porath, who co-authored the study with Deborah MacInnis and Valerie S. Folkes, two marketing professors from the University of Southern California. “They objected to what they perceived as unfair behaviour toward the employee.” The Methodology
The study was based on a series of customer surveys. In one, respondents were asked to recall a time when they had witnessed an employee being uncivil to another worker. Ninety-two per cent of the respondents said they had subsequently made negative comments to other people about the company, and nearly half of those surveyed said they were less willing to repurchase the company’s products or services. Illustration by Anil T
In other surveys, participants were asked to imagine that they were with a group of friends in a restaurant. They were told to envision their waitress being publicly scolded by her manager for making a mistake, with remarks like, “C’mon, what are you, stupid?” and “Can’t you be more careful?” Many respondents said the manager’s behaviour not only would dampen their dining experience but was simply wrong. Participants said they would have been less angry if the waitress had been reprimanded in private, but, in either case, respondents expressed a desire to punish both the manager and the restaurant.
How Rude! Customers rated their reactions to employees on a scale of 1 to 7.
The Takeaway
Hostility in the workplace often has a way of trickling down to customers, whether or not they witness it directly, says Danny Meyer, founder and CEO of Union Square Hospitality Group in New York City. That’s why you won’t get good service from businesses that resemble the reality show Hell’s Kitchen, he says. “The chef is yelling in the kitchen with the misplaced expectation that, somehow, the waiter is going to feel good when they deliver the food to the guest,” Meyer says. “That’s just not how it works.” Business owners may not be able to monitor every
employee interaction, but they can create cultures in which respect is valued. Once a month, Meyer, whose company owns 26 restaurants, including popular New York eateries such as Shake Shack and Union Square Cafe, invites all recent hires to a meeting. There, he emphasises the importance of being hospitable to both customers and co-workers. And Meyer cautions against what he dubs skunklike behaviour. “When a skunk is angry, it sprays the thing it’s angry at,” says Meyer, “but everybody else within a 3mile radius has to smell it.” —J.J. McCorvey
Rude to another Rude to another customer employee
Employee is...
Rude to me
Level of anger
5.67
4.99
4.87
Likelihood of another purchase
2.7
3.25
3.25
Level of interest in the company
3.3
3.29
2.6 March 2012 | INC. | 11
launch
inc. data bank
Crunching the numbers
employment
Business Travel
The projected average domestic airfare in 2012:
YOU’Re FIRED!
$487
(a 5% increase from 2011) Share of companies that reimburse employees for:
Private Public companies: companies:
22% 39%
91%
YOU’Re HIRED!
Baggage fees
47%
The big idea: Remember when “location, location, location” referred exclusively to maximising foot traffic? Marketing today is all about geography, as companies try to appeal to local tastes on a global scale.
3%
The backstory: For decades, Quelch—now dean of the China Europe International Business School—has contested economist Theodore Levitt’s famous argument that technology and other factors were erasing national distinctions.
In-flight meals
Share of businesses that expect to add employees in the next 12 months: Private Public companies: companies:
13%
51% 30%
Preferred seating
Deloitte
In-flight entertainment
Global Business Travel Association
Productivity
Annual profit earned per employee at privately held companies:
$15,279
Top three contributors to recent productivity gains, according to companies:
1. I mprovements to
business processes 2. T echnological improvements 3. More hours worked by employees
$9,998
2006
2011
Sageworks; deloitte
Young Entrepreneurs
Public Opinion
Share of Millennials (18 to 34-year-olds) who have started or would like to start a business:
Portion of Americans who have a favourable opinion of:
54%
Of those, the portion who plan to open a business this year:
11%
Kauffman Foundation; Young Invincibles; Lake Research Partners; Bellwether Research
12 | INC. | MARCH 2012
90%
Small businesses
61%
Large corporations
54%
The news media The federal government
The book: All Business Is Local: Why Place Matters More Than Ever in a Global, Virtual World, by John A. Quelch and Katherine E. Jocz; Portfolio.
35%
Public Affairs Council
—Compiled by Andrew Shafer
Where with all: All Business Is Local explains how place plays a role in every kind of business decision. If you run a supermarket, the authors point out, you want to be on the side of the street used by the most homeward-bound commuters. If you have both a physical and a virtual presence, you want pricing in the latter that doesn’t discourage visits to the former. If you read nothing else: Chapter One discusses the emotional resonance of place and consumers’ willingness to associate specific locales with quality. (Think Germany and cars, Alaska and salmon.) The authors shrewdly limn the tension between human beings’ curiosity about the exotic and their attachment to home. Rigour rating: 8 (1=Who Moved My Cheese?; 10=Good to Great). The authors draw on a wide swath of academic, journalistic, and corporate sources, including several of their own case studies. —Leigh Buchanan
kelly kollar
Portion of businesses that expect to lay off employees in the next 12 months:
2001
A skimmer’s guide to the latest business books
GET REAL BY JASON FRIED
Starting Over
Sometimes, the best way to improve something is to begin again from scratch. Even if it’s your top-selling product In 2004, 37signals, the software company I co-founded, released a web-based projectmanagement and collaboration tool called Basecamp. At the time, we mostly did web design; Basecamp was a side project that we developed in our spare time to make it easier for us to work together. Back then, project-management software was mostly about charts, graphs, statistics, and one-way broadcasts. Basecamp was different. It provides team members with a consistent place to work on projects and tools to swap ideas, share feedback, make revisions, and deliver the final project online. Millions of people across nearly every industry have used Basecamp to manage more than eight million projects; 96 per cent of users say they would recommend the software to others. That can mean only one thing: it’s time to start over. Why mess with something that has proved so successful? There are a couple of reasons. For one, eight years is a long time. Consider the ways in which the world has changed over the past eight years. We’ve learned a lot about collaborating in that time. We’ve received tons of feedback from users, many of whom have shown us the ways in which they work. Plus, there are technologies available that didn’t exist back then. But that’s only part of it. About a year ago, we began discussing how we might improve our best-selling product. The more we talked, the more it became clear that the only way to significantly improve Basecamp was to start over. Think about a product’s life span. When something new is released to the public—and this is especially true of software—it’s hardly set in stone. You get feedback from customers and make modifications. You add features, refine existing ones, and make things better over time. If you really listen and do it right, the product earns its success. But paradoxically, that success makes it harder to change. As time goes by, people get used to things the way they are. And the more someone is accustomed to doing something a certain way, the harder it is to ask him or her to change. When it comes to introducing ideas, the years have a way of boxing you in. Illustration by ANIL t
And that’s where we found ourselves with Basecamp—a successful product that was tough to change in major ways. Of course, it has evolved; over the years, we’ve made thousands of incremental improvements to the software. But now we have ideas that are more revolutionary than incremental. We think these ideas will dramatically enhance Basecamp’s speed, power, and flexibility. The problem is that we cannot make these kind of changes in the existing product. Over time, software builds up legacy. The old technology is baked in, and the roots of the product are so knotted that simply unwinding them becomes a massive undertaking. Think about trying to uproot a 250-year-old oak tree versus a two-year-old one. The easy thing to do is nothing. But continuing on the current path is a time-tested formula for complacency. Of course, customers have a way of building up legacy, too, and there’s bound to be some grumbling. We’ll deal with any such issues as they arise. But one thing is certain: starting over doesn’t have to mean forcing change on existing customers. We’ll have two versions of Basecamp—the Classic version and the new version. Users will be able to switch to the new Basecamp or stick with the Basecamp they are already comfortable with. After a year of hard work, this is all set to happen soon. How will our customers receive it? In an upcoming column, I’ll let you know. Jason Fried is co-founder of 37signals, a Chicago-based software firm, and co-author of the book Rework. March 2012 | INC. | 13
PASSIONS
Life Outside the Office
“In golf, a player tries to bring down his handicap by strategising, much like entrepreneurship.”
14 | INC. | MARCH 2012
Yogesh Bansal
Golf
In 2002, while he was still in the US, Yogesh Bansal, founder and CEO of Apna Circle.com, a social and professional networking site , was invited to a party where the talk swung to golf. “While my friends fawned over the game, I knew I was missing out on something if I didn't give it a shot.” Bansal invited himself over to play the next day, confident he’d be a pro at it. “I’m a sports person. I love competing. I'm good at badminton, squash and tennis, and also play all sorts of board games. Plus, I have killer hand-eye coordination. How hard could this be?” With his first tee off at the beginner’s range, Bansal was hooked. “I’d discovered the world's best-kept stress-buster secret. The game lets you think, strategise, and then change all of that if need be.” It’s also loaded up with adversaries—opponents, the nature, weather and other odds. Since then, Bansal has participated in pro-amp and corporate championships across India. Though his increasingly busy work life doesn't let him get to the golf course as often as he'd like, Bansal takes the odd weekend holiday just to tee off. Three must-haves for a great game: n Enthusiastic players n Bright and sunny weather n Fantastic grounds
photograph by subhojit paul
Best grounds Pinehurst Golf Resort, North Carolina, US n DLF Golf & Country Club, Gurgaon n
Golf guru Tiger Wood—he was the reigning champion for three years in a row
reported by rohini banerjee
The Scuba Sutras BY Guhesh Ramanathan
Be Current-wise
Letting go is an important lesson. Sometimes, it is also the smartest thing to do A typical dive actually begins on the boat itself. A dive leader gathers the group and briefs them for 10 minutes, covering details of what the dive site looks like—the underwater terrain, the depth, and the marine life one can hope to see. The leader also points out the direction in which the dive will begin, the approximate distance, and where you can expect currents. In diver lingo, this session is quaintly named “plan the dive” and as divers, we are expected to “dive the plan”. Not following this plan can lead to interesting results like it happened in the Maldives with us. The islands of Maldives offer the world’s most pristine diving, easily distracting a diver. While our dive leader was briefing us, my wife and I kept looking over the side of the boat—awestruck with the beauty. The waters were crystal clear with 100 per cent visibility, and we could see the top of the reef, roughly 10 metres down. Were those really white tip reef sharks? We couldn’t wait to roll off. Needless to say, we ignored most of what our leader was saying to our group of six. We especially missed the bit about currents. He had said there was the likelihood that we would be diving against the current and that we should let the current carry us back to the boat. But we were in a rush to dive in. Within minutes of his
16 | INC. | MARCH 2012
giving us the go ahead, we kitted up in double-quick time, did a rapid check of each other’s equipment and with one back-flip, we were in the blue. As we waited for the rest of the group, we kept our faces under water to see the fish. It was a feast—brilliant parrot fish darted around and a school of banner fish sailed illustration by anil t
The Scuba Sutras
around us. And, then there were the sharks! We could see at least three white-tip reef sharks (yes, before you ask, they are harmless). We went down with the rest of the group to the reef top but actually we were in our own world. Unfortunately, we didn’t realise that the current was slowly pulling us away from the group. And within minutes, that current was a raging force. We were pulled into it and over the next 20 minutes, we were treated to a wild ride—literally a fast merrygo-round over the reef tops. I confess that we were scared stiff. We’d never dived alone before. We didn’t know the area and both of us weren’t strong swimmers. After the first few minutes of desperately trying to fight the current, something amazing happened. We let ourselves go and quit fighting the surge. That led us to perhaps the most magical dive we’ve ever had. We were in a surge current which pulls you strongly in one direction for a few seconds, then it lets up for another few seconds when we could drift at peace. It was like being on a swing except we were moving forward and then slowing down instead of going up and down. Best of all it felt like the swing was moving so we could continuously cover new ground and incredible sights. We saw parrot fish nibbling at the reef; schools of snappers that would dart away when the current took us toward them and then slowly regroup when we slowed down, only to dart away again; a dusky moray eel would slowly turn its head to look at us suspiciously as we went back and forth; and millions of fronds of sea anemone that swayed in the current and had clown fish darting through them. Because of the currents, the dive required absolutely no effort from us. We were able to last out more than an hour on it. This reminds me so much of the time when I quit Digital Equipment to become an entrepreneur in 1996. With two old friends, we started a placement company, TVA Infotech, born from a strong demand in the marketplace for IT professionals. The Indian economy had opened up and Indian IT companies such as Wipro, Infosys and TCS were beginning to look beyond the border for business. Soon enough, the Y2K problem was upon us. In a nutshell, this is the Y2K problem for those who have forgotten it.
Basically, older computer systems and applications used to skimp on how to code dates. Mostly, dates were coded as two digits for the day, two for the month, and two for the year. What this meant was that as long as it was ’89, ’90, or even ’95 or ’96, there was really no problem. Software applications could understand this, and do their calculations accordingly. But what would happen when we touched the turn of the century and the date would become ’00? For example, what would happen to a loan that had been sanctioned by a bank, for 20 years, in 1985? In 1999, the bank computer would dutifully report that the loan had been in existence for 14 years. What would happen at the turn of the century?
TVA Infotech was born in early 1999 just as this demand was beginning to pick up. Our mission was simple—to solve the demand for IT professionals by scouting for people IT companies would hire. But, we were misfits. All three of us were MBAs from some of the top management schools in India. Did we know where we could find “kids with barely any experience” and send them to IT companies? No way. Soon, our fate seemed sealed. I’m not going to get into the sad details, and there aren’t prizes for guessing that we failed. We stuck it out gamely for a year. By the end of the year, we had placed one person we’d pulled out of a Bengaluru company— a couple of buildings away from our office.
When you dive, or build a business, learn to go with the flow. Markets often tell you which way you need to go. Would the computers report 15 years? Or would they report minus 85 years and automatically cancel all access to the bank account? This issue was complicated further because no one really knew how applications were coded. Most of the software had been written years ago. Documentation was incomplete or nonexistent. The older systems were often written in archaic languages such as COBOL, while newer generation of programmers understood more recent languages such as C or C++. This was a big break for Indian IT— every global company was looking for people who could delve into millions of lines of old code, look for those lines where the date had been coded in the standard dd-mm-yy format, and rewrite it to ddmm-yyyy format. As a follow-up, they were also looking for people who could test these applications. Indian IT companies needed thousands of programmers.
Our early days were a disaster. We couldn’t find the young recruits. So we decided to go with another flow—by biting the bullet and placing software programmers who had been reaching out to us. It was magical. Driven by this demand, TVA Infotech boomed. By 1999, we had raced ahead of many placement companies that dotted India. By 2001, we were among the largest and best known placement companies, working with over 300 clients. It’s a lesson I’ve completely imbibed into me. When you dive or build a business, remember to let go and learn to go with the flow. Sometimes, the market tells you which way you need to go. Follow those currents— they can be the best thing you do for your business.
Guhesh Ramanathan is a mentor at the entrepreneurship cells of IIM Bangalore and IIM Ahmedabad. He serves on the boards of several companies and is an advanced certified scuba diver. MARCH 2012 | INC. | 17
innovation
Companies on the Cutting Edge
“Devices should be simple. Customers should be able to operate them in a minute.” —Mallesh Reddy, co-founder & CEO, iTrans
18 | INC. | MARCH 2012
Tcop
iTrans
Wireless Cop
Before he started iTrans, Mallesh Reddy had 13 years of combined experience in technology and management abroad. His twin passions were wireless and automobile technologies. When India beckoned, Reddy came calling and soon invested in a home and a car, and the safety of both gave him sleepless nights. “It was then that I started to think of a product that would connect my car with my mobile and help me track it 24x7. What if I could trigger an alarm from afar,” remembers Reddy. That’s when a team of three, including Reddy, started cracking on a device. Tcop was launched seven months later. Tcop enables two-way wireless communication between a vehicle and owner. In case of theft, the device sends an SMS alert and allows the owner to trigger a siren by sending an SMS to the device. Owners can also track the stolen vehicle. Graded Security Available in three models. A customer can decide the
number of SMSes he or she wishes to receive (read: the level of security) by selecting from the basic, silver or gold plans offered
Photograph by S. Radhakrishna
Security Features SMS alert in case of theft Allows the bike and car to be located using the siren-onand-off feature A siren-on-and-off feature to alert the driver
reported by Rohini Banerjee
Your Business Toolbox
The Goods
Now Playing: 3-D Presentations Projectors to wow the crowd Looking for new ways to spice up your slide
shows? A new breed of projectors lets you bring a little Avatar to the boardroom by adding 3-D content to presentations. We tested the following four models. Here are the results. —John Brandon
Courtesy Company (4)
Acer H9500BD
Our top pick, Acer’s 15.9-pound projector, which has a 50,000:1 contrast ratio, is the only one of the group that automatically converts 2-D videos and still images to 3-D. During our test, we converted videos, an Excel pie chart, and a PowerPoint slide into 3-D by clicking a menu setting. The resulting images looked crisp and colourful and popped off the screen. The included pair of 1.8-ounce glasses, which lasts 60 hours when fully charged, was the most comfortable of the bunch. One gripe: The projector’s remote does not have a button for switching easily to 3-D mode. cost: $2,000, plus $69 a pair for extra glasses ILlustration By Anil T
JVC DLA-F110E
With a high 30,000:1 contrast ratio, this 33-pound JVC model projected the most life-like images during our test, including a scientific drawing and a 3-D version of the animated movie Rio. You can adjust image focus and positioning using the included remote, which, unlike the Acer’s, also has a handy button for switching to 3-D mode. On the downside, the projector does not come with the required 3-D glasses, which weigh 1.9 ounces and last 50 hours on a full charge. cost: $7,495, plus $179 a pair for glasses and $79 for an emitter that connects them to the projector
Before you buy
3-D projectors come with, at most, one pair of 3-D glasses, so you will have to purchase extra pairs for groups. You can find 3-D content for your presentations on a variety of websites, including 3DImages.com.
Optoma TX675UTi-3D
The only “short-throw” model we tested, this 16.7-pound projector sits next to a screen, making it ideal for smaller rooms. Still images and videos looked crisp and clear in 3-D despite the projector’s relatively low 3,000:1 contrast ratio. As with the other models here, you will need a special app, such as Stereoscopic Player, to project 3-D images from a laptop. The projector comes with a remote that has a button for switching to 3-D mode. It does not come with the required 2.8-ounce glasses, which last 70 hours when fully charged. cost: $1,699, plus $99 a pair for extra glasses
ViewSonic PLED-W500
We were unimpressed with this lightweight, 2.6-pound projector, which has a 6,000:1 contrast ratio. A 3-D science image looked crisp and bright during our test, but 3-D movies were a bit blurry and dim. The included remote does not have a dedicated button for switching to 3-D mode, but it does include a red laser pointer and buttons for adjusting the size and position of images. The projector comes with a pair of glasses that weighs 2 ounces and lasts 50 hours when fully charged. cost: $659, plus $99 a pair for extra glasses March 2012 | INC. | 2 1
the goods
Products + Services
All work and no play makes office a dull place Grab some adventure Not all management lessons can be learnt in conference rooms. Try these exciting
escapades near Mumbai and Delhi to sharpen your employees’ team and leadership skills, and better their performance in office. The biggest plus—the learning is accompanied with lots of fun! —Inc. India 1.Headrush Urban Extreme
SHOWCASE
Crystal Clear While there are several web conference calling options in the market, nothing beats the clarity and quality of sound over a landline phone. Which is why Polycom’s Sound Station IP 5000 is ideal for such communication in small conference rooms and executive offices. You can hold a conversation with up to six people simultaneously using this phone. The device ensures reduced listener fatigue by keeping echoes and drop-outs to the minimum as people speak. Users can talk in their normal voice and still be clearly heard seven feet away. The phone also resists disturbances from ringing mobile phones or other wireless devices kept nearby to ensure distractionfree conversations. The device has three sensitive microphones with 360-degree coverage to keep sound as natural as being physically there. It also comes with a high-resolution backlit display for vital call information and multi-language support. Power: IEEE 802.3af Power over Ethernet (built in) Optional external universal AC power supply kit: 100-240V, 0.4A, 48V/19W Phone dimensions: 11.4X10.6X2.6 inches Phone console weight: 0.52 kg
2 2 | INC. | MARCH 2012
Not much of a team sport, rock climbing is still a superb adventure sport for personal development (which will eventually shape the professional performance) of your employees. It requires strength, endurance and mental control to constantly motivate yourself to climb a steep wall of boulders. Located amidst Powai’s skyscrapers, Headrush’s “extreme zone” provides large corporate bookings of upto 500 people for rock climbing and other rope courses. Banquet and DJ facilities are also available on demand. If you’re looking for an off-beat office trip without having to go out of the city, head to Headrush, anytime of the year. 2.Camp Feel Factor
When five people manoeuver a single boat in a ferocious river, it teaches you more about coordination and team work than any assignment in the office can. Rafting is a great team sport for your employees and Camp Feel Factor, located 36 kms from Rishikesh, is a mustgo-to for white river rafting on the Ganges. The camp organises rafting trips in the season of February to May and then September to November. You can also try cliff jumping and body surfing in the crispy waters. The accommodation is not luxurious but comfortable, with 12x12 feet tents and a beautiful view of the river. 3.Peak Adventure Tour
When you’re constantly thrown into new environments at the workplace, you need to be flexible enough to adapt each time and stick it out till the end. Trekking in India, a subsidiary of Peak Adventure Tour organises mountain biking tours through the flat valleys of Kumaon to help your employees experience that. Navigation and problem-solving attitudes develop as your team thrives to find its way through rough, unknown terrains, roughly 5,500 feet above sea level. 4.Strawberry Outbound
If you don’t have enough swimmers on the team and are less of a risk taker, give trekking a shot! Located 80 kms from Mumbai, Strawberry Outbound’s training site at this hill station organises 12 corporate training programmes every month. You can choose to stay in luxury Swiss tents, cottages or a big bungalows at the venue. Strawberry organises trekking tours to the famous Kondana caves, waterfall abseiling and valley crossing along with several games like human foosball and ice scultping to help employees bond outside the office. After a good trek, there’s a swimming pool and a massage centre to relax and enjoy.
Products + Services
the goods
tech trends john brandon
Forgot a File at the Office? There’s an app for that Like many business travellers, I depend on my tablet for working on the go. But no matter how well I prepare, I often find myself forgetting a file on my office computer. On a recent trip to Los Angeles, I tested out Splashtop Remote Desktop and LogMeIn Ignition, tablet apps that let you access another computer remotely. My goal? To see how much work I could do on my office PC while cruising 20,000 feet in the air. LogMeIn Ignition costs $29.99 and works on a variety of smartphones and tablets, including the new Kindle Fire. Before heading to the airport, I installed the program on my office computer, which I left running. Once the plane reached cruising altitude, I fired up my iPad 2 and connected to the in-flight WiFi service. Then I signed in to the LogMeIn app and clicked a button to start a remote session with my office computer. My desktop screen popped up on my tablet instantly. I had fallen behind on my invoices, so I tapped an icon on the desktop screen to open my Microsoft Accounting programme. I created several invoices, typing on my tablet’s touchscreen keyboard. I saved them as PDFs and e-mailed them to my editors, all from my desktop. I also watched flash videos, something I cannot normally do on my tablet. Another nice perk? I could share documents between computers by simply placing them in a folder. I was impressed. My biggest beef? The app was frustratingly slow at times. Also, the iPad app does not let you play music stored on your desktop, though LogMeIn for Android does. On the same flight, I tried Splashtop, which costs just $2.99 and also works on a variety of smartphones and tablets. As with LogMeIn, I had to install the software on my office computer before I left and leave the machine running. During my flight, I tapped into my desktop remotely by entering my Gmail login information. I typed up some more invoices and watched a few videos. The app registered my taps much illustration by Shigil N
more swiftly and accurately than LogMeIn did. Even better, it let me listen to the music in my PC’s Windows Media library. Splashtop was quickly winning me over, but it does have some drawbacks. Unlike LogMeIn, it does not include a file-transfer
logmein ignition
splashtop remote desktop
works on:
works on:
Android tablets and smartphones, iPads, iPhones, and the Kindle Fire
killer feature: Easy file transfer between two computers cost: $29.99
The same tablets and phones as LogMeIn, plus the HP TouchPad and Nook Color
killer feature:
Access to iTunes and Windows Media libraries cost: 99 cents to $2.99
tool (you can e-mail files to yourself from your remote computer). It also booted me off my desktop when the plane’s WiFi signal weakened during the flight. LogMeIn slowed down but kept working. The verdict? The next time I hit the road, I plan to use the more affordable Splashtop app. I recommend it to other users looking for a way to tap into their office computers, whether they are up in the air or at the coffee shop.
social savvy
A new gauge of online influence How social are your storefronts? VenueRank can help you find out by measuring the social-media influence of individual locations. After you sign up, VenueRank analyses a variety of factors, including Foursquare check-ins, Facebook ‘likes’, and online reviews, for each of your company’s sites. Then, it uses an algorithm to assign each one a score of 1 to 100. On your VenueRank dashboard, you can check the scores, which are updated daily, along with the raw metrics, including Foursquare checkins. You can also view a map showing scores at various locations and see how you rank against benchmarks based on data from 100,000 storefronts. Then, you can e-mail score reports. cost: Starting at $499 a month —Abram Brown app RoundUp
Out of b-cards? Skanz, a free service gives users QR codes that link to their digital profiles. After signing up on Skanz.com, you can create a “Skanzsite” with contact details and a profile photo. When someone opens the Skanz app on his or her phone, your profile page pops up. CardFlick, a free app for iPhones and Android phones, lets you flick a finger to share a digital business card with a nearby CardFlick user. You can go to the CardFlick site to create a digital business card with your contact information. On the app, you can see a history of people with whom you have swapped digital cards. —Adam Brown March 2012 | INC. | 2 3
the goods
Beyond Business
Things I Cannot Live Without...
Gifting exhibitions I get to see new trends and gifting ideas to add to our collection.
Acer laptop It has a 38-hour battery life that gives me a lot of freedom.
Bestsellers I always keep two books, especially as back-up while travelling, in case the first one isn’t pacy enough. founder, Gifting Ideas
Suvir Khullar
Half-marathons I have done 16 to 17 halfmarathons in India, Switzerland, Belgium and UK. It’s a great way to explore a place.
2 4 | INC. | MARCH 2012
After six years as a merchant navy officer, Suvir Khullar quit it all to start his corporate gifting business in 1996. Back then, he had a single product to sell—car sunshades—as an advertising gift. Now his company, Gifting Ideas boasts of more than 5,000 products in its catalogue. A half-marathon maniac, his business takes him around the globe almost five times a year to gifting exhibitions. In Mumbai, he’s also part of of a 70-member running group. “Even though marathon running is an individual sport, I enjoy motivating others around me to run,” he says. He also loves a good book for company when travelling. As for the gift guru’s most memorable gift, it’s the iPad his better half got him on his 40th birthday. —Ira Swasti
...and What I Covet Wildlife safaris in Africa is something I have to try!
Everything you need to know to run your business in today’s economy
: : : : : : : : : : : A monthly guide to policies, procedures and practices
Remove booklet along dotted Line
02
Be A Better Speaker An American study shows that adults fear public speaking more than they fear death. This astounding finding led comedian Jerry Seinfeld to once quip, “At a funeral, the average person would rather be in the casket than giving the eulogy.” What is it about public speaking that people shy away from it so fervently? “A lack of confidence causes speaking anxiety,” says Feroza Engineer, a trainer with Dale Carnegie India. “Concerns about public speaking emanate from the inability to face an audience. It isn’t really about a lack of speaking skills.” That said, learning how to speak more effectively can go a long way in helping an individual gain the confidence to address and make a lasting impact on an audience. Founder of Qualified Learning Systems, Shiv Khera describes public speaking as a learnt art and science—art because speaking is more spontaneous than merely delivering information. A good speaker has the ability to touch hearts and minds, and thus change the physical and emotional state of the audience, provided that the speaker is sensitive to the needs of each individual listener. The best part is that speaking is a science as well. Precise practices and techniques help get positive results. For entrepreneurs certainly, the skill can be a valuable boon, while making pitches, meeting potential clients and achieving buy-in from partners and employees. Read on for tips to pull off a great talk. —Charu Bahri
Vol. 03 No. 02 | inc. guidebook
02
Be a better speaker : : : : : : : : : : : : :
Prepare Well Keep it simple: Good speeches convey a simple message, clearly. Motivational speaker and corporate trainer Minocher Patel recommends focusing on delivering the key points in the time allotted. Try not to go overboard and say too much—excessive description detracts from the main message. Not to mention that a simpler speech is easier to rehearse and deliver. Also, peoples’ attention spans are shorter now, and their ability to retain information is less. If you need to leave the audience with facts and figures, convey the basic idea in your speech and share the hard details in a handout. The audience can process the additional information at their ease. “Since people have become very result-oriented, a talk goes down best when the content is brief and focuses on outcomes. The message should be easily actionable,” adds Usha Periasamy, VP, brands and operations, Royal Classic Groups. Know your subject: “In-depth knowledge of the talk’s subject makes one confident,” says Periasamy. Nothing holds an audience’s attention more than a passionate, energised speaker. There can be no shortcuts to passion—it comes from genuinely knowing and loving the subject. Listeners can tell good speakers apart from those who have just memorised lines. The latter lack command over the situation, especially if challenging questions are asked. It takes a thorough knowledge of the subject to make a speech interactive and to respond to the audiences’ needs. inc. guidebook | Vol. 03 No. 02
Show, don’t tell: Personal experiences help establish a connect with the gathering. Stories go down much better than facts. That’s why Patel says, “Good speakers are good storytellers.” Work humour and relevant (not rambling) examples into your narration. Speaking from personal experience is always useful—your passion is evident when you speak about something that is a part of you and this helps win over the audience. The audience sees you as open and willing to share yourself, and that merits their attention.
Don’t fear silence.It can create emphasis and impact. Practise a lot: Put simply, speaking is a skill. The more you practice, the more proficient a speaker you become. “Practice, practice, practice, is the way to hold an audience spellbound,” says Anurag Aggarwal, a public speaking trainer. Give it your all, advises Dale Carnegie’s Engineer. She stresses ‘live’ practice —in front of a mirror or people you are comfortable with. You can even record and play your voice. Practice improves speech delivery. It is equally important to get into the skin of the presentation, which means keep at it until the day of the speech. Practising aloud compels one to enunciate words and get the pronunciation and grammar right. If in doubt, ask an expert. There is no bigger put-off than incorrect language. Also, speaking aloud helps develop
the habit of using short sentences, which are much easier to understand.
Speak Effectively
Use silence for effect: Good speakers talk at the right speed. Speaking too fast rushes the thinking process and can muddle speech. Pause during an oration, for effect. This also gives the audience time to digest the last point. Don’t fear silence, it can create emphasis and impact. An interlude gives a speaker an opportunity to collect his thoughts and to find the right words, instead of “umming” and “ahhing”. Silence also helps build anticipation among an audience for what the speaker has to say next. Use body language: “A good public speaker is a presenter and a performer. It isn’t enough to get the structure and substance right, you must also have style to make an influential speech,” says Khera. Body language is a part of a speaker’s style quotient. According to Patel, “It includes the ability to modulate your voice, gesticulate to create interest, stand straight with your hands in front, and make eye contact with individual members of the audience.” Speakers who address one person at a time, by making eye contact, are perceived as genuine. This builds trust for them and for what they have to say. Speakers who have had the opportunity to interact with the audience prior to the presentation can use this familiarity to their advantage. They can make eye contact with known individuals at the outset, and slowly extend their attention to the rest of the audence.
Respond to the audience: Good speaking is about being out there, adopting an inclusive approach and taking the audience along. Good speakers aim to hold a dialogue with their listeners, not preach to them. After all, delivering a talk is about the audience, not about the speaker. “For this, the speaker must be aligned to the audience’s thoughts. Otherwise, instead of allowing the transfer of learning, a talk could become a boring monologue,” cautions Engineer. Practise responsive speaking by focusing on the audience. Start with one individual, watch the facial expressions and body language as you move through critical points. Then, move to other members of the audience. The more you practise reading
people, the better you will get at it. Responsive speakers use their observation to give the audience what they need. This may involve abandoning or improvising upon the planned script if the game plan does not appear to find resonance with the audience. Remember, speaking on the fly requires a thorough knowledge of the subject.
Get Audience Feedback
Audience participation makes a talk lively and keeps interest levels high. Still, there are differing opinions about whether to invite questions during the lecture, say after each part is concluded, or at the end. If the speech is long, Patel feels this is best done during the course of the seminar as “that takes care of queries promptly and
retains interest. Otherwise, as they say, when an audience starts thinking, they stop listening.” But the speaker must be experienced enough to know how much time to give to each answer and not get stuck on a question. If the speech is short, allocate some time at the end for questions. At the end of the day, remember that effective speakers are made, not born. “Only babies are born. A good speaker is a blend of many ingredients —hard work, perseverance, knowledge, dedication, and so on. Inherent potential can be developed to make a charismatic speaker,” sums up Swati Sachdeva, a senior trainer who also works with Anurag Aggarwal. So, tap your talent. The world is waiting to hear from you.
02
be a better speaker : : : : : : : : : : : : :
These tips will help you sail through that dreaded speech:
Beth Fascitelli, head of consulting at Meta-Culture, a conflict management consultancy, shares tips to address workplace disputes successfully. Improve your vocabulary: An extensive vocabulary can be a powerful
speaking tool. Make a conscious effort to learn new words and incorporate them into your everyday speech. Quite apart from making an impact during your next speech, it will positively influence your day-to-day office interactions. Learn how to relax: Nervousness and shyness can affect speech. Learn
to relax in front of the audience. Breathing exercises can help calm your mind and body. Think as if you’re in a position to put your audience at ease. That can focus your attention away from your anxiety. Deal with nervous symptoms: Being nervous can motivate you to prepare
better for the speech. Always keep a glass of water handy. If your knees knock, shift your weight and flex your knees. Lock trembling hands together. Pause, take a deep breath and smile if you hear your voice quivering. Keep your notes handy: It is a fact that speakers tend to forget their next
point. Prepare for this eventuality by keeping your notes in place. Also, plan a speech that flows logically. That way, even if you forget a point, backing up and summarising the previous item is likely to lead you on correctly.
Notes:
More Tips to Improve Speaking Skills Some more tips to help you make a great speech: Visualise success: See yourself holding the audience glued to their seats, enjoying every word. Better, see yourself holding a conversation with the audience. Your tone will become more personal and keep them riveted. Know your audience: Tailor your speech to your audience. For instance, high brow language does not go down well with lower ranking employees. A lay audience will not comprehend technical jargon. Don’t fear blanking out: Don’t panic if you draw a blank on stage. It happens. Just ask, “Now, where was I?” The audience will be happy to answer. Take a public speaking class: If your work entails oral presentation skills, and you are lacking in this department, consider enrolling in a public speaking course.
Resources Read up about responsive speaking at http://www.
amazon.com/What-Every-BODYSaying-Speed-Reading/ dp/0061438294/ref=sr_1_1?ie=U TF8&s=books&qid=1236266350 &sr=1-1
Get instant tips to improve your speaking skills at http://
www.amazon.com/ImproveCommunication-Instantlyprinting-revised/dp/0966141490
Conquer public speaking
fears at http://www.stresscure. com/jobstress/speak.html
inc. guidebook | Vol. 03 No. 02
Balancing Acts BY Meg Cadoux Hirshberg
The Family Sabbatical
Extended breaks are wonderful things, unless the spouse and kids have other plans A few years ago, my husband Gary instituted a two-month paid sabbatical for anyone who has worked at least five years at Stonyfield Farm. The program has been one of our company’s most popular benefits: So far, almost 200 employees have taken advantage of it. I am ever hopeful—and ever doubtful— that one day, Gary will be among them. Entrepreneurs understand in theory the restorative value of downtime, but they are notoriously tough to pry from their companies for extended periods. The reasons are fairly obvious. No. 1 is fear the company won’t progress—or may even stumble—without its leader. Others include addiction to the work and to the pace of work, and unease at being separated from the founder’s mainspring of identity. Unless the entrepreneur is burned out, persuading him to take off a couple of months or, heaven forbid, six months to a year won’t be easy. It’s like asking him to become someone else for a while—to stop doing things he loves so he can do things that he and his family might love. Still, I’m a big advocate of career breaks, both for active entrepreneurs and for serialists between ventures. Full stops are a reminder that life is more than what happens in the interstices of business: They provide an opportunity not just to rest but also to change and grow. Given sufficient scope and thoughtfully managed, a sabbatical can be a life stage unto itself. The entrepreneur, his relationship with his family, and even his company may sustain benefits far beyond those of a mere vacation.
2 6 | INC. | MARCH 2012
Jay W. Vogt, a Boston-based organizational consultant, is my sabbatical poster boy. It’s not just the duration of his leaves that impresses me—it’s also how hard he works to make them happen and the importance he invests in them. In 1987, when Jay’s business was just five years old, he and his new wife, Stephanie, travelled around the world. The trip took Jay away from his young company for almost half a year. And this was before the Internet. “We fast-forwarded our marriage,” Jay told me. “We lived five years in five months. It was an unbelievable gift to ourselves. I still get teary thinking about it.” Then, in 2004, Jay took off another six months to live with Stephanie and their teenaged daughter, Camilla, in Mexico. The couple wound up buying a illustration by ANIL T
Balancing Acts
retirement home there, and Camilla, now in college, has become so enamored of travel that she spent last summer in Senegal and will study in France her junior year. “I look at how transformative these trips were for our family,” Jay told me, “and ask myself not how did we do this twice but why we didn’t do this more often.” Jay and Stephanie managed to save what they thought the vacations would cost and also accounted for the shoulder times, before and after, when Jay would be winding down and then rebuilding his business. Jump-starting his practice after each sabbatical was easier than he imagined. Before the couple embarked on their world tour, a respected colleague warned Jay that he was committing professional suicide. Instead, “my clients’ actual reactions shocked me,” says Jay. “There was an almost universal respect and a wistful envy—a sense of ‘gosh, I wish I could do that.’ ” Of course, the megatrip is just one way to
spend a sabbatical. If the goal is to take a break from business, then holing up in your den to write a screenplay or embarking on a home-improvement spree or training for an Ironman is equally valid. But long vacations are a good way to at least start sabbaticals, because all family members are simultaneously lifted out of their routines. That makes the entrepreneur’s reentry into domestic life less jarring. Jim Garland, founder of a private-jetcleaning company called Sharp Details, in Dulles, Virginia, contrived a plan whereby he, his wife, and their four kids would visit 30 countries in nine months. They would travel two or three weeks at a time, then settle down for a month of home (as it were) schooling. Away from the familiar, always on the move, the Garlands soon settled into a pattern of no patterns. “We had no ‘normal’ on the road,” says Jim’s wife, Carrie. “It would have been harder if he’d taken a sabbatical and stayed home.” Even so, the initial transition was rocky. “I love my family to death,” says Jim. “But I went through the withdrawal from my engagement with work to being with my kids 24x7. I asked my wife, ‘Are they always this crazy?’ ”
The problem isn’t that entrepreneurs find so much family time onerous but that they and their families have been experiencing time differently. Most company founders charge ahead at warp speed, grappling with one huge challenge and momentous decision after another. Their families progress, too, but they do so according to the gentler rhythms of biology and society. School year follows school year. Another birthday. Another dramaclub production. Consequently, when entrepreneurs take months off from work, they are transitioning not just from fast to slow (slower, anyway) but also from making things happen to experiencing life as it naturally unfolds. The result can be more stress rather than less. Prospects for deepening familial bonds instead of annoying one another improve
The couple compromised with a fourmonth sojourn in Europe and Tahiti. After that, Richard was largely on his own. He went winter camping, visited friends, and scuba-dived in the Great Barrier Reef. While home, he enjoyed taking his son to the playground and remodelling their new apartment. But he now believes he inadvertently pushed his wife away by “being in her space too much.” The marriage is strong, Richard says, but the sabbatical taught him that “our rhythms are different. We were unaccustomed to being together full time. I’d been a workaholic. So my attitude was, ‘I’m here—let’s do something together!’ But she was trying to kick-start her career after the baby, and I had too much time on my hands.” Sabbaticals—too rare and precious to squander—are among those things that, if
The problem is that entrepreneurs and their families have been experiencing time differently. if the family works out in advance how the entrepreneur will integrate herself. How much contact will she maintain with the office? What will be her role in the household during her months as a civilian? How do her plans for the period jibe with those of other family members? What can the family do that will make the best use of its time together? Richard Humphrey regrets not having had that discussion in 2007, when he decided to take a year off between companies. After working 80 hours a week to build a product-design firm, Richard wanted to “live all the dreams I had deferred” before launching Kavoo Air, a private air-taxi service in New England. “I assumed Michelle had embraced my dreams,” he said, speaking of his wife, “but that wasn’t the case. We had a new baby, and she wanted to buy a house and settle down, not go live in France for a year.”
not done right, probably should not be done at all. Sure, I wish Gary had given the kids and me a few months of his undivided attention back when everyone was still living at home. But it would have been worse if we’d tried and failed—if he’d turned restless or (shudders) used the time to cook up another business. For entrepreneurs, the desirable outcome of a sabbatical will be rest and rejuvenation, but also a new understanding of how family life unfolds when they’re not there to see it. Internalizing that knowledge, entrepreneurs will move in greater synchronicity with their families long after family members return to their own orbits.
Meg Cadoux Hirshberg (mhirshberg@inc.com) writes a regular column about the impact of entrepreneurial businesses on families. She is married to Gary Hirshberg, president and CEO of Stonyfield Farm. March 2012 | INC. | 2 7
It has taken Mini Yadav less than seven years to fill Le Marche shelves with gourmet food from all over the world—and build a `70-crore business in the process. By Pooja Kothari
Photographs BY Subhojit Paul
The
Gourmet 2 8 | INC. | MARCH 2012
DIVA
March 2012 | INC. | 2 9
THE Gourmet Diva
“I was amazed at the name she had built.”
That’s Nakul Yadav, the 22-year-old son of Mini Yadav, founder and owner of Le Marche retail stores in Delhi. We’re sitting in her office in Vasant Vihar, home to Delhi’s swish set and the starting point of the Le Marche journey. Having been away from the Capital—first at a boarding school in south India and later at a college in UK—Nakul was rather taken aback by how far his mom’s “complete food store” had come in those years. He isn’t the only one. Le Marche is a story that’s made people and businesses sit up and take notice. While the public is lapping up the “superior shopping experience” at the stores, those in the food import business are glad to find shelf space to display their wares. And still others in the retail industry are wondering how she gets it right—every time. Since 2005, Yadav has opened nine stores—all at some of the toniest addresses in Delhi and Gurgaon—and provided employment to nearly 300 people. Her latest offering, a 17, 000 sq ft store in South Point Mall in Gurgaon, is one of the biggest grocery stores in the city. Her company Marche Retail, which owns these stores, is hoping to close the current financial year with revenues in excess of `70 crore. More than financial success, she has been lauded for the experience her stores offer to shoppers. For the last two consecutive years, she’s won the prestigious Golden Spoon Awards for excellence in food retailing. “That’s no small achievement, especially for an independent retail chain,” says Rakesh Banga, director, Banyan Finefoods India. Banga is right. What Mini’s managed to do with Le Marche is no mean feat—especially since she works in an industry that com3 0 | INC. | MARCH 2012
bines the difficulties of retail trading with the unpredictability of consumer preferences in food. “Le Marche was the pioneer in Delhi and there is no denying that this has a lot to do with Mini,” says Mohit Khattar, managing director, Nature’s Basket. That’s some praise, coming as it does from competition. What’s more, “She managed to retain the advantages of being the first mover for quite some time,” adds Banga, who’s been in the food business for two decades and has watched Le Marche grow. Some might argue that Mini was simply in the right place at the right time. The food and grocery retail market in India has seen its best decade so far, growing from a meagre $2 billion in 2006 to $9 billion in 2011—a compounded growth of 30 per cent. (Source: Technopak Analysis) This growth is quite clearly reflected in the shelves of grocers such as Food Bazaar and the relatively new Godrej’s Nature’s Basket. One of the youngest players in the industry, Nature’s Basket claims to have grown at a CAGR of 66 per cent in the last three years alone.
Le Marche The Milestones 1989
THE Gourmet Diva
Mini’s husband, Naresh, opens Sugar & Spice, a 300 sq ft store in Vasant Vihar in Delhi selling delicatessen products as a franchisee of Oberoi hotels’ in-flight catering service operation.
Mini takes sole charge of the second Sugar & Spice outlet at Khan Market in Delhi. The family diversifies into manufacturing of bakery, chocolates and delicatessen.
2005
The first Le Marche store, covering 6,000 sq ft of space, opens its doors to the residents of the elite Vasant Vihar in Delhi.
Three smaller express stores opened in Gurgaon in quick succession.
2007
Two large format stores, each covering 10,000 sq ft, opened in DLF malls in Saket and Vasant Kunj.
Indeed, Mini opened up the doors of Le Marche at the right time. The Indian consumer was earning more, travelling more, and therefore, demanding more than ever before. The move from basic groceries to exotic food stuff was part of that journey. “The opportunity was undoubtedly there. Consumers were certainly ready for international foods, processed foods and more meats and dairy products,” explains Arvind Singhal, chairman, Technopak. The sale of marinated meats at Le Marche stores certainly corroborates this. What’s more, she worked hard to get her product mix right— something that has been touted as a major factor in Mini’s success by suppliers and competitors alike. “Her understanding of the psyche of the Indian consumer helped her develop the stores in a way that they catered to people from all walks of life,” adds Amit Lohani, CEO, Max Foods, a leading importer of food products and the Convener of Forum of Indian Food Importers. Her stores offer everything from basic everyday groceries such as pulses and masalas, to exotic imported groceries from around the world. They’re especially known for their extensive meats section. Moreover, explains Mini, the stores offer a choice between
2010
2009
Le Marche wins the “Most Admired F&G Retailer of the Year: Gourmet Foods Award” at the Coca Cola Golden Spoon Awards.
The largest Le Marche store covering nearly 17,000 sq ft of carpet area opened in a mall in Gurgaon.
2012
1992
2011
The company crosses `70 crore in turnover, and opens a Le Marche store next door to its Sugar & Spice outlet in Khan Market, one of the most upmarket retail spaces. March 2012 | INC. | 3 1
THE Gourmet Diva
three price points: low, middle and high end, thereby offering something for everyone. “For Le Marche, product selection is more about customer fit than about margins,” says Banga. Even at her newest store, where she needed to fill more shelves than ever before, she has not compromised with quality. After having given her suppliers a chance for the first six months, she’s now in the middle of moving out products that didn’t move off the shelves—margins notwithstanding. In Mini’s case, however, more than right time, the “right place” has fed her success. Of course, Delhi, and its growing expatriate population pushed the demand for international foods. Plus, her penchant for picking the right location has been her secret sauce. “We’re very finicky about our locations, in terms of the buying power of the people living around our stores. We go where the spending power is,” admits Mini. It’s no wonder then that Marche Retail has charted an impressive growth path in the past two years: from `40 crore in 20092010 to more than `70 crore in 2011-12.
B
orn and brought up in Delhi, Mini comes from a service-class background. Her father used to work for Indian Oil, while her mother ran a salon in Green Park, an upper middle-class neighbourhood. She studied commerce at Gargi College and got married even before her final exams. However, she was clear that she didn’t want to be just a housewife. “I had always dreamt of having a corporate life. Even as a child, I knew I wanted to go to office dressed smartly in business suits,” says the 45-year-old mother of two. Thankfully, she had married a first-generation entrepreneur, Naresh Kumar, who had started one of the first organised salons in Delhi in the 80s. And he gave Mini a taste of the life she wanted for herself. “He encouraged me to work and gave me the opportunity to do so at the salon. I would interact with customers and look after its day-to-day operations,” says she. She had no formal training either in running a business or as a stylist. Yet, she learnt the ropes, attended seminars to stay abreast of the trends in the business, and introduced the best practices she came across on her travels abroad. Within a year though, she had her son and decided to stay home to look after him. Around that time, her husband chanced upon an opportunity to collaborate with The Oberoi Group that ran multiple businesses, such as hotels and in-flight catering services. Naresh decided to sell products made at the Group’s delicatessen plant. “We opened the first Sugar & Spice outlet in 1989 in Basant Lok and that’s where the seeds for Le Marche were sown,” she reminisces. The store was a hit with the residents of Delhi. By 1992, the second outlet opened its doors, this time in the very expensive Khan Market. “I was solely in charge of it. I would open the store every morning at 8.45am and shut it every night at 9pm,” recalls Mini. In between, she would pick up her son from his playschool and drop him back home to her in-laws.
3 2 | INC. | MARCH 2012
Women And Food There’s something about the food business that attracts women to it. While there are many accomplished men who’ve run restaurants—both as owners and chefs—there’s a bevy of women who have built and run food businesses. Here are a few of them:
Rajni Bector
She started making cakes and creams as a hobby in Ludhiana in the late 70’s. Today, her company has built a name in food retailing and food services. Mrs Bector’s Cremica is a multi-crore diversified business that sells biscuits, ketchup and condiments.
Reshma Anand
She had it all—an IIM degree and a job with Hindustan Unilever. Yet, in 2007, she veered off that path to start a social enterprise called Earthy Goods. Her experience in India’s rural markets helped her put together a range of natural food products from villages around India.
THE Gourmet Diva
“We’re very finicky about our locations, in terms of the buying power of the people living around our stores.”
Ritu Dalmia
She’s one of the biggest success stories in the food business. A self-taught chef, she runs multiple restaurants in Delhi and London, has authored books and runs her cookery shows. She’s credited with making Delhi develop a taste for authentic Italian.
Ishi Khosla
She’s a practicing clinical nutritionist who’s turned her passion for healthy living into a range of products. Khosla runs Whole Foods, a health food company. Her company churns out an interesting mix—from salads and pastas to flours and snacks.
Seema Jajodia
A health freak, Jajodia started Nourish Organics to help people make healthier food choices. Launched in August 2009, Nourish Organics offers a range of organic health food products and specialises in organic nutritional bars and seed mixes.
March 2012 | INC. | 3 3
THE Gourmet Diva
That was the beginning of the gruelling 12-hour work days that remain till date. “Now that I look back, life’s been like that forever. Yet, I’ve enjoyed every bit of it,” says she. Things would have remained the same had it not been for The Oberoi Group’s decision to withdraw the franchisee rights in 1997. The Yadavs took on a new supplier and finally set up their own bakery under the name of Sugar & Spice India. They had travelled quite a lot by then and were totally fascinated by organised retail abroad. “Marks & Spencer seemed like paradise compared to what was available in India. There was a complete lack of organised retail back here,” she recalls. Markets like Khan Market and Greater Kailash had many food stores but offered a poor shopping experience. “Goods would be covered in dust and things would be dumped one on top of the other,” says Mini. So, when Modern Bazaar (a popular grocery shop in Vasant Vihar that was run out of a building owned by the Yadav family) burned down, they decided to set up a food store there—and thus the first Le Marche store opened shop in 2005. Though the idea was Naresh’s, the execution was left to Mini—something she was only too willing to go along with as long as she was given a freehand to run the place. For Mini, it was quite a jump from a 400 sq ft Sugar & Spice to a 6,000 sq ft store. “I really didn’t know what I was getting into. I just knew that I wasn’t going to sell jhadoo (brooms). So we put together the basic groceries of a GK shop along with the exotic groceries available in Khan Market,” says she of her product portfolio. But it helped that she had spent the past few years running a food shop. People who came to buy bakery products often asked for more. That ear to the consumer’s needs helped Mini decide on what wares will be displayed on the shelves including goods that she “hadn’t even heard of”.
“We hope to ramp up by another four to five outlets and increase the turnover to `200 crore by the end of 2012-13.” —Nakul Yadav
3 4 | INC. | MARCH 2012
Organised product displays were a change for Delhi shoppers. Softer touches, such as soft flowing music that changed with the time of the day and housekeeping staff who kept the store area spick-and-span, ensured a superior shopping experience, even if the goods were the same as at other places. At some stores, she put up pin boards for customers to write whatever they couldn’t find in her stores. “Whatever our customers wanted, we took it upon ourselves to make it available. This gave them the confidence that they could get what they needed at Le Marche” says Mini. Moreover, Mini worked hard to educate the consumers about newer products through promotions and food festivals which firmly established her association with exotic groceries. And that laid the foundation of the business Mini built—albeit with help from her family.
M
ini has played it quite safe till now. After opening the first store nearly six years ago, she didn’t do much till about two-and-a-half-years ago. “We waited, we learnt from our mistakes, and only then did we expand. We’re not an industrial house and we have no backing. Our own resources go into every store. So we’re very cautious about the waters we tread on,” says Mini. She almost admits to not being overly ambitious about growth. “We’re quite content with the north—Punjab and Delhi NCR. We’re ambitious in the sense that we want to see our brand everywhere. But we like to go slow and take it easy.” In fact, Mini declined an offer to set-up shop in one of the high-end malls in Mumbai. “It required one of us to shift base and we didn’t want to do that,” she admits. So far, she’s run the show with the help of her family members. Her husband helps choose locations and supplies “the infrastructure whenever a new location comes up”. Her father-in-law takes care of the 10,000 sq ft bakery in Gurgaon that supplies products to all the stores. Her father owns the outlet in Khan Market which houses Sugar & Spice, and keeps an eye on things for her. Even the younger generation has started pitching in. Her son Nakul has been helping her for the past year. He’s brought in TCS to put together strong IT systems at the back end, and streamline accounting and finance. Nearly all of her 450plus suppliers are now being paid electronically, and Mini’s been relieved from signing “100 cheques a day”. Nakul is, in fact, solely in-charge of the biggest store in the chain. Mini’s nephew,
THE Gourmet Diva
Mini-isms
In a free flowing chat, Mini Yadav tells us how she strikes a balance between work and home, and why travelling keeps her going.
On foreign direct investment On Nature’s Basket Eventually, FDI will come into the sector. I don’t see anything wrong in that. Post some investment, I see more variety of foods coming in. I see stores like ours finally playing the volume game. Yes, margins will go down but because MRPs have reduced people are buying more. It’ll be more approachable for the huge middle-class (which is everyone’s target customer demographic). We’re okay with FDI coming in. It may come in late but it does not make much of a difference to us because we have the stuff we want.on our shelves.
Of course, there is competition, but we’re all doing well. Nature’s Basket isn’t a direct competitor since their store size is much smaller. Their range of products is somewhat similar, but their size doesn’t allow them to offer a complete range like ours. A customer doesn’t want to hop shops. They want a range like ours that caters to all needs. My USP is “basic to the exotic”, whereas Nature’s Basket is totally exotic stuff, which doesn’t feature on the Indian plates. And we have low, middle and high price ranges.
Rahul, looks after the purchasing including decisions on the margins offered to suppliers. However, that can hardly remain so in future—even given the lack of ambitions of scale. As someone put it, “How many stores can she be personally involved in?” The consumer wants every Le Marche store to look the same, and offer the same quality of experience and products. That would be difficult to achieve without the help of some solid systems and processes. And though Mini is quite sure that the family’s presence isn’t needed and that “every store works on systems”, she admits that “everyone’s too dependent on me”. It’s not as if there are any serious problems with the business. Every first-generation entrepreneur goes through a similar cycle—having tasted success, the groundwork is laid for scale. “We’re also putting together a professional management team,” says Mini. However, it might not be easy for her to convince professional talent to join her, given the family’s heavy involvement in the business. On top of that, her set of internal challenges is playing out in a business landscape that’s changing very quickly. Newer players, such as Spencer’s Gourmet and HyperCITY, have entered the fray. Even chains like Easy Day are upgrading their offering to include gourmet foods. This means that customers and suppliers alike have more options now than before. Even employees have the option to move to more “professional” set ups. Most of the retail players come from business houses with deeper pockets and management bandwidth. They don’t face
On work-life balance
I have really enjoyed every moment of my life so far. I’ve never missed picking up my kids from school even once in all these years. I would work till about 1:30pm, pick them up from school, and spend my afternoon with them. And then go back to one of the stores. It’s my business, so I can manipulate my time. When I look back, I feel happy that I’ve done justice to my family and my business. I work every day except Sunday when I work for half-a-day. The morning is ours but in the second half, my husband and I visit a few stores.
On life beyond work
I love listening to music and driving. I hate riding in a car with a driver. Ever since I learnt to drive at 24, I wanted to be a rally driver. That didn’t happen. Growing up, I was a tomboy, and very adventurous. Even today, I love paragliding and water sports. My kids are my partners in my holidays. Last year, we went to Orlando in the United States, especially to do the 90 degree drop at Universal Studios. I love rollercoaster rides. I find them great stressbusters. I also love to travel. This year, we’re travelling every month for five days.
the problems of turning a family-run business into a professionally-run one that can scale up fast. Having said so, India is a growing market and there’s space for many players right now. “The market is currently under penetrated by modern suppliers. If they were to pause and start putting in place proper systems, even now, then each of them—whether Le Marche or Nature’s Basket, has the potential to become a much larger business than what they are today,” adds Technopak’s Singhal. Mini seems to have realised this and is working towards putting the house in order. “We have to become a system-driven company, and you should see many changes along those lines in the coming year,” says she. There’s an increasing realisation that this will require deeper pockets than theirs, and therefore, efforts are being made to find someone who shares their passion for the business. “We’ve decided to find equity participation from a likeminded partner and infuse funds into the business in the next financial year,” adds Mini. Nakul’s working with TCS to launch an online version of the stores, which will cater to the growing category of online shoppers who value time over anything else. They’re even thinking rather ambitiously for a change—“We hope to ramp up by another four to five outlets and increase the turnover to `200 crore by the end of 2012-13”. As if on cue, all the three Yadavs unanimously declare this isn’t a hard target to achieve given their current standing in the market. That confidence is just what they need to realise Mini’s ultimate dream—“to build a Harrods Food Hall in India and to maintain those standards”. March 2012 | INC. | 3 5
Rakesh Verma is glad his digital maps weren’t limited to a few clients—that’s not where his interest lay.
Rohan Verma knew where he was going—not even a McKinsey job could take him off-route.
3 6 | INC. | MARCH 2012
Digital maps of
5,76,000 towns
and villages
The
Street level maps of 4,000 cities
Journey’s Mapped
1.8 million kms of road network
End 150 specialist
engineers for mapping
How Rakesh and Rohan Verma found their way to a brand With pioneering digital maps of 5,79,000 towns and villages, street level maps of over 4,000 cities and 1.8 million kilometres of road network, MapmyIndia knows India inside out. It’s a knowledge that has helped the founders navigate an exciting business of GPS devices, city guides and what they call in-car “navitainment” (navigation, information, entertainment) tablets. The company claims it has 80 per cent of the navigation market share in India. Much of this action took place in the past few years when Rakesh and Rashmi Verma, the founders of CE Infosystems, MapmyIndia’s parent company, and their son Rohan, began to steer the company away from being just a provider of digital maps to government agencies and enterprise customers like Coca Cola. But where they really wanted to travel with their formidable data set was an everyday consumer’s mind and wallet. Their smart manoeuvring, of becoming a “brand”, presents a fascinating journey, crafted and executed both from the senior Vermas’ office in Delhi’s Okhla Industrial Area and their son’s dorm room in Stanford University. Here, Rakesh and Rohan Verma take us down that trip.
As told to Shreyasi Singh | Photograph by Subhojit Paul March 2012 | INC. | 3 7
400 field
surveyors to map India
it with our digital maps. We were going to call it Mappls because the enterprise and government community knew us by that name then. But, somehow this didn’t jive. One day over lunch, my father, mother and I suddenly came up with the name— MapmyIndia. It had a patriotic tone to it. We knew this would work.
Rakesh Verma: By 2004, we realised digi-
tal maps would be a crowded market. We knew the only thing that could differentiate us from the crowd was a brand that general people could rely on. Being a product company, we were nothing without a brand. The first step towards making a brand was to take it to consumers. So, we thought of the internet where we could talk to consumers directly.
Rakesh Verma: When we launched the
House-level maps for
36 cities
Rohan Verma: I was in my first year of
electrical engineering at Stanford University, US, when my father had this idea— putting our maps on the web. He told me that I should do this in my summer break. So, I did a summer internship of threeand-a-half months at what was then CE Infosystems. These were early days of the internet. There had been a boom and bust but people hadn’t thought of many ways of making money through the internet. I began benchmarking the different models around the world for digital maps—companies like MapQuest, YahooMaps and Maporama. Some had free content, and made money from advertising, while others would have consumers pay for search. At that time, we weren’t really thinking about a consumer focus as opposed to a focus on enterprise clients. We were just excited by the possibilities of what we could do with this business. It took us three months to build the website and load
20 cities in full 3D and 6.3 million destinations
Serviced over
600+ clients
“Our challenges were greater because we didn’t just create a brand. We created an entire category. We still enjoy the advantages of being the first mover.” —Rakesh Verma
3 8 | INC. | MARCH 2012
portal in September 2004, it was a big hit. Within months, we were getting 5,0006,000 unique visitors a day—at a time when internet penetration was barely there, and the internet wasn’t popular.
Rohan Verma: I think we were lucky. It’s
not like we knew how to craft a brand at that time. We were in the right place at the right time. There was no company like MapmyIndia in this country. We stood out because we innovated. When we launched, we also got incredible press attention. In fact, the media has been our lucky charm but that was because we had a solid product to back it up. We were truly different.
Rakesh Verma: We were thrilled to see the traction. The scale of reaching out to more and more people is what is exciting about the consumer space. In the enterprise space, that wouldn’t have happened. You can’t grow exponentially there. As entrepreneurs, we found this connect with people very exhilarating. Looking back, I know we wouldn’t have enjoyed our journey as much if we had only stayed in the enterprise space. In fact, I’m sure we would have struggled to grow there because our DNA is more tuned to work in the consumer space. My own experience of working with product companies in the US, and on programmes like Project Saturn for GM had shaped my interest in consumer businesses. But along with ideas and products, a consumer business needs money. You cannot survive in a consumer space without sufficient cash in your war chest. Rohan Verma: In my sophomore year at
Stanford, I took a course on entrepreneurship. We had some great guest faculty in those classes, including people from iconic
hiring traps
venture capital firms like Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, and others like David Filo, the co-founder of Yahoo. I’d hang around after classes to talk to them, and MapmyIndia would come up in our conversations. Those discussions led us to think that our company had potential to attract multi-million dollar investments. That was very exciting, and we took a shot at it. My father and I worked together on a business plan—he would work on it from India, and I would work in the US. I then presented the business plan to Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers and Ram Shriram of Sherpalo Ventures (who have invested in companies like Google, Amazon and Zynga). With those presentations, we were on track. Kleiner Perkins and Ram Shriram invested in us in August 2006. With money in the bank, we could focus on technology. Around this time, the world was moving from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0. My father wanted us to upgrade too. So, I took a quarter off from Stanford to do this. Soon, MapmyIndia became one of the first Web 2.0 technology portals in India.
photo Courtesy subject
Rakesh Verma: Since then, we have raised
$25 million in total, and reached four investors—Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, Sherpalo Ventures, Nexus India Capital, and last year, Zenrin Co. As a product company, we needed a lot of upfront investment. Plus, our challenges were greater because we didn’t just create a brand, we created an entire category. We are thought leaders in the mapping and navigation solutions space in India. Others have followed us. Although that was tough, we enjoy the advantages of being first movers to this day. Because we were always ahead of the curve, we’ve been able to sustain our market share even when the market was growing. Yet, not everybody agreed with all the decisions we’ve took in the last few years. When we brought out our GPS device Navigator in 2007, it was new for India. People wondered why we were doing this. Even some of our investors felt we should not have entered this space on our own because there were several international companies who made these products. Our investors felt we
Starting Point Rohan Verma | His father calls him a “one-and-a-half-generation” entrepreneur. It’s a definition that sits well on Rohan Verma, the 26-year-old director, and head of marketing at MapmyIndia. He might have joined the “family business”— the company his father and mother had co-founded in 1994—but since his first year as a college student, Rohan has co-created the company’s new innings. For a young student, the subsequent opportunities (like summer internships at Intel and McKinsey & Co.) Standford University throws up, could have proved to be distractions. But not for Rohan. “Through my four years in college, MapmyIndia was always in my head. I took the most out of Stanford, did everything I was supposed to do. But at night I’d be on calls with my parents and the MapmyIndia team in India,” he recalls. “I’d come back every holiday, and after two days of recovering from jet lag, I’d be at office. My friends thought I was nuts. In fact, at most times, I wanted to figure out how I could work more, not less.” The only time his commitment to the family business was really tested, he admits, was when McKinsey & Co. indicated it’d like to recruit him after his Bachelor’s. “That was a difficult decision. The McKinsey pedigree gives you a lot of exposure at the industry, strategy and functional level. MapmyIndia was my first big idea though. I figured I could potentially get a McKinsey job again but the opportunity to make the kind of entrepreneurial contribution I could in MapmyIndia at that time might not happen again. Such chances don’t come all the time.”
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the journey’s end
Starting Point Rakesh Verma | When Rakesh Verma moved back from the United States to India in the early 1990s with his wife Rashmi, the engineer couple were intent on starting out on their own—after years of working for global giants like IBM and GM. A chance letter to Rusi Mody landed them their first project in India—a large project for TISCO on the IBM mainframe. While working on this project in the US, Verma came across a digital map-making and GIS software. He had already found his entrepreneurial calling but with this software, Verma also found himself a mission—to map out all of India. After striking a deal with the mapping software company, Verma began the tough job of training 200 surveyors that criss-crossed all of India to map it out. In its early years, the company helped giants like Coca Cola plan its bottling and distribution infrastructure. Today, MapmyIndia is a leading navigation and digital mapping company with a range of solutions and products. Verma won’t divulge too much but he admits their monthly “run rate” is around `7 crore. Last year, he was also invited to be a part of the expert committee for GIS formed by the Planning Commission.
Rohan Verma: Even though we were a
small and conservative company, we gave in to the demands of professionals, and went in for television and print advertising campaigns in 2008-09. But what we really did well and differently from other players was that when we started selling devices in 2007, we invested in educating the market.
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We hired 150 sales people on the ground. This built long-lasting value. We were not a company that just advertised. When people went to buy our product, we had a guy at the retail point. That organically created, and helped perpetuate what the GPS was. We didn’t shy away from educating the market even though our size was an obstacle here. This kind of street presence was a conventional FMCG approach but it was unconventional for a company of our size. Till now, no navigation company has had the courage to put people out there. But, investing in a market before it’s even born is what forerunners do. That has had a lasting brand impact—our customers associate these products for us. Rakesh Verma: After the GPS device in
2007, we’ve launched many products like mobile maps, navigation systems and tracking devices. We’ve grown over 600 per cent over the past three years. Today, 75 per cent of our revenue comes from consumer business.
Rohan Verma: By the time I was finishing
up at Stanford in 2007, the company had achieved a lot. Our people had done a great job, yet we had done only half of what we could do with the portal. Through my college, I had filled up 20 notebooks with ideas for MapmyIndia. Location-based advertising— like McDonald’s on the map—was something I had thought up right in the beginning. It’s a great, and very-executable idea. We couldn’t focus on it earlier but we’re doing it now. Sometimes ideas and execution are separated. Going forward, we don’t want to “complexify” our maps but we certainly want to personalise it. Our maps should know you. We want to layer the map to add value. Although we have delivered on the base promise—accurate, rich, detailed maps of India—we’re only just beginning to work on the “my”. I’m deeply inspired by Facebook because they have mastered the “my”. I want us to connect places the way Facebook connects people.
photo Courtesy subject
should just supply maps to manufacturers. But, we knew we were going the right way. We’d identified a gap in the market—of navigation devices—and were confident we could plug it. The GPS Navigator was a critical point in our brand journey. After its launch, the brand really started building on its own. There was a buzz. Even negative reviews and discussions on the web helped. Most of all, people wondered what we were up to. In 2004, we’d entered the internet space. In 2007, we were moving from being a software to a hardware company. But that attention helped.
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First Movers Gautam Suri (left) and Arvind Nanda pride themselves on always introducing new products.
HOW we DID IT
Arvind Nanda Gautam Suri Engineering the Future
Twenty-nine years ago, an acoustic consultant and a chartered accountant got together to make loudspeakers. But fate had other plans for Gautam Suri and Arvind Nanda who saw a bigger opportunity in selling false ceilings when the New Delhi Indira Gandhi International Airport was announced in 1984. In the next two decades, their firm diversified into roofing systems, window coverings, and eventually, whole preengineered steel buildings. They did it all—from constructing airports and hangars for governments, to automobile plants and offices for clients like Reliance and Tata Motors. Today, the friends claim they’re not as aggresive in business as they used to be, yet their eyes are set on taking the `500-crore Interarch, global. as told to Ira Swasti photograph by Subhojit Paul
Gautam Suri (GS): I tasted entrepreneurship quite young. As a teenager, I used to make these specialised loudspeakers for my friends as a hobby, and they would pay me because these products were not available in India at the time. When I went to IIT Delhi for my mechanical engineering, I organised music concerts and events. These were profitable events, and I made some money out of them. It was then that I realised I could make money on my own. I didn’t need to get a job after college. Arvind Nanda (AN): I first met Gautam in 1969 when he became
friends with a very good friend of mine who was also my neighbour. I was still in school while he got into college that year. But, we used to meet each other quite often.
GS: Right after college, I started working with my father who had retired as an acoustics consultant with the AIR. After retirement, he continued to be a consultant, and would help design acoustics for industrial units, auditoriums and studios. I gave myself three years to see if I liked doing this. If not, I thought I would go work in the US. But I enjoyed the work and decided to stay back. Meanwhile, Arvind had March 2012 | INC. | 4 3
how we did it
returned from London after completing his CA and working there for six years. AN: In 1979, I came back from the UK because I was offered a job in India that paid `1,600 per month. I thought it was a fantastic opportunity to learn because I was given independent charge of someone else’s company (it was a small export house and the owner was away for a while). Such chances don’t come to you all the time, especially at that age. Here, I got to do everything—from ensuring the toilets were clean, to keeping people happy, recruiting and firing staff, and bringing in more business. Luckily, that gentleman had offices in Hong Kong, Nigeria, Paris and London which gave me a lot of exposure to international practices as well.
GS: Because there was a boom in the tele-
vision space then, we did fairly well. But, it wasn’t really the kind of business we wanted. It was a high-volume, low-margin game. Plus, chasing payments was a hassle. Fortunately, a year later, the New Delhi International Airport was being constructed. Because of my contacts with the architectural community—through the projects I worked on as an acoustics engineer—I knew there was a requirement for false ceilings at the airport. Arvind and I discussed how we could become suppliers for this. We got in touch with Hunter Douglas, a Dutch company, and they agreed to make us their licensee in India. And that’s how we got into the false ceiling market. It was a big change for us. We were used to manufacturing speakers. Now, we
“We had limited space, factories and money but we knew we were capable of doing something that nobody else had done in India before.” GS: Through this phase—when I was
working with my father, and Arvind was with the export house, we would meet once in a while. Every time we met, we would talk about starting something of our own. But we didn’t exactly know what we wanted to get into. AN: Gradually, things started moving in a certain direction. After two years of working with the export house, I partnered with my cousin to start a garment exports business in 1982. A year later, we also diversified into electronics which was Gautam’s field. We asked him to join us. So, our first venture together was Intertech. Mainly, we manufactured HiFi and TV loudspeakers.
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were supplying a custom-designed, readymade architectural solution to a large `45lakh project like the Delhi airport. AN: In the early 1980s, India was a closed
country—imports were not allowed and duties were extremely high. Everyone just thought of doing something locally and making money. We wanted to stand apart. But, nobody knew about false ceilings in India then. We had to create a demand for it. Educating people was the key to selling. There was no way we would get orders without educating the market. I remember going to a customer once, and telling him that if he would install our ceilings, his factory roof wouldn’t leak. But he told me he didn’t
really mind some leakage because all his factories leaked. He was just used to it. Even as we were battling with this, there were other tough decisions to make. In 1989, my cousin completely took over the garments export business. He wasn’t really interested in loudspeakers. Gautam and I had a choice to make. We had limited space, factories and money but we knew that with our educational backgrounds and exposure, we were capable of doing something that nobody else had done in India before. We dropped Intertech—and with it our loudspeaker business—and founded Interarch. We wanted to focus on manufacturing false ceilings and other architectural products. GS: Soon, we had expanded our offerings to window coverings which included Venetian and vertical blinds. We also tried to get Hunter Douglas to establish a manufacturing unit in India but they were not interested. So, we decided to break off and go on our own way. We wanted to make ceilings more competitive because imported products were very expensive. In early 1990, we got an opportunity to install a special roofing system in the Maldives. It was a new product line, and we didn’t know much about it. But we researched where we could get it, and found a company in Singapore to supply it to us. We worked on this project in the Maldives and were excited by the potential it offered. Soon, we started manufacturing roofing
systems ourselves. We set up a plant in Noida. It was our first, and also a first for manufacturing roofing systems in India. We also began thinking about diversifying upstream, i.e. if we do the roof, why don’t we do the whole building? We scoped out a lot of international players, and tried to sell pre-engineered buildings in India. But nobody showed much interest. In the late 90s, we decided to manufacture these buildings ourselves. We set up our own plant in Greater Noida in 2000 to manufacture a product line of roofing systems, false ceilings and pre-engineered steel buildings. Since then, things have been great. In the last decade, we’ve bagged many large projects including Tata Motors’ greenfield plant in Pantnagar, the
how we did it
“Making money can’t be your only objective in business. If it is, you will never be successful.”
Hitting Milestones For Interarch, bagging the `180-crore order for the roofing system of IGI Airport’s Terminal 3 was both a turning point, and the biggest learning.
IGI Airport Terminal 3 in New Delhi and the Air Deccan hangar in Bengaluru. These were all turning points for us. From `150 crore in turnover in 2005, we reached `400 crore in 2008.
photo Courtesy subject
AN: Not everybody thought we had the
right idea, or we’d be this successful when we entered into pre-engineered buildings. The conventional wisdom was that India doesn’t need pre-engineered inputs like the West because labour was cheap here, and people were happy deploying and working with their own steel and labour. But, soon the benefits were obvious. Preengineered buildings are really like readymade shirts. Nobody bought readymade shirts earlier. They didn’t think these could offer good fits because only a tailor could stitch to somebody’s size. But, when readymade shirts came, everyone forgot about their tailors. Plus, people didn’t compare costs. It was about buying a brand. We approached our products the same way. With Interarch, people are sure of what they are buying.
GS: Building a brand takes time. When we began, we were two youngsters with no track record. We got many contracts, projects and financial help through personal connects with the people we worked with. It took us four to five years before we built real credibility, where people began to say that if these guys say they will deliver, they will. AN: And in business, you always have to
remember that just making money can’t be your objective. If it is, you will never be a good businessman. You have to build a strong foundation of values, systems and processes within your company. You can’t see these things on a balance sheet. But without them, you’ll never succeed. Yes, you need money to keep the financials strong. For example, when we had to expand in 2008—because we got a `180crore project to build the roof for Terminal 3 of the New Delhi International Airport—we went for a private equity infusion. We didn’t want to burden the company with interest payments. Still, the three years from 2008-2010 were terrible
for us. With the economic crisis, business was slow. Plus, we were hiring more people, and expanding to execute the Delhi airport project. But, because our finances were in a good position, we came out of it successfully. So, money is important but you can’t see it as an end objective. I learnt this 30 years ago from an Old Chinese saying—happiness and satisfaction in life is like a cat’s tail. Just like the cat can’t catch hold of its tail, when you chase happiness and satisfaction, it evades you. Once you let go and keep working towards your goal, the results follow. GS: We try to do just that at Interarch. We’re now a `500-crore company. We don’t have to prove our skill. But now people demand much more of us. They expect very high levels of delivery excellence and professionalism. Also, we’re not the only players anymore. We have competition from several multinationals. In many ways, we are their benchmark. When some of these companies came to India, they thought they could sell a cheaper version of what they provided globally, and it would be accepted here. We instead offered our clients best-of-breed products that were being sold and used in markets like the Middle East or the US. AN: Over the last decade, our focus has
been to professionalise and delegate more because all our factories have moved out of Delhi. I discourage employees from coming to me for every little decision now. If you’re constantly looking into the day-today activities of the business, you don’t get time to think of tomorrow and what the future of the company can be.
GS: Our next big goal is to take Interarch international. We’re looking for strategic partners to take it to the next level. But that will take another two to three years to take off. We also want to be a larger player in steel construction in India. Steel adds a lot of value to constructions—it makes buildings more durable and saves a lot of time. Right now, steel is not optimised in Indian infrastructure. It’s more an exception than the norm. But that has to change. March 2012 | INC. | 4 5
Managing Enlist B-school students as consultants. While they learn, your company can benefit from fresh ideas this page Leadership How do you lead when everyone gets to be a “leader”? page 49 Managing To foster innovation, brew in a competitive spirit page 51 Globalising Why India can’t afford to follow a Western economic model page 53 The Way I Work Vijay Shukla is on his fifth entrepreneurial venture with EduVisors, an education consulting firm. His success mantra is simple—discipline and marrying the right person. page 56
Elevator Pitch
Will investors tune in with `30 crore with Lukup Media? page 54
strategy
photo Courtesy subject
Managing The kids are all right Need a deal on business consulting? Hire B-school students Chloe Dao knew she needed help. But she didn’t know where to find it. The owner of a Houston boutique called Lot 8 and the 2005 winner of Project Runway, Dao had just enjoyed a few flush years, thanks to a wave of post-victory publicity— including a spread in Elle and a showcase at the Smithsonian—and a lucrative contract selling women’s sportswear on QVC. But by mid-2010, the national spotlight had faded, and the QVC contract had come to an end. “I was stuck with all this overhead and a fraction of the revenue,” Dao says. “I needed an outside view of my business to figure out what to do next.” Hiring a professional consultant was out of the question. The fees, which start at about $200 an hour, were way beyond her
In, Then Out Chloe Dao got a big boost after winning Project Runway in 2005. But by 2010, she was in dire need of fresh ideas.
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strategy
reach. Instead, she took a chance on some students at the nearby Rice University. Like many other business schools across the country, Rice’s Jones Graduate School of Business offers free consulting services by teams of students. In the school’s Action Learning Project, or ALP, each team spends an entire semester on a project, logging about 40 hours a week. At a traditional consulting firm, that would cost tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of dollars. But the only compensation the students get is a grade for their final presentations. About 45 businesses, including giants such as Hewlett-Packard and Chevron, apply to host student-consultants each year, but only 20 get selected. Dao discovered the programme through a fellow business owner and immediately jumped at the opportunity. If the students’ suggestions were off base, Dao reasoned, at least she wouldn’t have wasted money; if they were good, they just might save her business. After submitting an application, Dao attended the ALP job fair and presented her situation to the students, who then bid on their favourite projects. Dao’s goal at the time was to replace her QVC revenue, which had constituted 25 per cent of her total revenue, by generating sales through her website. That goal would quickly change. About a week later, Dao met her team of six student-consultants. They ranged in age from 25 to 29, but seemed wise beyond their years to Dao, who is 40. One had managed construction projects before enrolling at Rice; another did publicity for the San Antonio Spurs. They divided themselves according to their individual specialties and began poring over Dao’s financial statements, interviewing her seven employees, studying the designer-boutique market, and surveying more than 300 customers. They consulted a retail architect, who analysed Dao’s approach to merchandising. Dao and the team met weekly at her store to discuss their findings. It took only a few weeks for the students to arrive at some startling discoveries. First, if not for the QVC contract, Lot 8’s revenue would have plunged 21 per cent in 2010. 4 8 | INC. | MARCH 2012
Is That Gonna Be on the Midterm? Working with B-school students can yield big results for a low price— but only if you follow these rules, according to Kim Kehoe, who heads the student-consulting programme at Rice University. Keep it manageable. 1. “These students have analytical skills,” Kehoe says. “They can slice and dice data, but don’t expect them to tell you how to run your business from scratch.”
3. Take them seriously. “Let them know you’re committed to implementing at least some part of the work they’ve done,” Kehoe says. “Don’t let them think that their work is going to go into a folder, never to be seen again.”
2. Get a short leash. “Meet with the students at least once a week,” Kehoe says. “Supervision is important. The last thing you want is to hand them the project, walk away, and come back in four months to something you don’t need.”
4. Keep it confidential. In other words, even if the school doesn’t require students to sign a confidentiality agreement, you should. “That way, there are no concerns about what you can and can’t share with the students,” Kehoe says. “Their project will only be as good as the data they work with.”
The team decided that before Dao even considered investing in e-commerce, she had to address the problems at her store. “QVC’s revenue had been masking a lot of operational inefficiencies,” says John Levene, who focused on Dao’s finances and operations. Dao’s expenses were 16 per cent higher than the industry norm, in large part because her store was twice the size it needed to be; plus, she was open an hour longer than most competitors were on weekdays. The research also revealed that Dao’s core customers were 25 to 38, younger than she had thought, and the
average Lot 8 cocktail dress costs about $100 more than most customers wanted to pay. From a marketing standpoint, the students also found that Dao’s own name was more meaningful than Lot 8, and suggested Dao rename the store to reflect that. Meeting with the students and absorbing their insights, Dao says, “was like going to therapy every week.” Meanwhile, the students were getting some professional help of their own. Three faculty advisers met with the students weekly and challenged them to come up with a business model for Dao
strategy
going forward, not just a list of near-term challenges. “The students saw the little pieces, but not how it all tied together,” says Kim Kehoe, director of the ALP programme and one of the team’s advisers. “We forced them to think about the connection between those pieces.” Kehoe admits that even the most diligent students lack the experience and expertise of seasoned consultants. But he says that giving students real-world assignments is no different from what medical students have been doing in clinical practice for decades. “Business schools don’t do much of that at all,” Kehoe says, “but it’s important to help students put their skills into practice.” While they were working with Dao, the students were enrolled in other classes. That enabled the students—and Dao—to get help from professors. Two students, for instance, were in a marketresearch class, which helped them draft the customer survey for Lot 8. “Our experience in the classroom really complemented our work with Chloe,” says Mallory Engler, the team’s marketing lead. Dao, for one, never felt as if she were dealing with amateurs. In their final presentation, the students urged Dao to stop thinking of Lot 8 as a national brand and instead position it as a destination boutique for young women in Houston and take greater advantage of her local celebrity status. They told her to cut extraneous merchandise, like her bridal line, and to open at 11am instead of 10 on weekdays and use the money saved from those five hours to hire a part-time worker. Since Dao started following the students’ advice, she has cut costs about 20 per cent, and for the first time in two years, sales are stable rather than shrinking. She expects even better margins next year, when she plans to halve the store’s size and change its name from Lot 8 to Dao Chloe Dao. As for the students, they received an A for their work and were among four teams given awards for top performance. “For me, it’s about what you know, not your age,” Dao says. “They performed CPR on my company, and it really was a lifesaver.” —Issie Lapowsky
Leadership Not enough Indians How do you lead when everyone gets to be a ‘leader’?
The L-Word Ronald Riggio says the idea of leadership is being cheapened.
Peter Drucker, the preeminent business thinker of the 20th century, wasn’t fond of the word leader. He much preferred manager. Ronald Riggio, a professor of leadership and organisational psychology at the Kravis Leadership Institute at Claremont McKenna College (Drucker’s old stomping ground), has his own concerns about leadership: that overuse has rendered the word nearly meaningless. In the first of a series of conversations Inc. will be having with experts in the art of leading people, Riggio spoke with editor-at-large Leigh Buchanan.
These days, we seem to slap the term leader on anybody who assumes responsibility for anything. No one is a manager anymore—it’s all project leaders and shift leaders. Is the concept of leadership in danger of going Barney the Dinosaur route, where “everyone is special”?
Leadership used to mean something specific. C-level executives. Leaders of countries. You would never call a middle manager, and definitely not a frontline supervisor, a leader. Now, when anybody kind of picks up the ball and carries it forward, we call those people leaders. What we’re really talking about are people who are engaged. And so we’re using leadership in a very broad sense. I can’t recall the last time I was at a company that talked about career development. Now everything falls under the rubric of leadership development.
In higher education, we see this all over. We see educational administration programmes turned into educational leadership programmes. Teachers are going through them, and they might aspire to be principals. But they’re just third-grade teachers. March 2012 | INC. | 49
strategy
Trying to better yourself is inarguably a good thing. But can’t you do that without the goal of becoming a leader?
I don’t think everyone sees themselves as a potential leader. I did a leadership development programme five or six years ago for a company. The theme this CEO had put in place was, ‘Everyone Should Be Their Own CEO’. I was a little taken aback by that. But this was the second year he’d done it, and he told the story of how the previous year, after they’d announced it, the receptionist wanted to improve the reception area so any guest would feel instantly at home. She asked her superiors to tell her who was going to come in over the next two weeks and what their likes and dislikes were. So Mr. Smith walks in the front door, and she’d say, “Mr. Smith, here’s your Diet Coke. I know you like to stay at the Hilton, so I booked you a room there.” I don’t think the receptionist thought she was going to be a leader of the company. It was just about being the best she could be at her job. That was the CEO’s intent, even if it was kind of a weird way to introduce it. In the end, I was so impressed by him and the company that when I got back, I bought a lot of stock in the company. And that’s probably my best-performing stock.
The most important determinant of someone learning to be a leader is whether they want to do it—what’s called developmental readiness. It’s like in medical intervention programmes: the prognosis is much better if the person genuinely wants to give up drugs or alcohol. Some entrepreneurs don’t do well at leadership. They love the craziness of starting something up. I would advise them to pass the reins to someone else and find something to do in the company that suits them better. Or start another business. What does it mean to learn leadership, anyway? What kinds of skills are we talking about?
Let’s look at those who are known as “transformational” leaders, who we know from research are the most effective. There are four components to this. First, you have to learn to act like a leader: to manage your image, but in an authentic way. Be straightforward; tell people what you stand for, and then stand for it. Second, you have to be inspirational. Learn what motivates people. Be optimistic; no one is going to follow a pessimistic leader. Put some emotion into it. Third, get to know the people you are leading. Check in with them all the time. Help them to develop. Lastly, stimulate them. Make them think. Make them take responsibility—but always with the positive support.
“Leadership now really refers to a shared process. How are people coming together and making a change?”
So leadership can be initiative. It need not compel or necessarily even inspire others to act.
I think when people talk about leadership in this way, they’re describing the phenomenon of getting engaged, not standing on the sidelines. We survey people about the characteristics they most admire in a good leader, and they say integrity and self-motivation— someone who accomplishes things and is inspirational. Those are the same qualities we want to see in workers in an empowered, team-based workspace. That’s interesting, given the success of the Arab Spring and the visibility of the Occupy movement, which have been both praised and criticised for lacking recognised leaders.
Yes, leadership now really refers to a shared process. How are people coming together and making a change? Shared leadership still requires followers. Presumably, that means leaders also must follow.
Most of the qualities that make people effective leaders also make them effective followers. They have to be loyal and help push the organisation forward, but they also need the courage to stand up when things are wrong and say so. Some people don’t want formal leadership positions, because they know they can get more done if they’re not on the radar. You teach leadership, so presumably it can be taught. What makes leadership easier or harder to learn for some people than for others?
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You have said that many of your students are cynical about leadership.
There’s a whole group that comes in jaded about leadership. “God, we’ve been hearing about leadership since high school and even junior high school. We had to write essays about leadership to get into college. We’re sick and tired of leadership.” We try to show them it’s a legitimate subject to study. There is very serious research going on in leadership, trying to answer very serious questions. Has the paucity of inspirational, effective leaders in public life influenced their opinions?
There’s this unblinking camera eye scrutinising every movement of our high-level leaders, revealing their every flaw. And so I think students have grown up with a level of distrust. For the past 16 or 17 years, I’ve asked all my classes: Who is the leader you most admire? And it’s funny how their responses have changed over time. They used to pick iconic leaders. Now they’re picking more close-to-home leaders. Occasionally you still get Martin Luther King or Gandhi. But generally it’s a teacher, a coach, or a parent. Do they ever mention business leaders?
Very rarely. Why do students consider teachers and parents to be leaders?
Because what those people do and say actually affects their lives.
strategy
Managing May the best business win Innovation contests can spur new products—and boost worker morale
photo Courtesy subject
For years, Elastec/American
Marine, a Carmi, Illinois–based maker of equipment used to clean up oil spills, had been tinkering with plans for a promising new oil-recovery system. But the project never got off the back burner. Things at the $30 million company were rolling along smoothly, after all, and CEO Donald Wilson was unsure about the potential market. The project might still be languishing were it not for the 2011 Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup X Challenge. Sponsored by the wife of former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, the contest offered a top prize of $1 million to the team able to create a device capable of recovering Cleanup Kings Elastec CEO Donald Wilson (fourth from left) and his team won a $1 million prize. oil from the ocean’s surface at a rate of at least 2,500 gallons per minute. That’s no small task: The industry standard is less than half that outfit sponsoring such contests. In this amount, about 1,100 gallons per minute. As age of crowdsourcing and open source, the largest manufacturer of oil-spill-cleanup innovation challenges can be found in equipment in the US, Elastec felt the presnearly all industries. DARPA, a division sure to respond to the gauntlet being of the Department of Defence, is well thrown down. “We like challenges, and this known for its annual challenges, which certainly was a challenge,” says Wilson. have included competitions for creating The oil-cleanup challenge was unmanned vehicles and recreating presented under the banner of the X shredded documents. Likewise, Netflix Prize Foundation, which is best known famously offered $1 million to whoever for contests designed to spur innovation developed the algorithm that best in aerospace and, more recently, the improved upon its movie-recommendation understanding of the human genome. system. For contestants, the benefits of But the foundation is hardly the only such challenges often go beyond the prize
money. Win or lose, competing can speed product development, create a team spirit, and produce some free publicity. Wilson first read about the X Challenge when online registration for the prize opened, in October 2010. Given the difficulty of the undertaking, there was plenty of internal discussion about whether Elastec ought to take the plunge and enter. And then there was the question of whether it truly had a shot at winning. A number of team members were openly sceptical about the likelihood of even completing the project on time. March 2012 | INC. | 51
strategy
To begin with, the company’s existing technology had never achieved the kinds of numbers the contest required. What’s more, even though Elastec had cooked up the basis of its new idea years earlier, it was still a tall order to get it built, tested, and ready to compete within the contest’s required time frame of 90 days. “We always give at least a year for any new product development,” says Wilson. “And for this one, there are a lot of things going on with the design. It might otherwise have taken us, maybe, five or even 10 years.” Were it not for Wilson’s faith in the proposed technology, which involves a series of rotating discs designed to skim the water’s surface and capture the oil from it, Elastec might have passed on the challenge. “We felt it was going to be head and shoulders above anything else that was on the market,” says Wilson. Besides, there’s nothing like a challenge with a deadline to light a fire under people. “Contests like this bring benefits like set timelines and deliverables that focus you as a business owner to get something on paper, a
prototype, and something out the door,” says Megan Mitchell, senior associate director of Wharton Entrepreneurial Programs at the Wharton Scho ol of the University of Pennsylvania. Wilson’s enthusiasm for the project soon drifted down to almost every one of the company’s more than 140 employees. “Morale was very high,” Wilson says. “We asked a lot of people to get up early and stay late and work weekends—but it was still easy to motivate people to be involved.” The company spent nearly $600,000 building the prototype. Some 350 companies entered the contest; Elastec and the nine other finalists were invited to demonstrate their devices at the National Oil Spill Response Research & Renewable Energy Test Facil-
“We asked a lot of people to get up early and stay late and work weekends —but it was still easy to motivate people.”
Up for a Challenge? Innovation contests abound. Finding them is easy, thanks to a number of websites that serve as platforms that allow various organisations to post their challenges. Here are three sites that would-be contenders should check out: 1. InnoCentive.com InnoCentive.com hosts more than 120 active challenges in a number of industries, although it leans heavily toward engineering, chemistry, and healthcare–related competitions. (Example: $30,000 to develop a room-temperature-activated adhesive) 2. Kaggle.com For number crunchers, Kaggle.com is the leading hub for datamining and predictive-modelling challenges. (Example: $3 million to develop an algorithm that uses available patient data to predict and prevent unnecessary hospitalisations) 3. BigCarrot.com Still in beta testing, BigCarrot.com posts more lighthearted challenges, usually with less lucrative prizes. (Example: The Methuselah Mouse Prize—$100 to the team with the longest-living laboratory mouse)
5 2 | INC. | MARCH 2012
ity in Leonardo, New Jersey. The facility contains a giant water tank designed to simulate the saltwater and wave conditions of an actual oil spill. To Team Elastec’s great excitement, the company’s new oil skimmer performed as intended. When the results were announced at an award ceremony last October in New York City, Elastec walked away with the top prize of $1 million. Its device achieved an efficiency rate of 89 per cent and took in more than 4,600 gallons of oil a minute—more than four times the industry standard, and nearly twice that of the nearest competitor. In addition to the prize money, which Wilson says will be used to recover some of the costs associated with the contest as well as commercialise its new technology, Elastec can now market to its clients an oilremoval device that has been field-tested and recognised by a panel of industry experts as demonstrably better than anything else available. Attracting clients is also likely to be a little easier, given the extensive media coverage the company received after the X Challenge win, which included interviews on CNN, Fox Business News, and National Public Radio. Wilson says Elastec has received calls from numerous customers around the world inquiring about the new technology. For all the success Elastec had, Wilson acknowledges the risks that failure in the X Challenge might have entailed. The money and manpower sunk into the challenge would have been wasted, at least to some extent. Morale might have been compromised. Food for thought for any company with thinly stretched resources that is considering participating in an innovation challenge. Besides the oversize, lottery-style cheque, the biggest takeaway for Elastec has been the sense of accomplishment employees feel in bringing a technology from idea to fully functioning prototype that shattered existing industry standards. “We didn’t leave any stone unturned,” says Wilson. “We did a huge amount of engineering, research, and testing. We did a lot of smaller-scale testing. But we can only test. You never know until you actually get into the tank.” —Andy Meek
strategy
Globalising Food for thought Why India needs its own economic model
No Easy Answers Chandran Nair says India’s public policy needs a hard rethink.
In his recent book, “Consumptionomics: Asia’s Role in Reshaping Capitalism and Saving the Planet”, Chandran Nair, a Hong Kong-based author and environmental consultant, says countries like China and India can’t afford to go the western-style consumerism way. “India needs more cars like I need a hole in my head,” says Nair, as he explains why hugely populous countries can’t work with an economic model that is primarily aimed at greater consumption , and underprices natural resources to do so. Inc. India’s Shreyasi Singh caught up with him on the sidelines of the MaD Forum, an annual gathering of young social-change agents in Hong Kong, a few weeks back. Here are a few excerpts. How can Indian businesses create the huge number of jobs we need, without going down the industrialisation route?
In the book, I argue that if we accept the current economic model as the only way to create jobs, then we will go down the industrialisation route. The industrial model of the West, which China has adopted, is essentially premised on underpricing resources, which, in turn, undermines rules. Public policy needs to be shaped by understanding that in the world’s most populous countries, we cannot subsidise costs. I’m calling for a game-changer approach, for public policy to figure out what we mean by jobs. In the Indian con-
text, I really don’t think that having more Indians in the factory is going to be good for India. Does that mean we don’t have industrialisation? Of course not. I’m not advocating utopian foolery. But let’s first acknowledge constraints and understand the price of resources. What are the sectors that India can look at—to tweak the economic model, and make it right-fit for us?
What do India and China need most? The most basic human right, that is not got through the ballot box is the right to safe, secure food. That should be the economic basis for development of a nation. Food production in most of our countries is a combination—mass industrial agriculture, chemicalisation of the food chain, and essentially, underpricing the labour of the farmer. The farmer is today the slave. But I think the Asian economy of the 21st century will not comprise computer nerds working on software. It will be the knowledge worker—the farmer, who is well educated and who will be well paid. Food today is underpriced to keep the urban “In India, elite from becoming restless. When you economic start changing that, you start changing the whole economic model because if activity needs food has to be less industrialised and less to be based on chemicalised, it will have to be depenhygiene, public dent on water supply (therefore, the health and farmer becomes the steward of natural education.” systems). Then, you have to protect top soil, watersheds and social nets. These services are not at all incorporated in the economic models of the West because in the West, the whole desire was for a small number of people to consume as much as possible. I think there is a huge opportunity to look at food as an economy. You’ve praised China’s ability to pull people out of poverty, but it did so by rapid industrialisation. Why shouldn’t India?
I’m not suggesting that India follow China although there are certain things in the Chinese model that may be part of the solution to dealing with constraints. But the Chinese haven’t done the best job. Yet, at least, they are absolutely aware of the constraints, and if they so want to act on it, they can. For example, the Chinese have done a brilliant job of reversing urbanisation. The notion that urbanisation is an inevitable human destination is wrong. In the last few years, the Chinese have figured that they can’t just make things for the West and have millions of Chinese go to the cities to make things. They’ve realised they need to do things right at home, and what they would always need is food. As a result, they have made amazing infrastructure in the rural areas: first class roads, first class airports. They have realised the hinterland needs first-world infrastructure so people don’t need to go to cities for jobs. For India, it’s clearly the infrastructure in the rural areas that needs to be improved, and offers a huge opportunity. In India, economic activity needs to be based on hygiene, sanitation, public health and education. If those priorities become public policy, it transforms economic activity. March 2012 | INC. | 5 3
Talking Ads Kallol Borah makes the telly talk to viewers—will investors listen?
5 4 | INC. | march 2012
Photograph by s. radhakrishna
strategy
COMPANY
Lukup Media
Elevator Pitch Lukup Media produces funky TV advertising Will investors be tempted to tune in with `30 crore?
FOUNDER
Kallol Borah LOCATION
Bengaluru (head office), Mumbai, Gurgaon EMPLOYEES
30
LAUNCHED
December 2010 Revenue Model
Revenue shared equally among TV channels, operators and Lukup Media
The Pitch“Television used to be a medium of one way communication—you
could only consume what you saw. With Lukup, you can demand content with the click of your remote button. We create rich, interactive advertisements and content that enable you to know more about products as you see them on screen and even allow you to buy them while watching your favourite shows. For instance, while watching a soap opera, you can click on a character’s outfit or accessories to know who the designer is, or where these styles are available. We already run campaigns for brands such as Gitanjali Gems, Bajaj and others. We partner with TV operators and TV channels to sell these interactive ads to media agencies, advertisers and broadcasters. What the media houses pay is shared between us, television channels and operators. Our content reaches 20 million homes across India through Airtel DTH and Dish TV. We plan to reach 40 million homes this year.”—As told to Ira Swasti
CLIENT BASE
6 clients
FUNDING SOUGHT
`30 crore FUNDING SOUGHT FOR
Paying for distribution, buying bandwidth and investing in products
The Experts Weigh In WORK ON THE REVENUE MODEL
FIX THE MEASURING SCALE
figure out how to SCALE up
Kallol and company are in an interesting space with Lukup as interactive media content is exciting. The whole issue is one of clutter though. They need to focus on distinguishing what they offer as a branded package. Clients need to feel excited that this isn’t just another interactive media offering. Also, Lukup needs to invest in intelligent systems both at the back-end and the front-end. They might want to tweak their revenue model to consider a commission on buy basis. This will make the advertiser feel that the company’s mouth is where the money is, and vice versa.
This is definitely an interesting business. I think the ability to introduce interactive advertising on conventional TV is a compelling one. A key objective would be to get mass distribution in place because advertisers look for critical mass of viewers. Secondly, establishing the key measurement parameters for this new form of advertising would be a key—in essence, how should advertisers measure this medium as against TRPs for conventional TV. Thirdly, establishing the effectiveness of the medium— showing that it actually works for consumers is important.
They need to examine the basic question of how keen a viewer is to consume an interactive ad within an entertainment programme on television. Essentially, television is a lean-back medium. The broadcaster will, at best, be willing to share the interactive piece on a per view or per click basis. That again brings the scale question into play. If it comes down to the premium, an interactive ad can command from the advertiser rather than a revenue share on ad spends, the market scale would be really small. So I would focus on elaborating how this business can achieve meaningful scale.
HARISH BIJOOR, branding expert, Bengaluru
ALOK MITTAL, managing director, Canaan India, New Delhi
Ajit Andhare, founder, Colosceum Media, Mumbai march 2012 | INC. | 5 5
strategy
The way i work | Vijay Shukla, EduVisors and Setu Ventures
“Change your frequency to fit the situation or person you are dealing with.” It wouldn’t be unflattering to call Vijay Shukla irrationally optimistic. With an engineering degree from IIT BHU, an MBA from XLRI, and stints with SAIL, SmithKline Beecham and Ernst & Young—Shukla could have led a successful corporate career. In his jobs though, he found himself being force fed systems he didn't agree with. But he wasn't the sort to feel down-andout. So, in 2000, he partnered with his college room-mate and found an angel investor to go the tech start-up way. The venture bombed. Shukla wasn’t scarred for long, if at all. He founded another mobile apps company which shut down during the business turbulence that followed 9/11. He finally “made it” with his third venture, ValueFirst, a mobile messaging and business communications company, that he co-founded in 2003. Today, ValueFirst does annual business of more than `100 crore and has served over 3,000 corporate clients. This wasn’t enough to keep Shukla interested though. In 2009, he left ValueFirst to start anew; an early stage venture capital firm, Setu Ventures, and a niche education consulting firm EduVisors with yet another college mate. For him, business is all about the joy of starting up.
As told to Shreyasi Singh | Photograph by Subhojit Paul 5 6 | INC. | MARCH 2012
strategy
New Horizons His earlier ventures were about netting financial stability. Now, Vijay Shukla wants to create jobs.
strategy
I’m an early morning person. I wake up between 5.30 and 6am. Earlier this was because I travelled a lot and took morning flights. So, getting up early was a necessity. Now, I travel much less but the habit of early mornings has stuck on. Getting up early ensures that I have quite a productive morning. First, I help my children get ready for school. Then, I check all my e-mails. So, by the time I’m ready to leave for work, which is around 9.45am, I have caught up on my backlog. In fact, my most productive days are those where all my homework— preparation for meetings and presentations—are done by 9.30 or 10am. If I can plan my day efficiently in the morning, I can have an execution-oriented work day. Between home and work, exercise does get deprioritised. I haven’t managed to get a routine going on that—sometimes I walk, other times I go to the gym. There’s definitely a plan to do more, but at this point it’s not a very well-defined, or well-executed one. Once in office, I’m extremely focused. I don’t even check my e-mails more than once in an hour, or even once in two hours. It’s not that I’m not into technology. I’m completely wired all the time. In fact, from 1998 till 2012, there have been only two occasions where I have not been connected to the world through internet or the phone for more than three days. The first instance was when I was on my honeymoon. The second time was on a holiday when my phone conked off and I was not carrying a laptop. But, when I'm really working and in office, my phone is more likely than not on silent. In fact, I’m much better on e-mail while I’m travelling. I respond immediately on the BlackBerry. More and more, I’ve noticed that people think checking e-mails is work. It’s not. Being online all day can be a huge distraction. Some people do it on the pretence of social networking. I don’t believe in that. Social networking doesn't help at all, and to do it during office time is unprofessional. At work, Facebook is a negative investment. Left to me, I wouldn't receive too many phone calls. Ideally, I would keep my voice mail activated all the time, and call people back later. I did use the voice mail for many years but in India, many people have a problem with that. Voice mail might be accepted well internationally but here people think you are “acting pricey”.
Work is worship—discipline and regiment are a big chunk of doing a good job. A lot of people think that when they turn entrepreneurs or become their own bosses, they can work around their own time. But a nine-to-six routine is a key ingredient to being successful, especially when you’re on your own. When you work, you should just work. I’d never allow myself to get out in the middle of a day, and meet a friend over lunch or a drink. Lunch, for me, is quick at the work table, or even if I’m meeting somebody, then it’s a working lunch. Those sometimes do get stretched. I’ve to confess that I have a tendency to spend more than desirable time in meetings. This happens often. It’s one of my productivity breakers. I can see why I lose some days because of this.
W
5 8 | INC. | MARCH 2012
hat I really enjoy is the joy of creation—the first few years of setting up a company, and seeing it stand on its feet. There aren’t too many interruptions. And, you don’t have to deal with large teams or structure. I have to confess I don’t enjoy managing large teams, or people in general. As an entrepreneur, I’ve been lucky that I don’t need to do that, unlike in a large corporate, where you have to. When you work for yourself, you can create your own ecosystem. Of course, the key is to understand one’s own references, and be aware of your strengths and weaknesses. In all my ventures, I have been very clear that somebody else needs to take care of the operations part. I always focused on business development. Even in Eduvisors, my co-founder takes care of the team. I focus on bringing the business in. Managing a team on a day-to-day basis is something I’m not comfortable with. I look at it as more of an interruption when people come to me with their problems. Because I don’t enjoy it, I’m very poor at it. Or maybe because I’m poor at it, I don’t enjoy it. I’m not sure which is more true—but I would rather not bother about it. You have to arrive at a structure where you can give your best. I still remember what a top boss at Smithkline Beecham, the company I joined right after my MBA from XLRI, had told all the recruits during induction. He said that if you don’t feel like going to office for three days in a row, you should quit. In fact, a part of the reason for which I decided to quit ValueFirst as it was scaling-up, was because it was becoming a bit too structured and big. I’m not a scale guy. That’s not my measure of success. People find it strange but I don’t adhere to the think-big credo. In fact, I
strategy
“Entrepreneurship is about gears. If you’re in gear one or two, you don’t have any time. You’re on the pedal all the time.” find this rush to make it big in quick time extremely annoying. Also, a lot of people now have this super obsession with scale. It’s not something I subscribe to. How many people have been able to build even a 20-people company? Even that is commendable, and very tough to do. But people are too hung up on scale and success. Now, I run two outfits; Setu Ventures and Eduvisors. I don’t find balancing both difficult. It’s part of what I call “wide spectrum frequency modulation”. It’s important for every entrepreneur to change hats and frequency depending on the person he or she is interacting with. At one level, you could be negotiating a million-dollar deal, and an hour later, you could worry about how your office is spending even a thousand rupees. Plus, I’ve finally arrived at the right model of investing. Setu Ventures has invested in 12 companies so far. Earlier, apart from writing a cheque—anything between `5 lakh and `50 lakh—I would spend time with the entrepreneurs. I wanted to do more than just give gyaan. But, I realised that this model of investing just didn’t work. Your time is valuable, but it’s not valued. Today I just sign a cheque. Moreover, I’ve created my networks, so scouting around for promising start-ups doesn’t take up much time either. Fortunately, I don’t have to spend too much time in identifying startups today. I’m linked to the IIM Ahmedabad incubation programme, so they do the shortlisting. In fact, over the past few years, my work life has changed. Entrepreneurship is about gears. If you’re in gear one or two, you don’t have any time. You’re on the pedal all the time. When I had just started out on my own, I worked 18 hours a day. Then, the focus was financial success. ValueFirst was certainly built to flip. I wanted to be free of the financial pressure of having to work for a living. That’s happened now. So, my life is in a different gear. I can’t do 18 hour workdays, or dozens of meetings per week. But, while the number of meetings has gone down, the quality has gone up. That is more important. Now, it’s about building a company to last. Exiting a business is a very modern, venture-capital terminology. Who did that earlier?
My entire approach towards work has changed today. Earlier, the drive was financial. Now, I want to be involved in employment creation. That’s where India needs to put in a lot of effort. Through my work, and through the institutions that I partner with, in the next 30 years I want to help create a million jobs. That is what is exciting about Eduvisors. We help set up and manage universities and schools, all of which lead to real, tangible, long-lasting jobs. When you change the way you work, the way you live on a personal level changes, too. My work-life balance is probably better than it’s ever been before. Not that I believe in playing up one against the other because actually this is a very contextual situation—it mainly flows from financial stability. It’s also a function of a person’s psychological make-up. When somebody doesn’t have money, there’s no question of wanting a work balance. It’s only after attaining a certain level of material comfort and financial stability that one begins looking at things holistically.
O
f course, I miss the time I lost out with my family and the comforts I could have given them in the early years of running my ventures. I neither had time for my wife and my kids nor any money. My wife kept the house running. We had made a pact, almost like a Rahul Dravid and Virendra Sehwag partnership. If one is on a sticky wicket, the other partner should be able to hold the other end. In fact, marrying the right person, in context of entrepreneurship, is crucial. I’ve seen several of my contemporaries miss the entrepreneurial bus because they didn’t get enough support and buy-in from a spouse. Your environment, like I said, has to be according to your situation. Otherwise, you go through hell. Between work and family, I don’t have time much for anything else. I do read a lot in my free time. Most of my reading is around management and entrepreneurship. In fact, most of the books in my home library are on these two topics. My wife complains that I’ve spent a lot of money on a golf club membership even though I don’t really play. But I got it five years ago, and I figured if I have it, I’ll pick it up sometime. It doesn’t need to be done right away. March 2012 | INC. | 5 9
I wish I knew then...
Pankaj Ratra, co-founder, Path Infotech Pankaj Ratra’s relationship with Path Infotech, a software solutions and services firm, is as good as a marriage: he founded it with his friends in 1991, and it’s the only one he’s worked for. Ratra admits the marriage gets stronger every day—the `75-crore, Noida-based firm has clarity as to where it needs to be to continue the 25 per cent CAGR climb. With the credo he’s learnt—staying strong and having a diverse customer base—the firm is on track to meet new milestones. Path Infotech was founded by four of us, all friends from college, the Institute of Management Technology, Ghaziabad. As MCA students, we’d talk about our own company. We officially launched in 1991 with a seed fund of `70,000 that we managed to cobble together. We used it to buy a computer, a UPS and a printer. When we started, we didn’t want to provide just technology maintenance. We thought about the solutions we came up with as an answer to the question—what business problem are we trying to solve? How will it impact a company, and will it lead to higher transactions? Computing power, to us, was a tool to achieve these objectives. The software solutions deployed dictated the hardware a company uses. When we entered the market, we found the opposite held true—people didn’t value the software as much as they valued the hardware. Changing that perception was our biggest challenge. We persevered because we knew there was a market there waiting to be automated, though people themselves were not aware of the proper definition of automation.
6 0 | INC. | MARCH 2012
resources and clients. But staying positive and strong is critical. It’s equally important to live your own journey, and not copy what others are doing. Today, we have a solid presence and market equity because when we began, we concentrated for the first decade on India. We branched out to Singapore in 2000, and opened a subsidiary in the US two years ago. We took the leap when the time was right and when we were equipped to fund our expansion. That’s not to say we’ve always got everything figured out. Client relations have been our strength, and firms like Maruti and CitiExit Rules It was the abrupt exit of a founder group have worked with us for director and friend, that made Pankaj Ratra more determined to go on. more than 15 years. Still, we’ve been jolted by clients sometimes. Seven years ago, a US-based client decided Many of our lessons came early. It wasn’t to disengage with us. Of course, our business easy being a young team—people didn’t know if we would stick around long enough. was hit but we learnt a valuable lesson that day: we had let ourselves become vulnerable However, our biggest blow came in 1994 when one of the founding directors decided as a large percentage of our revenue came from too few customers—a lot was riding on to quit. Our revenues were insufficient and a handful of people. Since then, every three we were vulnerable. Looking back, his exit brought in that extra bit of resolve. It pushed years, we try to bring on a big customer on us to strive harder, and it became even more board. —As told to Rohini Banerjee important to succeed. I believe that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. There have been many challenges—losing critical
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