Theory of Constraints!

So this is a ridiculously unpredictable journey that you’ve embarked upon. Every time you think you’ve got it figured out and are now set to get cracking, a new constraint pops up on the horizon.

Limitation of capital and the imperative to maximize the impact of your spends, is what even the fence-sitters are aware. By fence-sitters, I am referring to the ones still contemplating about quitting their cushy corporate jobs. But those two are perhaps the most elementary of constraints that stare you in the face all along. Here I am going to make an attempt to talk about the lesser known ones.

The constraint of expertise:

Now this is the foremost constraint that you feel, as early as the incorporation stage of your company.

While you would have managed teams of hundreds and revenue turnovers of hundreds of crores in your previous corporate avatar, you would certainly not have expertise on drafting AOAs, MOAs and the hazaar other regulatory jazz. You could have been the sales stud in your previous company, but when you get down to it, you’ll realize you know jack-shit about building a tech product. Drafting your contracts from scratch, reviewing them, creating offer letters, IT procurement, renting the office space and furniture, believe me none of it is as easy as you’d have thought.

You were always supported by experts on these things in your previous company. Entrepreneurship will help you appreciate their roles in your professional life. You’d miss expertise on so many things – big time!

The constraint called cash flow

This will hit you six months later. While your initial business plan will tell you that you were covered for 9 months of your employees’ salary, there’s no way you’d have figured that payments from clients would get delayed by 3 months over and above the agreed upon 60 days. Nobody would have told you in the beginning that all the enthusiastic travel that you’ve been undertaking in the name of acquiring clients is in most likelihood sunk investment.

All this will hit you when in the seventh month, you realize there isn’t any money to pay out salaries.

The constraint of finding good people

This is the most humbling experience of all. You always thought that you had the eye for sharp talent, could spot the best and engage them in suitable roles to get you the best results. All this while you conveniently forgot, none of those studs were joining you. They were joining the company you represented.

As a boot-strapping startup the best don’t want to join you, only the foolhardy do! Either you need to rely on sheer luck to find the odd bright spark or train the average-yet-enterprising minds to run for you!

The constraint of sharp focus

This might sound a little fuzzy now. But believe me you, this the most critical lesson which you always learn a little later than what you’d have liked.

In your corporate job, you always had those fancy 3-4 KRAs. You had one, at max, two bosses to report to. You had 5-10 DRs to manage. And since you knew that the fixed salary would anyways hit the bank account, there was only one incentive target to be chased. You never realized it- all these seemingly irritating trappings of your job, helped you focus.

Entrepreneurship is a different world, where the urgent versus the important is a perennial debate. Every darn thing would need your urgent attention and suck your bandwidth. There’ll always be the temptation to do multiple things at the same time. That is the time to remind yourself, that you have human constraints and need to focus sharper and on fewer priorities.

Angerpreneur learnt all this the hard way!

That Sense of Achievement on Receiving the First Repeat Order

An entrepreneur's life is replete with momentous events and the frequency with which they seem to take place is equally breathtaking.

There are several such moments, like installing the first laptop, receiving your incorporation certificate, hiring the first employee, signing the first paycheck, receiving the first purchase order and receiving the first payment. Yet amongst all the above mentioned ones what is perhaps the most fulfilling moment is the one when you receive your first repeat order.

The sense of validation and vindication that sweeps over you is something that sets this moment apart. So if your first payment made you jump with joy, the first repeat order, whenever it happens, shall make you feel like sitting down and cherish the feeling.

Today we received our first repeat order from Britannia, our first marquee client. An order much larger, than the previous one. What makes the memory stand out is the matter-of-fact manner in which the order was communicated. Clearly, we've become a part of the client's system and they depend on us to deliver. We've now been accepted as the norm!

The real deal is in being able to hold on

So while I was taking the plunge into the unknown waters of entrepreneurship, dozens of friends warned me about its perils. Quite a few of them encouraged me as well, hoping to get a free ring side view of the struggles involved in it. Since most of them were people who would never give up the bondages of corporate slavery, I tended to discount their views.

But I clearly remember, all the faces of people who admired the fact that I had taken the courageous decision which most of them would never end up taking. This happened when I had ultimately taken the plunge. Most of them couldn’t stop raving about the kind of guts needed to take such a call.

When I think about it now, what most of them on the other side of the corporate fence do not realize is that the real game of courage starts when you are in it. It takes much more courage to go on in the face of adversity when you are actually in the middle of the entrepreneurial journey.

The only other parallel that I can think of is the game of roulette where the differentiator between the men and the boys, is their courage to hold on. The longer that you can stay on the table and keep taking the hits of the losses along the way, the higher are your chances of raking in the wins.

For all those people sitting on the fence and wondering when and whether to take the plunge, the big deal isn’t the decision to jump. But the real deal is in being able to stay in the pit and continue to fight your way out of it.

After a long hiatus the Angerpreneur is back with lots of stories of hatred and anger!

Life as entrepreneur comes with its own set of compounded challenges. Amongst the scarcity of several other resources, what pinches the most is perhaps the scarcity of time. It often becomes literally impossible to take time out from the daily rigmarole of juggling priorities by the dozen, operational details, tactical plans and strategic imperatives all at the same time. That is perhaps the most plausible explanation of the long hiatus.

The journey is so consuming that there's barely enough time to even document it!

Since the last post much has transpired in the life of our fledgling start-up. New clients, new mistakes, the first invoice, the first attrition, the first really ugly internal confrontation, new well-wishers, new motivations, new quarter plans, the first investor discussion and several revised business plans later what angers me the most is the 'fakeness' of people. (Don't even know if that's a word!)

There are too many people who'll want to start up with you with the unmatched eagerness. They'll talk about sharing the passion of wanting to create something valuable together. There's a lot of initial chest-thumping and hoo-haa about going to war together!

But as the bruises of war get deeper and the pain of failing keeps getting prolonged, you begin seeing the first signs of the weaker ones chickening out. Surviving prolonged periods without any success, having to dig your heels in that much deeper and keep looking at the longer-term picture isn't easy for a lot of them. Lets face it, the ideals of entrepreneurship sound fancy from a distance but when you are in the thick of it you need men made of sterner stuff.

Powerless Without Brands

 

Well, for most us who've chucked their careers in the corporate world, after working with some power brands in the past, to pursue their entrepreneurial dreams - there is one thread common to us all. We all share uncannily similar stories about that first moment of truth.

 

After years of working with large brands across the globe, people come to identify you with the brands that you work with and very soon the brands that you work with, go on to become your identity. The brands you represent become a part of your introduction at social dos. The alacrity with which people respond to your emails and phone calls becomes a function of the brands you represent. The ease with which your meeting invites get accepted also depend on the name of the brand in your email id, from which the calendar invite was sent. Your loans get sanctioned basis the brand on your business card that you hand out to the sales rep of the bank.

 

And then comes the day when you, as an entrepreneur, call up one of our oldest clients (and also one of your friends now) from your days in the corporate world and your phone call goes unanswered! The follow up call is answered, but the response you get is, "Hey, that was you! I am so sorry I did not have your number saved. Can I call you back please." Three days later when you still haven't heard from him and you decide to drop in an email, the response you get is that he's travelling over the next 2 weeks. Dejected, but not the one to accept defeat, you persist. Two weeks later, you write back again and you are told to connect with the assistant to schedule a 17 minute meeting, nothing more. That is the moment of truth when you do not know whether to be happy that you've finally landed a meeting or be perplexed about how-on-earth can you possibly describe your entire venture and operations in 17 minutes!

 

Contrast this with a scenario when you could just walk into this clients' office at will - courtesy the brand you represented while in the corporate world!  

 

Believe me you, dealing with rejection is a cultural unlearning that you need to undertake very rapidly else you'll find your self-confidence taking a strong beating. Some of us jump on the entrepreneurial bandwagon to make more money, some do so to cherish the process of building something and some do the same because they cannot work in places where somebody else decides the rules. Very few do it to create a name for themselves and make their names brands, as big as the ones they represented at one point in time. Hence, very few are prepared to deal with this sudden sense of loss of identity and the powerlessness without brands!

 

-

 

 



 

I am sure this banner is the work of an inspired mind and at the same time it must have inspired several minds to be disposed positively towards the much-fancied life of entrepreneurship!

But a very personal view here - I believe, the probability of this inspired mind being that of an entrepreneur's is  very limited. I have some strong reasons to believe thus.

First, it is very unlikely that this person is an active entrepreneur. If he really had been one, its is almost impossible that he'd have the time to come up with witty stuff such as this. This holds true unless, of course, our friend in question is in the business of coming up with nuggets like these and makes money out of it.

Having ruled out the possibility of the guy being an active entrepreneur, I move towards quashing the possibility of the person being a successful been-there-done-that kind of an entrepreneur. A successful entrepreneur, unless he's moved onto motivational speaking, would in most likelihood be occupied with spending the money he's just made in a successful sell out. If it isn't the successful sell out, then it has to be the new-found ambition to turn VC, Angel, Chief Mentor or Gardener!!! All of this, yet again, leaves little room for witty banners!

The third possibility kind of rules itself out on its own! The possibility of this being the brainchild of an unsuccessful entrepreneur doesn't arise. Unless the guy is one of those who likes to send at least a dozen friends to a movie which he's just come back loathing and wasted his money on. In essence, I do not think a failed entrepreneur would extol the virtues of being on your own when he himself has just come out of a bitter experience.

Now, the question arises, if this hasn't been written by somebody who's ever tasted entrepreneurship - who has written this?

The most probable sketch of the person who just sketched this banner, has to be that of a salaried person.In most likelihood he'd have hit upon this brilliant one-liner while taking a shower in a hurry on a day when he's late for an early morning review as usual. It is equally likely that he had his inspired moment in the crowded bus which he takes for work and emerges out of it as smelly as the bus itself. Perhaps the one-liner came out of some kind of deep angst against having to reach office everyday at the same appointed hour and leaving it with the same humdrum monotony. In fact it'd be interesting to note when this banner was designed since it could very well be some kind of loo-art of a disgruntled employee post his appraisal.

Honestly, my one month of baptism by this fire called entrepreneurship hasn't been easy at all. The few dreams and excitement that I had walked into this is clearly turning out to be illusionary. I am not even thinking of this as those 'few years in my life' and I have no time to even dare dream of 'the rest of my life'. Every waking moment is about how much can I get done today, how much of whatever I planned to achieve this week can i realistically achieve and whether I'd be able to stick to my plan for the month and how'd I justify not being able to do so.

Repeat : too many get lured by the promise of the 'rest of your life' in the banner above, while what matters is  whether you can even survive just 'those few years' that is being spoken of here.

                                                                                            -Yours truly
                                                                                              Angerpreneur

Watch out for the next post on 'Power of Brands v/s Powerless without Brands"

Well, I guess somebody had to do this some day!

Entrepreneurship for far too long has been the glorified chapter in the dreams of most working professionals, tired of the tyranny of bosses. Often forgotten is the fact that in a regular job with a fixed mandate, the boss is perhaps the only variables out of your control. As an entrepreneur there are way too many people, bodies and circumstances that are way out of your sphere of influence.

Somebody needs to talk about all these frustrations in the everyday lives of an entrepreneur. I have decided to pick up the virtual pen to deliver on this onerous responsibility for reasons more than one. First, at a very selfish level, it helps me vent out my anger on all things which everyday spin out of my control. Second, at a very philanthropic level, it helps a lot of people contemplating on their decision to jump into the lap of the unknown, take a better informed view. Third, I hope that someday I shall have readers to this blog and further hope against hope that there might be people out there wanting to share solutions to my issues.

So here goes Angerpreneur's first journal entry!

Like most first-time entrepreneur's we were perplexed by the whole challenge of navigating through the myriad processes of getting a company registered in India. So we decided to engage the services of this other company called Companiesinn.com, which claimed to be an expert in incorporation processes, for assisting us in the process of getting our start-up registered as a Pvt Ltd company.

To begin with, we never really had high regard for businesses whose business model is based on the fact that the government has made too many processes complicated in this country and is simply inefficient. I see such companies as nothing more than glorified agents and touts. The day government processes become efficient, simple and citizen-friendly most of these companies will be out of business. I continue to hope for the sun to rise on such a day in this country.

There are after all 17-year old Nick D'Aloisio's in the developed world creating companies and selling of their Summlys for 30 million Dollars!

At every step, Companiesinn.com  continued to frustrate us out of our skins by being prompt only on the action of accepting an advance payment and reneging on all other promises. Not a single deadline was stuck to, no mails and calls went answered on the first attempt, never was there one SPOC for a customer and never was there any genuine value-adding advice received from them. To make matters worse, they perhaps have managed to hire the rudest possible bunch of customer service reps, who sometimes behaved worse than the average government babu. 

Our application for a name approval from the MCA has already gone through multiple iterations and re-submissions. We've been given multiple versions by each of their different customer service reps on what constitutes an acceptable list of KYC documents for a registered office address. For every delay in the process, we've been told that Companiesinn.com is helpless since the ROC in Bangalore is inefficient. And never have they been able to give us a suitable justification as to why are they charging us as much as they are, if they are as helpless as they project themselves to be.

All in all, its been an absolutely harrowing experience with outsourcing an activity we believed was best left to an expert. I wish there was some kind of tool or mechanism which could assist start-ups like us in rating/assessing vendors like companiesinn.com. Especially, because for us every penny counts and it is critical to get the best value out of every penny spent.

However, lesson learnt, it is going to be critical going forward to perform necessary due diligence at every step before jumping into the decision to outsource. A wrong vendor selected can actually cause more heartburn than business benefit!