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!
