Who' the f#$k' Moved My Cheese

I am reminded today of a certain blockbuster publication called

Who Moved My Cheese.  Though I am yet to figure out why that book did as well as it did.

For some innocuous reason, the book was about a couple of odd mice and, as far as I remember, a block of cheese that kept moving. It was supposed to be an inspirational piece with something to do about how and why you should keep moving your targets in life.

But then I was always this bird-brain and even the most evident inspiration was rarely grasped. However, what remained very firmly embedded in my circuitry are the obviously hilarious caricatures of the mice shoving the cheese around.

In a very different context, I feel like my cheese just got moved.

So as a startup, with little credentials as a company behind you, most clients or decision makers at client places find it difficult to take the chance of entrusting their business with you. Hence acquiring a customer involves several rounds of meetings, credibility-building, cajoling, begging and most importantly zeroing in on a potential evangelist in the client organization. You end up travelling for client meetings multiple times to the same client place – often in another city. Uncomfortable bus rides, scourging the city for cheap hotels, living on cheap street food, waiting in the receptions, bargaining with the rickshaws are just a few of the ordeals that you undertake in the process of acquiring a client.

Once you’ve identified your evangelist in the client organization you, like the perfect eager-beaver, work towards building a relationship with him.  You suffer his stories, theories and all his worries with a smiling façade – pretending to be his perfect agony uncle. All of this is done in the hope that one day he’ll help you get the purchase order through and the cheque cleared.

But as I’ve always said – it a cruel world out there! Just when all your efforts invested in building the proverbial relationship with your sponsor were about to bear fruit – your cheese gets moved.

Your evangelist get transferred into another role.

In a very different context, you feel exactly like those odd-looking mice whose cheese not just got moved – but rather rudely got snatched away!

An Angerpreneur's Journal : Hiring for Dummies

An Angerpreneur's Journal : Hiring for Dummies: So where’s the guy who said that a recruiter’s job was a lame one! Whoever said it wasn’t a specialist’s role. If as an aspiring entrepr...

Hiring for Dummies

So where’s the guy who said that a recruiter’s job was a lame one! Whoever said it wasn’t a specialist’s role.

If as an aspiring entrepreneur, people told you that hiring the first lot of people to join your startup was the tough one. Well, they clearly aren’t your best advisors. They told you only half the story. The bummers who join you in the beginning are in most likelihood people who’ve known you for a while. They invariably come from your close circle of friends, family or colleagues. The familiarity on both sides makes the decision relatively less ambiguous.

The fun starts when you start hiring for quality folks without the use of referrals or word-of-mouth. So here we were, looking for some young talent with reasonable communication skills to make outbound market research calls!

Sounds simple enough to most, especially if you are in bpo-land Bangalore! Aren't

these kind of people supposed to be found here-there-everywhere in Bangalore. Clearly not, when you want to hire them for a startup. So you start out by buying a limited access subscription to a certain almanac called www.monster.com.

The customer support chick at Monster treats you like chicken shit itself, for buying a measly rs 3000/-for 3-day subscription. The experience makes you feel like you just walked into a fine-dine asking to be served the cheapest version of masala chai, basis the figures on the right side of the menu card. This is just the beginning of things to come. Hereafter you are bamboozled with a database which could throw up results in hundreds of thousands or just a few hundreds depending on how artfully you check on the list of filters. But then as a startup, you have already metamorphosed into the habitual housewife trying to maximize your bang for the buck. You end up undertaking the painstaking process of downloading thousands of profiles. Navigating through which, is another story.

Now you are finally ready to make your calls, trying to imitate the recruiters who called you all these years. But rude surprises, one after the other, await you Mr Co-Founder! From straight monosyllabic responses like ‘not interested’ to ‘I am overqualified for your job’ – you have a range of stories to hear. Some of them show interest only to fizzle out by not turning up for interviews. Some of them who don’t even have jobs currently give you hazaar attitude. One of the blokes actually wanted to end the telephonic interview by asking me, why he should join our company. No wonder the bugger was without a job!

By the way, startups are known for their mess. Recently I realized, we clean up only when investors visit or when people turn up for interviews. The last minute dash to stow away the clothes hanger from next to the interview table in hilarious. Sometimes it gets funny, with both sides equally eager to impress.

Lesson for all future co-founders – hiring is a much larger role than what you ever thought it to be. Hiring, for dummies, can potentially involve cold calling, scanning through endless lists, repeating the name of your company at least twice on every call, cleaning up for taking interviews, waiting for candidates to turn up and sometimes even offering them the last bottle of Coke that you had saved for yourself in office!