28.57% of time is all a typical corporate professional longs for, during the rest of his/ her time. Yes, we are talking about those 2 precious days in a week, the weekend. Every Friday, we at Deloitte get a ‘weekend fun’ mailer with info on events happening in the city over the weekend. (It’s a huge business for some companies like buzzintown.com. I can’t help but muse at their copyright reservation; they cannot even figure out when their so-called copyrights have been infringed. We will talk about digital copyrights and their fragility in a separate post). Thanks to my friend who sends the mail, a couple of weeks back there was a mention of a startup exhibition in the city. Now, Hyderabad is not (yet) a hot-spot for entrepreneurship and events such as this, are like circus-in-town for the passionate. Contrary to my regular Saturday wake-up time, I got up earlier (9am) and made my way to the circus, err, the exhibition.
The venue was buzzing with crowd (I later realized that each startup brought with them 5 people on an average, who formed most part of the crowd). Each team was given a kiosk, good enough to display the product or banners/ brochures if it’s a service. Startups included a budding social networking site, a corporate skills training-for-students firm, an online interview platform, a niche consulting firm, a firm that makes edible cutlery (substitutes plastic), recruitment based firms, an online veggie bazaar among many others. These exhibitions are great platforms for entrepreneurs to showcase their innovation to VCs and the media, attract potential customers and talk to potential suppliers. If done effectively, they make great first steps for your go-to-market strategy. Not disappointing the expectations, the owners were very passionate about their ventures, explained in detail how it all began, how they managed to gather a team, what kind of challenges they faced and how they are doing currently.
Being a member of the business consulting fraternity, I could communicate with the entrepreneurs in their own language and assess their product/ service, business model and understand their challenges and future expectations. For the pitfalls I pointed out, some of them were intelligent enough to come up with a resolution scheme, some good ones lent their ears to understand possible corrections and solutions and a few were either defensive or unwilling to admit any loopholes. The presentations to the VCs went really well (some of them were epitomes of confidence). In the end, one of the VCs (who is an NRI returning to India to start his VC firm) mentioned that he found nothing innovative, some ideas too complicated to be practical and some startups did not do their market research before they took their plunge (it may be his money at stake after all!).
Based on this exhibition and my many other encounters with startups and entrepreneurs, I felt that the chemistry in a startup is not different from that of a typical company. The same business principles a management consultant uses to assess a regular company can be slightly tweaked and applied to a startup. Moreover, you can find ‘pure business’ in a startup. Before things settle and the company stabilizes, the focus is on the core revenue generating component rather than other components like managing huge volumes of data or optimizing your customer service operations, as an example.
A startup goes through few critical phases before it blooms into a sustainable business (many don’t). In my understanding, the beginning phases of a typical startup are characterized by the features, challenges depicted in the pic.
At every stage, the owners need to ask themselves some questions to understand if they are going in the direction they initially envisaged. I have put together a set of questions (which are by no way collectively exhaustive) knowing the answers to which is very critical for an entrepreneur to make sure he/ she has a perspective of what's happening with the venture. These questions spread across the phases of the startup and serve as a checklist to ensure the venture is moving towards sustainability.
The first set (Core business) is like your front office- the part of your business that earns you money. The remaining parts are those that cost you but essential in running your business.
As promised in my previous post, here is my value proposition to startups: As a consultant, I would like to help startups in answering the above questions and also trying to improve the answers. I am no Ram Charan to present a panacea to all your issues and immediately uplift your top-line and bottom-line but can use my consulting skills to help you make decisions that are most appropriate for your business. More importantly, I bring an outsider perspective to your business from someone who has no stake and hence no reason to be biased in any way. While I have experience in some of the above areas, I am sure I can add value in any required area by doing the required due-diligence as a typical consultant would do.I would be doing this over weekends as pro-bono. So if you think I can be of any help to you, please feel to reach out to me. I will be happy to talk to you. Cheers!
P.S: My future posts will be deep-dives of the above areas, one by one.
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