Surviving 2 Years of Business in India

Of all the things I have done after my graduation; founding, running a business and sticking to it for a sensible amount of time is one of the greatest achievements that I have done so far. I am a co-founder of an Interior Furniture Manufacturing firm Bonito Designs which has been providing interior products for the past year and a half. I can happily say that the business is flourishing and has been growing at every opportunity.

Before Bonito Designs, I used to do internet marketing and owned web properties; before which I worked at Motorola and parallely ran a Tuition Agency to provide kids with qualified tutors. In between somewhere I was a real-estate agent too I guess; and a few times freelance writer.

Having done all of the above; there are these common threads that connect them all together and makes them work the way they do. Hang on to these and you will see yourselves sailing the wind of uncertainty; be it any business.

Tuning to a more specific frequency; I’m going to share with you what it is to be a business owner in India. What it takes to create and run a business in profit. Pick up whatever business you like; and do the following to ensure your survival.

Nobody gives a shit about your business

Having gathered balls to quit your job and to be pursuing the long awaited passion of yours; you might expect a plenty of back pats, congrats, praises and appreciations… Expect none. Cos nobody gives a shit unless you are an overwhelming success/failure. Dig your head two feet in your work and never look up.

Family is your first hurdle

If you are planning on telling your business idea to your family or sharing the happiness of resignation from your job; Don’t!. Believe it or not, the very first villain for your business will not be wearing a black leather jacket with ugly look on face.. It’s gonna be your girlfriend, your mom, dad or brother or sister or your entire family. You are even more stupid if you are asking them for advice. They will eventually accept the decisions you take. Just give them time.

Your idea is worth nothing when you start

You might be sitting on a possible cure for cancer. But unless you have figured it out already it has absolutely zero value. The idea alone without execution will not even sell for peanuts. So dont sit there plotting graphs, filling up excel sheets, drawing charts and piling up bookmarks. Its what you do with the limited resources and the kind of results you pull off are the things which interests possible investors.. Execution is what goes to show your mettle in the real world.. And your mettle is what an investor invests in.. And not the idea alone.

There is no ‘mahurtham’ for your venture

There was no ‘right’ time and there will never be.. Sitting there in the cubicle if you are praying for stars to align, or to gather that magical amount of money to start off or waiting for that ‘experience’ to come by.. Just remember; with the passing time, your commitments and problems will only increase. So there is no perfect time for what you want to do. Its the time when you decide and say “chuck this.. Let’s get it started.”

Become a Faker and get cracking with those first sales

You don’t have to have ACified wall cladded five star office to pull in sales.. The first sales of any startup can always happen from a coffee shop. You wouldn’t believe for Bonito designs, we closed first few sales with my home address set as office address. “Sir we are renovating”, “Sir our office is currently occupied”, “Sir We still have to receive internet connection at office” and what not are the reasons that we have given to our customers just to have that discussion in a coffee joint and skip showing them our office which was basically my home with 3 bean bags thrown in. So stop giving bull shit reasons like “I need to register for running a business”, “I need a website to be launched for my business”, “I don’t have the necessary experience yet..”, “Why would people pay me if I don’t have an office”.

Reverse engineering investment – Fetching from market

After we friends decided to start off a manufacturing plant; there isn’t a single business magazine that we haven’t read and not a single Govt run SMB institute that we haven’t visited in order procure funding for our idea. Not only that, we approached numerous so called ‘investors’ with our idea with a hope that we’d raise an amount of Rs. 25 Lakh which would cover our Manpower needs, machine, rent, registrations etc. That funding never ever came; and almost half of it was coughed up by our own pockets which we had saved up from our job.

• Banks will not give you loan unless you have an ITR of 2 years (by when you would bloody not require any loan from anybody)
• Investors are interested to see sales; and numbers which won’t happen unless you get the capital.
• Once you quit your job; Banks won’t even provide loan on your properties (lands, home, vehicle) unless you have salaries going on. (Mortgage won’t work without a solid third party assurance).

Probably the above will be the 80% of the reason why a lot of young start-up will collapse even before they get started. Trust me; 2 years down the line; the very amount is a meaningless sum that exchanges hands from your firm to another. This is the very first hurdle that you need to get across all by yourself. So the lesson as below..

Get Funded from Market. Its as simple as that. Its always a good idea to get started in a consultancy model as the cashflow happens faster and you have high chances of receiving cash advance for your orders which you can utilize as a temporary investment unless you receive further orders whose cash can be rotated.

Survival Mode – Taking up all that comes to you

Just have it in the corner of your mind that you are starting as a low level scavenging parasite in the business world (no-offence) and how much ever you think you know about business; you still have thousands of things to learn about nuts and bolts of doing business; so for god’s sake get started with whichever small order you get and start rotating cash. Not only does it help you with the running capital but it also gives you that practical learning edge which you can NEVER EVER receive from an institute about doing Business; so when you are placing bigger bets in the future; you know what to bet on for sure.

Cutting the advertising slack – Kick Justdial, Sulekha, AskLaila and everything else in the face

As soon as you have your phone numbers on classified sites or on your own website; the very first call will not be from a customer for a query or from your friend to congratulate you. It will be from one of the sites above. Just a note from my end here. “These don’t work for you when you want them to; with the budget that you have”. We refrained from doing a paid advert on these websites; and as much as they make you feel that they are an indispensable tool for your business to survive; you still will flourish. Even to-date we haven’t advertised on these. Go for PPC campaigns on AdWords and Facebook and start with the amounts that you are comfortable with.

Forget you are the boss

Before I go in detail about this; I highly suggest you read this book a title=”E-Myth” a by Michael Gerber. This tells you how to visualize your entire organization like a fortune 500 company and yet how you need to slog your ass of the way a daily wage labor does in a construction site; for your company to see the light of the day.

When you start up; you are the security guard, you are the coolie, you are the cleaner and janitor. Don’t shy away from even a single task; as there will be times when you will have sufficient money but no people to get the job done and the job NEEDs to be done in a business. Me & my partners almost got perfect biceps as we had started unloading plywood of 30 kgs each and 50 sheets almost every 3 day as we didn’t have labor when we started; we then would go back and work on the laptop. Each of us did every imaginable task that had to be done to provide the customer with the promised product/service and throughout we learnt so much that none of the employee could fake his/her work and it gave us this amazing scale with which we could not only teach our employees but also appreciate them right in time when they did an amazing job.

Everything is a problem when you start.. So forget about targeting perfection.

Oh… how would I tell you about this little dialogue that I keep hearing from so many of my friends who aspire to to become a great businessman. They keep telling me “I’m just trying to perfect this; its just across the corner, I will get this done and make it public”, “I’m learning this; I’m almost complete, and as soon as I’m done I will startup”, “I’m waiting for a perfect idea”.

There is nothing called perfect and as Seth Godin says in almost every book of his; emstart shipping; start delivering them. Get started; Its a journey towards perfection and you can’t achieve perfection unless you haven’t figured out all the mistakes that could happen along the way 

Evading the Taxmen, Chanda Collectors, Sanghas and Samitis

Roll your shop shutter up and you’d have at least one of the above people standing to suck your pocket inside out. They don’t care if your Q3 sucked and you aren’t yet done sobbing; they don’t care if you have mortgaged your only home to come up with this business; and they never will. You can never fight these people; you fight and they keep coming back in hordes. This is what you can do.

Evade.

When they show up; just remain calm and say that “Boss is not here Boss”. This is the reason why I always have my old disconnected number handy so that it is always switched off or not reachable. Ring that up and ask them to come back later. We have an old saying in Kannada which goes like this.. “Beeso Donne Tappisikondre Nooru Varsha Aayassu”. Evade that donne 

Don’t you dare Delegate

Once you have gone through the book I mentioned above.. It will be more and more clear to you that the first thing you shouldn’t be doing in your early days of business is Delegate. Consider your employees as infants who need to be taught how to walk before you expect them to work. When you yourselves aren’t clear with the type of responsibilities that he must be doing, you can’t expect them to take them helm the very first day. So never ever start by saying “Get this done”, you always say “Let’s get this done” and by that they know that you have their back when they do it.

Pampering Yourself is a Must

“Love Yourself” is the first statement that any self-help leader or motivational speaker gives. It has its own benefits and is the ultimatum in personal happiness. Whatever you do all day; if you aren’t happy by the end of day, all that you did was in vain. So go out; pamper yourself a bit; buy something that you love; go watch a movie or two if you like doing that, get yourself a pedicure or manicure, dance to death in a pub. You have earned it. Don’t be crumbled by those expenses; it might be hard for you to afford those luxuries sometimes; but it is going to come back in multi folds when you work even harder the next day.

Labor Pain

There is no bigger pain in business than the ‘labor pain’; the acute pain your labor force will give you if your business involves works that needs to be done by labor. You don’t have a degree in this world which shall teach you how to handle labor well and efficiently, in fact if you have learnt to do this; you could bloody do any business in the entire world as this is the force that constitutes 70% world population and is the force that gets things done. This is the force that got the Taj Mahal done, Egypt Pyramids and Hanging gardens of Babylon.

You might think that its the money that gets the labor moving. You are grossly mistaken. They look for compassion, leadership and trust in their owner. You should be harsh and strict on them, you should also end up shouting on them badly when things aren’t going your way; but also treat them when they get a job done nicely, offer them bonuses in time before they ask, get them that biryani and eat along with them when they would have worked all day long and yet work more till midnight cos you said that work was to be done urgently. These are the people who value family more than money; and the moment they consider you family, you shall fulfill all responsibilities of a family without them asking.

You’ll get kicked, jabbed, badmouthed, bad reviewed, pushed – but never be not humble

Even though I’m not from an interior design background; I loved doing interiors as I was much more careful with everything I did and there were lesser chance of mistakes as I was never careless. I did a lot of designs which my customers fell in love with. There was this one customer who had a small space that need to be designed and her requirements couldn’t fit in her given space. I pointed out to her that I could very well accept to do that but it will not only be an expense on her end; but it will end up ruining an already perfect space. But she insisted that she needed it; and ultimately I had to refund their fees as I just couldn’t accept something that I strongly felt wasn’t right to do. There was good debate while all this happened and there were good chances of conversation ending up badly; but I conveyed what I believed and both of us departed ways with a smile on face.

You will make mistakes – and you will learn from it. Many a number of times, the customer is the one who is funding those mistakes. When we do business; we always have at the back of our mind. We have done gross mistakes in our early days but what we know for sure is, being honest with your mistakes with your customers will not only clear your mind for better things, but will also serve for a longer and better relationship with your customer. They will hate you for doing that mistake, but they love you forever for having admitted and corrected it; and these are the truest evangelist you could ever get for your business which even money can’t buy.

I’ve been there in that firing spot where I knew it was my mistake and I could have avoided it with little care and I would go stand in front of the customer with a puppy face and say “Sir I know its my mistake, and I’ll get it rectified” and in many cases the cost for fixing isn’t as much you would think it is. And to be honest; it will NEVER EVER work if you try to convince/promote your mistake as the intended final result.

Go make a family out of strangers and see how you discover fame and money are the last thing you will want out of your venture.

Re-posted from my web-log Surviving 2 Years of Business in India.