By Deepak Ghadge
Ease of Doing Business for MSMEs: Entrepreneurs need to have a PhD! How many of you agree with this statement?
I was interviewing one of the success stories in the salon industry Mr C K Kumaravel who is the founder of Naturals Salon, which has 700 franchisee stores in four to five states. He mentioned this statement. We asked him out of curiosity what does that mean?
He elaborated that it is an acronym where P is Passion; H is Hunger; and D is Discipline.
This is true for every entrepreneur no matter what the scale or size of the business is.
If you have passion and hunger and no discipline, the entity will not have a great customer experience, books may not be clean or maintained, and money will be spent without consensus. Unorganized behaviour often leads to devaluing time and money.
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If you have hunger and discipline and no passion, then you will not be able to build a ‘wow’ product or service and are likely to be in that business for a short period.
If you have passion and discipline and no hunger then you are not scaling your business. You are contended with what you have. There will be a competitor in the future who will come and scale it up, take away a good percentage of your market share and even eliminate you.
Hence, all three factors need to be balanced by an entrepreneur. In fact, another element can be added to the equation, which is obsession or rather a balanced obsession. If you need to be passionate, and disciplined you need to be obsessed with it.
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Now, let’s look at the core of this diagram. This teaches you another aspect which is how to create a greater ROI. This is a learning from another entrepreneur A. Mahendran, the inventor of Good Knight mosquito repellent. His secret to scaling any business is professionalism.
At the initial stage, every entrepreneur is a maverick entrepreneur, taking risks without consensus and analysis. However, to scale up, there is a need to adopt professional entrepreneurship which is about being risk averse, complaint, organized, leading by example, and using data and consensus as a mechanism before taking a decision. This protects from making any major mistakes. JRD Tata also mentioned that he used to always take consensus before making any decision. It is important to hire smart people who can give inputs worthy of pondering and calling the right shots.
Hence, to achieve greater ROI, it is important to have a mix of Entrepreneurial Entrepreneurship and Professional Entrepreneurship, let’s say in the ratio of 60:40.
So, are you raising the bar to have a PoHD in Entrepreneurship? List your current gaps and put an action plan against each of them. For the next 100 days make a list of what you want to achieve, be very clear, and committed, and go far with it. Do not have too many things listed. Only the top five to seven tasks which you can work on and streamline. Do not make frequent changes to your top tasks, then you lose the momentum. Repeat the exercise for every cycle of 100 days and build this as a culture of performance, timebound, innovation, working with limited resources and making the best use of your resources. Capture your journey and create a storyline for sharing with your team and clients. Empower your employees to speak up, participate, and innovate this builds a culture of openness and generates innovative ideas.
Deepak Ghadge is the author of the book ‘Dhool Dhoop Dhakka: Entrepreneurship by Design’.