Omar Abdullah Speech at Ashutosh Garg's Book Launch - The Buck Stops Here.3gp

VCCircle Interview

Research is important – but can delay start ups

Research is important – but can delay start ups

I have sat on the boards of many companies and institutions and whenever we have been confronted by the need to take a quick decision and the board is not ready to take that decision, we have asked the management teams to conduct research to get more information.

How many times, as members of boards of large corporations, have we asked the finance people to run some more numbers or do some more analysis?

How many times have we asked the product design people to redo some pack designs because the “red was not red enough” or the “green could be a little more green”?

How many times have we asked our marketing people to redesign a campaign because we did not think this was “communicating” the right message of the product?

All this additional information was generally called for because as members of a board charged with the responsibility of direction setting for the company, were not ready to take a decision.

For a startup company, research is important to set the direction the company wishes to pursue and not to delay decision making. Research must be an aide to reinforce one’s views and not a crutch to play “I told you so” later, more so if the decision taken does not work out the way it was intended. At the same time, moving forward purely on impulse may also prove to be an expensive process.

Nothing is more important for an entrepreneur to “put his money where his mouth is”.

Research helps mature companies to fine tune decision making. While I am not advocating starting any business enterprise without doing any research, I do believe that too much research delays decision making and therefore the startup journey of any new entrepreneur.

I am reminded of a quote of Sir John Harvey Jones,

“Planning is an unnatural process; it is much more fun to do something. The nicest thing about not planning is that failure comes as a complete surprise, rather than being preceded by a period of worry and depression”

Quote from “The Buck Stops Here – My Journey from Manager to Entrepreneur”

India Inc - Ashutosh Garg, J J Valaya - II

Ashutosh Garg - Zee Business Interview - 13 Aug 13

The Medicine Buying Experience in India

Most chemist shops in India are small, dusty, counter stores and the customer has to stand outside the shop at the counter in summer and winter. The stores selling medicines to cure the patients were completely unhygienic in their practices. 

Standing outside several chemist shops and observing a customers buying behaviour gave me far more insight than I could have could through extensive research.

I observed the following steps when a customer walked up to a chemist shop to buy medicines:

1.    The customer would walk up to the counter of a chemist shop and ask for a bottle of cough syrup.

2.    The chemist would rummage through dusty store shelves and pull out a dusty bottle.

3.    The chemist would then reach for a dirty rag from underneath the counter and he would clean the bottle of cough syrup with this rag.

4.    Once the bottle had been cleaned, he would take a paper bag made out of old newspapers or a plastic bag from a shelf below the counter.

5.    He would then either “blow” into the paper bag to open it or wet his thumb and index finger with his spit and then open the top of the plastic bag.

6.    The bottle of cough syrup would then be put into its packaging and handed over to the customer.

7.    If the customer asked for an invoice, it would be issued manually. If no invoice was asked for, it would not be given.

8.    There would be no checking of the expiry date, the batch number and the maximum retail price printed on the bottle.

Every stage of this purchase process was unhygienic and lacked transparency. Cleaning a bottle with a dirty rag or blowing into a paper bag or putting spit on a plastic bag was unacceptable when selling medicines and yet the Indian customer did not seem to care. Not taking a bill for a purchase ensured that if there was a problem with the medicine, there was no way to establish that the medicine had been purchased from that particular chemist.

Quote from "The Buck Stops Here"

Who is an entrepreneur?

Who is an entrepreneur?

So, just who is an entrepreneur?

In a broad overall sense an entrepreneur is a person who

1.    Organises a business venture and assumes the risk for it.

2.    Has looked at a problem and seen it as an opportunity or a likely prospect to start something new.

3.    Feels that his ambition is being held in check by corporate red tape. Though it takes more than just cleverness and frustration with the status quo to get an entrepreneurial venture off the ground.

4.    Is someone that assumes the financial risk of the initiation, operation and management of a business

Most entrepreneurs are driven not by the need to make money, but by the need to make their dreams a reality. More often than not, money is a byproduct of an entrepreneur's motivation rather than the motivation itself. Entrepreneurs are participants, not observers; players, not fans. And to be an entrepreneur is to be an optimist, to believe that with the right amount of time and money, you can achieve anything.

An entrepreneur’s “gut feeling” is often the subject of a lot of discussion and my own learning here has been that gut feel is the really the extract of one’s own experience and one’s ability for risk taking rather than some vision that an entrepreneur purportedly has had.

Yet, everyone believes he / she is an entrepreneur and has the capability to build any business and take any risk.