Kuldip Maity

Over the weekend, while searching for a document, I stumbled upon an article about Kalpana Saroj and was reminded of her life story, the struggles that she had to go through in her early life after her father rescued her from an abusive marriage, her journey as an entrepreneur and how it led to a Padma Shri for trade and industry. What an amazing leader!

We have had several such personalities who have risen from rags to riches and become examples for others. It is all about latching on to the right opportunity that comes our way.

But when we talk on these lines, I keep getting reminded of the stories that I hear from VFS customers. While we all wish that some of them grow to become business celebrities, even the small progressions of the others cannot be ignored. The efforts and passion of our women entrepreneurs who try to get their families out of financial distress are commendable and should also be included as case studies in all management institutes.

One such story is of Anjali Pal, who could attend school only up to Class 6 before she was married off. But she did not let her life be derailed.

After performing the traditional family responsibilities and becoming a mother of three children, Anjali started helping out with her family’s agricultural land, while looking out for growth opportunities. When her eldest son Narayan had to put his education on hold after writing his Higher Secondary examination, she reached out to VFS for a loan to take some agricultural land on lease and grow vegetables. She planned to set aside the profit to help her son restart his education.

Anjali lacked capital, but what was never lacking is her passion and determination to succeed. Needless to say that her business initiative flourished and she could even pay for her daughter’s wedding.

It has often been seen that when a person’s income level rises, so do the expenses, as the person moves to a higher standard of living. But not with Anjali! She would never forget that all this was for her son’s education and there was no compromise on that front. Narayan has enrolled for a graduate degree and is also taking vocational training at an ITI.

If Narayan has the same tenacity as his mother, it is a sure bet that we shall witness another rags-to-riches case.

There was a time when most workplaces banned social media and personal mailing systems because managers were worried about business information being leaked to rivals. Today, some managements still ban social media but this is to optimize bandwidth since most people have smartphones loaded with apps. Every company’s information technology team has to find new ways of securing information.

As we create more communication channels, we also become more vulnerable. But this outweighs the positives of having free-flowing communications.

On the same note, as the digital world takes over communication, the most critical question that keeps us awake is how much business information can remain confidential.

There was a time when many micro, small, and medium enterprises or MSMEs were reluctant to disclose details of director-level stakeholders of the company, to prevent critical escalations. The government then ordered transparency and this practice was dropped. One can easily look up the construct of a company by visiting its website.

While we are on the topic, we should also differentiate between what we define as confidentiality for business and what is meant by privacy. Confidentiality primarily refers to internal business information shared between the owners of a business and other individuals or entities that should not be communicated to a third party without the consent of the business owners. Privacy, on the other hand, is more personal, referring to an expectation of freedom from intrusion into personal matters or information. While both are of extreme importance, this blog is more about confidentiality.

Normally we define confidential business information as that which holds economic value, which if shared with anyone with a vested interest might negatively impact the business. As most information is stored digitally and can flow freely, it is important to ensure that it does not go beyond the designated recipients. IT solutions play a major role here and we should not cut corners while implementing them.

On the other hand, information is the key to every business and it must flow. Blanket restrictive measures could affect performance. Hence availability is also important and we need to be reasonable on what information we should consider confidential. By definition, confidentiality is specific to the profile of the person who has access to the information. The level of detail of the information that gets shared also defines its confidentiality. For example, while individual invoices generated for a customer may be confidential, the figures add up to the turnover of the organization, which has a much lower rating of confidentiality.

It is important that we maintain a balance and treat information on its merit and deploy measures that are optimal to facilitate sharing.

A few years back, I was spending an evening with a friend when he narrated an amusing story. For his business, he needs to travel a lot and sometimes at short notice. On one such occasion, he did not get time to book his hotel and walked directly up to the reception. Being a frequent guest there he was quite aware of the room rent and was surprised when the receptionist quoted a much higher price. Even when he explained that he was used to a lower rate, she would not budge. Standing at the counter, he looked up a travel portal on his smartphone and got a much lower rate. He checked in at the discounted price, which the receptionist had not been willing to offer.

This experience was not very uncommon till around five years back, when the companies had two distinct operations for digital and physical channels. While it has matured with time, there are still many such glitches where businesses have not been able to manage convergence well. Needless to say that it was frustrating for any consumer to pay a higher price at the store when free delivery is offered from the marketplace at a much-discounted price.

I firmly believe that this disparity needs to go, and fast.

While there is no denying that in today's world, digital is the way forward, companies that abruptly dumped their existing physical processes to bet on digital ones run the high risk of losing both ways. Discarding physical assets that got success to the company in the past, to venture into unknown territory in a hurry is like pushing away the real value that the customers saw in them in the first place. Transformation, as in all other cases, needs to be well planned and at a comfortable speed.

Looking from the other side of the table, though less now, after the lockdown many companies are still sceptical about taking the digital route, waiting for others to take the plunge while they follow. There might be situations where these entities will not be able to pick up speed and perish over time. Taking a cautious step does not necessarily imply that you cannot take the first step. “Who else has done it” may be a phrase that needs to be discarded. Every digital initiative needs to be evaluated on its merit and not on precedence, and then aligned to the present business model with proper change management.

I keep reminding my team and those who have started their entrepreneurial journey with assistance from VFS that physical and digital processes have their own merits and how much we adopt them depends on the nature of business.

Modes of executing processes should facilitate business operations. It should never be the other way around.

I have come across many who are eager to jump into the world of entrepreneurship but hesitate to take the plunge as they are unable to figure out how to solicit business from a new prospect. This is not uncommon as we have traditionally grown up in a system where conversation with unknown people is restricted. While from the perspective of a child’s security it is not a bad practice, it holds us back from opening new doors in an unknown space.

But does that mean introverts cannot be entrepreneurs or good new business developers? No, that will be a very wrong assumption to make. All it might take is a few conscious grooming steps. And that might apply to all.

A new entrepreneur needs to be a disciplined self-starter and a positive thinker. The person cannot be complacent with the present state and look at each event as an opportunity. On the other hand, it is extremely important not to get burdened with failures. Each failure should be analyzed so that remedial steps help avoid mistakes in the future. Entrepreneurs, by definition, do not operate under a boss and should be hungry enough to set their quotas and monitor themselves against key success metrics. They should continuously look forward to improvement, and not expect anyone else to drive them.

Discipline is a non-negotiable quality that an entrepreneur should possess. Right prospecting and planning have the biggest contribution towards hunting for new businesses. Or else, not only do we waste a lot of time chasing non-existing businesses, we get exhausted before we reach those who actually can give us revenue.

Like it or not, you should want to meet new people. Shying away from networking opportunities will not help in generating new business. Even if you are not comfortable in soliciting, just being visible helps a lot in getting time for meeting prospective customers. But while doing all this one needs to also be conscious and respectful of the schedule of others. Denials should not be taken personally as rejection. It is not that your prospect does not want to meet you, it may be that the person has higher priorities. Persistence in such scenarios plays a key role.

Lastly, and the most important aspect, is to stay nimble. Hour-long slots scheduled for meetings often get trimmed to a couple of minutes. It helps if you have multiple versions of the pitch ready. Elevator pitches need to be practiced, and practiced again, till they become an organic part of your system. Elaborate research on the prospect can never be counterproductive, though you might still want to hear the facts from the customer directly. Listening skills play a crucial role here.

There may be other necessities to counter specific scenarios, but the above aspects should be common to all businesses which require personalized customer interactions.

Please bear in mind that the job does not end with opening the door. In the rapidly changing business environment, entrepreneurs should progressively qualify their prospects. Sweet surprises of getting orders from the least probable ones are not very uncommon. But more on that later in another blog.

Micro, small and medium enterprises or MSMEs and digital technology are among the biggest influencers in the Indian economy and will become unstoppable when they converge.

If we go back a decade or two, MSMEs, other than those in tech-enabled lines of business, resisted going down the digital route. The reasons were not arbitrary. Implementing digital technology came with its own sets of challenges—high capital investment, the need to recruit a white-collared IT task force, and training the workforce on things that seemed alien to them. In short, the hassles outweighed the benefits.

Changes in the digital workspace are taking care of the inhibiting factors. Almost all the business solutions that an MSME needs now come with flexible payment options of SaaS (Software-As-A-Service). An MSME no longer needs to set up an expensive data center but can opt for less capital-intensive cloud options. Add the smartphone revolution and the workplace changes wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic. Almost every business household may now have at least one smartphone, which gives them the platform to run business apps. The apps are user-friendly.

With all these changes, MSMEs can now plan their digitalization with better clarity. Several business processes can adopt automation and artificial intelligence capabilities, increasing overall efficiency. Many MSMEs have started implementing IoT or “Internet of things” solutions to automate triggers for functions that earlier needed manual intervention. For example, a flower cultivation business can easily automate the water sprinkling process based on a few monitored parameters. We also need to keep in mind that sustainability is no longer a responsibility of only the bigger corporates. MSME businesses also need to keep a keen eye on sustainable options that give them good business returns. Energy use is the first thing that comes to mind.

On the sellers' side, the digital world has progressed to a level that MSMEs hardly need any extra effort to get them on the platform. I find solutions floating around where an MSME business does not even need to build a website, leave alone enable e-commerce. All this, with minimum upfront investment. This opens the entire world for MSMEs and those who stay back run the risk of losing out to market dynamics.

The way MSMEs and digitization are working hand-in-hand, the outlook for India’s business environment is bright.