Thursday, September 20, 2012

The difference between what life is like as being self-employed and what life is like as a business owner

There once was a small village, in a town far, far away that had one tiny little problem. They didn’t have a water supply. The only time that they could have water was when it rained. To solve this problem, two men from the village volunteered to find a way to provide water for the people. The first man, John, immediately bought two large buckets and started going back and forth to the lake that was about a mile away. He placed the water into a huge concrete tank that the village had built. Each morning, he would get up early before anyone else so there would be a water supply for everyone. For five days a week, John worked diligently. He was having great success the first few months because the other man, Fred, seemed to have disappeared. Where was Fred at for all of this time? Well, Fred wrote a business plan to run a steel pipeline from the lake to the village. He hired contractors and found some investors that were willing to pay all of the initial costs. He even hired a president to run the company. Once everything was set up, Fred charged 75% less for his water than John. He could also provide it 24/7 unlike John who always took the weekends off to rest. To make up for this, John immediately dropped his prices to match Fred’s. He also bought two more buckets and started carrying four buckets instead of two on each trip to the lake. He then hired his two sons to work weekends so the village would be in constant supply. John worked very hard all of his life moving buckets of water from the lake to the town. Fred, on the other hand, didn’t really need to do anything. Everything had been set up in the beginning. Fred realized that if his village needed a water supply, there were probably many other villages just like it that needed water. He went out with the same contractors and investors and started building water pipeline to several other villages. Fred became very wealthy. And the more successful he got, the less he had to work. He simply hired more people that would do all of the work for him. All he really had to do was collect his portion of the profits at the end of the month. Not only did Fred build a pipeline to run water to the villages, he built a pipeline that poured money in his bank account. The end. What You Can Learn From All Of This This story shows us the difference between what life is like as being self-employed and what life is like as a business owner. The most important thing to learn from this story is what happens to each person over time. With John, his days of hauling buckets become more and more difficult. The more successful he got, the more he had to work because the water in the tank started to get low. When John took a few days off or went on vacation, his income stopped. And his customers were unhappy. Fred, on the other hand, never really had to work once everything was set up and he hired a president to run the corporation. He worked smart in the beginning to allow the financial freedom that he has today. Fred was taking a risk in the beginning, but it was calculated risk. All he had to do was convince his investors that it would work. Then, all of the financial risk was on them. When all was said and done, Fred got rich, the investors got rich, and the contractors and President made a nice steady income. And the most important thing… The people in the village were happy! Ask yourself whether your current work is hauling buckets or building a pipeline. Are you headed toward the life of John and working harder and harder with the more success you have? Or are you living like Fred and becoming more and more financially free with time? If your dream is to become a business owner then go for it! Don’t let the risk bother you because hauling buckets your whole life is far more risky. _Source:Ryan Whiteside.

Saturday, August 7, 2010

India unprepared for consumption

Rama Bijapurkar: Unprepared for our consumption

Rama Bijapurkar/January 16, 2010

We certainly are not prepared for our consumer economy. Macro numbers tell us Consumer India is a mega consuming monster and a solid economic growth engine. But when we look at corporate results, industry stories or data on consumer behaviour, we set pretty modest parameters about what merits “wow!”. Perhaps as suppliers, we lag behind consumers in shrugging off the poverty effect. Perhaps we subliminally realise that such consumption growth without fixing the fundamentals is chaotic, and may one day go into heart seizure. More likely, at an intellectual level, we have not managed to wrap our arms and heads around the enormity of what the Consumer India story actually is: One billion people, at least 80 per cent of whom have steadily rising income; huge confidence based on their own upward mobility in the past decade; and a very keen desire to improve their quality of life. That’s why we lose our battle for dreams, fear investing to build scale; and that’s why in the broader consumer space, we have only a handful of companies which are of any size of consequence. China “gets it”. It doesn’t have as vibrant a consumption environment, so India’s consumers are definitely on its map. With scale, and some say innovative accounting, it has the right price-performance point in some categories, not all, and Indian mass consumption is lapping up “made-in-China to Indian design” chappals, saris, salwar kameez co-ordinates, agricultural sprayers, ganesha idols, watches and much more

For our consumption engine — and our consumption economy — to realise its potential, the supply side has to really understand how enormously large this can be, and in fact, already is. Benchmarks and ambitions should be based on the potential of the opportunity, not on past sales. The questions we need to ask are: How high is up? How many people have this need? At what price-performance point will they upgrade to better ways of fulfilling this need? From matkas to water coolers; from mosquito coils to transparent gels on the body; from belief in destiny to goal-based savings plans; from trains to planes and so on. Growth of consumption in Tier-2 cities or rural India should not surprise us. For a long time, they have been pockets of money in search of supply, sort of all dressed up with nowhere to go! Then came new kinds of supply and the market blossomed.

Growth in car purchase these last two quarters is not unexpected; for the upper-income people, confidence, incomes and wealth have returned to the way they were before the uncertainty. Four crore two wheeler owners and 40 crore-plus mobile owners are begging the question, “What more can we do for them to build on this?” If we observe the supply side in a more unorthodox way, we can see that we are a shortage economy already — see the crowds at every reasonably-priced place of consumption, whether it is the bhelpuriwala or the wait for the better known tarot card reader, airport check-in queues, etc. But at the same time we keep reminding ourselves that several of the high-end malls are going empty; that the Bandra-Worli sea link failed to meet its projected numbers (the Gurgaon story was the opposite); that housing inventory available in many cities is unabsorbed or that top line growth of big companies isn’t at 30 to 40 per cent year-on-year. However, the truth is that many of these failures of anticipated demand not happening actually lie in supply side miscalculations, either based on an unwillingness to accept that the creamy layer that all this is targeted at is not yet thick enough; or due to shoddy consumer behaviour analysis.

Let’s take a reality check here. Forget income statistics — consumption, like maternity is a certainty while income, like paternity, is a matter of inference. Chris Butell of IIMS Data defines the consuming class as the one with its own transport, entertainment and communication devices, and puts the number at 46 million households or 230 million people, a number far higher than the estimates of market sizes put out by global consulting firms. Durables penetration data by quintiles (NCAER) shows that only top quintile and a small part of the next quintiles have started their consumption journey. Our most popular market definition for consuming class of SEC A/B does not even cover the urban households in the top quintile. You have to add half the SEC C households to get that. However you look at it, the main event of our consumer story is yet to happen, and we are already running out of capacity and becoming a shortage economy. And if we get consumer acceptable price-performance right as some industries have, we can see the instant explosion in demand.

(The author is an independent market strategy consultant. This was the first of a monthly column)

courtsey:business standard.

EVALUATION OF MANMOHAN SINGH AS AN ECONOMIST!!

In the five full budgets that Manmohan Singh presented, the country's finances showed only marginal improvement.

His first budget in July 1991 was pathbreaking where he did away with industrial licencing, liberalised trade policy and slashed expenditure in the backdrop of a foreign exchange crises forcing a devaluation of the rupee by 16 per cent and again by 6 per cent.

Singh boldly attempted to cut fertiliser subsidies where he encountered stiff political resistance. His axe fell on capital expenditure and on health and education.

But he had to roll back the fertiliser price hike, by restoring the subsidy. While the subsidy bill rose marginally, Singh managed to sharply cut fiscal deficit to 5.9 per cent for the year ended March 1992, largely on account of a 20 per cent rise in revenue receipts.

In the same year, he set up the Raja Chellaiah committee to carry forward the tax reforms he initiated and also the institution of the Narasimhan Committee to revamp the financial system.

The foreign direct investment regime was liberalised and the energy and power sectors were opened up.

The Foreign Investment Promotion Board too was set up to attract long-term capital into the country. For the stock markets, Singh gave legislative backing to the Securities and Exchange Board of India [ Images ].

Singh had the full backing of his Prime Minister P V Narasimha Rao to set the economy rolling again. Besides cutting expenditure, he also cut excise and customs duties and rationalised direct taxes.

He was systematially executing the job till he realised soon that there were limits beyond which the budget could not be used purely as an instrument of economic policy.

In his second budget, Singh carried forward his reform measures such as liberalising gold imports and also announced partial convertibility of the rupee on the current account.

Three tax rate slabs of 20 per cent (for income up to Rs 50,000), 30 per cent (upto Rs 100,000) and 40 per cent (over Rs 100,000) were introduced. Peak customs duty was cut to a maximum of 110 per cent and advalorem mode for excise adopted.

He also put import of raw materials and capital goods on the OGL with a small negative list. For the capital markets, he freed companies to fix the premium on their public issues.

While there was no significant increase in capital expenditure, the revenue expenditure had started rising with the result that the revenue deficit did not show any improvement in the second year at 2.6 per cent of the GDP.

But the economy had logged a growth rate of 5.1 per cent in 1992-93 with a marginal improvement in fiscal deficit to 5.7 per cent of the GDP.

In the next fiscal (1993-94), Singh set up the R N Malhotra Committee to suggest reforms in the insurance sector and also entrusted NIPFP with the task to prepare a framework for a value-added tax regime.

Peak customs duty was cut to 85 per cent. A host of tax holidays for power producing units, for new industries in several states, for STPI and for electronic hardware parks.

The next two years saw a healthy GDP growth of 7.3 per cent each, but not much progress on the fiscal front. In the five years, between 1991-92 and 1995-96, the fiscal deficit in absolute terms had risen by 66 per cent.

It stood at 5.4 per cent of the GDP for the year ended March 1996. The annual average inflation had for the first time charted the single digit course at 8.09 per cent compared to 10-11 per cent during the last four years.

COURTSEY:REDIFF

Friday, August 6, 2010

BUSINESS JUST NEEDS A BIG IDEA!!

(This article is inspired from BRAND EQUITY of TOI edition:04.08.2010)

Genuine Innovation indeed has a breakthrough quality.Today if we consider the example of Emami's Fair and Handsome they cover 80% of market share in mean fairness cream and already worth Rs.200 crore (as per ET reported till august'4th'2010) The Big Idea was when 30% of fairness cream users are men, why not one come up with fairness cream exclusively catering to men.And today the results are all visible emami certainly turned up this notion into practice and milk the idea into cash pile.

In present scenario it is all about institutionalising flashes of genius other than sticking to one brilliant idea od "once upon a time". it is indeed inevitable to develop & nuture a culture in the company so that their mindset of innovation get changed and every employee should ingrain and behave like a part of the innovation.

The pattern should be the eventual emergence of ideas from freeflowing minds, and then the purpose should be to channel and control those ideas in an effective manner.

The past few years have been evident about the critical light out of the blackwhich is INNOVATION.Many companies pondering over this strategic priorities.Revaluating their tools that help them navigate a new reality.

Companies across a world awash with technology and deconstructing Apple's sucess in innovation on all fronts; the company led buy steve jobs have turned into an exemplar of the creative organizations.

Innovation is an ability to commit anything new and different and to be actively involved in it(sleep with it breathe with it eat with it in precise live with it)making it a priority and graduating from abstract ambition.

If a company took "INNOVATION" as its principle strategy it should make its employee really feel it in thir life.It should run in the artries and veins like blood in the body of organization.Innovations if one would define will only say that something new, where as it is more than that it is an attitude, it is not theprocess that merely drives the innnovation,infact the secret recepie is involving customer insights,radical ideas,modification of already existing products or services on advanced levels and noticeable benefits that a customer wish for or willing to pay for.
TGIF(Tate Group Innovation Forum) works on the same principle where the mandate is simple that is to inspire employee to be more innovative and drive a cultural transformation within the group.Nano and Swatch their products are outcome of the same brilliant ideas.And the industry is expecting ample of action yet to take place.

Even godrej people have an offcial meeting once in the month for the same.

But have some one noticed that Innnovation is just likfe business ethics ..the topics which are much talked about but when it comes to the implementation part of it not very often management will like to go for the idea.This whole thing really need one more impotant element and in fact the most important i.e COURAGE

Creativity is now a days seem to be the currency for the forth coming future.Since it not only fetch growth for the company, it also make them more agile towards the future.

Mr.C.K.Prahlad an eminent management thinker in his book "BEST PRACTICES ONLY GET YOU SO FAR" have also took a stand where he urged the manager to seek for new mega opportunities rather than focusing on competition.He also advised to image the future, invent next practices, so that world could witness market leader.CHEERS for the same if businessmen in India realize the importance of his words.

-mrinal bhattacharya

Saturday, November 28, 2009

SOCIAL ECONOMY: THE NEW ECONOMY OF NEW ERA

(facts and figures: business outlook; September 2009)
After having a knowledge feeding session in telecom symposium last to last week, I actually inclined towards reading something which not only update me but also move my innerself.
Mrinal is again “ONTRACK” ... Thanks to all those intellectuals who have enriched me with their knowledge these days...
I recently came across the September outlook business issue on 50 social entrepreneurs, and how they are making India better. And it turned around my whole perception of looking at business. Till now I was unaware of this fact that business is not all about “Money Making”, It’s also about Ethics and responsibilities too.
Mr. M.Anand , Editor, Business outlook rightly questioned, “what is going to be out next new economy?” Extending his words I want to say that the rise of internet spawned new entrepreneurial fervour towards the end of the last decade. Even the head of development Banking at a private sector, had the same opinion that social economy is the forthcoming economy, and the social entrepreneur will make a far greater impact on India than the ones we have seen so far.
This very time, I truly understand that how rapidly people are transforming into society-oriented from last decade community-oriented genre, its another story that they are still self-oriented.
But an another unconventional path is opened...who works to maximise shareholder value, a social entrepreneur’s primary aim is to create value for society at large, especially for the disadvantaged section. This drive to create shareholder value is incidental, often even non-existent. And the very fact is that these social enterprises are not at all loss-making ventures...they are actually contributing to nation’s revenue.
They have been excellent business people with superb business sense and often make profits. The bouquet consists of flowering personalities like SALONI MALHOTRA, who is generating jobs in TN through her regional BPO.
ANITA &KALYAN PAUL are empowering rural communities.
PRASHANT LINGAM & ARUNA KAPPAGANTULA are receiving India’s business Industry.
STAN THEKARKARA is helping rural producers sell their products to urban consumers and get better returns.
RAJENDRA JOSHI has made life better for Gujarat’s urban poor.
GITA RAM & NEELAM CHIBBER is talking rural artisan places.
UMADEVI SWAMINATHAN gets farmers better prices for their produce.
PREMAGOPALAN is empowering women through her retailing initiative.
ISHITA KHANNA is helping spiti’s villagers build a sustainable livelihood.
ADARSH KUMAR plans to organise poor producers into profitable firms.
ARBIND SINGH has championed the cause of marginalised.
KAUSHALENDRA is connecting vegetable farmers and vendors.
And every one comes out ahead.
SOLOMON JP is linking workers in the informal sector with customers.
WILLIAM BISSEL has organised Fab India‘s worker into companies, and many more.
Ergo with the trend going we can predict or certainly social economy is going to be the face of new economy.
Cheers!!
finally something really good is about to come.
-mrinal

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Business Ethics: necessity or luxury

During a Gd session recently happened in my college for the placement assistance team, On the very first day i came across a quite a general topic but it was difficult for me to react, with appropriate words at that time, so now as i have studied a bit about "business ethics", I would like to share my own perception about the whole topic.
Business ethics where they stand in present scenario.After the collapse of wall street last year, an old age debate of business fraternity about being ethical has been rekindled.
Truth is that without ethics,business is not even legitimate.The collapse of firms like lehman brothers and bear sterns has threatened those who are unaware of the menace created by eroding basics of a capitalist economy and being excessively greedy,as the mad rush for revenue and profit generation is no9w reaching its most logical downward trend,the time has come to revisit some of the basic concepts of being ethical in business.
We have had enough of an era when the companies were openly flouting the legal and financial norms to benefit there stake holders.
But business ethics where they stand in last year's disaster rather than a necessity they had became a commodity.
The whole edifice of the new generation of the economy is based on trust , so we can say that the importance of ethical value has also increased with the time.
But the very thing is transparency and clarity in corporate behavior, which is only able to attract both customers and investors.
-mrinal