Is your business scalable?

Well this is the question I have been hearing too often in seminars, from investors, even from the local chaiwallah and so much so that I thought let me try and put my own thoughts on this.

What is scalability. Any business which starts would expect to see an increase in revenue on a Y-to-Y basis and it will for sure see an increase in people etc so whats the hype around scalability.

Scalability has some key dimensions and one of the them is the 'Market' which means would your target addressable market grow with time, is the growth rate good enough to keep your business pockets exciting enough for investors

How scalable is your offering. If you are doing products then you scale up by adding more modules , more functionalities etc and you can easily talk about a product life worth 4-5 years but what about services. How do you define scalability for consulting business

How do you scale yourself in terms of your reach in the market. How do you reach out to a large set of customers, geographies etc. Digital Marketing, virtual sales force, distributor model or franchise...

Keep thinking as I don't feel that it covers all so pour your comments

Cheerio
M

Mice is Nice

There are times when a thing heard strikes you right at the core and thats precisely what happened while watching 'Rocket Singh, Salesman of the year'

I thing at times we are too nice and that stems from the fact that we don't really know our actual value and we were a veil of nicety. We ourselves are responsible for how the world treats us and most importantly how we are perceived.

At a personal level I think i have suffered a lot from 'Yes' syndrome where I have in order to either keep myself in good books or to avoid confrontation have said yes to things where I should have really said a big 'NO'. At a long run it doesn't help because the recipient perhaps doesn't always have the visibility to understand that you are too much pain to say that 'Yes'. This is a trait which needs to be developed specially if you are in a leadership role.

Cheers
Mitul

Know your value

Back to blogging after a short break. Life has been hectic to say the least. Too many stuff happening and most importantly every passing day brings in a sense of enrichment.

I was part of a discussion between some of my close pals and the agenda was how do you measure whether an individual has achieved success in his/her career and I loved when one of them said 'Happiness'. True if you are happy with what you are doing thats good enough to say that you have achieved success

Back to my agenda for this blog I think that we somehow fail to realize the value we bring to the table and thats the key reason we never achieve what we are destined to achieve in life. Sometime we term this phenomena as lack of exposure or lack of confidence but these are all offshoot being oblivious to the value one brings to the table

The day you know what you are and what you can do guess that day you achieve the strength to live your dreams. At that juncture success or failure becomes immaterial and you set yourself for a journey.

Cheerio
M

Procrastination - The 'Biggest' evil

This is more of self analysis , more of maturing over years which has given me this feeling that the biggest evil in the journey of entrepreneurship is 'Procrastination' . Success definitely depends on a lot of factors but something which is essential is discipline , a focused approach and most importantly a feeling that 'There is no tomorrow'

There would be a lot of stumbling blocks, lot of enticements but as a entrepreneur you need to just move ahead thinking that a a momentarily delay can cause a huge impact on your overall plans.

At a personal I have faced may instances where not taking quick decision or not reacting has made many trivial things go complicated, almost out of hand so you need to check that

They say Success has no magic sauce , a focused approach , a burning desire to attain success and most importantly a never say die spirit is what you need to hit the Stars

Cheerio
M

Intelligence Vs Information

I have had a brain wave tonight and couldn't help sharing it through my blog. How do you differentiate between Information and Intelligence. We all perhaps know and understand how raw 'Data' is differentiated from Intelligence. In fact there are plethora of BI and Reporting tools in the market who claim to just do that albeit using different names and tags. They follow the basic thumb rule of Information ( unambiguous, contextual, accuracy, speed of retrieval etc etc). But guess the challenge is how do you create Intelligence blocks which is one layer above conventional information

So how about a Business User looking at Sales Forecasting data for his/her items for the next 6 months using trends, customer buying pattern, inventory for those items etc and then applying a market pulse to that analysis so that he/she can add more 'Confidence' to that analysis

Thats intelligence as it is just not data aggregation or roll-ups it goes one step above and adds feedback to the whole process by applying data driven and localized patterns.

Got an opportunity to present Business Intelligence concepts in a MS BI event

More in the next blog

Cheers

How free are you...

This post gets dedicated to one of my mentors in the Industry...

He was doing a mentoring session with the CEO of an emerging startup company and the first thing he asked to him was 'How free are you?', at first I was amused but then I understood the deep insight which was wrapped.

In today's world if you really want to make a venture, an enterprise successful you need to be 'Present'. As they say the 'MBWA' , Management By Wandering Around, where as a CEO you are just meeting people ( Clients, Prospects, Investors, Mentors) , fine tuning your pitch and business model and of course you have a strong operational team to back you up.

Gone are the days where you can get a mileage by pitching in with your offerings quality or uniqueness unless they are relevant to the business.

I was hearing a interesting video of one of Guy's book on pitching where he says, imagine that old man sitting on your shoulder and whispering in your ears 'So What', if you can pitch your offering keeping that old guy happy you have made it

It is a journey move on .....

Cheerio

How passionate are you about the work you do

Sorry a long lull in my blogging due to 'Durga Puja' and other stuff. So first of all Subho Bijoya to you all.

This though suddenly popped up in my mind that perhaps one of the key elements of achieving success depends on the fact that 'How Passionate are you about your work', how much 'good feeling' does it generate , how much closeness do you feel when you do those things.

Yes, there are other important things like how scalable is your stuff , how much financial benefits can that generate but paramount importance is 'How much are you enjoying'

So measure that happiness before you embark on a journey because that will decide as to how long can you persist to realize your vision , how much struggle are you ready to face...

More on my next blog..