The Business Today Team - The best advice I ever got

The Best Advice I Ever Got

THE BUSINESS TODAY TEAM

Content

D uring times of crisis such as the recent downturn, or even in the general milieu of tough competition that exists in the business world, what everybody, from the CEO to the chaiwala, welcomes is advicesome definitive words of wisdom from a person we personally admire and respect.

But advice turns golden only once it has been implemented and found to be of value in real life. For this very reason, Business Today decided to come out with a special issue in January 2009 that compiled the best guidance received by the super achievers of various fields. After the runaway success of the issue, we felt that such good counsel must not be limited to the short shelf life of a single magazine issue, and deserved to be made more widely available.

The Best Advice I Ever Got is, therefore, a compilation of good counsel that lent a hand in making the whos who of Indias corporate world, as well as respected professionals and leaders from other fields, go from nobodies to people to reckon with. The book contains a few contributions we couldnt get in time to publish in Business Today; some have been modified or edited.

The diversity of the advice available in this selection is amazing. From the sublime to the practical, the advice is here for you to be inspired by and benefit from. So heres hoping that something you read here will one day feature in your list of the best advice I ever got!

Rohit Saran
Editor
Business Today

Founder and CEO, Contests2win

T he year was 2001 and the dot-com bubble had burst. Life was tough with Internet becoming almost a bad word amongst the media and marketing community. As a start-up just into our second year, we had created a unique business model at contests2win.com but were finding it very hard to pull through the tough times. Since ICICI had invested in us just a year ago, as an entrepreneur struggling to make ends meet, I requested a meeting with Renuka Ramnath, the CEO of ICICI Venture, with the agenda of asking for more venture capital. I was granted that meeting almost immediately, and I presented Renuka a very passionate story of c2w and how we could create a great company if we received some more financing. It was a nice and well-packaged ple patiently. After I stopped speaking, she spoke, and her comment changed everything. She said, Alok, when we have children and they begin to walk, the parents help the child walk for the first few days and support it. Then one day, the parents stop supporting the child and expect it to walk on its own. Its difficult for the child and he/she craves for support from the parents, but that help doesnt come. The child falls, stumbles and even gets hurt but eventually learns to walk on its own since it has no alternative. In the same way, we believe its time for you to find your own feet and be self-sufficient. It will be difficult you will stumble and get hurt, but if you are determined enough, you will learn to support yourself. We cannot finance you any longer. Renuka said no more, but what she had told me struck me like lightning. Something fundamental changed that moment in the way I was thinking of my business. Rather than constantly looking for venture capital money to keep us going, I had to look at real-world finance in order to operate my business the way other businesses did. From 2001 onwards, Contests2win not only became a profitable business, but we also created three new companiesMobile2win, Media2win and Games2win. We employed over 200 people and Mobile2win created value significant enough to be acquired by the Walt Disney Company in 2006.

Founder Chairman and CEO, Edelweiss

T here are two sets of advice which have stayed with me for a long time. In 1992-93, I and Venkat Ramaswamy were working with ICICI Bank. Because of our job profile, we often met Narayana Murthy, chief mentor of Infosys Technologies and our client at the bank. After our meetings, Murthy would often talk about entrepreneurship. In one of our interactions, he said, Always make sure your employees are your partners. This advice has always stayed with us since then. It was an important piece of insight.

Again in 1995, when I and Venkat turned entrepreneurs and started Edelweiss Capital, we met Narayana Murthy for advice. The Infosys campus had just become operational at that time. There are two things which he said and which have stayed with me since that meeting. One was when he said, Make sure you are profitable, otherwise you will share other peoples dreams and not your own. The other one was his suggestion that we should put the guiding principles and values of our company in writing, so that every employee can go through them and be inspired to follow them.

I am sure that in his long and illustrious career, he must have given advice to many people and may not have realized how important his advice was to the other person, but for us it became a core part of our value system. Whenever I happened to meet Mr Murthy while travelling, he would ask, Are you profitable? and I would reply, Yes, we have been profitable year after year.

Thats how at Edelweiss we have built a strong culture of partnership where people think like owners. If an employee sees an AC running in an empty room, he feels that its his responsibility to switch it off. Its not about retention and compensation only. Its about unleashing a culture of ownership among employees. Out of 1800 employees in Edelweiss, 800 have stock options and anyone who has spent two years in the company becomes eligible for stock options. We have also laid out the core guiding principles of the company in our annual report and a separate booklet is handed over to the new recruits and its called your passport to Edelweiss.

During the slowdown in 2001, Navtej S. Nandra, one of our board members and my senior from IIM Ahmedabad, pointed out that we should get our priorities right and remain focussed. When the going is slow, you can do hundreds of things and not achieve anything. So it really helped us during that tough period and remaining focussed is now an integral part of the company. Navtej was on our board from 1999 to 2003 and he helped us create balance scorecards to bring focus in everyones role in the company. At the beginning of each year, senior employees create a Focus 10 (F10) list and they are measured against it on a quarterly basis.

I got another insight from Jim Collins books Good to Great and Built to Last in which he analysed companies which did well over the years. I have learnt that if you constantly try to build a great organization, then everything else will follow. The market share, profitability, etc. will be taken care of.

One of these days, I and Venkat (executive director and co-founder) plan to meet Mr Murthy and thank him by presenting an annual report of our company to him.

As told to Rachna Monga

Founder Chairman and MD, Vishal Megamart

I imbibed the save more, spend less ethos from my family which taught me that very single rupee matters. That focus on cost made sure that in the initial years when we had just a small shop and when Vishal Megamart was just starting out, we paid in cash for all goods purchased. Since we took no credit and bought in bulk, we got cheaper prices. It is a practice which we continued till recently. That put us on to our growth path. We hope to close the current financial at 40 per cent growth in topline at around Rs 1500 crore. Without this focus on the value of every single rupee, there would have been no business. Another advice that helped us grow was that of taking people along. Some of the members of the present team are the ones who have been with us for the last twenty years.