The Startup Guy

I am an entrepreneur. And the first thing you develop as part of being an entrepreneur is to start picking up patterns of directions people are moving in, and either do a mental math or just walk on the opposite direction of the flow and see whats it that people are totally missing. Usually there are interesting business propositions at the end of that rainbow.

There are two things that trouble me lately, and it connects to the subject of this post. Size.

We are in a rat race, and unfortunately so are most entrepreneurs. Working with entrepreneurs, the common chorus sung these days is to build a company, get it funded, scale, scale globally, make tons of money, go IPO or get acquired, and settle down. And this usually a 15-20 year plan (Anyone who does it in time less than that is either a genius or in sheer luck). The problem with this picture is that everyone thinks this is the de-facto route to go. But not everyone seems to be built for that.

Instead of getting into all the gory details, here’s the question: What’s really wrong about running a Sole Proprietorship firm, making perhaps about 3-5 crores in revenues, and being stable at that?

I met an audience of around 300 such entrepreneurs a month back, and the pace they live their lives by, not hazzled by competition, globalization, board pressure, missing out on family time etc seems almost non-existent – One even mentioned that its a better tax plan as well.

The reason I write this to this audience is cause, one of the biggest things that we worry about, especially with rural enterprises is scale. And at times you notice, sometimes with RTBI, and often outside that not every entrepreneur and entity is built for this. Small can be beautiful, if you know thats what your capability is, and can with content deliver on that consistently.

The second aspect of whats bothering me is something directly related to the first.

I am possibly fairly young, but even I miss the days when you call a company for customer service and you got someone that you spoke to the last time – makes for such a pleasant experience. I have an issue with my Airtel connection and I have called them 17 times so far over the past 18 months trying to get it fixed – so far no solution yet and I have given up on their system and started hoping for Number Portability to arrive.

One of the other side effects that I am lately noticing is the sheer amount of bills and receipts that I am hogging. You make a broadband payment, settle something here, there and you want to keep a copy of it all, because you really dont know when one of these companies will send you a note saying you owe them something and you have to make a case for yourself – and there is no one in the entity who can show you a friendly face.

Its almost unfortunate that with scale, customer experience has gone out of the window. Its said that when we were still bound by the day and age when we werent globally connected, most local businesses and entrepreneurs eventually “ran out” of a market to target, and their way of keeping themselves busy was to constantly improve upon what they offered to keep their customers engaged, happy, and conversing with them. Those days are really gone, arent they?

I think small is, was, and will always be beautiful. The sphere of success and what we really want – whether it be the size of the enterprise we are building, the mode of operation, or the values we want to be known for (even if its darn good customer support) are decisions we make. If anyone can make a decision agains the tide, its entrepreneurs. And with this day and age when trust is nowhere to be seen, and transaction costs inevitably will rise, small can be really beautiful – with a pleasant experience and happy customer.