The Hindu Business Line : When and how to `seize the moment'

Seventy-hour workweek, and an average 140 days of travel. A way of life in MindTree, writes Subroto Bagchi in The High Performance Entrepreneur, from Penguin Portfolio (www.penguinbooksindia.com) .

Daunting? But hard work like this comes with a great incentive, he assures: `the ability to work unsupervised', which is `a critical requirement' of entrepreneurship. "As a paid professional, often someone can blame the system for not providing either the direction or the resources. As an entrepreneur, you no longer have that latitude. You have to work hard, very hard."

The book brings together `golden rules for success' such as this that Bagchi gleans from his experience.

"I have been an entrepreneur thrice," he writes. "Once, as a small kid, I sold balloons. As a grown-up, at the age of 28, I had my first taste of serious entrepreneurship. It lasted all of three years. At the age of 42, MindTree happened and it continues to happen."

It all begins with a special moment, Bagchi reminisces. You get an inner call that says, `You are designed to create something new.'

To aspiring entrepreneurs who struggle internally to decipher if their special moment has come, Bagchi's message is simple: "Look around and read the signs. Who knows, you may the next big success!"

To those who are afraid, he advises: Let not failure weigh on your mind so much that you become tentative in your search for success. "Failure cannot be an option when you raise money from others or take on employees who work to make the shared vision a reality."

While profiling the entrepreneur, `self-confidence' comes top in Bagchi's list of required qualities. Next is freedom, which entrepreneurs value; but they are also very disciplined. "I like taking instructions from more competent people and my customers. But I do not like someone telling me how to go about doing my work. I work best when I am given what is called a `porous boundary'," declares the author.

Freedom, according to him, is not "deciding for yourself when to come and go, who to serve or not, how much to pay yourself, how much to be able to spend on entertainment, choosing the hotel you want to stay at or accounting for a personal trip as official." Freedom is `an inner need for space' in which you can `create greater value without interference'.

One other attribute of entrepreneurs is flexibility, even as they recognise `the power of emergence'. In 1999, when MindTree started, the vision was to focus on two businesses, viz. IT consulting and software services, and R&D services. "The former was for building Internet-based applications, and on the R&D side, we wanted to work on providing solutions in the telecom domain," recounts Bagchi. "In just about a year, there was a dotcom bust and the telecom domain just about vanished."

What happened then? The company moved rapidly into other areas, such as `supply chain, data-warehousing, mainframe-based application management services (AMS) and enterprise resource planning (ERP)', though none of these existed in the original business plan.

"On the R&D side, we created new verticals such as semiconductors, appliances, industrial automation and avionics, storage technologies, and consulting platforms. Again, these were things we never thought we would dabble in."

Writes Bagchi: "Nine out of ten companies born at the same time as us, anywhere in the world, do not exist today. Entrepreneurship requires the ability to read patterns on the wall, flexibility and an uncanny ability to seize the moment."

Candid and compelling read.

It's all about convenience

Don't reinvent the wheel. Learn from others' mistakes so you can catch the second wave of Internet commerce

The formula for success in small business has only five steps, say Rick Segel and Barbara Callan-Bogia in The Essential Online Solution, from Wiley (www.wiley.com) . The first step is to uncover the possibilities. "Don't reinvent the wheel. Learn from others' mistakes so you can catch the second wave of Internet commerce," counsel the authors.

"An online business can save you money with many new opportunities, especially when it comes to advertising, publishing, and the like." Online solutions can allow merchants to thrive `with fewer customers walking through the front door as long as packages are being shipped out the back door'.

Step two is to build `practical, powerful, professional Web sites that work'. Your site is `the front door to your online business', and it gets an immediate reaction. What counts is not what kind of impression you want your Web site to give, but what the visitor to the site gets. The first rule of creating Web sites is that they are never finished. "It is a process."

Everything you do on the site should be in alignment, insist the authors. "If you say you are known for quality, make sure your site represents quality. If you believe in fast service, make sure your site loads quickly and that its operation and order form are as simple to use for customers as walking into a physical place of business or over the phone."

Clutter kills, watch out! "Word everything at your Web site simply - just like your newspaper, which is written at a fifth grade level." The authors mention as examples sites that list the steps 1-2-3, as if talking to a child. "It's okay. People appreciate that level of simplification. After all, isn't that what `user friendly' means? Remember, it's all about convenience."

A chapter with `rules for killer sites' speaks of the three Ps, viz. pull them in, prove the point, and purchase. Another is `the 8-second rule'. That is, "the Web surfer spends about eight seconds at a Web site to determine if it matches up with what they are looking for." Also, don't forget to read the statistics to monitor the performance of the site, because "it is your own personalised market research, and this market research doesn't lie."

A book that can motivate you to start an online business.

Tailpiece

"I received an SMS that instructed me to forward the message to six other people!"

"Else, something bad would happen? Ha-ha!"

"How do you know?"

"B-O-O-M!"

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