The Hindu Business Line : Business is about people

Pick and choose your partners: No matter how difficult it is to find the right people for a new venture, it is important not to lower the bar for entry, says the writer.

K. Srikrishna

When most people talk about starting a business, they are thinking about commerce — buying and selling. At first glance, business appears to be about that. The street hawker who sells vegetables off his cart or the corner boot polish is indeed doing just that. Even in the case of these single-person businesses, people, usually in the form of customers (and occasionally as investors or moneylenders), are critical to their survival.

However, any business that does anything more complex very rapidly becomes all about people. Particularly for entrepreneurial ventures, it may seem that it is only about people. Make no mistake, capital, cash flow, products, marketing and sales are all important; yet these play the same role for other businesses including your competitors. Your people are what will separate your business from the pack.

No journey can be as lonely or as exhilarating as an entrepreneurial endeavour. Gururaj ‘Desh’ Deshpande, founder of Sycamore Networks, summed it up best: “Being an entrepreneur is like riding a roller coaster with tremendous highs and scary dives. You had better enjoy it, especially when you are paying for it!”

As with any journey, having the right people come along with you can make it so much richer when it is good and so much easier when it is rough. There are at least three groups of people travelling with you — your team mates including other founders and employees in your business, your external partners comprising customers, suppliers and professional advisors and, most critically, your family.

Team mates

“Get the right people on the bus first, even before you figure out where to drive it,” says Jim Collins, author of Good to Great, Why Some Companies Make the Leap… And Others Don’t. When you first hear this, it seems not just counterintuitive, but downright dumb. A little reflection, however, makes the wisdom of Jim Collins’ assertion evident.

With the right people, be they other founders or employees, taking your company to a different destination or to the same destination through a different route or means will be a lot easier and may even be fun. Trying to do this either alone or worse yet with the wrong people on board will be difficult at best and painful or even impossible at worst.

So how do you get the right people on the bus? Very simply put, by being very picky and uncompromising about who you hire in your business. I can personally vouch that as a new business, fighting the panic when you can never seem to find that right person(s) and having the ones you find all seeming to turn down your offers is not easy. Nevertheless, keeping the bar for entry into your business high and placing values and vision alignment above all other considerations for new employees will pay off in spades.

Partners, professionals and others

When you first considered starting a business, you would have spoken to a number of people including family, friends and colleagues. Your business advisors, especially if you are a one-person business and the professionals — accountants, bankers and lawyers — you choose will be critical to your success. All too often, this may become evident much too late, at crunch time. So pick these people with care; keep in mind even though these are not your employees they can affect your employees, yourself and the business you are trying to grow.

I cannot emphasise enough the need for aligning on values and purpose with your professional partners before you start doing business with them. Don’t hesitate to ask prospective professional service providers for references from other entrepreneurs and check these personally. If you are going to do reference checks for employees (and you should), there is no reason not to do this for the professionals you intend to engage. It is the best way to avoid the unpleasantness of having to change horses mid-stream.

Family

While it is important to understand why you want to be an entrepreneur, it is critical to be aligned with your family. Even if you are single, your family is likely to be a source of support, if not capital.

If you are married or have children, then family takes a completely new level of precedence. From the simplest “What do you do at work dad?” to the harder “Do you have to travel, why can’t I come with you?” to the hardest, “Why is Mom never home? She never makes it to my sports day?” children have a way of making us face the hard realities of being an entrepreneur.

Tales of broken marriages punctuated many stories of the frenzied Silicon Valley landscape of the 1980s and 1990s. Other garage-to-global entrepreneurs such as Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, founders of their namesake company, Sony’s Akio Morita or Reliance’s Dhirubhai Ambani have demonstrated that family and business need not spell disaster. Like houseplants, which you can just as easily kill by over watering as by ignoring them, you could ruin your personal life by overspending time at your business.

Business, as with the rest of our lives, is full of contradictions. One such contradiction is the fact that people more than money, product or technology will be crucial to your success and often, even when surrounded by people, you will feel alone as an entrepreneur. Embrace the contradictions and you are ready to enjoy being an entrepreneur. And if you love the people you work with it will make the journey a lot more enjoyable!

(The writer was founder and CEO of Impulsesoft Pvt Ltd, which grew from a bootstrapped organisation of two people to a global leader in Bluetooth wireless stereo music prior to being acquired by SiRF Technology Inc in 2006. Srikrishna, who has an MS and a PhD from the University of California in Berkeley, has more than 18 years of experience building and marketing semiconductor and software products. He writes for The New Manager on the travails and triumphs of being an entrepreneur. You can contact him at k-srikrishna@hotmail.com.)

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