The Hindu Business Line : Delivering on your promise

Every business sets out with a single premise and in the case of successful entrepreneurial firms this usually is a simple premise. If your business promises to deliver ‘hassle free online bill payment’ or to ‘keep all your contact information current automatically’, it keeps everyone in your company focused on what needs to be done. As an entrepreneur, you discover that just as you manage to get your ducks lined up, growth sneaks up on you scatteri ng things once again.

Businesses, much like humans, grow in spurts and despite what all those books say, they many a time grow willy-nilly. As your company grows, you may find that much like The Coca-Cola Company, you no longer are selling only ‘the real thing’, but fruit drinks and bottled water too. Soon, it may be hard not just for customers, but for employees to state the single, simple core business promise. Should you be amongst the lucky few who have grown predictably and continued to stay focused and consistent with your original business promise, you may yet find that growth makes delivering on this promise no longer as simple as it seemed.

Experienced entrepreneurs, who have managed to build a strong team, raise sufficient capital and manage their cash flow, still find that products take much longer to develop, service levels are not up to scratchand customers who loved them are beginning to lose the gleam in their eyes.

While the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche did state: “That which does not kill us makes us stronger,” entrepreneurs can mitigate, if not outright avoid, the pain of not delivering on their business promise by doing two things. First, by recognising that such delivery challenges are a part of normal business growth and second, by recognising that the very entrepreneurial (hard driving), dynamic (ad-hoc) and never-say-die (pig-headed) attitudes that got them here, are now getting in the way of their delivering on their business promise. Yes, you are the problem — okay, maybe merely part of the problem — and so the solution begins with you.

Focus

Al Ries and Jack Trout wrote an entire book on the subject of focus. The very dynamism and never-say-never nature of entrepreneurial firms that keeps them alive in their early days is the first cause of loss of focus. As a scrappy start-up, you get ahead by saying “Yes, we can do this” to every challenge you meet. “24x7 support? Yes, we can do it.” “Support the Windows 98 operating system? Yes, we can do it.” Your customers love you for it — the adrenalin is often its own reward as you scale seemingly insurmountable delivery challenges. And each mountain scaled, you believe, makes you more successful. Of course, one of these days you plan to put an end to this insanity.

However, the need for growth creates increasing demands on the entire organisation: To retain and grow the accounts you already have, to win new accounts and to thwart your competitors who seem to sprout like weeds at the first sign of a growing market. As you continue saying “Yes, we can do it”, your sales team begins to sell products or services you don’t have yet; the marketing team hawks vapourware — features which may be available at a future date or a product not scheduled for release. The engineering team then tries to modify and re-design a product even as it is being built and the applications or customer support team try to hold it all together on a wing and a prayer.

Before you know it, everyone is doing three different things just to keep up and nothing gets done on time or as well as it should. You are no longer focused and well on your way to having a disaster on your hands.

“No” is probably the most powerful antidote to the constant pressures to defocus. Companies, and especially entrepreneurs, need to learn to say no — to impossible deadlines, sure-would-be-nice-to-have features and insane product or service demands, particularly when seeking new business. Initially, it will be hard to do, not just because of how you are wired, but because the road to defocus has a gentle slope.

Saying no to existing customers, ones that have contributed to your very survival, is difficult; but if not done at the appropriate time, your delivery challenges will anyway make losing them certain. The days of you personally, or an expert or two, conceiving, developing and delivering products and services should be relegated to the company history bin so that you can minimise the delivery problems you’d face as you grow. The only way to make commitments that you, as a business, can keep is to put in place a process of how products and services are developed and delivered.

Process

Sit down with any successful entrepreneur and talk to them about their first product or service and you’ll see a glazed look appear on their face. Like recounting their first love, nostalgia soaked sepia images will flit past their eyes. Every one of them will recount tales of great heroism, overcoming odds that would have killed mere mortals and an emotional high that chemical substances can rarely produce on their own. However, for businesses that seek to perform consistently and be capable of growth, such heroics should be a rare requirement — being needed for every product or service delivery is a sign of certain impending failure.

Mention the word process, and the very same entrepreneurs will look at you as though you just bit them. Many of them being refugees from large corporations hear “bureaucratic, slow and politics” when you talk of process. “A particular course of action intended to achieve a result” is how the dictionary defines the word ‘process’. In the simplest terms, process implies having a defined and preferably written method that you adhere to regardless of who performs a given task, be it requirements gathering, product definition, actual development, field testing or launch. The principle of Occam’s razor (“the simplest solution for a given situation”) should apply for processes not to be onerous and yet effective. It is also important to deem processes as living rather than ossified habits, so that as new methods emerge you can continue to evolve and adapt for maximising the effectiveness of your delivery process. .

Judgment

Those of you who have been successful managers or have run businesses before might have internalised the need for focus and a well spelt out living process for product delivery. Nevertheless, there are times when you’ll find yourselves despairing while trying to make a product or service successful. As the marketplace is not merely dynamic, but unforgiving, as are customers whose expectations are not being met, you find that you need more than focus and process. I’d like to term this third ingredient judgment. And more importantly, as judgment of what needs to be left out of your product or service.

Our products, unlike our children, need not be perfect at birth — in fact to aim for perfection in a newly launched product is a sign of inexperience. However, to actually ship a product or deliver a service that will be life-changing requires strong judgment about what to leave out of the product — at the very least what to leave out at the launch. Subsequently, the market, customers and assorted pundits will all pipe in to tell what ‘you have’, ‘you should have’, ‘could have’ and ‘must have’ put in there. It is through repeated application of such judgment on what will get left out while you stay focused and adhere to process, that you can consistently deliver on your promise!

(The writer was founder and CEO of Impulsesoft Pvt Ltd, which grew from a boot-strapped 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 Ph.D from the University of California in Berkeley, has more than 18 years of experience building and marketing semi-conductor and software products. He writes for The New Manager on the travails and triumphs of being an entrepreneur. He blogs at http://designofbusiness.blogspot.com)