At this age of business disruptions, if you are planning to start your own enterprise or already running an organization, you should be thorough on certain business fundamentals. I call them The Ten Mantras for running an organization successfully. Let us go through them.
1. Problem
There should be a problem in the society that you want to address through a product or service. Without a problem there is no product or service and without a product or service there is no business. You can visualize this as a triangular relationship with each vertices are marked as problem, product and business.
2. Product Traction
The problem should be faced by a significant number of people and who are willing to pay for your product or service. Even if you have a wonderful product and nobody wants to pay a price for it, then there is no business at all.
3. Capital
You need money to do business. It should be sufficient enough to meet the Capital, Initial Working Capital and Operative Working Capital. Capital is required to buy the space and machineries etc. we typically call them the initial investment to setup the business. Initial working capital is to cover the period where you will be producing products but it may not sell at the same speed, that is the time the business takes to establish. Operative working capital is when your business operation has reached a higher volume.
4. Marketing Strategy
There is a saying that Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door, coined by Ralph Waldo Emerson to stress the importance of building better products. It still holds true to a great extent but cannot succeed without an effective marketing. I may have a wonderful product, but if no one knows, you may miss the bus. So you need to develop a sound marketing strategy.
5. Compliance
Many entrepreneurs ignore one important area that is compliance. Whatever be the business it comes with a compliance package. To be in the business we need to comply with the various national, state and local level legal and regulatory aspects.
6. Right People
Identify the list of capabilities you need to run the business and hire the right people who have those capabilities and share the aligned passion for your business.
7. Right Processes
Design and build appropriate processes for your business. The processes may be further divided into primary, secondary and management processes.
8. Right Systems
Even with right people and processes you may not be able to create the best product in the absence of correct systems such as machineries, software, application, tools etc.
9. Voice of the customer
Stay in touch with your customer, who will tell you well in advance whether you are in the right direction or not. But don’t be completely blinded by this statement. Once in a while, you may have to go by your gut feelings as well, because at times customers will not be able to spell out what they want exactly.
10. Measure and Control
Business world was never static and will never ever going to be static. In the constantly changing business climate you need to be vigilant on what’s happening in your field and review and change all the above nine principles continuously to fine tune and to stay relevant with time.
Hope you find these ten mantras helpful. Fhyzics helps organizations to implement these 10 mantras and also conducts a one-day Executive Development Program titled Business Master-Class. The EDP is designed around these 10 Mantras and filled with case studies and techniques to make you a successful practitioner.
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