K Srikrishna

The Entrepreneur Life

Month: April 2016

Photo Marsel Minga

What is marketing’s role in a business?

April 29, 2016 / / 0 Comments

Marketing is probably one of the most misunderstood of functions – particularly in startups. Product development or even sales seem easy enough to understand but the average entrepreneur struggles with marketing. One of the reasons for this is our common confusion of activities (what does marketing do) and outcomes (what should marketing accomplish). The emergence of the internet, mobile and social media has only muddied the waters further.  Popular media, particularly television and to a lesser degree the movies haven’t helped, painting a picture of marketers as either slick Madison Avenue types or slimy snake oil salesmen.

Theodore Levitt, the American economist, said “marketing … view(s) the entire business process as consisting of a tightly integrated effort to discover, create, arouse and satisfy customer needs.” Whilst I certainly agree with Levitt’s definition in his book “The Marketing Imagination” I’d simplify it to the following assertion:

For startups, at any stage, marketing has to achieve only one goal or outcome – profitable growth!

I’d argue there are only one of three ways to achieve this.

  • shorten the selling cycle
  • optimize the selling price
  • maximize profit in absolute terms

A little math before we jump into each of these. Regardless of whether a business offers products or services, profits boil down to

Profits (P) = Revenues (R) – Costs (C)

This would imply that anything that improves revenues or decreases costs, is likely to increase profits. So ideally marketing will increase R and decrease C thereby maximizing P. As our Chairman was fond of saying, there’s the minor matter of managing cash – it’s better for money to come in today rather than tomorrow – in other words we could be profitable on paper but still fail as a business because we ran out of money.

So what should marketing do? Marketing needs to be doing whatever is required to achieve one or more of these objectives which will result in the desired outcome – profitable growth (in case you missed it the first time).

Shorten selling cycles If your customers buy whatever you are selling sooner (than they would if you didn’t do any marketing) then you are doing something right. So if the brand value (or recall) will help shorten selling cycles you’d do that. If educating the customer (inbound marketing) or free trials (freemium), partnerships or Google ads shorten the selling cycle you’d do those. Alternately, any of those if they have no impact on shortening selling cycles, you’d abandon them.  In other words, rather than doing what you did in your previous job, or what your competitors are doing, or what TechCrunch or HBR say is the hottest marketing trend, let the results drive what you do. You may use some or all the previous methods, but measure and keep only those that shorten your selling cycles. So any time your marketing team proposes a campaign or a strategy, you’d want to know will this shorten my selling cycle.  Shortening selling cycles is the knob that you likely have the most influence over.

Optimise Selling Price One way to shorten selling cycles is to drop your price – it’s also a good way to go out of business or rush to the bottom at least. If you make a loss on each unit, no amount of sales volume is going to make it up. And dropping price alone does not make selling (or revenues) easier.  Ask all those mobile app developers trying to sell a $0.99 app. And if that is hard, making a $2,500 course or $60,000 service, you’ll discover takes even longer. Selling at the highest possible price, that the customer is willing to pay or market can bear (real estate anyone?) is one way to maximise revenue. However, this may affect the number of units you may move and the time it takes to make the sale. The market for 5 million-dollar homes is finite – say you make one a year. Then again you’d have to sell fifty (50) $100,000 homes to make the same $5 million revenue, which may mean one a week!.  So marketing has to make two critical determination – who’s our customer and what are they prepared to pay and how do I get them to pay me the best price? Again brand perception, may command a high price ($120 white T-shirts) or positioning – can you afford to risk your family’s safety (Volvo) – the cost of alternates or non-purchase (insurance)  are all things marketers may do – with the optimising selling price. Different segments (homeowners vs farmers) may consume the same product (insecticide) in different volumes (frequency of use), form factors (storage constraints), and therefore price. The higher unit sales, at lower price (but high margins) of homebuyers may underwrite the lower price (and margins) at high volumes of farmers (which drives unit cost of production down). So segmenting, positioning and pricing are strongly correlated.

Maximize absolute profit  “We make 200% (or even infinite) margin on each unit we ship,” would be a true statement for products such as software – where incremental unit costs are negligible or even for a sandwich or burger. But such unit margin is illusional if you take the cost of all the software engineers or cooks (and the rent to house them). Unit (or gross) margins are important, but high or at least positive net margins are nicer. Even if you make a profit on each sale, funding new product development or growing your revenue requires more money – in which case profit (gross or net) cannot be a matter of only measured in percentage terms but in absolute dollar terms. Almost for any business (there are exceptions) this means growing revenues while maintaining or even growing margins, so that you can at least keep up with inflation that leads to increasing salaries or other input costs, even if you don’t wish to innovate or grow. Marketing can help achieve this by bringing growth – be it demand creation (new markets), greater market share (revenue growth) that will not just increase revenues but profits.

Everything else, you’ve learned or heard about marketing whether the four Ps (product, price, positioning, promotion) or four Cs (consumer, cost, communication, convenience), inbound or content marketing, paid or earned media or any other flavor-of-the-week are all mere methods or tools to achieve these objectives.

Money

How much money do you want?

April 22, 2016 / / 0 Comments

English: The Miz's Money in the Bank briefcase

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

“I remember the first time I closed a big deal – was for about 50,000 bucks. That evening, I went out and got myself a fancy watch – that probably cost me half as much,” my friend Murali recounted. He’d been invited to talk to a group of young entrepreneurs, who were looking for mentors. “I was so ignorant, that I didn’t know that revenue is not profit,” Murali continued. “And of course, I knew nothing about revenue versus cash flow even. So here I was spending money that I didn’t have and in hindsight couldn’t have afforded to spend, even if I had it.”

 

Murali is by no means the first entrepreneur to fall into this particular hole. He’s the one that I’d seen recall it with the most relish and absolute candor. His point was that doing business requires a good understanding of financial basics. Not an MBA but just plain nuts and bolts of understanding, what revenues are, net and gross margins, cash flow versus revenues. In other words everything your mother, or for those of you lucky enough, your spouse, felt you should learn about budgeting and handling money. And of course if he could do it, so could you – was his unstated message.

This is never more evident or critical than when you set out to sell your company.

As entrepreneurs when we engage in sales conversations, we tend to focus on the “selling price” a great deal. And all too often, they mistake their selling price with the cash that may flow into their accounts. This is made a lot worse, especially when the negotiation is around selling their business.

“How much money do you want to have in your bank, after this whole thing is done?”

You’d think this is a simple enough question to answer. And it is. This is usually the first question I pose to entrepreneurs when they talk about selling their business. Most of them, after some initial hemming and hawing, are able to give reasonably specific answers – “A million dollars. five crores.”  It’s almost always a round number. I don’t ask why that number, whatever it is. But have a slew of other questions?  The first one I ask them, is this before or after taxes? And what if it is not in cash but in stock? What if it is deferred or staggered in time? Against deliverables or future performance? And how would you partners answer these same questions? By this time, the entrepreneur’s turned quiet and introspective. Given how often this conversation takes place, I reckoned it makes sense to capture these starter questions.

How much money do you want to have once everything is done? The answer to this obviously is a very personal thing. One woman’s 250K maybe another woman’s billion dollars. But this is the amount you want – never mind if you will get it – in your bank account with NO strings attached – no further taxes to pay and no assumptions about what more you may get. In other words, you would be perfectly willing to walk away from you business, for this much money in the bank NOW.

What taxes are you liable for? Knowing this is critical. Keeping the usual disclaimer, that I’m no tax expert and this should not be deemed as any sort of competent tax advice, consult your own tax advisor, recognise that you are liable for capital gains tax – which may vary from taxed as straight income (up to 33% in some cases) to varying degrees (long-term vs short-term, privately held vs publicly held) and liable to state or local taxes in some jurisdictions. In other words, if you wanted to still have that X million dollars, you may have to clear (x/(1-tax rate) (1.5M to have 1M left over after 33% tax for instance)

Will the cash all come in tomorrow or will some of it be deferred? Does this matter? It may if you need or want all the money now. It may also matter whether the amounts are deferred simply over time, to retain you for instance or they are tied to performance or other deliverables. In both cases, will you be ready to walk away if you got nothing beyond the first payment or tranche? If so would you revisit your answer to the first question?

Will it all be in cash? While our answer may always be yes, reality may not be. And getting some of it in stock may not be all bad – but as my mentor Chandrashekar would put it, balancing your need and greed is important. And how would this change your answers to the questions we’ve already asked?

Finally, how would your partners answer the above questions? Whilst what you need or want should, in an ideal world, be not influenced by what your partners want, reality is that a good deal can be consummated only if all parties are at least semi-clear on what they want. While this is NOT critical, as with salaries or many things in life, we might be happy with the answers we come up with, till we find out what the other guy is making. So thinking about it and factoring it in, helps our mental wellbeing if not our bank accounts.

In an earlier article, I spoke about Valuation 101 – how you can value your company. The reality is that your answer to the first question “How much money do you want to have once everything is done?” is really what sets the valuation of your company – or the walk-away price. So stop reading and get out a piece of paper or a spreadsheet if you prefer and begin answering these questions as the second step to selling your company. For those still looking for the first step – you can find it here.

As many companies that I’ve been involved with grow past their fifth or even seventh anniversary, they are facing new questions around exits – be the outright sales or mergers or in some case existential questions. I’m hoping to write about these questions in what I’d like to think of as “Selling your startup” series

Photo: paulsoninstitute

5 Questions Founders Need to Ask, Annually

April 13, 2016 / / 0 Comments

“Can I meet with you today?”  Usually, when I get such a call, which I do about once in two weeks, the entrepreneur wants to meet immediately. In this instance, I suggested that we can meet the next Tuesday. The entrepreneur, let’s call him Jack, persisted, “If it’s okay can we meet today please?” So I agreed we’d meet at 530pm that evening and moved around a few meetings to make it happen.

At about 445pm I get a call. It’s Peter, Jack’s partner. He says “I’m going to be about 10 minutes late.” As I’m wrapping up a meeting, I tell him “Don’t worry about it. I will be at the coffee shop. See you there.” At that time, I didn’t pay attention whether Peter had said “we’d be late” or “I’d be late.”  So at 530pm, I’m surprised to see only Peter show up with no sign of Jack.

“So what was so urgent that it couldn’t wait till next Tuesday?”

Peter was polite enough to apologize for Jack’s absence, “A major customer crisis has arisen. Jack had to go in person to placate the customer,” before jumping into why he’d asked for the meeting.

“BigCo has made us an offer. We’d approached them as a strategic investor. As we talked to one another, the discussions turned into an M&A one. They are interested in acquiring us. So we’re looking for advice on what we should do.”

Over the previous six years Jack, Peter, and another partner had at first bootstrapped their tech business and then raised both an angel round and a series A. They were on the verge of operational breakeven and had impressive Fortune 100 customers that any startup would kill for. They’d also dabbled in hardware and systems, pivoted a couple of times and overcome significant challenges in pulling together a fragmented supplier marketplace. In short, they were not just smart and hardworking but successful by any measure.

“What do you want?” I asked. “What does Jack want?”

Peter’s responses, many of which were questions rather than answers, sounded similar to ones that I’d faced more than a decade ago when my own startup was acquired. And one that I’ve heard from many entrepreneurs since. Most founders rarely stop during the madness that is doing a startup is, to ask, let alone answer these questions. So regardless of where you are in your own startup journey, here are some questions for you to ask yourself. I’d suggest revisiting these once a year, more frequently they’d be a distraction.

What do you want? Why are you running/doing a startup? To make a zillion dollars? Because people don’t have easy access to mental health? Because every kid should go to college? Whatever be your reason – only money, only greater good, some combination of both or yet another reason, knowing what it is, is important. This will help you figure out, are you close to it? And regardless of your distance from it, do you want to keep doing it?

How much money do you want? Despite startups being businesses, many entrepreneurs haven’t really put thought into how much money, specifically, they’d like to make or have. So when they are faced with a sudden offer to sell or particularly when they face a hostile or shall we say unwilling ejection, they are in no position to figure out what they want in any dispassionate manner. Surprisingly many entrepreneurs, starting with myself, find that they are uncomfortable talking about money for themselves. So this is a good question to answer if only to get comfortable talking about it.

What do your partners want? Usually your co-founders, especially at an early stage startup, much like you would also have not given this much thought. But in some cases may have greater clarity, which is usually a good thing, but you’d better know what it is and how different it is from your own answers to the question. Again, they may have thought of things only in terms of money or in terms of outcomes and not money. Knowing the answer to both and knowing your differences will be immensely useful.

What does your team want and what do you want for them? This may or may not matter to you, or you may even be unclear if this matters to you or not. Knowing this is critical at some many practical and even ethical reasons. For instance, what matters to them – that they work in a startup, the freedom or independence they get maybe very different than what they get from BigCo once they acquire you. What are they likely to get monetarily if you sell your company?

What will you do tomorrow, if you get what you want? If your company were to be acquired today, in an all cash deal, with no strings attached (and let me know if there are such deals out there 🙂 what will you do tomorrow or ninety days hence, after you take that well-deserved vacation. In many ways, this is similar to the first question around purpose? If you’d still do what you are doing today, what does that tell you? And if you’d do something totally different, what are you waiting for – what should you do differently today?

I believe if you ask and answer these questions both individually and collectively as a founding team, periodically, it would help you make better decisions when you are at crossroads in your startup.

As many companies that I’ve been involved with grow past their fifth or even seventh anniversary, they are facing new questions around exits – be the outright sales or mergers or in some case existential questions. I’m hoping to write about these questions in what I’d like to think of as “Selling your startup” series.

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