media – K Srikrishna

Lessons from a close shave
In 1996, when I first returned to India, Ramani, my neighbor and friend, took me to the local barber. Harking back to the barber shops of my childhood, it was two barber chairs in a room the size of large shower stall. Prasad (all names changed to protect the privacy of individuals) the owner of the barber shop seemed barely in his twenties and full of life and great enthusiasm for the task at hand. He greeted my friend in Kannada, even as he cropped a customer’s hair, acknowledged me with a quick nod and kept a close eye on the other barber. My positive impressions of that first day were not only borne out but grew stronger, as over the years Prasad bought out the neighboring space and expanded his barber shop. Now renamed as Classic Hair Saloon (CHS), he added head massages first, then facials and subsequently full body massages, in an expanded back room.

Three years after my first visit to the CHS, several friends and I embarked on our own first startup, Impulsesoft. I relocated overseas as we set out to grow our business and in my frequent trips to India, I’d always make it a point to bring my hair cutting business to Prasad and the CHS. The half hour or thereabouts I’d spend on a padded chair having a luxurious shave or an oil-soaked head massage proved to be my own personal MBA class.

In 2000, our chosen market (Bluetooth technology) sputtered in the downturn and well funded competitors threatened to swamp us. Yet as I saw Prasad thrive in a market with nary an entry barrier, hiring more seats and hands, I learned the criticality of customer focus and personalized service. Subsequently when we set out to raise money, capital had dried up as the market seemed stillborn or delayed in 2002. Again the lessons of repeat customers, word-of-mouth referrals and growing existing customers by up-selling (cut to shave; a shave to coloring; to head massage) were apparent in Prasad’s growing business. And whenever we despaired that hiring, training, retaining and motivating software engineers was hard, Prasad’s challenges in ensuring service quality, even as he brought on more barbers, often with few other formal skills, made our own look small.

Even as I write this, the CHS has held its own against newer competitors (including a fancy upscale national chain and another barber shop that sprang up in the neighborhood) and has continued to grow. Prasad has demonstrated bootstrapping success, growth through hard times and sustained product and service innovation. He has built a strong and passionate customer base and seen good financial returns. In other words his business is an immense success by most measures, even though it has yet to figure in any mainstream story or have its own case study.

“If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” is a riddle philosophers have posed to question reality and its relationship to observation. Much of the entrepreneurship in India is like trees falling (or growing) silently in an unobserved forest. The media rarely notices it and the public is hardly aware that its happening. Does this mean it is not happening?

The casual reader of the business pages could be forgiven if they reckoned that entrepreneurship in India happened only with technology or more recently Internet startups, often venture funded. Coverage outside the technology domain focuses on the hyper-successful and all to often on personalities. The stories of Dhirubhai Ambani, and his humble start in Aden, Karsenbhai Patel’s Nirma taking on the entrenched multinationals and more recently Kishore Biyani and his Future Group’s rise in retail have captivated the media and readers’ imaginations.

In many ways, the recent appointment of Infosys founder, Nandan Nilekani, as the Chairman of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) marked a milestone in Indian entrepreneurship. In his own words [Infosys] “… was not a family-owned company. It was not a multinational. It was not a state-owned company. …It’s become a metaphor. If they can come from nowhere and create a world-class organization, then anyone can do it.” The grant of a Cabinet level post to someone who has cut his teeth as an entrepreneur and a professional manager is the most visible sign of mainstream acceptance of entrepreneurs.

Entrepreneurship in new light

However as we have learnt, having a woman prime minister or now a woman president, symbolic as it is, does not automatically solve all the issues plaguing Indian women. So too this recent interest and boosterism for all things entrepreneurial, while welcome, is merely a start. Even today, traders who likely constitute the lion’s share of Indian entrepreneurs are referred to in pejorative terms. Unlike the titans of technology or rajahs of retail, whom we read about on page 3, all of us encounter traders on a daily basis, but rarely recognize them as entrepreneurs. So there is much each of us as individuals, organizations and as a nation can do to encourage, nourish and grow the flame of entrepreneurship. This article is a small step in that direction.

Ram Charan, author and renowned management consultant, frequently points to his family’s shoe shop and to street vendors in India and elsewhere, and the lessons businesses can draw from them. Without romanticizing either the giant multi-billion dollar corporations he consults for, or the fruit seller on the street, he is able to highlight the commonalities that underpin businesses. It is such a balanced view of entrepreneurship – whether small or large, tech or non-tech, urban or rural – that we all need to develop to build an ever stronger ecosystem that will foster Indian entrepreneurship and innovation. The two books, “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish,” published by the IIM Ahmedabad and “Inspiring Women to Start Innovative Enterprises” by the NSRCEL at IIM Bangalore, are a great start. Whilst still about college-educated entrepreneurs, both books highlight a wide variety of entrepreneurs across various stages of the business cycle. Without focusing solely on the large or “successful” but by including several still-at-an-early-stage businesses, they are a step in the right direction.

In this article I will share a few common but untold stories of entrepreneurial journey, along with my own experience as a first generation entrepreneur. Drawing on these and others’ experiences, I will stake a position on how we can influence the perception, coverage and the course of entrepreneurship in our own communities.

*The fine folks at Indira Institute of Management approached me to write an article for their quarterly magazine Tapasya. This article first appeared in the Summer 2009 issue of Tapasya.