Is your Business THRILLed to Grow !

Around 80% of startups close down within their first year of operation. While some of these go down simply because of part time involvement of the founders, lack of persistence and fizzling out of passion, a large percentage go down during their transition from a Startup(Micro) phase to a Small Business phase. A business can aim for the long term only when the owners have vision and concentrate on building a value system based on THRILL – Trust, Honesty, Respect, Innovation, Loyalty and Love. Since most of these are subjective, many businesses don’t believe in writing them down or have policies to define the role of THRILL in their company. But a closer look at each of these factors tells us how important it is for each one of these to be a part of your day to day business activities if you are seriously looking at building a company that grows consistently.

Trust:
If your customers don’t trust you, they are going to buy from someone else – no matter how good you think you are. If your employees don’t trust you, they are going to treat your customers badly. If your vendors don’t trust you, they are not going to extend any credit to you. So trust is a factor that forms the basic foundation pillar of pretty much everything that is your business. So how does this trust develop?

Honesty:
If you , the owner of the business, think that you are going to get away with treating people with anything that is not totally honest, you will just be fooling yourself. Not being honest is sooner or later going to land you as the owner in the shoes of someone like Dick Fuld of Lehman Brothers, Ken Lay of Enron or Ramalinga Raju of Satyam Computers. If you don’t do what you said you will, you are going to shake up the integrity of the business. Sooner or later, your employees are going to follow suit and it is going to lead to nothing but degradation of the culture within the company. Honesty and fearlessness go hand in hand. A simple example of this is telling your client that you have not clearly understood the exact requirements for the second time in a row instead of feeling embarrassed to ask again and working with half an understanding. Or not letting your customer know that you are not going to be able to deliver in time. Committing fake product features. Sometimes, this may lead to some short term profit, but it is going to cost you heavily in the long term. Dishonest behavior is almost always going to create a communication gap, reduce trust and boost corruption Being diplomatic may seem to be a simpler affair most of the times, but it is honesty and straight forward attitude that’s going to hold the company together in the long run.

Respect:
To a certain extent, honest behavior can be embedded into the business through policies – but respect is one factor that is born within the organization and must seep through from the owners to the management and finally to the employees. You cannot treat your employees rudely and expect them to be sweet and caring to your customers. In your absence, your employees are going to treat customers just the way you treat them. You are going to command respect only if you give respect. And a culture of respect is born only when the owners lead with example. If you come across a company where the employees are frowning all the time, check their immediate bosses or the owners, most often than not, that’s where the root of the problem is going to be. Dedication and passion come from people who feel good about themselves and have a high level of self respect which comes from being treated with respect all the time. This also applies to the quality of the product/service you deliver. If the employees observe that you are sloppy and not worried about the quality of the final delivered product, they are going to nurture the same attitude.

Innovation:
Innovation is basically trying the same thing in a different and more efficient way for better results and a higher level of excellence. Anyone who says that this is the best way to do something and there is no need to look for alternatives, is giving an open invitation to competitors to come and screw their business. Change is essential because companies who don’t adopt change are going to be stagnant and are bound to be hit by competition. If you, as the owner are not prepared to adopt change and do not encourage people to go through some apparently unpleasant changes for the future of the company, you are just going to keep digging into unsuccessful rut for years. The entire American car industry had to learn this lesson of innovation the hard way when Japanese car makers started taking them apart. Businesses that show the willingness to embrace change during difficult times are the ones who are vibrant and show sustained growth. It is companies who are continuously finding better ways to market, manage HR, log in accounts, handle cash flow, and are striving hard to consistently achieve excellence in every aspect, who come through sailing smoothly through thick and thin. And for those who don’t believe in measuring and improving continuously, sooner or later, they are sure to go out of business or just stay a mediocre business that keeps dragging along for years.

Loyalty :
Loyalty is an automatic effect of the points discussed above and is the cause for amazing level of faith, increase in productivity and gain in competitive advantage. Loyalty within the company is going to lead to high levels of morale which naturally results in low absenteeism, higher levels of dedication and smoothening out of day to day operations. A growing business means that the owner has to move out of the day to day operations and concentrate on the business rather than stay in the business. Responsibilities can be easily delegated if the level of loyalty in the organization is high. Any owner caught up in the daily activities is just going to find himself doing a mundane job and not running a business. And unless loyalty is developed within the company, delegation is always going to be a tough task.

Love:
If we have a look at the most influential business leaders like Sam Walton of Walmart, Richard Branson of Virgin, Dhirubhai Ambani of Reliance Industries, Steve Jobs of Apple Inc (after his return to Apple), Narayan Murthy of Infosys etc., one thing that we observe is their ability to lead with love. They command so much love that there are people whom they have inspired to sacrifice their whole life for their mentor’s ideals. A more precise way to look at this is to look at so many smart people who don’t step ahead as influential leaders. You can be exceedingly smart, but unless the smartness is backed with the instinct of doing something good, you are going to be just momentarily impressive to people. Crude smartness starts to stink after a while unless it is backed with the willingness to do some good. And this is good for anyone who is running a company with 5 employees or 5Mn employees.

Anyone approaching employees, customers and vendors with anything that is less than the 6 points of THRILL is not looking forward to a long term relationship with either one of them. Try judging businesses on the scale of THRILL and you will find that the ones who score high are the ones who have the ability to achieve excellence and sustained growth and more importantly, higher levels of overall happiness throughout the business. After all, isn’t happiness what we all are seeking!

How to save your mobile even after it is drenched !

So you dropped your cell phone in a puddle. Forgot to remove it from the pocket before the pants entered the washing machine. Or carried it along while swimming . Try out the following and mostly, its going to be fine again.

Remove the battery from the mobile, and place it in a jar of rice. Rice is great at soaking up moisture, so when you keep it over night, its going to get rid of almost all the water particles embedded in your phone.

Install all softwares on your PC in a single click !

We all know how bugging it is to format the PC – and the biggest headache is installing the softwares again and running the setup a million times.

This app helps you to install all the softwares you want to get your pc running  – in a single click. Pretty Cool and saves a lot of effort. So if you got a new lappy or have formatted your existing one or are upgrading to windows 7 – this is the thing for you – you can nowinstall your chrome, itunes, winamp and heaps of other apps with just a single click.

Its the best thing if you are going to upgrade to windows 7 too.

All in one application installer

Check out here : http://ninite.com/

Create a font of your own handwriting

Ever thought of drafting out a word document – with your own hand writing font. This is a site that helps you do just that.

All you ahve to do is download a file, write in the stuff in your handwriting and upload it back and it will give you a font file that you can directly place in your fonts folder and use it wherever.

Click here to create your own font.

Swap your file !

This is one of the silliest apps I have seen . It basically asks you to upload some content from your computer and you get a file in return, which is basically a random swap file in return . lol ! so you can upload anything – your dogs picture, your pic, a text file, any pdf and it uploads the same and throws out a file especially for you !

So the app is basically going to act as a black box and put in your file and pull out another file in return and give it to you.

I uploaded my pic and got this :

—->

May be implies that I have to be a truck driver. Sorry ! a Mini-truch driver .

Its crazy but fun to try out. There is this unknown fun element while you wait for the surprise swap file you get back in liu of the file you uploaded.  Be careful though : the content that you upload is going to be free for distribution.

Check out here : http://www.file-swap.com/

The Freeway of Dreams !

Dreams are wonderful – flowery, ideal and honeymoon like. Fascinating about some idea sometimes wakes you up, you experience a terrific adrenaline flow and a lovely cinema of the future successful you starts playing on the screen of your mind. It all awesome and cool.. until you decide to start chasing.

We all are walking along our  little ‘pathway’ of life. All is well and calm – until our minds are attracted and attached to that one thing. It can be anything – some path breaking business idea, the girl next door, a sport, big house, your French teacher, those 6 pack Abs, that fancy sports car, a fatter salary, your own company, and just anything and everything the mind can catch hold of. No harm done will now, but as soon as you take your first step towards fulfilling your desire – your dream, a little stone pricks you in your foot and you wake up to the Valley – the valley of realization.

The valley of realization is no more a fantasy land. Its the simple truth that draws the thin line between the world of your dreams and the world you actually are in. So anyone who chooses to give away the comforts of the average little pathway of life and take the big leap towards the freeway of dreams, has to walk through the valley. Its full of rough mountains, deep pits, seemingly unsurmountable walls and small cute little thorns all the way that many times are going to make you feel : Well, is this really the right way ? Many a times the pathway would seem much more happier and comfortable. Every now and then, you are going to loose your way or stand in front of a big rock and wonder – should i go back ??.

Slowly, you do have to come to terms with the fact that in the journey through the valley, no one is going to cover up for you. Its all you and your own will power that is going to take you through. And within all the chaos going around you, innumerable mistakes that you are making, stumbling upon a million new things and knowingly or unknowingly – learning every single day, you start coming close to who you actually are. Many a times, you may start finding way towards your own life’s realization.

And for those who learn to bounce back again and again and again, its a continuous motivating learning curve.In fact, you are no more just motivated by something , you are inspired by your Goal. And for the ones who survive all the pitfalls, jump the walls and stand tall – its time to hit the freeway !

And finally those who reach the freeway, there is the ultimate realization-  that the stones and pitfalls was where all the fun and happiness was. Those spurts of emotions, happiness, sadness, the anger, the sacrifices, the faith and all that you had to come through – is what set you free. That the struggle is what makes being on the freeway worth it.

So if we actually imagine the pathway of life and the freeway of the life of your dreams and the valley of realization in between – there actually seems to be no easy way to give up once you leap into the valley. If you give up mid way – you are going to be caught up in all the thorns. If you decide to come back – you are going to come back with sore memories and bitter scars and an unquenched mind thats always going to be fluttering around. All the scars in the way are only going to feel sweet when you are on the freeway.

So many people keep walking down the pathway just looking at the freeway and the possible obstacles in between. But coming to think of it rationally, if you have the slightest doubt that you will give up – do not plunge. So the big lesson is that if and when you do plunge – never ever give up or some back. The time to reach the freeway is different for all. Depending on the guides you meet in the valley, lucky shortcuts that your lovely angel called destiny might show you around etc. But one thing is for sure – if you stay long and have faith – you are going to come through sailing.

Not all of us are going to reach the freeway. The freeway is  free and fast after all, because not many get there. Else it would be clogged like the pathway.  But lets not forget – all the fun is anyways in the valley .

Communicate for a better Business !

There are various factors that determine the culture of a company- the attitude of the owners, ethics of the management team, transparency, governance, priorities of the business and a lot more. But above all, it is how the company ‘communicates’ – both internally and externally.

Communication is going to determine how the world is going to perceive you. And the same applies to a company – as well as to any organization, community and to a country as well.

There is an amazing government Ad campaign that runs in Australia – it has a newly joined female employee working at a bakery. A customer walks in and asks her for a specific type of bread. After messing around with a lot of options she finally finds the one – but it is uncut and the customer now wants it cut. She looks around and her colleague is on a call, so she goes ahead and hesitantly turns the cutting machine on and inserts the bread with her hand and— ouch ! cuts her hand off. And a big message pops up – ‘It Does not Hurt to Speak Up.!‘ And hell it doesn’t. Its amazing how much difference it makes to the productivity of a company that has a free communication policy implemented within it. It is really important that employees are not shy or embarrassed to speak up and ‘ASK’.

It is also seen that people who ask without feeling embarrassed, are at a higher level of peace with themselves and are more open to helping others too.

Communication is the ultimate key – key to relationships, key to growth and key to freedom. It is the way employees communicate with their boss and vice versa, the way sales communicates with prospective customers, the way project managers handle client communication, how the management communicates with employees, the board with the investors, how your Ads communicate with customers – all these factors are going to ultimately lead to the fate of your company. And with so much importance to communication , it is amazing how many businesses go ahead with no ‘policy for communication’. I think it should essentially be an integral part of the value system of the company.

From a customer’s point of view, many times, its the only thing that they want. Fair, true and timely communication is going to get you a satisfied customer and repeat business. Your customer is going to trust and refer your product or service only if he trusts the way you communicate, trusts that you are going to be there if something goes wrong. And this is where small businesses have a big advantage over the larger ones – they can give much more attention and personal communication. This is the reason people shift from large to small companies – if all I am going to get after calling a million times is a bunch of pre-recorded messages , its surely going to blow my head off.

This is where a Customer Relationship Management Software comes handy for any company. It will automatically communicate and most importantly, keep reminding you about the communication. Keep a track of all past communication and give you a good record of what went wrong and when. But no software is going to do any good to the company unless it is backed with a strong ‘policy of communication’ becomes a part of the value system of the company.

Walk in to Mcdonalds and 99 times out of 100, you will see a smiling face greet you. Walk into Vodafone and 8 out of 10 times you will see an over smart dork who doesn’t help you in any way. Well, these are just from some experiences but you for yourself must have come across countless such happenings. Dont you love it when something is wrong a product and you dial out a number that gets attended within 3 rings and has a person with a smile greet you happily. Mostly, even if you were intending to, you will not yell.

Communicate and your employees are going to stand with you through thick and thin, communicate and your investors are going to give you support during tougher times, communicate and customers are going to understand the thin case when you cannot deliver on time. Its one simple thing which, if incorporated can be one of the most powerful building block of your company. Just a policy that determines the habits of everyone in your company in doing ordinary things is what is going to take your company from being ordinary to extra ordinary.

rahulrane

Open Source = Open Money

At EC, we have a lot of people coming to us with all these different ideas about building portals. More because we often push Ads like ‘Have an Idea ? We have the technology. Build your dream web portal with ECBuzz.com’. So we get to listen to a lot of ideas everyday. And as true software guys, what do me and sushant do when we have to work out a proposal for something new, we follow the standard coders maxim : Good coders code. Great coders reuse !, and look out for existing softwares. We look out for all that free stuff, or better call it open source to reuse. And every so often, we used to wonder- how do these guys make money ? With all the code up for grabs, are these people so noble at heart and want to earn so much goodwill – of course not ! So this leads to the all important question – how do open source companies make money ?
There are 2 entities here, the ones who write the original software (‘original company’) and the ones who take it, reuse and deploy (lets call these ‘parasite company’). The case of the latter is easy to understand- why reinvent the wheel, if someone is just giving it to you, take it, polish it and sell it. So we will consider entity 1 here. Lets try and see.
So you come up with this great idea, find a loophole in the market, or just have a super enhanced version of some existing concept and you decide to make a software solution. After toiling hard and working with great passion, you build your product. Lets say you spent about $20,000 building it. Lets see how going open source is going to help you make money, both in terms of saving of essential investments and actually generating revenue.

Marketing : once you have decided to go open, you give away your code for free download, have it for a free download on your product website, blog about it like mad and post about it in every possible place you can. You start attracting some developer community attention – obviously its free and no one has anything to loose to download and see what you have done. It’s amazing how the word FREE has a specific magnetic effect on your mind no matter where you see it. Anyways, so people start downloading and messing around. To your surprise, the software starts reaching customers who would have never have even considered or even come to know about it. Here comes the most important point about going open – you need a software that is seriously good – because it is naked out there, a good enough will never attract developers and downloads. You didn’t spend a penny and your software is already going places by harnessing the power of open source to market itself. This much about saving on money – now about actually making some-

Service : You then put up pages on your website about a complete installation suite(1st source) – a preinstalled OS, DB, App Server and your free application over that and offer it for some price, say $5000. You can now officially use – free, open source, $0 only to attract all the attention you want. There is a good chance that a lot of prospects considering your software will go for you as of all the parasites thriving on you, you yourself are obviously the most reliable. Next comes your customization : Many of the users who consider going in for your free software, would need some arrangements to suit their own needs and since the idea of getting the software for free has already gotten them excited, they would not mind shelling out something like a $100/hour for customization(source 2). And once you have gotten your customer – you always have the enhancements @ may be $150/hour which becomes our 3rd source.

Support : By now, with some amount of downloads and some community focus on your software, you would probably have an active support and knowledgebase on your site. Its obviously free until now. But now onwards, you start charging for a support package selling support on case basis or a monthly or yearly basis(Say $100/month). Consultants depending on your software and serving customers will not mind paying you for all genuine support. Every programmer has their style of coding that other coders dont understand and trust me, even if its open- tones will need support which is our 4th source.

Demoware Open Source : This is a somewhat debated but definitely a very effective way. Give a really basic, almost commercially non usable version of the software as complete open source. And have a professional and enterprise paid edition over it(Say $500 and $900 respectively). The lowest version suffices the basic needs, but people are stuck up during critical customer custom deployments and have to upgrade. Sugar CRM does this. But attracts a lot of criticism for marketing itself as open source while truly being our demoware open source. But they seem to be better off than other truly open source CRM’s. Proprietary softwares like Salesforce.com, Oracle On Demand and FreedomCRM are way better off in the CRM market though. Anyways, so this is our 5th source.


Collaborative Money : This is where open source is used to collaborate and help some other aspect of your business to monetize itself. Google have Wave and Android open for developers and cant we see the android boom now(2% to 7% growth in market share in just 6 months). Turning these into open source is actually their marketing strategy to market their software through the power of the community in order to be able to sell more Advertisements. So that’s source 6 to use the self marketing power of open source to generate revenue through some other aspect of the business.

So as per our(just some rough) analysis, you need to sell 4 Installation suites($20000) or 200 hours customization ($20000) to break even and we have not even considered other sources.

So open source is not about goodwill or spirit, its about fierce competition and capitalism. You know that the company next to you has the same piece of clay as you have and it all boils down to who can mould it better and sell, thus fostering innovation and productivity. No one can put it in words better than Red Hat CEO, Jim Whitehurst “If we all had to walk around naked, we’d spend more time in the GYM”.