How it all began
In August ’82, I QUIT my job after an unsavory personal experience with the management and decided that I will NOT look for another job but do something on my own.
I had no money except for small savings in Employees Provident Fund which could meet my financial needs for the next 6 months at the most. I had two small kids and my wife had a job which was just enough to pay the rent and nothing more.
Most people around me called me mad not to look for another job and the security that comes with that.
In the early days, my office was my scooter, the local job typist was my secretariat and the public telephone booth was my telephone. A helpful friend agreed to take messages from anyone who wanted to reach me. When I look back now those early days were tense with lots of uncertainties but at no point it occurred to me to end all this by looking for a job. The excitement of wanting to do something on my own and confidence in my conviction that I will succeed kept me going.
All this is history. Over time I built a reputation for adding value and trustworthiness among my clients and had the luxury of picking and choosing assignments.
First a little about my background so you can get to know me;
I belong to the generation which came into the job market in the 1970s during the Control Permit Raj and had to be part of the transition of the Indian economy from this to a liberalized one later on in the 1990s. Having passed out of IIT Bombay in 1973 and IIM Bangalore in 1976, I was having stars in my eyes and very idealistic. So when I got my first Job in 1976 in a public sector and posted in New Delhi at the head office, we were in the midst of Emergency and found every one was looking over his shoulder and generally talking in hushed tones. As a management trainee I was simply thrown into a job which made no sense to my education or sensibilities. but having signed a bond to serve for 4 years I had no choice but to hang on. In the meanwhile I got transferred to Hyderabad, got married and had 2 kids and continued to rue my fate in this job waiting for the bond period to end.
During this period I had befriended people from Academic world in Management working for Administrative Staff College of India (ASCI) based out of Hyderabad and they suggested that ASCI was looking for Marketing Faculty; why not I apply since my background suits their requirements. This was close to the end of my Bond Period at the beginning of 1981 and I liked the idea of a non transferable job based in Hyderabad and hopefully help me pursue my interest in completing a PhD while working. I got the offer to join from ASCI at the same time the bond period was ending and decided to move to the Academic world.
While ASCI offered me immense freedom to work and set my own agenda with lots of time available outside the classroom teaching time, I took to the environment with gusto and did lot of reading, published papers and even got funding from ICSSR (Indian Council for Social Science Research) for a research proposal I had sent which was surprising to all the other faculty who said you have to have a PhD to get any grant from ICSSR. While the work front everything was going fine the Academic environment was fraught with a lot of political machinations by fellow academics which was very disturbing. And the management of the institute was doing everything to make the situation worse for individual faculty and I noticed exodus of many old hands from the institution. I realized that I have no future in this world. So I decided to quit overnight around August 1982 after an unsavory personal experience with the management and decided that I will not look for another job but do something on my own.
But to do something on my own needed money which I had none except for a small savings in Employees Provident Fund which I could with draw in full and which could address my financial needs for the next 6 months at the most even if I had no earnings. I had two small kids aged 3.5 and 2 years old and my wife had just managed to get a job which I realized was enough just to pay the rent and nothing more. Most people around me called me mad not to look for another job and the security that comes with that.
Without capital the only option available was to use my education background and work experience of six years in industry and academia to offer my services as a management consultant. About this time another friend who was based in Hyderabad and after quitting his job had moved back to Chennai with an intention to start his own management consultancy practice. When he got to know my plans he approached me and suggested why not we work as a team and cover both Hyderabad and Chennai markets. When you embark first time to do something that too with zero bank balance and only hope as the motivation and confidence in ones own self that one can manage the future which looked otherwise uncertain, the comfort of having someone with you was enough to make me accept his offer.
So we formed a partnership company and started looking for clients. But we had no idea where they could be and what we should offer them initially as a special focus and so we ended up offering everything we could think of which could come under the ambit of management consulting in the brochure we created hoping some thing will click with prospective clients. We were prepared to take on any work that could come our way and that is exactly what happened in the initial days.
Being a two man outfit, large corporates were beyond our purview but we thought small and medium businesses could possibly use our services. To target them instead of making blind calls we used our friends locally and network of alumni from our alma maters IIT and IIM to get references to meet them. Surprisingly most of them had issues which needed outside help but did not know how to get since those days consultants were mostly working for large corporates and charging by the hour which was beyond their reach. More over when we met them their first response was why don't you just work for them full time and they will pay us a salary with out having any idea how to engage us. Or they would ask for our rates for our services and when we quoted some reasonably low rates compared to the high priced consultants they would say they will get back and never did. And some of them also said we can't implement your advise even if you give since we don't have people to do so, can we work with them to implement on a contract basis if they decide to engage but after asking and getting our rates they will not go ahead.
This is when I realized that prospective clients were not able to see value of engaging us but could see the cost when we quoted with out showing the value experience. And the need to implement was more important than getting advise in their value expectation. So instead of talking cost we need to discuss value and that cannot be shown with out them experiencing value. So I started suggesting that let them engage us with out any financial commitment to begin with for a period of month or two as they feel fit and let us help them address their problems working with them along with their other employees and after and if they see value we can discuss continued engagement and the financial aspects. More like a trial offer. Surprisingly in every case where we made this offer the client accepted it and after experiencing the benefit of our association they on their own came forward with a contract which was far more than what we would have asked for. I started realizing the power of Value Pricing in practice even though it was a theoretical concept till then in my mind for a service offering. Second aspect of this was what clients wanted was not management consultants but management services where implementation is the key. This became the corner stone of my approach to acquiring clients which started with small and medium businesses in the early days and later when the economy opened up even with large corporates about which I will share as we go along my journey.
Apart from the individual businesses we were also approaching institutions like banks, financial institutions lending to MSME's and small business promotion organizations. They used to refer us to problem units whom they had funded and not getting their money back and give them an assessment in the form of diagnostic study of the unit or stock audits if they suspected diversion of funds. In some cases we also got assignments from these institutions for study of certain types of industry to develop policy options which we got only because we quoted ridiculously low prices since all contract decisions by these government organizations were solely based on price.
When I look back now those early days were tense with lots of uncertainties but at no point it occurred to me to end all this by looking for a job. The excitement of wanting to do some thing on my own and confidence in my conviction that I will succeed kept me going. And after a couple of months work was coming our way quite regularly and due to band width limitation we had to do some juggling around to space the assignments with out losing the prospects. Honestly it was all requiring improvisations.
During this period my office was my scooter in which I moved around, the local job typist was my secretariat for getting any typing done and the public telephone booth was my telephone to make contact over phones. And giving a helpful friend's personal telephone number who agreed to take messages for any one to reach me. This was reality since in those days getting a telephone connection took 7 years or more after you apply; only special category personnel were allotted phone connections with in a year. Or under Own Your Telephone Scheme (OYT) if you deposit Rs 10K, you will get a connection in one years time!!! So I discovered that my wife who had para medical background could get a phone on priority in a year's time and applied for and got a connection in her name in 1984 which I still use it even though the Plain old Telephone has become a museum piece in todays world of Smart Phones and Wifi enabled Internet connections.
In these musings I will share interesting experiences of assignments and the lessons learnt with the sole purpose of guiding young potential entrepreneurs on building lucrative businesses.
