My Journey As Consultant -6

 Launch of Personal Computers and My Tryst with Information Technology

Ten years into my consulting career, I realised the benefit of building an associate network of professionals with an array of skill-sets which expanded my reach and business portfolio many fold. The IT Industry was on the threshold of path-breaking changes and many small and medium enterprises saw the benefit of introducing IT solutions for greater understanding of their businesses and the marketplaces they served. My tryst with Information Technology gave me the ability to offer business process management tools and demonstrate tangible results to my clients.  

The advent of computers in the Indian market started with mainframe computers even before I finished my IIT course in 1973, and we were exposed to these as part of our course in Computers. I was  quite fascinated and interested in the possibilities that could open up by the use of computers but did not enjoy programming very much. By the time I finished my MBA from IIM Bangalore in 1976, mini-computers were the rage in the market, and this expanded the user market to mid-size companies. However, this still needed computer-trained specialists to program and maintain them. 

In 1983, IBM launched the PC XT  and shortly after its launch many Indian small businessmen bought the PCs, paying upwards of ₹1 lakh apiece; however, they were mostly used by their secretaries as a substitute for typewriters.

In 1984, during the heyday of the mini-computer, I met Antony Xavier, a self-taught computer software guy. He was a postgraduate in Economics, but had a good understanding  of business and financial accounting. He had just joined a cable manufacturing company where I was conducting a diagnostic study of the unit on behalf of a bank. The owners wanted him to help them start a computer services business and were waiting for some mini-computers to arrive. The company deputed Antony to assist me for my study and to provide all the information that I required. He noticed that I was manually doing some tabulations of the financial data given for the last five years and offered to speed up the analysis, using computers that had arrived by then. Thus started a great relationship with him and his team and  together we were able to offer computer-related services to many small businesses where they already possessed a PC XT or were willing to hire the facility provided by Antony and his team for their use. 

Officially, he became my computer associate  and  his services became part of our consulting work where use of computers became an important tool in running many small businesses. 

Soon Antony decided to leave the company he had helped set up, and started his own outfit with a PC XT facility and developed a Financial Accounting package specifically designed for small business application, which became a big hit  in the Hyderabad market. At one point he had more than 250 regular customers who were using this software aptly named FACTS (short for Financial Accounting Software). Many of these customers were those I had identified during the course of my business development efforts and on many occasions my consulting work led to implementing FACT as a first step to introducing the benefit of using PCs to these small businesses. 

By this time, many locally-assembled PCs were available in the Indian market. Prices of new PCs also dropped to make them affordable, and banks were  generous in funding. In many cases, we were able to get the clients to extend the use of PCs for their material accounting system and, using floppy diskettes, we were able to move the data between two computers running the material accounting and accounting packages. During this period I also started noticing that the use of manpower required to run the operations started reducing, which was a big boon since getting well-trained people to work for these small businesses was always an issue. Later, when I moved to work with large corporates, I could use this  experience effectively while implementing Process Reengineering projects.

Once Antony became part of my associate network, we started collaborating to give composite solutions to many clients and all data analysis  part  of my work was done by his team based on the framework I had given to them; this speeded up our work as it also helped many clients get a better information system established. 

We had a good run for this model between 1984 and 1992. Around 1991, the Government of India accepted the Mandal Commission report and this started a great deal of social unrest across the country. We found that many of our small business clients started losing business in Hyderabad and were not able to pay our service charges. The uncertainty  lasted for so long that Antony realised that, with his talent, he could do better if he migrated to the USA. In 1992 he got a good offer from a USA-based firm near New York City and decided to wind up his business and move on. And I lost the support of a very good associate. 

But soon after he had left India I also realised that there was not much future in focusing on small business clients and I started looking for medium to large clients who could afford my services when the economy opened up. During this period  most of my work also involved helping clients adopt information technology creatively using concepts like Business Process Reengineering, Lean Management and Theory of Constraints and I had to work with new IT specialists who were very happy to piggyback on my consulting work to implement IT solutions. Between 1992 and 2009, when I finally decided to hang up my consulting boots, was also the period the IT industry itself was evolving rapidly with new technologies, and the advent of the internet completely transformed the business environment globally. India was no exception to this trend and this provided more opportunities for me  to work with IT specialists to offer innovative solutions.

Well, I don’t want to move fast into my journey before narrating the progressive changes that were forced upon me in the intervening period, starting with my decision to move away from being a private limited company director to an Independent Freelance Consultant. And subsequently building an associate network that came together to work on specific assignments based on a client's business context and created a business model which sustained the relationships with associates in a mutually beneficial and fair manner while giving value to clients.

My Journey as a consultant - 5

 Two Early Clients and Lifelong Association

Early in my career as a management consultant in 1984, I worked on assignments with two well-known and respected entrepreneurs in Hyderabad. These assignments blossomed into lifelong relationships with the entrepreneurs, which gave me immense satisfaction and a firm conviction that I was on the right track. Successful consulting businesses are built around such lifelong associations established through building trust and adding value to the business over time. Here in brief are the actions that led to career-changing associations for me and my associates.

 

They were much older Individuals and came from two opposite ends of the entrepreneur spectrum. One was a technocrat with foreign education coming from a well-to-do community from the interior of Andhra Pradesh. The other was from a Gujarati trading community from the Kutch region whose family had settled down in Hyderabad several generations ago and had an established traditional trading business. He was not formally educated beyond high school or intermediate level but the first person from that family who decided to venture into manufacturing in engineering. Both were very successful in their respective businesses. Both had different approaches to their business. The technocrat understood technology and focused on developing new products and launching them every year. The businessman used his acute sense for managing money and using technology to establish niche businesses.

Mr D V S Raju was the founder of Elico Private Limited in 1962. He had a background in instrumentation engineering and was a first generation entrepreneur. After going to the UK for higher education, and having worked with a large electronics company there, he decided to return to India and start his own business. He found that the National Research and Development Council (NRDC) had developed several products and offered the technology to potential entrepreneurs to commercialise these products for a nominal fee. Mr Raju bought some of these basic designs along with their prototypes and, using his engineering skill, made them into commercially marketable products. Since most of his products were cheaper substitutes to imported ones available in those days, his company, Elico Pvt Ltd, became an established player in their business very soon. 

I had first met Mr Raju around 1979 as my customer, when I was working for a public sector company supplying imported electronic items required by the electronics industry. Later, when I started on my own, I contacted him around 1984 to look for business based on my unique value proposition. Since I had an electronics engineering background he felt I would be able to understand the technical nuances of his business and decided to hire us.

He had the same set of problems that have been mentioned in my earlier posts (see my blog My Journey as Consultant - 3). After my feedback, he decided to engage me on a regular basis for addressing various problems of management that he was facing. During this period he also decided to diversify into manufacturing other electronics products unrelated to instrumentation, like telephones, speakers and personal computers, and involved me with those diversifications. Since he was not exposed to the emerging new technologies, he took my help to connect with some of my classmates from IIT Bombay who were offering technology consultation based out of Bombay and Pune, and took me with him to various government organisations involved in approving these projects in New Delhi to present these project proposals. 

What I discovered during this time was that he was trusting me more than his regular employees. Apart from this, he started introducing me to other business units and local government agencies promoting small and medium businesses by registering me to attend their seminars on behalf of Elico Pvt Ltd. This led to wide exposure for me among small and medium business units and I got small assignments from some of them. He went one step further and invited me to join the Rotary Club of Hyderabad North, where he was a founder member since 1966, and got me admitted to that club in 1986. This club had many entrepreneurs operating from the same or nearby industrial estates and many of them approached me for help. 

As he got older, and found managing the day-to-day affairs of Elico strenuous, he handed over the business to his nephew and focused his energy to working with Instruments Society of India. When he took over as its President, he invited me to help him perform his role effectively. Even after I had moved on to look for and get work from large corporates from 1993, when the Indian business environment changed giving consultants like me opportunities, he continued to call me to help him in some aspects of his work life, which he never stopped till he passed away in 2005. He always introduced me as his Management Consultant, emphasising that he valued me as an important person in his life, like one does with a lawyer or doctor or chartered accountant or an architect, at a time when management consultants were not recognised like the other professions with any legal status.

Mr Bhanu Sanghani was a soft-spoken businessman who founded Unicorn Industries Pvt Ltd in the early 1970s when Amul, the famous milk brand from Gujarat, was looking for Indian suppliers for setting up new milk plants across the country on behalf of National Dairy Development Corporation. He had met the legendary Verghese Kurien who encouraged him to set up the facility to fabricate stainless steel products required for dairy and other food industries since the imported equipment was very costly. Mr Sanghani, with his business acumen and strong networking ability, succeeded in building Unicorn Industries as a name to reckon with for manufacturing stainless steel equipment not only for the dairy industry but also for other food and beverages industries which needed them.

I literally bumped into Mr Sanghani over a cup of tea during a seminar organised by the Hyderabad Management Association. After self-introduction and exchange of information about each other, he gave me his visiting card and asked me to call him and meet in his office. The way he talked to me, he sounded very soft spoken, very inquisitive and always looked eager to learn. I was quite impressed with him. 

After a couple of days, I called him up and met him at his office at the appointed time. He delved deeper into the kind of work I had been doing and was keen to understand the value-pricing model and how I used it to ensure that the engagement with a client was beneficial to both. During this meeting, he also expressed his disappointment with his inability to study beyond intermediate level and made sure all his four sons went to college. He even encouraged two of his youngest sons to go abroad and get qualified in some specialisation of their interest. 

All his sons were involved with his business at the time I met him. He had already diversified into other businesses and the eldest son was handling that project. The second son was actively involved in running the dairy equipment manufacturing plant and he was thinking of helping the last two to start a new business based on their interest acquired abroad. He introduced me to all his sons and I was wondering why he was sharing all such information with me. Then he said he would call me one of these days with a specific aspect of his current business and take my help. After a few weeks, I got a call from his office and, when I reached there, found his second son in discussion with his accountant on how to get proper management information quickly from their accounting information. He posed his problem to me, saying that, though they maintained all the books of accounts manually, they did not get any financial analysis done fast enough, and ended up with guesswork to make business decisions. That was the time personal computers (PCs) had entered the market and I had a few associates who had developed financial accounting software for use by small and medium businesses. (How I got to know them and built up a business around the use of PCs for small and medium business is a separate chapter in my life.) I suggested that they should use PCs to achieve their purpose. At Mr Sanghanis' request, I undertook to build a good management information system in association with one of these software developers. Thus started my association with Mr Sanghani and his sons. 

A few months after completing the first project, Mr Sanghani called me asking if I could help his third son to put together a project report for his business idea, and also some other ideas he had which were unrelated to his current businesses. Thus I kept getting work from him at regular intervals. 

A few years later, when he had decided to step down from all his current businesses and hand over the day-to-day operations of all the businesses to his four sons, Mr Sanghani asked me to be available when the sons met, to guide them how to run their businesses the corporate way instead of like a typical family-run business. During my first meeting, I noticed that the four sons were pulling each other in different directions to run all their businesses. I ended up giving them some gyaan on how they should look at their roles as financial stakeholders of all their businesses and have each one of them manage one business of his interest and be fully accountable to the stakeholders. Each one of them would be paid for his job as a CEO for his business according to the market salary that they would have paid a professional if employed, and all of them would get a share of the profit from each business in the form of dividends and support each other where needed to ensure all the businesses were run successfully. They liked the idea and decided to follow my advice. 

I moved on from there to other assignments and was later told by one of the sons that they had implemented my suggestion totally and it was working well. Today Unicorn Industries has grown to become a large business house with interests in many other areas and the four brothers are still managing it the way I had advised and remain united. Recently I found similar advice being given to large family owned companies by many consultants. 

In the meanwhile, Mr Sanghani had become very close to me on a personal level. He started an NGO to promote education-related activities and travelled extensively. In order to fund the NGO, he started another new business involving export of floriculture products, using the profits from this business to support the NGO. He was good at networking and connected with educationists all over India and abroad to share his ideas and take their help where possible. He got me associated with his NGO in the early stages for formulating his ideas into a report which he could use and kept calling me for guidance when he needed it.

Apart from this, Mr Sanghani also arranged for me to address his business community which, as he put it, was languishing due to their shopkeeper mentality. He wanted me to expose them to technological and other changes which required them to change and adopt. This exposed me to the traditional business community who never thought an outsider like me could be of any help. But soon after my round of addresses, I started getting requests from some of those businessmen to help them grow. 

One day, Mr Sanghani shared his thoughts on why he was focusing on education so much, when he himself came from a community which valued making money through business more. His view was that money is chanchal and could not stay at one place all the time but education is solid as a rock. Once you acquire it, it will remain with you. That is why he had more respect for educated people and made sure his sons, unlike him, got properly educated. This, he said, was the reason why he valued my association all these years. I was very humbled by his words and kept wondering where he would have been if he was educated. He had grown fond of the South Indian snacks and South Indian coffee that my wife prepared, and would drop in to my home once in a way for breakfast specifically for this. He continued to stay in touch with me even though I had stopped working with small and medium businesses post 1993, until he passed away in the early 2000s.

Both Mr Raju and Mr Sanghani were instrumental in helping me believe that I was on the right path in my approach to work and helped me to mentally sustain my faith through bad as well as good times. And they were both amazing entrepreneurs coming from different backgrounds but left behind solid institutions. I met Mr Raju’s nephew a few years after he passed away and he insisted I visit his factory which he had grown to new heights and sent his car to pick me up. He said I had helped establish a base on which he could build his business and it had become a global supplier of high-tech instrumentation. 

Similarly, I later met one of Mr Sanghani’s sons who told me that the project for which I had helped prepare the report had been sold to a global conglomerate for a huge sum and he was now in charge of managing the family finances in the manner I had advised them so many years earlier!!

In my next post, I shall share my encounter around 1984 with a self-taught computer professional in an assignment referred by a bank, and how we together built up a business around getting small businesses to use PCs as important tools to run their businesses.

My Journey As Consultant - 4

 Two Early Major Assignments and Insights Learnt.

Let me share the excitement of two major assignments, early in our consulting career, which gave us wide exposure to product marketing. These assignments also honed our business development efforts for our unique service model of management consulting which became a great hit with prospective clients. While we were getting small assignments with low yields per engagement till then, these two assignments brought substantial billing that matched our earning potential. 

Of the two, one was a new electronics components manufacturer and the other was a medium-sized two-wheeler manufacturer based out of Hyderabad promoted by the AP state government. The lessons we learnt from these assignments stood us in good stead all through our consulting career and will be of value to readers of this blog. 

Professional Grade Components Ltd. (PGCL) was a new entrant in the manufacture of Carbon Film Resistors (CFR) and Metal Film Resistors (MFR). It was set up around 1983. The company was promoted by two technocrats with manufacturing background in a large public sector electronics company based in Hyderabad along with a businessman dealing in electronics products being supplied to the electronics industry. They had appointed as Chairman of PGCL an eminent former CEO (let me call him AML) of a major consumer product company who was also, post retirement, a member of the Board of Governors of Administrative Staff College of India (ASCI).  Mr GVS Murthy took me along to meet him in another company where he was associated as an adviser. AML immediately recognised me as he had been  instrumental in selecting me as marketing faculty in ASCI and had received good reports about my work there. His first comment was that ASCI had lost a good professional in my leaving and he knew the reasons for my leaving  which made him unhappy with the  management. I saw that the meeting had started on a positive note and I explained to him my new avatar as a management consultant in association with two other associates. When he found that I had an electronics background, he asked me if I could conduct a market study for electronics components to assess demand and give recommendations for launching a product. Since I had an early background working in the electronics industry and a marketing background I immediately said yes. He arranged for me to meet the MD of PGCL and his team to get a briefing and finalise the terms of reference and a contract.

During the meeting with the PGCL MD and his team I noticed that, while all of them had a very good background in manufacturing and technology in the electronics industry, they had no one with a marketing background in the team at that stage. They had already invested in an imported plant with a huge capacity to manufacture both consumer grade CFR and professional grade MFR. CFRs were used in consumer products like radios, television, etc. and MFRs were used in industrial electronics and military and space applications. In those days, the Department of Electronics was the nodal department giving licenses and other permissions to set up new manufacturing facilities for the electronics industry. They had allowed a large number of small and medium units to manufacture these products as they were considered to be import substitutes, which was an important consideration for licensing in those License Permit Raj days. After some initial discussion, the PGCL MD agreed to my suggestion that I undertake both secondary data collection from published sources as well as primary data collection from both the end-users and the electronics market supplying these industries. We agreed on my travel to a few major cities and smaller towns across India for field work and acquiring certain government reports and other publications having information on the electronics industry in India. Keeping in mind the amount of work involved for me, and the time it would take to get all the data from both primary and secondary sources, they agreed on the substantial fee which I indicated to cover my time and travel costs. I was given 45 days to get back with my report giving my findings and recommendations for a marketing strategy to launch the product. Since I needed money to start work and travel, they also agreed to 50% advance, with the balance payable on submission and acceptance of the report and recommendations.

First, I spent a few days poring over the secondary data available and to my surprise noticed that PGCL’s installed capacity was four times the entire effective demand for these products in the Indian market as available from the published sources. At the same  time, the total approved capacity for small and medium units for these products was ten times the effective demand projected in the next 5 years! I parked this information in my notes and went on my field work to get data from both end-users and dealer markets  located around Bombay, Pune, Ahmednagar, and New Delhi. These field data also confirmed the huge supply against effective demand within the country, apart from some of the trade practices which indicated that these components were  now sold like commodities instead of speciality technology products. 

Finally, when the time came to make  my report, I decided to first sensitise the client about my findings through discussions, to ensure that  he understood the magnitude of the challenge the company would face to enter this market. It was clear that they had to look beyond the Indian market right from the beginning if they had to be economically viable, and they had not even thought of this when preparing their  project reports!! To my mind, this project was heading for trouble from the word go; but, without saying so, I presented to them the reality, and the options available to survive initially, which would involve exploring the export market from the beginning, apart from competing in the Indian market purely on price. With hard data  backing my report and recommendations, they accepted my findings and paid the balance amount. After a few years, I noticed that many component manufacturers who had set up new capacity in this industry along with PGCL folded up, and PGCL itself changed hands before it also folded up. 

This assignment taught me an important lesson about how not to start a major project. Demand assessment  before starting a project, and understanding  competitive information and market dynamics, is essential to formulate a new project. We started using this insight while guiding anyone, particularly technocrat entrepreneurs who were encouraged by industry promotion financial institutions looking for business opportunities to start a new venture using their technical competence.

As I was completing the PGCL assignment, Mr. GVS Murthy spoke to me about AP Scooters Ltd (APSL). He had worked for them as marketing manager earlier and, after he left his job with them, they had appointed him as an adviser for marketing on a nominal monthly retainer since they had recently signed a technical collaboration agreement with Piaggio of Italy to produce the famous Vespa brand of scooters. Since Mr. Murthy was not finding enough time to APSL, after discussions with MD of APSL, they agreed to transfer the contract from him to us with Mr. Murthy available in the background.

Originally, Vespa had a collaboration with Bajaj Auto Ltd. but, due to government policies changing during the change of government in 1977, Piaggio had to leave the Indian market along with many other major foreign brands. Bajaj continued making the same products under their own brand names and improved on them using good R&D backup. In those days, they had a waiting list of 7 to10 years to supply a scooter to those customers who had booked with them. There were other manufacturers of scooters, but they did not command such huge demand as Bajaj for various reasons. 

In 1982, the government changed its policy and allowed Indian manufacturers to bring in foreign brands with only technical collaboration, to manufacture and  supply four-wheelers and two-wheelers to meet the surging demand in the country. 

Vespa was still a very sought-after brand and, due to the long waiting list for Bajaj scooters which were originally based on Vespa design, Piaggio felt that relaunching their products under a new collaboration would help meet the pent-up demand. Piaggio signed up with Lohia Machines Ltd. (LML) based out of Lucknow, which was entering the two-wheeler business for the first time, and AP Scooters Ltd based out of Hyderabad. Both were  licensed to produce only 100 cc and below scooters, whereas Bajaj was selling 150 cc scooters, which was considered the standard for the Indian market. 

By the time AP Scooters finalised their collaboration and were ready for launching the Vespa brand, LML had successfully launched its product and collected Rs. 100 crore as advance with 20 lakh bookings. This put pressure on APSL to match LML to some extent and get significant bookings to show that they were also a serious player in the two-wheeler business.

It was against this background that APSL engaged us. Soon after that, they also needed us to get more involved in the launch process, and signed up a major contract to avail our services in all aspects of marketing involving advertising, promotion, booking and allocation and appointment of distributors. It was indeed a de facto Marketing Manager’s role except that the product decision was already taken as per the collaboration agreement. 

We had a major role to play initially in finalising the advertising campaign. One major decision was to give a unique brand identity differentiating their product from the Vespa 100 cc scooter which was already used by LML. At this stage, we discovered that, while Piaggio had signed two collaborations, the product they offered for APSL was a different variant from the LML one: LML had the wide body variant and APSL had the narrow body variant. The wide body variant looked very similar to the popular Bajaj brand in the market but had a 100 cc engine, whereas the narrow body variant looked totally different, though it had the same 100cc engine. However, on studying the finer technical details, we found that the load carrying capacity of the APSL version was 170 kg whereas the LML scooter had lesser capacity due to its body weight being higher. So we positioned the APSL scooter as VESPA PL170 to emphasise the load carrying capacity, using the short form for Pay Load as PL. This was a major shift in the industry since, till then, all two-wheelers were described only in terms of engine capacity. 

APSL had appointed a major national advertising agency based out of Chennai for designing and executing their ad campaign which included all the major media mix available at that time, like newspapers in many major languages, magazines, cinema and in-showroom merchandising displays. We had to help approve the campaign and the timing of release of these campaigns. We noticed that, although the teaser campaign was started, the company had not imported demo models for display at their showrooms before announcing opening of bookings. So we had to slightly delay the further ad releases till all the showrooms across the country had a nice display model before going ahead with the bookings announcement. Since LML had already skimmed the market, we did not expect to match their numbers but hoped to get at least 20 to 30% of what they got. Finally, VESPA PL170 ended up with 5 lakh bookings and collected Rs 25 crore as deposit. Before the announcement of bookings, we also had to help finalise the printers for printing of the booking forms and getting them distributed across the country at their showrooms and an agency to collect the booking deposit and account for it and deposit the collections in APSL’s banks.  We also had to locate a  data processing agency to randomly allot the priority using a suitable computer program, and another agency to post the allotment letters to customers with their priority numbers, but without committing when the actual delivery would happen!!!

At this stage, we had too much attention from the media and most of them were trying to look for some negative news that they could carry to the public. The MD quietly made us deal with the media and I learnt how to be circumspect in answering them without giving them much to write about. Once the bookings came, there was clamour for appointing more new dealers across the country who wanted to encash the opportunity to get  into the automobile dealership business. We had to guide and advise on the need to exercise proper caution while doing so, since there was also political pressure being brought about to appoint dealers in many places which were likely to be unviable in the long run.

The drama of both the LML and APSL booking stories did not end there. New problems started as soon as the allotment letters with priority numbers reached the customers. Two types of problems, in fact. In the first case, all those customers who got a very low priority number, where they felt they would not get delivery even in the next one year, started cancelling their bookings and there was a major logistical nightmare dealing with refunding of the deposits and reallotment of fresh priority numbers for the remaining bookings. 

The second reason for cancellation had to do with the capacity of the 100 cc vehicles. In the case of  LML’s design, the scooter had a wide body design and looked similar to the 150 cc Bajaj scooter, but its pulling capacity was perceived as poor compared with the Bajaj vehicle, leading to cancellations. In the case of the APSL scooter, the pulling capacity was better than the LML model because of its lower body weight; however, the narrow body design became an issue since scooters were treated like family vehicles where husband, wife and two or three children were carried, and the narrow body did not give enough space for that. So another set of negative feedback followed, leading to more cancellations. 

Later, both LML and APSL had to indigenize their manufacture progressively as per their license approval and, when the later models hit the market using locally made components, quality problems multiplied, adding to more customer dissatisfaction and word of this eventually destroyed these new launches. In the middle of this, Piaggio decided not to renew their collaboration agreements and both  companies were denied the use of VESPA as the brand name which was the last nail in their coffin!!!!

For my colleague and me, this was a major lesson in how not to take customers for granted and give them what they did not want. Over the years, the market for scooters changed and other major two-wheeler brands came up with variations of scooters to meet different customer segments. In addition, motorcycles slowly took over the scooter market to the point where today Bajaj scooters don't exist, and Bajaj has moved on to become a major player in the motorcycle market. Scooters have become a niche product and Vespa has returned to the Indian market as a premium scooter along with other major brands like Honda and TVS.

Both these assignments gave us wide exposure and showcased our business development efforts for our unique service model of management consulting, which was appreciated by prospective clients. But we never again got another assignment like these two early projects for various reasons about which I shall discuss later.

In the next post, I will share my experiences with some clients who had great appreciation of our work and had long associations spread over their lifetime and who made it a point to refer us to others. 

My Journey As Consultant - 3

 Market Opportunities and Insights gained from early assignments

It took us six months to establish our credentials as trustworthy and reliable consultants, or rather, partners in progress, of the owner-managers of small and medium businesses. We learnt the art of navigating our way past the maze of road-blocks in each of the three  principal categories of consultancy assignments on which we focused our attention. Here in brief is our mantra for success.  

We built the wherewithal for the first category by establishing our credentials with a public sector bank which was the major lender to many small and medium enterprises in Hyderabad. Companies that were in this category were businesses which were having financial problems due to various reasons and were approaching the banks for more money to manage their day-to-day affairs; such units usually got referred to us through the bank for stock audits and diagnostic studies. 

Personal references of well-known businessmen like my friend GVS Murthy (referred to in the last post) and building a portfolio of success stories brought success for us in the second category. These were businesses that were doing well but the promoters were having difficulties growing the business and were seeking outside help. This approach worked well for us in Hyderabad but is an infallible route to success anywhere in the country. 

Market studies and project reports are a major opportunity for any consulting business and formed the third category of our assignments. Building a portfolio of well-documented and thoroughly researched reports, backed by extensive field work, built our credibility both with entrepreneurs and banks. These were new projects promoted by first-time entrepreneurs looking for funding from financial institutions. They needed a market survey along with a project report to be presented to these institutions and, if necessary, our help to negotiate with them for getting approvals.

Looking back at those engagements, we notice certain patterns of issues in each type of assignment. The businesses facing financial problems were of two types. In the first case, there was systematic diversion of funds from working capital to other purposes and covering up these with overstating the value of their stocks to get more funds from banks. These diversions could be deliberate or misguided decisions to use working capital to build long-term assets like an additional building or expansion of capacity, hoping to get more business which never came.

The second  category was mostly due to inability to manage receivables from their customers effectively, thereby upsetting the working capital cycle. In some of these cases our diagnostic study also brought out an interesting aspect. When the units were running a small business with a short working capital cycle they were very profitable. But when they expanded capacity and started going after newer markets, mainly  with large government organisations as their clients, the working capital cycles increased, eroding their margins and also affecting the cash flow. Since we were engaged by the banks on behalf of these units, our role ended with submitting our findings to the bank and also to the business owner. Since the units were already financially stressed, no additional work came from these units.

The second category  of businesses had different sets of problems. They were financially very successful. The original promoter had started with a few known, trusted people working for him who were essentially good errand-boys but very loyal. They also had the ear of the promoter. Once the firms started growing steadily, they needed to hire new people to work for them who also had better professional qualifications and were younger. These newcomers had expectations of growing in their careers. They also wanted to earn more and most of them, coming from a middle-class background, wanted for job security. In those days, in the command and control economy, public sector jobs were paying better than many of these smaller organisations and there was job security. Most youngsters who had joined these client organisations right out of college used these jobs as a learning  ground to gain experience and quit the moment they got a job in a government-run organisation. To add to their discomfort, the older employees who were with the promoter from the beginning used to carry tales about them behind their back, which also made the promoter distrustful of them. So, getting and retaining people to help manage the growth was a big challenge for which these  units had no immediate solution, affecting their growth. 

Another related problem was that these units also had no proper systems and procedures, and the owner was used to taking all decisions on an adhoc basis as he was in charge of all business activities and everyone was expected to do his bidding. This culture continued even after they started growing and this caused a lot of resentment among the employees. I got many of these insights when I insisted on starting my engagement with an attitude survey  of employees in an unstructured freewheeling discussion with a cross-section of the employees before coming up with ideas for improvements. This is also when I realised that I was confronted with the challenge of change management along with growth management. I also noticed that the older employees who formed the inner circle of the owner resented my being appointed as consultant and were constantly trying to  undermine my work. So the first focus was to get the promoter to trust me.

When I used to present my initial findings in confidence to the promoters, they would willingly agree, saying that they didn't see any  other way to deal  with their situation but realised that the  problem was with themselves. So my first engagement was to help them set up proper systems and procedures, along with some semblance of structure and an information system, so that all work would go on as smoothly as possible without the owner getting involved in every aspect of running the business at the operating levels. To keep the old-timers at bay, I suggested that they be given independent responsibility for particular areas of operations where they had already established an understanding of the business operations and they had to now report to the owner only these aspects and nothing else. 

In the beginning, this was not easy but I noticed that, with my role as an external change agent -- and constant  prodding -- some order finally came into an otherwise chaotic situation. 

The next challenge was to recruit, at the middle management level, professionals who also had exposure to working in a structured organisation. This is when we took the responsibility for recruitment and placement activity, where we had to use our network along with some head-hunting to identify good candidates. We noticed that in those days many youngsters who were working in other big cities but had roots in Hyderabad were looking to shift back here. We were able to identify such individuals and sell them the idea that, since Hyderabad had a large number of mid-sized organizations who could gain from their experience and would give them a good opportunity to grow, why not consider these options? After initial hesitation, they would join and we as consultants would make sure that they made a smooth transition and stayed put in their job. 

This kind of role also ensured that we were with the same organisation, implementing and monitoring our recommendation over a longer period: in some cases, the association lasted for 2 to 3 years. This also got us steady revenue from a few of these clients over this period. Some of these clients subsequently engaged us for helping them in diversifying their business operations. 

In a few cases, the professional equations became closer than the arm's-length one usually seen between consultant and client. Some of them went to the extent of trusting me in particular with their personal issues at the family level, and many employees also started confiding in us. I realised that we were getting sucked into roles for which we were not trained or engaged and decided to  move on by slowly winding up these assignments. 

In the third category, where market surveys and project reports were required, we found two types of clients. The first type were the most avoidable since they approached us to fix a deal with the financial institutions to get funding in such a way that their margin money was also funded!! We took a stand of saying a point-blank “No!” and let go of such opportunities. In a few instances, however, we found that it was possible to convince the promoter not to do this if he was serious about earning by running a successful business, since such an approach was doomed to failure. 

The second category was the  serious promoter who wanted to go by the rule books but found that in many financial institutions in those days there were some black sheep who would not fund a project unless they were taken care of. This is where we were able to take advantage of our connections to bypass such individuals while making sure a solid project report, backed by a good market study well defended by us, would get the funding it needed. My Bangalore  associate had become particularly good at this over a period of time and he used to handle such assignments. 

During this period we also had to hire additional staff, particularly to conduct market surveys. Most of these were industrial market surveys which required our staff to visit potential clients located across the country, to assess demand gaps and opportunities for new entrants. We also tried to use them to do some follow-up work on getting new prospects. We soon realised, however, that they were not  coming up with new clients since they required a deep understanding of the selling process for client acquisition and closing the deal, for which they were not yet trained. 

Between 1983 and 1986, we had regular business in Hyderabad and  Bangalore but we noticed that in Chennai, where we had registered our firm hoping to get more business from an established industrial base, we were not getting any new business after the first study we got in the beginning of 1983. I shall discuss in the future posts how this kind of skewed business development causes its own problems in running a small consulting outfit. 

Apart from this, we also got a few large assignments which gave us big exposure in Hyderabad and we started getting enquiries about our services from prospects. These assignments also gave us a good exposure to markets in some industries, and challenges involved in launching a new consumer product. I shall discuss a couple of these engagements in the next post.

My Journey Through Management Consulting as an Independent Consultant - 2

Acquiring Clients – The Early Years

Getting clients and getting paid for services are the two most important aspects of doing any business, and Management Consulting is no exception. But when you start for the first time this looks like a daunting task. And no doubt it is not a simple task either. When I look back at how it all happened, I realise that three things helped us to get introduced to prospective clients, and our Value Pricing approach ensured that we could start work quickly once the prospect was convinced. And eventually we always got paid. Officially, we started our business on September 1, 1982.

The first thing that worked for me was my personal contacts. The moment I left ASCI and was planning to start my new life as an Independent Consultant, I just went around telling everyone I knew. In the process, I met a friend who was the husband of my colleague from ASCI, a Chartered Accountant by profession, who was also running a printing press along with another partner. When I shared my plans with him, he said he would like to hire me and be my first client. He was thinking of diversifying his business to make cardboard cartons for packaging, for which he felt there was good demand around Hyderabad. Would I be able to help him identify prospective clients in the pharma industry which had proliferated around Hyderabad, and guide him how to enter that market? Without even blinking my eyes, I said “Yes!” and asked him to give me a letter which I could use to meet prospective clients for his new venture. I didn’t bother to discuss any terms of a contract and such other niceties. 

In a week’s time, I gave him a list of persons in various companies whom I had met, and who had shown interest in his offering and would like to meet him. I went along with him in the next round to introduce him to some of these prospects and then left it to him to finalise the deals with them. I just simply moved on after a few days, looking for the next client, when he sent word through his wife asking me to meet him to take payment for my services. I told him to pay whatever he felt like paying and he was very generous. Today he has moved on to start and grow a large Financial Services business with a national presence, but he continues to remain a good friend, who also was my first client.

The second client was referred by one of my course participants when I was in ASCI. This happened towards the end of October 1982. I was the course director along with another colleague for Indenting Agents of a large chemical products company which wanted its agents to get trained in modern marketing approaches in a changing competitive environment. One of them was from Hyderabad and I had informed him that I had left ASCI and was working as an Independent Consultant. Being a businessman himself, I asked if he could refer me to anyone who could benefit from my services. One evening, he landed up with another businessman who was a semi-wholesaler in sarees. The person was one of his customers who owed money to him as he was facing financial difficulties. Could I help him get out of this situation? Without hesitating a bit, I said of course I would and set up a meeting at the office of the textile dealer the next day. The address I was given turned out to be a small shop located in a nearby textile market from where the dealer was doing his business as a semi-wholesaler. No discussion on fees and contracts; I just started listening to his problems. I realised that I needed to spend time understanding his business first, and only then could I come up with ideas for solving his problem. We agreed that I would spend two hours at his shop every evening for the next few weeks. I also told him I may need to go into his books of accounts and other operational information including his financial details, which he should share without hiding anything from me. He agreed to cooperate fully and kept saying that he was on the verge of bankruptcy unless I helped him out. 

Then he also said something which made a big difference to my approach with small businessmen. He said whatever advice I came up with I would have to hand hold him to implement, since he had no one to do so. Thus I embarked on an assignment for which I was neither formally trained by education nor had I any clue how I was going to do it, except by just diving into his problems as my own, and finding ways to help him address them. Needless to say, it took me one year to get his operations from heavy losses to breakeven, at which point he decided that he was in a position to carry on without my physical presence every day. In the process, I also learnt quite a lot about trading businesses and the approach to earning money on a daily basis followed by his business community. 

The third advantage I had was having a good mentor and well-wisher who went out of his way to help me get clients. This was my friend, GVS Murthy, who had been closely interacting with me since my days in ASCI, as he was interested in my work in management education. He took it upon himself to hand hold us to get new clients, sometimes literally dragging us to meet some of his business friends and telling them to hire us with strong recommendations on our behalf. We got quite a few assignments through him over the next couple of years and made a big breakthrough in the Hyderabad market. Mr Murthy was like a Guru who also guided us how to deal with many tricky situations in our client engagements, and I owe a lot to him in getting a sound foundation as a Management Consultant.

Apart from the above three approaches, we also got work from the small business services group of a large public sector bank. My Chennai colleague’s sister referred us to her friend, who was heading the small business services unit of the bank. So we went and met her and talked about our new venture. When she saw our profiles, she felt that  banks could use our services in doing stock audits and diagnostic studies of incipient sick small units they had funded. On her reference, one of the local branches of a bank hired us to do a stock audit of a small engineering company which had never repaid its loans over the previous several years.

Normally stock audits are done by Chartered Accountants who have no knowledge of the engineering-related aspects of the stocks. Being engineers, we brought in this insight and showed to the bank in our audit report that the owner of the unit was over-stating the stocks to the extent of his margin money. This revelation pleased the bank officials since they got a  better understanding of the situation, and we got recommended to other branches to use our services not only for stock audits but also for diagnostic studies of sick units which in their opinion could be revived. 

During the early days of our work, we had an assignment from a government industry-promotion organisation in Chennai for doing a study on small business development. The assignment took me to Bangalore in January 1983, where I was introduced to one more person who was freelancing as a Management Consultant doing market research and project reports. He was from IIT Bombay and IIM Calcutta, and remembered me from our IITB days. He agreed to join us and cover the Bangalore market and merge his existing business with ours from April 1, 1983. He was independently getting work from Bangalore-based clients and this led to our business booming from the second year onwards. 

We also converted our business structure into a private limited company registered in Chennai so that we could show a professional face to the market. All three of us became founder directors. 

To summarize, the key takeaways from the early days were:

1. Focus on demonstrating value and do not bother about financial returns; 

2. Get involved and learn the client’s business so that you can offer assistance of practical value; and 

3. Have a good Mentor from the beginning.

As we progressed, we started getting references to new prospects from these early clients. But we also noticed that our yield per client was not very large and we needed to handle more assignments to develop good top line growth. This required us to hire people to work for us, which added to our overheads. I will discuss later the issues that we had to address because of this, since the overheads were a fixed cost which had to be borne every month while our new business acquisition rate was not fast enough to cover the idle time cost of these overheads. 

In the next post, I will discuss the market environment and the kinds of business opportunities we could see and the new clients we could acquire in the mid-1980s.

My Journey through Management Consulting as an Independent Consultant

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.

Success From Failures

Success From Failures

A long time ago I was listening to a talk by the headmistress of a local school where my son was
studying. This school had a philosophy where they didn't push their students to be competitive and
succeed as an individual but encouraged the students to develop their own personalities as they felt
appropriate and the school was acting as a guide in this process. When the speaker finished her talk
one of the audience member asked her a pertinent question."Dont you think your students won't be
able to succeed in a highly competitive world where they would eventually land up". For that the
speaker asked another pertinent question back: "What is your definiton of success". Well this
stumped everyone in the audience and I was so glad I sent my son to such a school that didnt push
him. But at the same time I asked myself the contra question: What is failure??

Both success and failures are two sides of the same coin. Succcess is measured in terms of what one
thinks of as personal success and what others think as worldly success. Same goes for failures.
Other day when we had an occassion to catch up with some of our classmate after 30 odd years
when we were engaging in exchanging notes about how we had spent our intervening years, I was
amazed at how each one of us had succeeded in our own way in our respective lives. For some it
was a measure of their personal success and for some it included public accolade.
Does that mean our life was a smooth ride all the way. I dont know about others but if I dig deeper
each would have a story to tell about the pitfalls they had to cross to end where they have reached
now..

But in my case I can definitely say that my own story was one failure after another leading to
amazing reinvention of myself after every failure.

Let me narrate how it all started. Soon after graduating from IIT in 1973 I was keen on working
only in design and devlopment job and kept rejecting job offers for sales and production jobs and
ended up jobless for the next 7 months before I finally got a job as a design engineer in a small start
up. It was exhilarating and I ended up doing some great designs and new product development
before I realized that I had no long term future in India, back in those days when R&D came to
mean Read and Duplicate!! So there ended my dream of a successful Design Engineer!!

So I quietly looked around and found that at that time in India (1974) the only future option if I had
to stay back in India and work (I loathed the idea of leaving my country) I would have to get an
MBA to have a meaningful career!!! So when I got a seat for the first IIMB batch in 1974, I simply
grabbed it, and quit my job. But my employer felt I was making a big mistake since in their view I
had a great future as design engineer!! Well I told them I felt otherwise and left anyway.

I dont know if many of you know that when IIMB was inaugurated the stated goal of the institute
was to train future managers who would serve the Public Sector as at that time the commanding
heights of the economy was held by the public sector. It was a patriotic duty of every management
graduate to work only for the public sector and they invited only Public sector companies for
campus placement.

So I along with a few other classmates ended up joining a Public sector company which had just
been formed with the stated objective of promoting east europan rupee trade in electronics and also
develop technology to reduce dependence on the Hard Currency areas. Leave alone the laudable
objective but what was interesting in those days when we joined this company, they already had
more than a dozen MBA's from IIMA and IIMC and we all thought we are the great catalyst
recruited to promote the interest of this great country through foreign trade with east european
countries.

Like all great dreams this dream also started souring with in a year of joining when we found that
this company was primarily behaving like a purchase department for the various government bodies
which wanted some imported elctronic product for which they had no foreign exchange so they
asked this company to scout for similar products from these countries. Moreover very soon I
realised that instead of the MBA's setting the agenda for catalysing the great trading alternative, the
company was headed by unqualified bureaucrats from govenment and other public sector agencies
who were only good at throwing the rule book at you. The last straw was when I found that those
who were at the beck and call of the bosses were treated with better work assignments and perhaps
even increments and promotions!!

So my dream of making a big difference through public sector came to an end. When I enquired
with some friends how they were working in other private sector organisations, most of them had
similar dissatisfying experiences. I then decided that it is better to go back to the academic world
and have the freedom to think and act and make a difference!!

I was in Hyderabad back then and the best known institution for managment education was
Administrative Staff College of India (ASCI) and since I had taken a liking for Hyderabad as a city,
explored for an opening there as a member of faculty and very soon I landed up as a Marketing
faculty in ASCI in 1981.

I was elated and felt here is my chance to use my intellectual prowess and make a difference to the
management world. ASCI was unique in one respect in that they only taught working managers and
they had no undergraduate or any other programme. And I was expected to be available when called
for to give specific input on marketing subject depending on the pogrammes they were running. It
all seemed easy. Also I had a lot of free time I could use to read and research and publish and there
was no one to tell you what you should do. No boss no subordinates. Looked like a very cosy job
until to my horror I discovered two major truths about the academic world in management
education of the time.

The first truth was that the managers who came to attend the courses offered by ASCI took it as a
paid holiday and they were not interested in learning which came as a big dampener. But the more
serious problem was with fellow faculty. They knew that the participants were not interested in
learning but they could be influenced to rate their lectures in there respective favour and against
other faculties. And the Indian frog syndrome was opearting in full with each faculty pulling the
other down behind each other's back. For me this was worst than a corporate job. Even though I felt
I had a golden run during the 18 months I worked at ASCI in terms of teaching, research and
publications, at my heart I felt this is not a place I should waste the rest of my life. I was only 32
years old in 1982 when I took the major decision to quit ASCI and literally walked out of the job
with no other alternative except a dream to make something of myself on my own.

After quitting I realised the enormity of the challenges of life. I had by then married and had 2 kids
below the age of three and my wife, though a professional was not able to work as she was busy
bringing up the two kids and zero bank balance. I did not know where the money is going to come
from to pay the mandatory expenses to run a middle class life. In the beginning of this narrative I
said every failure helped me reinvent myslef. This was the first major reinvention when I found that
there is no one out there going to pay you unless you are useful to them. And useful I decided to
become by offering my only asset, my knowledge and learning, to help solve business problems for
any company which would hire me to address the problem.

Thus my consulting practise was born in 1982. Surprisingly I found it was not difficult to get work
so long as you didnt ask for any money upfront and when the clients discovered that they had
benefited immensely from your work they were more than glad to pay whatever you asked for. I
discovered the power of value pricing and with good references from friends and the power of IIT and
IIM network kept the body and soul together comfortably. I was soon joined by a couple of friends
who had similarly left there jobs to start out on their own in Bangalore and Chennai and we felt it
would be a good idea to team up so that we can get larger business from a larger geography with a
complementing skill sets. So we formed and registered a Private Limited company with branches in
Hyderbadad, Chennai and Bangalore and we had very soon a very large client base in both
Bangalore and Hyderabad but the Chennai office was becoming a drag. Moreeover we soon
discovered that as our business was growing we had to hire people to keep our business
committments. And these overheads started eating into our profits since the assignments were not
continuous but the salary committments and office over heads had to be met. Thus after running this
business for 4 years when our top line doubled every year, our bottom line was always showing
negative balance. I soon realised that this business model was not going to work out and decided to
break away from the company and became a totally freelance management consultant.

This move helped me financially since I had zero over head and I literally operated out of my
scooter and home and my client's business premises. Remember this was 1987 and we had none of
the luxuries of the modern day technology to run a home office. The only saving grace was that we
managed to own a landline because my wife had a para medical background and was entitled to
priority phone connection(very funny management graduates with engineering background were not
considered priority professions) which itself was a great feat to get in those days when waiting list
ran for 10 years to get a phone connection.

This was also the period I realised that only depending on Managment consulting practice to make a
living was not a good idea and started other business activities to offer marketing services to help
companies outside Hyderabad to sell in the Hyderabad market. This second busines brought in
significant improvement in my financial position and I was able to afford the luxury of graduating
from scooter to car and own other material comforts.

But all good things cannot last forever. By 1991 Indian economy was heading south and the
consulting business started slowing down and there was a general recession and this took a toll on
my cash flows. Very soon I found no new business was coming and old customers had no money to
pay for services rendered and by middle of 1992 things had reached rock bottom when economic
reforms were announced.

The reforms created new opportunity for the consulting business from the traditional companies
who found their cosy world of easy money from the command and control economy was shattered
by global competition and the need to become more customer focused. The long queues for many
consumer products and services started disappearing and along with that came new opportunity for
smart businesses to make money. I found my work experience of the previous ten years using
emerging Personal computer technology with small businesses was easily adaptable to address the
problems of large corporates who by then had heard of concepts like Business Process
re engineering and Lean management and Theory of Constraints but had no clue how to get them
implemented. I seized this opportunity with both hands and using my old Value pricing model
approached the corporate world with an offer which they found it difficult to refuse. I once again
started on a roller coaster ride for the next 15 years with occassional tripping here and there. I found
that when most of the major consulting firms offered to render advise with a report, my model that
you pay based on implementation of the advise and ideas and creating ownership of solutions
among client personnel made a big difference in our success.

In fact some of the clients jovially jibed that I should have been a consultant in europe or other
developed counties where I would have perhaps travelled in a Rolls Royce for my abilities. Many a
satisfied CEO's used to ring up other companies needing similar help, who sent work to me and my
team. Despite the business growing steadily I resisted the temptation to create an overhead based
organisation; instead created a network of asscoaites who worked with me on a project to project
basis sharing the fees equitably. Everything was looking so great I thought the good times would
never end when one day in July 2008 I was rushed to a hospital with severe pain in my stomach and
doctors performed an emergency surgery and discovered I had a severly gangrened gall bladder
which they had to remove before the gangrene spread to the liver and other parts of the intestine.
With that ended my active consulting pracitise since it took me six months to recover and my
digestive systm couldn't take the strain of intensive travels and outside food. I hanged my
consulting boots in 2009 and since then I am spending my time mentoring young and not so young
entrepreneuers pro bono and willing to give my vast knowledge and experience to whoever who
cares to ask for help. But only from my home, online or over phone!!!

Well the story I told of my life has taught me 2 important lessons about measuring success and
failures. Lesson one is success to me was not the amount of money or recognition I got from others
but how well I did my job assigned to me so that I am remembered for my contribution. The second
lesson is that you have to reinvent your self personally with time if you want to remain relevant to
the out side world if not for yourself!!..You cannot be boxed into a small corner with limited
possibilities but you should use your learning skills to pick up new ideas and adopt them for others
benefit.

Finally there is one aspect which is most important in life..which is self belief..with out that
you can be swept away by failures.

This is the success of my failures.

R. Srinivasan