The Startup Journey

Impresario Entertainment & Hospitality MD Riyaaz Amlani on the "best advice he ever received" in a Business Today article : The trouble: ...The same people who bring you from Chapter 1 to Chapter 2 in one's story sometimes don't elevate their own game for what is required to get you through to the next chapter. They get comfortable, become fat cats quickly, and don't seem to want to change. It seems that they needed me to ratify everything. I needed to be everywhere and personally supervise everything. I worked 18 hours a day. And couldn't do enough. It was frustrating and heartbreaking. I loved my people but I just couldn't get them to take full ownership. The solution provider: Tariq Ansari of Mid-Day, The solution: "Go on a two-month holiday." As soon as I began to protest, he explained: "It's a concept called 'benevolent negligence'." Leave. Go away. Take your hands off, and your people will be forced to s...

India is the world’s largest whisky (in all its variants) market and it’s fast growing market for alcoholic products is worth in excess of $22billion. About 40 million bottles of Scotch whisky was imported into India from Scotland last year, up by 40% from 2009. Recently, India granted geographical indication of origin (GI) status to Scotch whisky, a legal protection that will help reinforce the authenticity of the product and enhance the market potential. This recognition is “good news for Scotland and great news for one of its most important exports” according to the Scotland Office Minister. Scotland’s whisky producers naturally see India as a priority market and the granting of the GI will ensure that Indian whiskies (99% of the consumption today) will not be able to use the term Scotch whisky on their products. What was once an unorganized and illegal family activity of distilling is now a global recognized branded product. The Scotch whisky industry is over $6 billion in size (wi...

Pradeep Gupta of the Cybermedia Group has a nice article in Business Today on the topic: Another bottleneck is absence of delegation. When a company starts, the entrepreneur behind it often performs multiple roles, from chairman to caretaker. He takes a wide range of decisions from technical ones to marketing, from production to administration. His team too depends on the entrepreneur for every kind of decision. At a later stage, this hampers growth. The entrepreneur soon finds his knowledge inadequate to tackle challenges, or faces time management problems, which hold back the company. To achieve genuine delegation of responsibility, a second rung of leadership has to be created and empowered. Till this is done, businesses cannot scale up. Entrepreneurs often feel that by delegating they are giving up control. In reality, they are helping the business to bloom. ...There is also the pitfall of execution. In entrepreneurial companies, much work gets done without being formally recorded...