January 2021 – Page 3 – Raja Venkata Blog

IPL6 –figures behind the action -Compilation on May 2013

Overall statistics:

Pepsi ATOM MVP is more favorable to a bowler or a bowling all-rounder and in fact less favorable to a pure batsman. How else can you explain an Irfan Pathan, Umesh Yadav, Awana or a Praveen Kumar placed well the likes of Raina, Dhoni or a Rohit! None of these bowlers seem to have any match winning performances but the above batters did many a times! Praveen does not even have a 3-wicket haul this time. We need a good metric that combines good batting with good averages, consistency and strike rates, along with catches and run outs effected, and with bowling figures with economy rates and strike rates as part of the equation, add to whether their performance lead to a match winning performance which is key. I have come close to it by starting in some direction but it needs a lot of data and man power and automation to get this done.
Once the MVP or the new metrics are in place, we must go back and do a report card against each player for what he was paid and what he has contributed to clearly show the huge discrepancies in most of the cases.
The Champions trophy team representing India may not be a bad one given that all the 15 players are in the top 100 in the MVP list – credit must be to the batsmen because their points are harder to make it to the MVP list. Even that apart, I strongly feel Irfan Pathan must have made way for Stuart Binny unless BCCI wants to fill that minority quota! And given the form Murali Vijay is in, I would rather take Cheteshwar Pujara who is more technically sound and is out of the injury and can even open.
The probable list though is something worrisome as none of the players in that, except for Praveen Kumar perhaps, are worth even to be considered – their performance does not warrant them to be there as other players can make a bigger difference. I would say Mohit instead of Shami, Rahane instead of Gambhir, Parthiv instead of Ambati, Mandeep instead of Tiwary and P Ojha instead of Rahul Sharma as a spinner backup.
Age has been the most determining factor in choosing the team as India may be eying the next World cup couple of years down the road and building a team for the same. But present is present and we need to send the best team to win any day, irrespective of age as long as recent performance backs it up.
Encouraging people who have come to the news for all the wrong reasons like Rahul Sharma and Praveen Kumar for drugs and violence respectively, is not appreciated. In fact, we must be tough on these and ensure discipline and behavior is maintained well.
It would be a wasted player if the top three batsmen do not consistently perform and frequently do big scores – couple of fifties through the season for these three players’ calls for a replacement at the top. By not being to do big scores, the later batsmen who have little time to settle are under lots of pressure. On the other hand, if they have a nice platform, they can build on it.
Just checking the KXIP bowling: Both Praveen and Piyush do not even have any 3-wicket haul this time and their salary is $800K and $900K, I guess. What a waste. On the same team, this new comer Sandeep Sharma has taken 3-wickets twice in four matches he has played, and that too away from Mohali – would not a medium pacer like him do better in Mohali if he plays a full season????
3 out of the four teams that qualified for IPL6 semifinals have Indian captains – only Hyderabad has either Sangakkara or White. By the same token, out of the bottom 4 teams, only one had an Indian captain – Gambhir for KKR, the other being KXIP, DD and PWI. So, it is fair to conclude that an Indian captain is a better bet for leading IPL teams – I cannot reason it out, but still it makes sense.
Fair play award usually sets the tone for the team and speaks a lot about their leadership – captain and the coach. Chennai has won it three times so far and they are the leaders this year, and Rajasthan and Punjab have won it once so far. If you look at this year, unfortunately, not only Delhi and Kolkata play well, they did not play fair as well as they are the two teams at the bottom of the fair play award table. Although no correlation exists between fair play and qualifying, the spirit of the game is important and we need to remember the Game is bigger than any individual and their ego and anger!
Home advantage seems to be a beneficial thing for most teams as the win record at home is 70.83% – 51 games won vs. 21 lost, out of a total of 72. Mumbai and Rajasthan have won all home games, and Bangalore and Hyderabad have won all except one. Pune and Delhi are the ones who do not seem to take advantage of the home crowd to pull a win and they have the worst record here.
When teams bat first, Win – loss ratio is 34:37 and when teams chase, they have Win-Loss ratio to be 38:35 overall – somewhat equal chance of win and loss in either case. Some teams are better batting first like Mumbai and Chennai, and some teams are better chasing like Rajasthan and Hyderabad. Delhi is the only team that has highly inverted ratio leading to a loss in either case. Chennai is the only team that has more wins than losses, either batting first or chasing – seems to me that they do not bother much as to where they are playing as they do not have a clean record in either scenarios. Chennai and Mumbai have had good success in the top order to post big scores to defend by batting first, although the quality of bowling of Chennai, esp. at death, is lower than Mumbai’s.
All – rounders are the ones best suited for the limited format versions of the game. India’s success with the World cup in 1983 was due to the fact that it had lots of good and utility all-rounders in Mohinder Amarnath, Madan Lal, Roger Binny and lead by Kapil Dev. In this IPL6, we see teams what have good all-rounders winning matches – SRH with Perera and Sammy, RR with Shane Watson, MI with Pollard and to a little extent CSK with Jadeja and KXIP with Azhar M. The inverse inference is also applicable as when these all-rounders to not perform, the teams perish with them: PWI with Yuvraj and Angelo, KKR with Kallis and Yusuf, and DD with Irfan Pathan. In a sense, an all-rounder does not need to excel in both bat and bowl in the same game, but can be a good batter who can bowl, or a good bowler who can bat, and in all the cases, he would be the person counted upon to finish the game.

Some National Team analysis:

WI Team and individual performances: After their recent success winning the T20 World cup, their team members seem to be in fine knick in the sub-continent and have played a significant role in each of the IPL teams. CSK has Bravo an all-rounder and Holder, a budding young fast bowler. RCB has a dangerous mature opener in Chris Gayle and a good opening wicket taking bowler in Ravi Rampaul (they did not play Chris Barnwell at all). Darren Sammy had been a great all-rounder for SRH. Pune had Marlon Samuels who has to return early in this IPL due to injury. Mumbai has Keiron Pollard, a massive finisher and Dwayne Smith who can also open well in this format, and both are good at the field and can help in bowling. RR had the leggie Samuel Badree who played only couple of matches, the fast bowler Fidel Edwards who did not play this season and Keron Cooper who seems to be a good death bowler with his medium pace. KXIP never had a West Indian player in its role this year. DD had a decent all-rounder in Andre Russell who played early in the season. And Of course, KKR had the clever spinner in Sunil Narine. Overall this IPL may have belonged to West Indians as they have taken a lot of credit in each game that has been played and have players who have had live practices in the shorter format of the game. They would be a great force to reckon with in Champions Trophy although the conditions in England would be totally different and I hope they adjust fast and well. With their long list of all-rounders, they stand to gain a lot under Bravo’s captaincy; he being with Dhoni for 6 years would go a long way in honing his leadership skills. With Gayle and Smith to open, Marlon to come as one-down, Ravi Rampaul and Fidel Edwards to open their attack, Narine to give that spin option , with Sammy and Pollard to finish the innings in the middle , and Keron to do the death overs, this is going to be interesting.

Looking at the other side of the coin, this has been a bad season for all Sri Lankan players except for T Perera(good all round performance) and S Senanayake (9 wickets from 8 matches) perhaps, and of course the consistent-at-death bowler Malinga. The flop show list includes Dilshan, Muralitharan, Sangakarra, Jayawardhene, Angelo Mathews, Ajanta Mendis, Janith Perera and Jeevan Mendis. This is of concern to the Sri Lankan team esp. at the point that Jayawardhene, Sangakarra and Dilshan are just having a few more months or year to retirement, and certainly looking like well beyond their peak in their shorter format performance.

IPL Teams Analysis:

Chennai Super Kings (CSK): They have won the toss 7 times – 3 at Home (twice batted and one fielded first) and 4 Away (twice each batted and fielded), chose to bat 4 times and field 3 times. All the 6 full games they won and they lost the last game which was shrunk to 8 overs. So, if they win the toss, it is fair to conclude they would win, except for a rain affect shortened game. And they have the best AWAY win records (with 62.5% which is a big asset).

They never had any 4 wicket haul at all by any bowler, and generally the bowlers were expensive, esp. at the death. Ashwin although economical, is not the strike bowler he used to be and not fully utilized either by Dhoni.
They have the best fielding unit with 11 run outs to their credit.
Hussey, Raina and Dhoni were the big scorers here and Vijay is yet to strike any big form.

Played: 16; Won: 11; Lost: 5;
Won/Lost at Home: 6 Won vs. 2 Lost ; Won/Lost Away: 5 Won vs. 3 Lost ;
Won/Lost Batting first: 6 Won vs. 1 Lost; Won/Lost chasing : 5 Won vs. 4 Lost ;
Won/Lost batting first at home: 3 Won vs. 0 Lost ; Won/Lost Chasing at home: 3 Won vs. 2 Lost ;
Won/Lost batting first away: 3 Won vs. 1 Lost ; Won/Lost Chasing away: 2 Won vs. 2 Lost ;
Batsmen with most runs(50s/100s): Mike Hussey with 646 runs(5/0), Suresh Raina with 466 runs(3/1), M S Dhoni with 398 runs(3/0) and Murali Vijay with 271 runs (2/0) ;
Bowler with most wickets(Average): 25 by Dwayne Bravo(17.84), 17 by Mohit Sharma(15.76) and 15 by R Ashwin(23.4) ;
Most consistent batsman (>=30 runs/innings): 9 – M Hussey , 7 – S Raina, and 6-M S Dhoni ;
Most economical bowler(wickets): 6.23 by Mohit Sharma(17) , 6.62 by R Ashwin(15) & 6.72 by Albie Morkel(4) ;
Most consistent bowler (>=3 wickets/innings): Twice each by M Sharma (3 /10 and 3/21), R Jadeja (3/20 and 3/29) and D Bravo (3/27 and 3/34). Ashwin is no more a threat he used to be as he has no 3-wicket haul and is not used as strike bowler by
Best Fielder – non Wicket-keeper (catches): Dwayne Bravo (12) from 16 matches
Surprise find: Mohit Sharma – a medium-pace bowler who made his debut this season both for IPL and T20;
# of times in Semifinals: 6 ; # of times in finals: 4 ; # of times IPL champions: 2;
Top players paid the most : M S Dhoni($3M), R Jadeja($2M), S Raina($1.3M), M Vijay($900K), R Ashwin($850K), S Badrinath($800K),Albie Morkel($500K), Mike Hussey($425K), D Bravo($200K), Faf Du Plessis($120K)
Top players paid most in 2013 in Auction: Chris Morris ($625K) and Dirk Nannes($600K)
Captain’s performance: M S Dhoni: 398 runs with 3 Fifties and average 36.18 and 167.22 Strike rate, 13 catches and 2 stumping and a win record of 68.75%
Not Worthy Performances by ‘Stars’: M Vijay has not done much to make a difference(only four scores over 30), Dirk Nannes (4 wickets from 5 matches at 39.5 average and 7.96 economy rate)
Fair Play Award Rank for IPL6: Leaders this year (Won it three times out of 5 so far overall)
Previous results from IPL5 and IPL4: Runner-up in IPL5 and Winner in IPL4

Royal Challengers Bangalore (RCB): Have won the toss 5 times, chose to bat twice (1 Won and 1 lost) and field 3 times (all 3 won). It is fair to say that every time they won the toss at home, they chose to field and chose to Bat when they are away. Whenever they win the toss and field, they have won all the games.

Their top order has been very consistent this season with Gayle, Kohli and AB firing almost every other game. From the records, it is seen that Gayle is more threatening at home but Kohli and AB are equally good at both home and away. They do not seem to have any other batsman performing, nor had the reason to bat itself.
Bowling has been mediocre at best, although RP Singh took 3-wickets three times, they were all at home ground.

Played: 16; Won: 9; Lost: 7; had two tied games – one lost and one won in Super over.
Won/Lost at Home: 7 Won vs. 1 Lost ; Won/Lost Away: 2 Won vs. 6 Lost ;
Won/Lost Batting first: 5 Won vs. 5 Lost ; Won/Lost chasing : 4 Won vs. 2 Lost ;
Won/Lost batting first at home: 3 Won vs. 1 Lost ; Won/Lost Chasing at home: 4 Won vs. 0 Lost ;
Won/Lost batting first away: 2 Won vs. 4 Lost ; Won/Lost Chasing away: 0 Won vs. 2 Lost ;
Batsmen with most runs(50s/100s): Chris Gayle with 708 runs (4/1), Virat Kohli with 634 runs (6/0), AB De Villiers with 360 runs (2/0);
Bowler with most wickets(Average): 23 by Vinay Kumar(21.43) in 16 matches and 13 by three – R Rampaul(20.07), J Unadkat(28.46), RP Singh(25.76) in 10, 13 and 11 matches respectively ;
Most consistent batsman (>=30 runs/innings): 9 by Virat Kohli, 8 by Chris Gayle, 6 by AB De Villiers;
Most economical bowler(wickets): 6.92 by Ravi Rampaul(13) ;
Most consistent bowler (>=3 wickets/innings): Both RP Singh (3/13, 3/27, 3/27) and Vinay Kumar (3/18, 3/27, 3/31) have done it three times, although RP has played only 11 matches vs. Vinay’s 16. Unadkat has one 5/25 to his name and Zaheer a 4/17 in the last game with CSK. RP Singh got all his three wickets hauls playing at Home.
Best Fielder – non Wicket-keeper (catches): Vinay Kumar with 8 and Virat Kohli with 7 catches from 16 matches, AB DE Villiers has 8 catches(but he may have been a WK in couple)
Surprise find: Moises Henriques is worth a mention for his utility all-round performance; Unadkat can be groomed to be a good bowler- has potential.
# of times in Semifinals: 3 ; # of times in finals: 2 ; # of times IPL champions: 0 ;
Top players paid the most : Chris Gayle($2M), Virat Kohli($1.8M), S Tiwary($1.6M), AB De Villiers($1.1M), Vinay Kumar($1M), Zaheer Khan($900K), C Pujara($700K), T Dilshan($650K), D Vettori($550K), A Mithun($360K), M Muralidharan($220K), Andrew MacDonald($100K)
Top players paid most in 2013 in Auction: Jaydev Unadkat($525K), RP Singh($400K), Moises Henriques($300K), Ravi Rampaul($290K)
Captain’s performance: Virat Kohli with a win record of 56.25% and the 2^nd top scorer for RCB with 634 runs that includes 6 Fifties with an average of 45.28 and strike rate of 138.73 and has taken 7 catches. His 634 runs are the most by any captain in any IPL.
Not Worthy Performances by ‘Stars’: Saurabh Tiwary (109 from 9 matches at an average of 27.25), Zaheer Khan out due to injury for most of the matches, Muralitharan not being that effective anymore, Dilshan had not much to write about with his bat, and Vettori was never played.
Fair Play Award points: Ranked 4^th out of 9 this year
Previous results from IPL5 and IPL4: Finished 5^th in IPL5 & Runner-up in IPL4

Sun Risers Hyderabad (SRH): They have won the toss 6 times- chose to bat 5 times(4 times away and 1 time at home) and field once(that too at home). They won only once (that too at home) and lost 5 times. When they are away and win the toss, they choose to bat – again, may not be reading the conditions well and hence want to put a tall score and allow the home team to chase it.

Whenever Parthiv and Dhawan fared well as an opening pair, they have had good success.
Glad to see lots of local Andhra talent being utilized by the franchisee to give them an arena to perform – H Vihari was a revelation, thanks to the opportunities although he needs to improve significantly on his strike rate.
Perera as an all-rounder made it count with his batting at the finish, along with the big hitting and was very decent with the ball as well.
Although their bowling unit can be rated well with the likes of Steyn, Mishra and Ishant, not much damage seen in terms of high number of wicket hauls by them. Many an occasion though they have managed to restrict their opponents to lower scores.

Played: 16; Won: 10(Includes one Tie game with RCB that they won in Super over); Lost: 6;
Won/Lost at Home:7 Won vs. 1 Lost ; Won/Lost Away: 3 Won vs. 5 Lost ;
Won/Lost Batting first: 4 Won vs. 4 Lost ; Won/Lost chasing : 6 Won vs. 2 Lost ;
Won/Lost batting first at home: 2 Won vs. 0 Lost ; Won/Lost Chasing at home: 5 Won vs. 1 Lost;
Won/Lost batting first away: 2 Won vs. 4 Lost ; Won/Lost Chasing away: 1 Won vs. 1 Lost ;
Batsmen with most runs(50s/100s): Parthiv Patel with 293 runs (1/0), S Dhawan with 278 runs(3/0) and Hanuma Vihari with 240 runs (0/0) ;
Bowler with most wickets(Average): 20 by Amit Mishra(18.9), 19 by T Perera(24.42), 18 by Dale Steyn(20.05) and 14 by Ishant Sharma(31.07) ;
Most consistent batsman (>=30 runs/innings): 4 times by both T Perera and S Dhawan, and 3 times by Parthiv, C White and H Vihari ;
Most economical bowler(wickets): 5.65 by Dale Steyn(18) ;
Most consistent bowler (>=3 wickets/innings): 3 times by Amit Mishra (4/19, 3/19, 3/26), 2 times by Perera (3/20, 3/45) and Darren Sammy had taken a 4/22 once.
Best Fielder – non Wicket-keeper (catches): CameronWhite with 10 catches and Ashish Reddy with 7 catches, both from 12 games
Surprise find: Hanuma Vihari;
# of times in Semifinals: 3 ; # of times in finals: 1 ; # of times IPL champions: 1(as Deccan Chargers) ;
Top players paid the most : Dale Steyn($1.2M), C White($1.1M), K Sangakkara($700K), Parthiv Patel($600K), Ishant Sharma($450K), JP Duminy($300K)-did not play this season, S Dhawan($300K), Amit Mishra($300K),
Top players paid most in 2013 in Auction: Thisara Perera($675K), Darren Sammy($425K)
Captain’s performance: K Sangakkara with no scores over 30 and with 55.55% wins in 9 games (5 Won and 4 Lost) – at home, won 4 and lost 1 & away, won 1 and lost 3, Cameron White had only one fifty score and an average of 16.18 but had a 71.43% win record having won 5 and lost 2 off the 7 games he captained – won all three home games, and won and lost 2 games each away from Hyderabad.
Not Worthy Performances by ‘Stars’: Cameron White – 178 runs with only 1 fifty at an average of 16.18, Kumar Sangakkara-120 runs with his highest score of 28 and an average of 13.33
Fair Play Award points: Ranked 7^th this year
Previous results from IPL5 and IPL4 (as Deccan Chargers): Finished 8^th in IPL5 (out of 9) and 7^th in IPL4 (out of 10)

Pune Warriors India (PWI): Has always been the worst or second worst in three years of its IPL. They won the toss 9 times- chose to bat 5 times and field 4 time. They won the toss 4 times at home (3 times batted and once fielded) and 5 times away (2 times batted and 3 times fielded). They pretty much lost all their matches except one (away when they beat CSK) – with three captains this season, this would have been a confusing thing in terms of answerability and getting support from the team members. Whenever they field after winning the toss, they have lost – shows a lot about reading the conditions badly and the opponents badly, and not able to bowl and restrict to be able to chase with their modest batting.

Their flop was due to the fact that only 9 times a batsman has hit 30 runs and above this season, and only 3 times a bowler has taken a 3 wicket haul. They had three captains and their regular captain Clarke withdrew before the tournament!
Except for Bhuvneshwar Kumar, their bowling was below par.
Other than Aaron Finch, no other batsmen seem to be consistent and wanted to get a big score or stick around – I did not see a fire-in-the-belly approach anytime.
Something has to be done to this franchise they seem to be the bottom team for the past three years.

Played: 16; Won: 4; Lost: 12;
Won/Lost at Home: 2 Won vs. 6 Lost ; Won/Lost Away: 2 Won vs. 6 Lost ;
Won/Lost Batting first: 3 Won vs. 4 Lost ; Won/Lost chasing : 1 Won vs. 8 Lost ;
Won/Lost batting first at home: 1 Won vs. 2 Lost ; Won/Lost Chasing at home: 1 Won vs. 4 Lost ;
Won/Lost batting first away: 2 Won vs. 2 Lost ; Won/Lost Chasing away: 0 Won vs. 4 Lost ;
Batsmen with most runs(50s/100s): 456 runs by Aaron Finch(4/0), 434 runs by Robin Uthappa(2/0) and 238 runs by Yuvraj Singh(0/0);
Bowler with most wickets(Average): 16 wickets by Ashok Dinda(29.06) and 13 wickets by Bhuvneshwar Kumar(28.53) ;
Most consistent batsman (>=30 runs/innings): 7 times by Aaron Finch, 6 by Robin Uthappa and 4 by Yuvraj;
Most economical bowler(wickets): 6.50 by Bhuvneshwar Kumar(13) ;
Most consistent bowler (>=3 wickets/innings): Twice by Bhuvneshwar Kumar (3/18,3/25) and 1 time each by Ashok Dinda(3/31) , Angelo Mathews(3./14), W Parnell(3/27) and Ali Murtaza(3/15)
Best Fielder – non Wicket-keeper (catches): 7 by Mitchell Marsh from 9 games and 6 by Manish Pandey from 7 games
Surprise find: Bhuvneshwar Kumar($60K) and Aaron Finch, for a guy who was NOT sold in the auction initially, he has turned out to be the highest run scorer to prove his stake and managed to captain the star-less team;
# of times in Semifinals: 0 ; # of times in finals: 0 ; # of times IPL champions: 0 ;
Top players paid the most : Robin Uthappa($2.1M), Yuvraj Singh($1.8M), Ross Taylor, Angelo Mathews($950K), Ashok Dinda($500K), Marlon Samuels($400K)- 2 matches and 8 runs, Luke Wright($200K), Wayne Parnell($160K)
Top players paid most in 2013 in Auction: Ajantha Mendis($725K)-2 wickets from 3 matches, Kane Richardson($700K)- 2 wickets from 3 matches, Abhisek Nayar($675K) – 2 wickets, hit 66 runs from 11 matches, Michael Clarke($400K), Ross Taylor – 63 runs in 5 matches at an average of 12.6
Captain’s performance: A Mathews – captained 5 with a win record of 20% – won 1(at home) and lost 4 (2 at home and 2 away), Aaron Finch – captained 10 times (5 each at home and away) with a win record of 20% – won 1 and lost 4 each at home and away, Ross Taylor – captained one and won it against CSK at Chennai (100%)
Not Worthy Performances by ‘Stars’: Yuvraj Singh(238 runs with No fifties and just 4 scores of 30 and above. and 19.83 average and only 6 wickets), Angelo Mathews(172 runs with No fifties and 3 scores of 30 and above, and 24.57 average and just 5 wickets), Abhishek Nayar(66 runs with 11 average and 2 wickets from 11 matches), Rahul Sharma(9 wickets from 11 matches at 31.22 average), Ross Taylor(63 runs from 5 matches at an average of 12.6) and Robin Uthappa(only 2 scores of 50 and above).
Fair Play Award points: 3^rd best this season
Previous results from IPL5 and IPL4: Finished last in IPL5 and Finished 9^th in IPL4(out of 10)

Mumbai Indians (MI): Won all Home league games, same as RR. Like RR and KKR, they have been lucky at the toss having won 11 times and choosing to bat almost all the time except for twice (in away games -in their first and last league matches). 6 times they have won the toss at home and 5 times away. Once Rohit wins the toss, it is fair to say he elects to bat mostly. Mumbai did have a strong batting line up that was in form and batting first gives them the liberty to post good scores, so that their bowlers can defend them – with the likes of Malinga at the death and M Johnson taking wickets in the beginning, it is not surprising their overall results have been great. They are knocking very close for the past three years, having been in the semi-finals all the three times and once in the finals, and may be this is the year for them to get crowned.

All their players have struck well and hence there were other good players who did not get too much of a chance to play – they had a problem of plenty which is a good problem to have.
Overall their bowling is just Ok with some big names in it – but the resurgence of Johnson taking wickets early and Malinga being his best at the death with his Yorkers seem to be doing a lot of good.

Played: 16; Won: 11; Lost: 5;
Won/Lost at Home: 8 Won vs. 0 Lost ; Won/Lost Away: 3 Won vs. 5 Lost ;
Won/Lost Batting first: 8 Won vs. 2 Lost ; Won/Lost chasing : 3 Won vs. 3 Lost ;
Won/Lost batting first at home: 7 Won vs. 0 Lost ; Won/Lost Chasing at home: 1 Won vs. 0 Lost ;
Won/Lost batting first away:1 Won vs. 2 Lost ; Won/Lost Chasing away: 2 Won vs. 3 Lost ;
Batsmen with most runs(50s/100s): 526 by Rohit Sharma(4/0), 456 by Dinesh Karthik(2/0) and 325 by K Pollard(2/0) ;
Bowler with most wickets(Average): 22 by M Johnson(17.13), 19 by Harbhajan Singh (20.68) and 17 by L Malinga(21.05) ;
Most consistent batsman (>=30 runs/innings): 8 by Dinesh Karthik, 7 by Rohit Sharma, 5 by Dwayne Smith and then 4 times each by Pollard and Tendulkar
Most economical bowler(wickets): 6.66 by Harbhajan Singh(19) and 6.71 by L Malinga(17) ;
Most consistent bowler (>=3 wickets/innings): 2 times by Harbhajan Singh(3/14,3/27)
Best Fielder – non Wicket-keeper (catches): Pollard with 11 catches from 15 games, and Rayudu took 8 catches from 16 games
Surprise find: None in particular but M Johnson was a revelation in bowling by taking early wickets ;
# of times in Semifinals: 4 ; # of times in finals: 1 ; # of times IPL champions: 0 ;
Top players paid the most : Rohit Sharma($2M), S Tendulkar($1.8M), Harbhajan Singh($1.3M), Dinesh Karthik($1.2M), Lasith Malinga($1.1M), K Pollard($900K), P Ojha($800K),Munaf Patel($700K), Mitchell Johnson($300K), James Franklin($100K)
Top players paid most in 2013 in Auction: Glenn Maxwell($1M)-played in the last 3 league games only(36 runs at 18 average and took no wicket), Nathan Coulter-Nile($450K) – played only the last league game(hit 9 runs and took 1 Wicket), Ricky Ponting($400K)
Captain’s performance: Ricky Ponting (52 runs from 6 matches with 10.4 average and 50% captaincy win percentage out of 6 matches) and Rohit Sharma (296 from 10 matches at 42.28 average and 1 Fifty, and 80% captaincy Win percentage in 10 matches). As a non captain, Rohit had a better record having aggregated 230 runs in 6 matches with three scores of over fifty – does feel that captaincy is taking a toll on his batting!.
Not Worthy Performances by ‘Stars’: Munaf Patel(played 3 matches and took 3 wickets), S Tendulkar(287 from 14 matches at 22.07 average and only 1 Fifty), Ricky Ponting(52 runs from 6 matches at an average of 10.4)
Fair Play Award points: Ranked 6^th out of 9 this year
Previous results from IPL5 and IPL4: Semi-Finalists in both IPL5 and IPL4

Rajasthan Royals (RR): Won all Home leagues games, same as MI. Seems to be lucky at the toss, having won 10 times and chose to field(3 times at home and 2 times away) and bat(once at home and 4 times away) 5 times each. They have won 6 times (4 times fielding and 2 times batting) and lost 4 times (once fielding and 4 times batting). It is fair to say that if they win the toss, and chose to field they have a higher probability of a win and if they chose to bat, they have a higher probability of a loss. And they have won all their matches at home when they have won their toss which makes me believe they understand the Jaipur ground condition well.

Stuart Binny as a great utility all-rounder was a good thing for RR and he seems to be a decent finisher they needed with 4 not-outs scores of >30 to his credit.
The 18 year old Sanju Samson is another revelation who has a decent technique and nice aggression to back it. Hope he learns from the Dravids, Watsons and Hodges to make it big soon.
Faulkner has been their main bowler and the only bowler with two 5-wicket hauls. K Cooper has been slightly consistent as well with some 3-wicket hauls.
Their entire team is built around Shane Watson who alone can take any game away.
Rahane, after being dropped from being selected for the Champions Trophy, made it a point for making his bat speak for him with some consistent 50+ scores. But again, like Rohit Sharma, he has been given a lot of chances in the big stage but he had not made it count at all.

Played: 16; Won: 10; Lost: 6;
Won/Lost at Home: 8 Won vs. 0 Lost ; Won/Lost Away: 2 Won vs. 6 Lost ;
Won/Lost Batting first: 3 Won vs. 4 Lost ; Won/Lost chasing : 7 Won vs. 2 Lost ;
Won/Lost batting first at home: 2 Won vs. 0 Lost ; Won/Lost Chasing at home: 6 Won vs. 0 Lost ;
Won/Lost batting first away: 1 Won vs. 4 Lost ; Won/Lost Chasing away: 1 Won vs. 2 Lost ;
Batsmen with most runs(50s/100s): 513 runs by Shane Watson(2/1), 449 by A Rahane(4/0) and 416 by Rahul Dravid(4/0) ;
Bowler with most wickets(Average): 26 by James Faulkner(13.96), 17 by Kevon Cooper(22.35) ;
Most consistent batsman (>=30 runs/innings): 8 times by Shane Watson, 7 times by A Rahane and 6 by both Rahul Dravid and Stuart Binny ;
Most economical bowler (wickets): 6.58 by J Faulkner (26), 6.66 by Shane Watson (11); Sorry discounting Chandila who had 6.24 from 8 matches!
Most consistent bowler (>=3 wickets/innings):4 times by J Faulkner(5/16,5/20,3/16,3/20), and 3 times by Kevon Cooper(3/15,3/23,3/30)
Best Fielder – non Wicket-keeper (catches): 9 by A Rahane in 16 games, and 6 each by Shane Watson and Brad Hodge in 14 and 15 games respectively
Surprise find: James Faulkner as a good strike bowler and Stuart Binny as a good utility all-rounder ;
# of times in Semifinals: 2 ; # of times in finals: 1 ; # of times IPL champions: 1 ;
Top players paid the most : Shane Watson($1.3M), Rahul Dravid($500K), Brad Hodge($475K), Sreesanth($400K), Shaun Tait($300K)- 1 wicket in 3 matches, Owais Shah($200K) – 24 runs from 2 matches, Brad Hogg($180K)-went wicket less in the only match he played
Top players paid most in 2013 in Auction: James Faulkner($400K), Fidel Edwards($210K)
Captain’s performance: Rahul Dravid with 62.5% winning percentage, 416 runs with 4 fifties at an average of 29.71 and 110.05 strike rate, and 3 catches
Not Worthy Performances by ‘Stars’: Sreesanth, Chandila
Special mention: Ajinkya Rahane($60K), and Kevon Cooper($50K)
Fair Play Award points: 2^nd best this season
Previous results from IPL5 and IPL4: Finished 7^th in IPL5 (out of 9) and 6^th in IPL4(out of 10)

Kings Eleven Punjab (KXIP): They won their toss 7 times(3 times at home and 4 times away) – chose to field 5 times(3 times at home and 2 times away) and bat 2 times(both away). They won 4 times (always chasing) and lost 3 times (twice batting and once fielding). If they choose to bat after winning the toss, it is always away which makes me feel that they have not understood the ground well and want to get a big score to de-risk their play.

Sorry, Adam Gilchrist is not the threat he used to be. Fully understanding this, a great player like him also hung his shoes at the end. He did have some good scores towards the last few games but the way he made it was not Gilly style.
No Great starts in this team, but seems like Shaun Marsh has silently been performing well, and David Miller has stuck big as a great finisher for them.
There is a lot of talent available to be groomed here – Mandeep, Manan, Gurkeerat and Sandeep, and I hope they stay the course and make it in due course to the big leagues.

Played: 16; Won: 8; Lost: 8;
Won/Lost at Home(Includes Dharamsala): 5 Won vs. 3 Lost; Won/Lost Away: 3 Won vs. 5 Lost ;
Won/Lost Batting first: 2 Won vs. 5 Lost ; Won/Lost chasing : 6 Won vs. 3 Lost ;
Won/Lost batting first at home: 2 Won vs. 2 Lost ; Won/Lost Chasing at home:3 Won vs. 1 Lost ;
Won/Lost batting first away: 0 Won vs. 3 Lost ; Won/Lost Chasing away: 3 Won vs. 2 Lost ;
Batsmen with most runs(50s/100s): 418 runs by David Miller(3/1), 300 runs by Shaun Marsh(3/0) ;
Bowler with most wickets(Average): 15 wickets by both Azhar Mahmood(22.00) and Parvinder Awana(27.46) ;
Most consistent batsman (>=30 runs/innings): 6 times by David Miller and 4 times by Shaun Marsh ;
Most economical bowler(wickets): 6.62 by Praveen Kumar(12) ;
Most consistent bowler (>=3 wickets/innings): 2 times by Sandeep Sharma(3/21,3/23) and Azhar Mahmood(3/21,3/35)
Best Fielder – non Wicket-keeper (catches): 8 catches by Miller in 12 matches and 6 catches by Mandeep in 16 matches
Surprise find: Sandeep Sharma – a medium pacer who took 8 wickets from 4 matches includes two 3 wicket hauls, Mandeep Singh with 3 scores of 30 and above and total runs of 260 with a strike rate of 116.59 ;
# of times in Semifinals: 1 ; # of times in finals: 0 ; # of times IPL champions: 0 ;
Top players paid the most : David Hussey($1.4M), Adam Gilchrist($900K), Piyush Chawla($900K), Praveen Kumar($800K), Shaun Marsh($400K), Ryan Harris($325K), Azhar Mahmood($200K),David Miller($100K), D Mascarenhas($100K)
Top players paid most in 2013 in Auction: Manpreet Gony($500K), Luke Pomersback($300K)
Captain’s performance: Adam Gilchrist- captained 13 matches(7 at home and 6 away), won 7(4 at home and 3 away) and lost 6(3 each at home and away) – 53.84% win record, D Hussey – captained 3 matches – won 1 at home and lost 2 away from home(33% win record)
Not Worthy Performances by ‘Stars’: David Hussey(235 runs from 12 matches and 0 wickets at an economy rate of 8.27) , Adam Gilchrist294 runs from 13 matches but not hitting the ball well and is not a threat anymore), M Gony(7 wickets from 8 matches with economy rate of 9.14 and average of 36.57), Ryan Harris(1 wicket from 3 matches), Piyush Chawla with no 3 wicket haul at all and an average of 38, Praveen Kumar with no 3-wicket haul and an average of 31.08
Fair Play Award points: Ranked 5^th out of 9 this year
Previous results from IPL5 and IPL4: Finished 6^th in IPL5 (out of 9) and 5^th in IPL4 (out of 10)

Delhi Daredevils (DD): Lost all away matches so far. Also when they win the toss, they lose the match and thankfully, they have not been too lucky with the toss. They won 5 tosses, chose 3 times to Bat (2 away and 1 Home) and 2 times to Field (1 each at home and away).

Delhi lost all their away matches, and except for one 4 wicket haul by Umesh, none of bowlers in the entire 16 games even took a 3 wicket haul any day which is a disgrace for a team that had M Morkel, Yadav, Irfan Pathan and Ashish Nehra.
They need two more good batsmen to support David Warner henceforth, and some re-jigs in their bowling department which has a lot of old Indian bowlers like Ashish and Ajit who are well beyond their peak.

Played: 15; Won: 3; Lost: 13(includes one Tied match they lost during Super over vs. RCB);
Won/Lost at Home(includes Raipur): 3 Won vs. 5 Lost ; Won/Lost Away: 0 Won vs. 8 Lost ;
Won/Lost Batting first: 1 Won vs. 6 Lost ; Won/Lost chasing : 2 Won vs. 7 Lost ;
Won/Lost batting first at home: 1 Won vs. 2 Lost ; Won/Lost Chasing at home: 2 Won vs. 3 Lost ;
Won/Lost batting first away: 0 Won vs. 4 Lost ; Won/Lost Chasing away: 0 Won vs. 4 Lost ;
Batsmen with most runs(50s/100s): 410 runs by David Warner(4/0), 331 by M Jayawardhene(2/0) ;
Bowler with most wickets(Average): 16 by Umesh Yadav(31.75), 11 by Ashish Nehra(28.72) and 10 by Irfan Pathan(38.2) ;
Most consistent batsman (>=30 runs/innings): 6 by David Warner, 4 by M Jayawardhene and 3 by Ben Rohrer ;
Most economical bowler(wickets): 5.88 by Shahbaz Nadeem(9) ;
Most consistent bowler (>=3 wickets/innings): 1 by Umesh Yadav(4/24) – no other bowler even took 3-wickets ever.
Best Fielder – non Wicket-keeper (catches): 6 by David Warner(16 matches) and 5 each by Johan Botha(6 matches), S Nadeem(12 matches), V Sehwag(13 matches) and Umesh Yadav(16 matches)
Surprise find: Siddarth Kaul shows good promise(4 wickets from 6 matches) , Nadeem seems to be economical and a great fielder, and Ben Rohrer(193 from 8 matches with 1 Fifty and 3 scores above 30 and strike rate of 137.85 and took 3 catches);
# of times in Semifinals: 3 ; # of times in finals: 0 ; # of times IPL champions: 0 ;
Top players paid the most : Irfan Pathan($1.9M), V Sehwag($1.8M), M Jayawardene($1.4M), Kevin Peitersen($1M)-did not play due to injury, David Warner($750K), Umesh Yadav($750K), Venugopal Rao($700K)-played one match, Morne Morkel($475K), Andree Russell($450K), Naman Ojha($270K), Ajit Agarkar($210K)
Top players paid most in 2013 in Auction: Johan Botha($450K), Jesse Ryder($260K)
Captain’s performance: M. Jayawardhene – captained 14 matches, won 3(all at home) and lost 11, David Warner- captained 2 matches, most both (one at home and one away)
Not Worthy Performances by ‘Stars’: Irfan Pathan-142 runs at an average of 17.75 with no score over thirty and 10 wickets at an average of 38.2, Virendra Sehwag-295 runs at an average of 24.58 with his two highest scores being 95 no and 30, Mahela Jayawardhene-331 runs at an average of 22.06, M Morkel with 7 wickets from 10 matches at an average of 47.85, Umesh Yadav with only one 4 wicket haul and expensive at 8.78 runs/over.
Fair Play Award points: Ranked 8^th out of 9^th this year
Previous results from IPL5 and IPL4: Semi-Finalists in IPL5 and finished last in IPL4

Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR): They have not won any games chasing away from home this season. They seem to be the luckiest in terms of toss, having won 12 times – chose to bat and field 6 times each. They won the toss 6 times at home(batted and fielded 3 times each) and 6 times away(chose to bat 3 times and field 3 times). They won the match 4 times(3 at home and 1 away) and lost 8 times(3 at home and 5 away). It is fair to say that the toss does not give them an advantage as they seem to be poor in deciding what to do in getting a favorable result for them.

None of the batsmen who played more than 5 matches had an average of >30 which is deplorable. Kallis seems to be beyond his peak when it comes to strike rates, and Yusuf batted when it did not matter anymore (KKR was already close to be being out of the tournament). Eoin Morgan having had a decent batting average must hone his skills better to be a finisher for KKR.
The same goes with bowling – Narine needs 1-2 more good consistent, economical and wicket taking bowlers
Their main owner who was all over the TV in the past five years was hardly to be seen – is there an issue here?

Played: 16; Won: 6; Lost: 10 ;
Won/Lost at Home(includes Ranchi): 5 Won vs. 3 Lost ; Won/Lost Away: 1 Won vs. 7 Lost ;
Won/Lost Batting first: 2 Won vs. 5 Lost ; Won/Lost chasing : 4 Won vs. 5 Lost ;
Won/Lost batting first at home: 1 Won vs. 2 Lost ; Won/Lost Chasing at home: 4 Won vs. 1 Lost ;
Won/Lost batting first away: 1 Won vs. 3 Lost ; Won/Lost Chasing away: 0 Won vs. 4 Lost ;
Batsmen with most runs(50s/100s): 406 runs by G Gambhir(4/0), 332 runs by Yusuf Pathan(1/0) , 311 runs by J Kallis(0/0) and 307 runs by Eoin Morgan(1/0),;
Bowler with most wickets(Average): 22 wickets by Sunil Narine(15.9) and 16 wickets by Jacques Kallis(24.62) ;
Most consistent batsman (>=30 runs/innings): 6 times by Eoin Morgan and 5 times each by G Gambhir and J Kallis ;
Most economical bowler(wickets): 5.46 by Sunil Narine(22) ;
Most consistent bowler (>=3 wickets/innings): 3 times by Sunil Narine(4/13,4/22,3/17) – all at home, and 2 times by J Kallis(3/13,3/24)
Best Fielder – non Wicket-keeper (catches): Manoj Tiwary – 10 catches from 10 matches and 6 catches from 16 matches by Narine.
Surprise find: NONE;
# of times in Semifinals: 2 ; # of times in finals: 1 ; # of times IPL champions: 1 ;
Top players paid the most : G Gambhir($2.4M), Yusuf Pathan($2.1M), Jacques Kallis($1.1M), B McCullum($900K), Sunil Narine($700K), Shakib Al Hasan($625K), L Balaji($500K), Manoj Tiwary($475K), Brett Lee($400K), Eoin Morgan($350K), Brad Haddin($325K), Ryan Ten Doeschate($150K), James Pattinson($100K)
Top players paid most in 2013 in Auction: Sachitra Senenayake($625K)
Captain’s performance: G Gambhir – 406 runs with an average of 25.37 and strike rate of 118.36 with 4 fifties and with just 37.5% winning rate
Not Worthy Performances by ‘Stars’: Yusuf Pathan-332 runs with an average of 25.72, Brendon McCullum-played only one game, Manoj Tiwary-146 runs with an average of 18.25 with no fifty and a strike rate of 104.28 and a highest score of 33, Brett Lee – 4 wickets from 3 matches.
Fair Play Award points: Ranked last this year
Previous results from IPL5 and IPL4: Winners of IPL5 and semi-finalists in IPL4

All data collected after all the 72 matches of the league stages were done with.

For all bowling, fielding and batting statistics, the player must have played a minimum of 5 games in IPL6.

Most statistics referenced from espncricinfo.com and the official website iplt20.com.

From the revenue figures listed in the Aril02 issue of Live Mint, looks like only Rajasthan Royal have been able to make a profit for the past couple of years, and KKR and Pune Warriors say they are profitable this past year. RCB seems to have incurred the heaviest loss in 2011-12 whereas the other three franchisees (KXIP, DD, MI) are showing their losses are narrowing down already . SRH predicts after this year’s loss, they hope to be profitable next year. CSK revenue figures are not obvious as they seem to operate within their parent company that owns them. Overall, there is no consistent data available to show the revenue numbers or the profile/loss statement for any of the franchisees online which , in my opinion, must be available in a very transparent manner to all.

Disclaimer: Although best attempt has been made in ensuring the names and the details behind the statistics are correct, any error needs to be pardoned as I believe they may be only a few and does not distort the message being conveyed.

Teams of IPL9 (Apr/May 2016) – observations and analysis

This is a compiled list of the most significant players given below (not all the players) in each of the eight teams that is playing in the ninth chapter of IPL. The first thing that strikes out after having seen 11 matches (till RCB vs DD) has been the absence of Chennai super Kings and Rajasthan Royals, two of the premium franchisees of the first eight IPLs.

Observations:

Going by the number of empty seats in almost all grounds thus far, looks like some of the interest is fading. It is also worthwhile to note that the high prices of certain tickets is keeping spectators away from the stadium, added to all the negative publicity that IPL had got over the past year .
Most of the matches so far has been one sided without a close finish which makes me feel that either the players are warming up or their team chemistry is not in place yet.
Most of the teams seem to be lacking batting depth with no quality all-rounders filling in the middle-overs spots, and most of the teams do seem to have only two or three good bowlers.
Every team seems to also have holes in their fielding which does not bode well while defending smaller totals, and slower runners between wickets which may be a disaster if you are chasing huge totals.
Gujarat Lions with three wins thus far is roaring, thanks to it inheriting the best all-rounders (Jadeja, Raina, and Bravo) of this format and the better fielders of the now defunct CSK team. With Brendon and Aaron Finch and supported by Dwayne Smith as a backup, they seem to be having the best hard-hitting opening pair of IPL9. Bravo and Faulkner also make the best death bowling pair in the tournament, with their effective slower balls.
Pune Supergiants given that this is captained by MSD who likes tried and tested players and would not like to change the team that much, would not be able to exploit their deep pipeline of players. Their star find may be Murugan Ashwin and with two Ashwins for spin, they look set for some quality eight overs. But MSD who believes that fielding does win matches has to throw this thought in the back-burner as he has a lot of less agile legs and slow pick-up-and-throwers in his team – R Ashwin, Ishant Sharma, RP Singh, Irfan Pathan, Ishwar Pandey, Ashok Dinda and Rajat Bhatia, which would make him concede about 10 runs more every game. His best fielders are all his foreign players and Rahane, and those are the five he should use at the right fielding positions. He has been a lucky charm to all the teams he has led so far in the limited overs format.
Kolkata Knight Riders seem to be a stable team and most of them have been together for a few years and looking like the team to beat in this episode of IPL. Andre Russell would be the only foreign player to play in all matches and the other three spots seem to be open for rotation depending on the ground conditions, although I expect Shakib to play in most of the games as a genuine all-rounder and Narine as their main spinner. Gambhir’s batting forte is his Indian players and this is unique amongst all the teams that is playing, and with Gambhir in top form in the initial games, thus making a statement to BCCI that he is ready to replace S Dhawan, this IPL9 may give him back his Indian Jersey in all formats for the next 1-2 years. Anyway India is playing mostly tests and mostly at home! KKR support seems to be most loved this season as even the Eden Gardens gets filled for their games, despite some stands in other stadiums giving a barren look.
Kings XI Punjab after having been to the finals couple of years ago, have been in the doldrums since and they seem to be a Miller and Maxwell show. Sandeep Sharma has been showing good potential for a while but they do not seem to have a cohesive batting or a bowling story and they seem to be short in both departments. Their batting can be aided by Shawn Marsh and their bowling can be strengthened by Mitchell Johnson and Mohit Sharma, and their opening batting pair of Vijay and Vora needs to be more consistent.
Mumbai Indians again has this purely talented but inconsistent Rohit as the captain and their opener and with no Malinga, they need to depend on the rising star Bumrah to do the opening spell and death bowling damages. With only Bhajji being their star spinner, they seem to lack strength in their Indian bowling department with only Vinay having some international exposure. They cannot afford to rest Guptill and Anderson at all which they seem to be doing for the first few games. The Pandya brothers, with so much hype on Hardik, seem to be a joke at best – I still cannot believe how he made it to the Indian team. Using either Parthiv or Buttler in the playing eleven, both being wicket-keepers are very tricky for them. Given the present form, they need to have Buttler in the team and definitely Guptill or Simmons, because they need the other two spots for a foreign bowler or an all-rounder – the choice is being between Southee, McCleneghan or Anderson.
RCB time and again have always depended on their top three for all their runs, and whenever Gayle hits, they do not have issues. Even with AB and Kohli firing in the last match, Delhi was able to maul them in their home ground which is famous for even 200 plus scores being chased at ease. After their top 3, which seems to be the same design flaw in this IPL edition with many teams, they seem to be lacking good batters who can hit or finish. But they have certainly strengthened that middle over with Shane Watson which was the spot that Yuvraj was tried for in the previous year. Shane Watson brings them a good all-rounder and if Mitchel Starc is back after his wedding, their pace bowling department looks decent but they do not seem to have any quality Indian bowlers to fill in their other 12 overs. They cannot choose from their good arsenal of foreign bowlers either due to their four limit, but it is good to have Milne, Badree, Weise and Richardson as their replacement for Starc and rotate them around.
Delhi Daredevils is the only team captained by a bowler who ideally bats at 11! They would be batting centered on De Kock and bowling centered around Zaheer and Mishra for their season. With Zaheer beyond his peak and giving away 50 runs against RCB, this does not tell a good story. Having the need to play De Kock, they seem to be playing Sanju Samson as a non-wicketkeeper and placing him the outfield is a mistake as he does not seem to have a good arm – throws the ball back like Amla. They would be playing Carlos Braithwaite and Chris Morris as all-rounder options pretty much throughout, and they need to play JP Duminy in every match as well. I cannot understand how they can get Imran Tahir to play at all, but they can play Coutere Nile if Braithwaite is not able to. Shreyas Iyer, a star in domestic cricket last season, has started off as a flop and it is time that Mayank Agarwal replaces him.
Sunrisers Hyderabad again is a team centered around David Warner – if he fires, any score is reachable. Unfortunately with Yuvraj, Ashish and Kane Williamson all injured presently, they are counting on them to come back to the team soon to raise its level of play – so expect some good matches in the latter half of their rounds. Without these three, this team looks despicable and Shikar Dhawan is adding to their misery. Henriques is forced to come at three whereas he can do more damage coming in later after Morgan- these two can be their finishers, but unfortunately once Kane is back, only one of them can play. Rahman and Bhuvie can be their bowling spearhead and Boult can come in anytime to replace Rahman.

Analysis:

Gujarat Lions – Having got some of the best fielders, which was one of the key arsenals of CSK, and with their good death bowling pairs, they are a team to reckon with and in my opinion, would make it to the final four, given that they have won three in a row so far. Their foreign players may not change much – Finch, McCullum, Bravo and Faulkner being their four, and if need be, will bring in Smith as an opener somedays and Steyn for Faulkner on other days. They seem to be short of one good Indian bowler with Jaddu, Bravo, Faulkner and Praveen Kumar or Dhawal making the four options. That fifth spot would be taken up on rotation by a spinner and this could be the target four overs for the opponents to capitalize. Raina has to come to form, and Dinesh Karthik having been ‘undervalued’ this time around, after enjoying two years of surprising glory, needs to bat well. If other team gets their top three batsmen early, they will not be able to get adequate runs on the board which is something that the opponents would try to exploit and vice versa, if their top three fires, then they are on a way to a 180 plus score which they can defend in most grounds. The good thing they seem to have done is they have used most of their bench players in their first three games on rotation which is good as they would not stay rusted for a long time.
Pune Rising Supergiants again will play three of their four foreign players in every match as batters– Faf du Plessis, Steve Smith and Pieterson. The fourth spot of the foreign all-rounder can be either Mitchell Marsh, Albie Morkel or Perera. Chances of Adam Zampa or Bolland playing in any match look remote. Rahane and Faf make a fairly consistent opening pair, but they are not major six hitters, which may make their power play overs not that rewarding. His pace bowlers looks like his liabilities, and if they do not do well, his spinners would also be taken to the cleaners which makes me believe he is going to bleed a lot of runs all the time. He needs to expect to chase a 180 plus score every time or try to defend a similar score to give his bowlers enough leeway. My opinion is this may be the first time MSD would never lead his team to the final four! But with Dhoni at the helm, he has ways to make the team click and take them to the playoffs and it is not easy for me to write-him off yet. Never say Never.
KKR unless they mess up, should be going through the final four because they look composed and settled. With Narine ready and ably assisted by Chawla, and with their foreign players mostly making up their other bowling options, they seem to be set. They seem to placing their bets on Indian players for their batting and if Yousuf Pathan can return to form with some heavy heating, and Andre adding to the fireworks, they need a score of 160 plus to be able to defend with their good bowling. Their long pole in the tent seems to be their batting, and again, like the Lions, if the opponents take care of their top 3 to 4 batters within a few overs, they would struggle to get a big score. But they seem to be one of the better teams to be able to defend a lower score, thanks to their effective spinners and good pacers.
Kings Punjab does lack in their spin department with the likes of Axar Patel leading it with only Sahu and Maxwell as the other spinners. Their batting can be either too good if both the Ms fire or can be bad if both fail – so I think we would see extremes in their scores. If their opening pair fails, then it puts a lot of pressure on the 2Ms which would curtail their natural game and no fun to watch. Unfortunately I do not see them making it to the final four.
Mumbai’s bowling would be around Bhajji and Bumrah, and batting around Rohit and Buttler. Rayudu has to raise his batting up a notch in the middle and Parthiv has to deliver almost every game. I would still say that they would find it hard to get a good mix for any given match, and both batting and bowling look vulnerable at best. They need to play a more consistent team henceforth and ensure stability sets in for them to have any chances of a playoff spot. With them playing in one of the smaller stadiums (Wankhede), where a par score would be 180 to 200, they should have this in mind while planning most of their home games. I would still say they do not look today like a team that would enter the final four.
RCB is a team that can hit 200 plus on any given day, given that Kohli and AB are in their best form but if Gayle becomes their liability, they do not seem to have a foreign player to replace him other than David Weise as an all-rounder. So, only the fourth foreign spot is up for toss and they have a wide array of bowlers to choose from. Binny has to be play and excel as an all-rounder and Chahal has to be more respectable as a bowler for them to see any playoff berth. This game can be cruel to the two best batters of this format in this world being on the same side, hitting consistently but still may not be able to make it to the playoffs.
Delhi seem to have a good bowling attack – Zaheer, Mishra, Morris, Brathwaite/Couture Nile, JP Duminy, Negi and Shami. They can definitely restrict their opponents to a respectable score to defend. But other than De Kock, the batting lineup is inexperienced as best but with lots of promise – Mayank, Karun, Sanju and Shreyas. If any one of them strike in any given game, and later the all-rounders in JP Duminy, Brathwaite and Morris blast their way through, I guess they do stand a chance. Their weakest link is the fitness of Zaheer and his captaincy as this is the first time he is leading a team. But with Rahul Dravid as their coach now, having been a mentor to RR for quite some years, anything is possible.
Hyderabad’s chances look better if they get Dhawan to perform and the injured players come in. Then their foreign player combination gets set –Warner, Williamson, Morgan/Henriques/Cutting (the last two if they need an all-rounder option) and Rahman/Boult. Their Indian bowling would be spearheaded by the best T20 pacer this year – Ashish Nehra and ably assisted by Bhuvnesh Kumar and Yuvraj. There are lots of baggage in their playing eleven – Karn Sharma, Ashish Reddy and Deepak Hooda, which they need to carry on their shoulder. Deepak was supposed to provide the fireworks for them in the middle overs and Naman Ojha has to perform with his bat well. Remembered they fired late in the season last time around and this seems to be their habit. Even if one of their injured players does not make it, they do not seem to have a chance.

The third and fourth spot for the playoffs seem to have some choices now – Hyderabad, Pune, DD or RCB, but my choices would be Pune and RCB. At this point, I may be wrongly writing off Mumbai and definitely writing off Punjab but as I see it, this may be reality. Best results in T20 comes with good batting, excellent fields and tight bowling. And once you are in the playoffs, the team that performs that day becomes the winner – no statistics can infer winning from the playoff stages. The best bowling unit though today seems to be Delhi and KKR.

Remember the T20 format is definitely batting friendly and cruel to the bowlers in the Indian wickets and hence it is important that the team has to have a good six to seven deep batting strength to score well and be able to defend with good bowlers. A great fielding team is critical for success as this can save about 10 runs every match and make a critical runout happen. The middle order must have two good all-rounders in any team. The fifth option of a bowler can by design be set weak if the other four bowlers can come with respectable quality. Assume the fifth bowler quota gets hit for even 50 runs in their four overs, if the other four bowlers can still get a max average of 8 runs an over, a score of 170 can be defended or chased if they have a strong batting lineup. But more than one bowling quota of four overs gets hit, and then you are in for trouble. And if your top order does not perform, again you can be in trouble.

As a side note, not seeing my favorite team CSK in action, I am supporting RCB for the entertainment value they have provided and are likely to provide this season. IPL and T20 is all about a three plus hour entertainment which seems to be an effective channel to wind down the summer days.

The author is from Bengaluru and is a cricket fanatic and an avid blogger. Some of the blogs related to cricket along with various other domains of his interests can be found in www.rajavenkata.com . He is a business consultant and a corporate trainer by profession.

Is your Recruiting on solid grounds?

Recruitment, as defined by the Business Dictionary, is the process of finding and hiring the best qualified candidate for a job opening, in a timely and cost-effective manner. The process itself includes analyzing the requirement of the job – the must haves and the nice to haves, attracting the employees for the same through targeted advertising, screening and selecting applicants, hiring and integrating the new employee to the organization.

And during recruiting, there is no such thing as an ideal fit – this never exists. And better fits always costs more, just like a tailor-made suit would be more expensive than the one available readymade in retail stores. If cost is the main driver and the job opening is budget bound, look for ‘less-expensive’ candidates and settle for someone with lesser experience and a little lesser fit. If time is of essence, and it is critical to get someone immediately, get the best qualified candidate from the available screened list and hire quickly. Remember, recruiting comes with several boundary conditions set by the organization and the hiring team.

Now let us dissect each of the verbs in the definition:

Analyzing the requirement: The recruiter must know clearly what exactly is the hiring team looking out for, what technology area that they want the candidate from, what level of experience they need, any salary bounds, what compromises can be done, etc. At the end of this process, it is a good practice to formally quiz the recruiter to ensure he has understood the requirement well and is confident to get the right folks.
- The requirements must be clear, precise to the role and realistic– you cannot expect a technical lead or a manager of say 10-12 talents to also do hands-on technical work 100% of the time – if he has to manage talents well, then all he can do is offer technical insight and monitor the work progress of team regularly and sometimes roll up his sleeves and start working. Managing talents well is an art by itself and if you are looking at successful employees, you need to create successful managers first. The immediate boss is the embodiment of the entire organization for all his/her employees.
Screening: Based on 2 to 3 essential skill sets that are absolutely needed for the job, the recruiter parses through various job portals and internal referrals and generates a few resumes that will meet the requirement. He must be able to use all different channels to get the best talents, with preference given to local candidates(unless there is a void of skill set in that geography) and look out for a diversified set of candidates who can offer more than what the job requires (but not fall into the trap of over employing anyone).
Selecting: This is done at two levels: First the filtering of screened resumes by the recruiter through a short call with all the candidates which would translate to a bunch of 5-10 resumes that meet the requirements; from here on, the hiring team actually selects 3-5 resumes and have a direct personal discussion with the candidate. The recruiter needs to get updated resumes from candidates with their photos attached, and have a video call with them during the first level. It is important because in certain countries, the so-called candidate who takes the phone interview may not be the candidate who comes for the personal round! Surprise, Surprise!
- Itis equally important to value the candidate’s time in a similar way the hiring teams time is being managed – having all the necessary personal interviews in one day with the required stakeholders sets the right tone, and the last two interviews must be with the Talent office team who would check on general expectation, soft skills, etc. and a 15 minute wrap up with the hiring manager who would talk about the next steps and thank the candidate for attending. The first interview must be with the recruiter for 15 minutes who would describe the process being followed during the day and what to expect that day and in the coming weeks. One must not look at bringing in the candidate each day for every interview which would frustrate the candidates very much. Once selected, it is important to inform all candidates within 2-4 days of the interview, one way or the other. If the candidates see this professionalism, the company automatically goes high on their potential next employer list. Every action that the company’s employee does must be with the intent to lure the candidate to join them. Consider the candidate as the customer irrespective of the market conditions, and you need to sell the opportunity well to them.
- As part of selecting, it is important to do all the required reference checks – some mandated by the law, and some mandated by the job itself. Examples can be employment and education verification, professional references that can vouch for the candidate, any required medical checks, license (to operate a vehicle or operate machinery) checks, psychometric tests etc. Do not roll out an offer without doing these mandated checks.
Attracting: All the candidates called for the personal round needs to be sold about the company – the benefits, the growth potential, the culture and environment of work place, etc. The recruiter must be able to keep the candidates engaged in this process and infuse excitement in them. He must be following up with the candidate every week once the offer is given till (s) he joins so that the candidate ‘feels important that they are valued’.
Hiring: This is when the offer is rolled out and a discussion happens with the candidate around the offer. If all parameters fit well, it is important to ensure the candidate takes the offer and all efforts should be made by the hiring team to have the candidate on board as soon as possible. It is also critical for the recruiter to have the second best candidate talked to and ensured that if something goes wrong with the first candidate, this candidate is made to join immediately. In certain hot markets and hot domains, it is always better to roll out both the offers even for one opportunity so that any last minute absenteeism in joining is taken care of, and since this is a hot domain, there would always be projects available for both the candidates.
Integrating: This is where most of the recruiters and even the organization believe it is not the recruiter’s responsibility. Essentially since the recruiter has been the single point of candidate prior, it is important that the recruiter takes care of all the candidates till their probation gets over (or first six months) and develop the appropriate training plans for them to fill the voids in skills that are essential and were noticed as gaps during the interview process. Stopping with a training plan is not enough but they need to ensure that the training gets completed by the candidates. It is important to have a successful probation to all the candidates joining and this is one of the success metric for any recruiter’s performance appraisal.

How many of these actions does your recruiter actually do? Most of them would just parse through some resumes and give it to the hiring team based on their understanding of the requirement, and just schedule the interview. Is it not?

It is always critical to hire the candidates quickly as due to changing times, the budget for the job opening may not exist for a long time. Think about the reverse view of the same – if the budget indeed goes away and no one can be recruited in time and the company goes about their work normally, then may be this position was redundant in the first place. Have you given this a thought?

Organizations are about people and the quality they bring in. Knowledge management is about managing the collective intellectual capacity of the employees put together. It is a known fact now that diversity increases innovation and being innovative gives the company the much needed competitive edge. Getting new products in newer technologies and offering better solutions to customers always gives one the leadership position. While recruiting, it is important to have the best recruiters for the job who understands the job fitment and requirements better, is on top of the market conditions, has a good knowledge about the organization from both the strategic and tactical sides and one who has had lengthy conversations with the hiring manager to understand what is absolutely essential for the role and what are the nice haves. They must be able to make a judgement call on what the candidate brings in to the equation, more than what the job actually prefers and sell them back to the hiring team.

Recruitment is more about the process of getting the employee into the organization, rather than the end product (employee). Recruitment is about acquiring the best talent there is available, and ensuring (s)he is welcome in such a way that they give their best to the company. It just should not stop in screening, scheduling interviews and rolling out an offer letter – these are just a few tasks that are part of the process.

Let us NOT confuse recruitment with Human resources (I hate this name personally – prefer to call it Talent Office) as latter is about ensuring the employees lives a good career inside the company by giving him/her the best in terms of opportunities, growth, responsibilities, work-life, etc. Once you call an employee a resource, our mind has the nasty habit of looking at them as machines and not humans which is not healthy. Recruitment can be part of the Talent office though, as long as their roles and responsibilities are clearly specified and understood. The PEOPLE office hence should have at least three verticals that have some overlaps in their functionality – Recruitment, Talent Office and Learning & Development. And let us be clear who has the responsibility of hiring – it belongs to the hiring manager ONLY and the recruitment team is just a facilitator in the process.

Recruitment should ideally own integration of the employee for their first six months and should own their training and development during this period to ensure proper training takes place for the employee so that he is more successful in his job – this is filling the voids they found during recruitment which are needed in the job. He works with the L&D department to ensure that the needed courses are properly scheduled. A proper way to appraise the performance of a recruiter is to correlate it from the probationary performance appraisal of the recruit after 6 months. If he has brought the best and made him better in the first few months, then this recruiter is a golden egg for the organization.

Talking about appraising the recruiter, a few KRIs have to be listed:

How good was the engagement of the new employee between the time of the offer and the day they join as measured by the employee’s feedback on the joining date? A good way to measure is how quickly he has facilitated the candidate to join – minimal is better. Also you can also infer the recruiter’s performance through the acceptance number compared to the offers rolled out.
How good was the skill fitment based on the feedback from the interviewing panel – this would really give you an indicator how good pre-filtering was done by the recruiter? If this is not happening well within the first couple of candidates, I guess another talk with the recruiter by the hiring team is essential.
How many resumes did the recruiter manage to qualify and how many of them were appropriate – Qualify just means that the candidate has most of the skills needed for the job, and being appropriate is measured by talking to the potential employee and going through the resume and seeing whether the skills required for the new job was actually worked upon by the candidate and the candidate fits into all the conditions of the hiring team– for this, the recruiter needs to be knowledgeable in the area he is recruiting from, and this goes back to the previous point, look out for a recruiter who has been in the same area for many years. While sourcing resumes, how many channels did he use to get the resumes – referral, social media, sourcing consultants, etc.? Reducing recruitment cost would be a good criterion which may translate to using the sourcing consultants as a last resort only.
Feedback from the hiring manager and the interview panel, and the employee on the joining day about the technical knowledge and professional conduct of the recruiter is also another measure.
Key element nowadays is diversity and minority recruitment –the more diverse the company is, more different perspectives comes into any decision which makes it more effective. Diversity is measured by two angles – how diverse the set of candidates are in terms of gender, age, experience, etc. and how diverse are the skills sets of any candidate which may translate to buying more for the same price – you can either catch a shrimp or a whale with the same fishing technique! Studies show that diversity increases innovation which translates to better operations for the company. Is the recruiter voluntarily or involuntarily rejecting experienced candidates? The last point is more prevalent in emerging markets as more experience is usually directly correlated to higher salary, they consciously want to fit a younger profile within the company and they wrongly associate experience with non-trainability.
Did the recruiter document what the person needs to be trained at during the first few months to carry out his work effectively and was this mapped back to what the interview panel actually found? A training chart has to be published for every candidate by the recruiter in assistance with the hiring team as part of the probationary process.
- An evaluation after 6 months whether the employee really met the requirements based on his skills and training and how effective he was performing at his job.

I always believe in the “Rule of Two”. Ensure you have two and only two technical or domain skills (non soft skills) that one needs to qualify a candidate. More the number of skills, the lesser the number of resumes that can qualify. Usually testing technical skills is more objective and testing soft skills is more subjective. The more senior the role is, it is imperative that the candidate comes in with loads of honed soft skills. The more quickly you need a candidate, the more compromising you need to be as filling up a role may be more important than finding that exact candidate. Sometimes close enough is good enough as long as a good on-the-job training is planned. The faster the need to ramp up a team, it is best to have a daily lunch session with hiring panel to look at resumes, select a few and speeden the process.

When the hiring manager sits in some other site than where the job opening is, and this is common with multi nationals having teams outside of their headquarters, the most common complaint (s)he has is the lack of transparency of the recruitment process and the quality and quantity of resumes he gets. Again, the hiring process is owned by the hiring manager and given the global nature of today’s work force, it is imperative that good regular communication happens with the recruiter to ensure they get the best candidates for the interview process and to keep the pressure on the recruiter to get the best.

Hiring managers need to ensure the following during recruitment:

Is the recruiter the right person for the job? Does he understand the technology that the company works in? Is he someone who has been through many industries or focused on your own industry? Is the recruiter capable of asking relevant questions to the candidates? It is always good to interview the recruiter first and ensure the expectations are correct and the ‘two must haves’ are applicable to all candidates.
Set the success criteria and how many qualified appropriate resumes you would want to see every week and how many interviews needs to be scheduled and with whom.
Is the recruiter getting a good mix of screened candidates from different channels? Is he consistently getting only sub-standard candidates? If this is the case, immediate having a quick discussion with the recruiter would help to ensure the proper correction happens. From a practical perspective, there is a stronger likelihood of a ‘local’ candidate joining the organization than one from another city – make it a point to source more ‘local’ candidates.
More importantly, are there any compromises happening on the ethics front? Is the recruiter working hand in glove with certain external consultants and are they having some ‘understanding’ in the background? It is not uncommon to notice this if you look hard. Recruiting, along with vendor management and facilities management, are few of the common roles where ‘income from other sources’ is not so uncommon.
- It is time to get suspicious if the recruiter always sticks to a set of consultants even if they do not give proper resumes and keeps blaming the market for the quality, and is not able to accept resumes from other consultants with whom you would have better experience in your earlier avatar. It is better to audit the whole exercise after every recruit to see if any violation has been there for business excellence.
- You can get suspicious if you have called a few candidates for interview, and only one stands out as the ‘closest match’ – this may mean that the other candidates are just ‘fillers’ having been set-up by the recruiter who would know well in advance they would be rejected for various reasons (technical fit, salary, etc.). It is an expectation that all the 4-5 candidates that get interviewed face-to-face must be close enough to choose from which means the recruiter had done a fantastic job.
- In a few cases, in larger private or publicly held organizations, candidates pay money to get a job. Then the recruiter works with certain senior managers within to interview and select ‘this candidate’ and everyone gets a piece of the pie. Nobody notices such infraction because this is just some little noise in one tiny corner of a huge company.
Is the recruiter doing his best to get good referrals from existing employees? This is the best way to get good results as good employees always get good referrals and they can also start engaging with the potential candidates to make them join earlier. The referral bonus schemes must also be motivating enough for the employees to bring in good folks. Never let go of a referral from your super performer – the chances are they are also good. Even here, there are incidents where the recruiter would sell the referred candidates to the hiring manager only if offered ‘some piece of the referral bonus’ – one way to beat this is to ensure the existing employees refer their candidate formally through the internal system and send a brief note directly to the hiring manager and recruiter about their friend.
It is also equally important to interview all external consultants and be measuring their contributions regularly. It is imperative you put some hard expectations on the recruitment consultants and not necessarily go with whom your recruiters go with. You may know a particular consultant from a different organization that has done wonders for you and it is always nice to invoke their services so that you know what you are getting.
If you are recruiting for fresh graduates, are you recruiting from the very best of institutes? Yes, they could have higher expectation but if you want the best of talent, this is the best avenue to bring in the best. Remember, a second tier institute usually may not shape up a good well-rounded candidate.

The company itself must ensure they do not advertise for external candidates, even if this is part of a process they need to follow if they have some candidates already in mind for the opportunity. This can be disappointing and discouraging for the external candidates. They should think of rotating certain ‘valuable’ employees to newer roles and look out for their replacement in their former roles. Also ‘selfish’ managers here must also let go of their good employees to other roles with the organization if the talent is interested, and the senior management must mandate that a good percentage of senior roles be filled only by internal candidates – this would be great for global companies to transfer employees to other countries. Look out for managers readily offering some of their employees as this could be ‘bad performing ‘employees that they want to get rid of. This happens! Merit must have its way and only the better performing employees must be given opportunities with the company that they want to pursue.

They must look around only if they cannot fill with any internal candidates and once they feel they need to go out, then all external candidates must be viewed on equal footing, except may be for internal referrals. The recruiter must also keep his or her options open and must not have ‘someone’ in mind while he starts screening the candidates, as it would sound hollow when he talks in a more ‘eliminating voice’ even during the first call. An example here would be to pick on something not related to the job and he may say “you do not seem to have this”, “your experience does not relate directly to what we want” – if you have been called, it looks like you have been qualified for screening and these statements just give a negative vibe. And the worst thing is when he is trying to lowball you on the salary front even in the first call which is something uncalled for – he may say “your experience is much higher than what we want” or “you seem to have worked in unrelated areas than what we need”. The proper way is to go through the resume with the candidate over this call, and understand what each other’s want rather than making initial decisions during the call itself.

Now the debate is how many recruiters does a company need? A company, however big they can be, does not necessarily need a big full time recruitment team, but just a handful permanent trustworthy team who would be able to standardize the process across recruiters who can be hired on contract for a specific time period. The on-contract recruiters should be paid based on the metrics listed above and the small recruitment team must have a smaller base pay and a high variable pay so that they work for the best interest of the company, similar to the way the top executives are getting measured.

Recruiting less experienced candidates (< 12 years) works more on “What You Know” basis whereas for more experienced candidates (> 12 to 15 years) it usually works on “Whom you Know” basis. Hence it is important to have an extensive professional network as your career progresses, and keep oneself ahead of the technology by acquiring new technical skills every 3-5 years. Senior leadership would always bring in the folks who they were comfortable working with and whom they can trust – there would always be enough churns at the senior level when a new CEO is appointed externally who would more likely get his ‘comrades’ from prior organization to be placed at critical positions and since the ‘old gang’ becomes uneasy with this, they start to attrite and this is an opportunity for other external seniors to fill in these positions. Have you not seen this happen? Infosys now under Vishal Sikka is top heavy with former SAP employees!

Recruitment in one geography can be totally different from another, and similarly recruiting for certain technology areas can be tougher than others. Some companies have turned recruitment process to an art , and on the other side of the spectrum, in many companies it would look more like a joke because you do not feel that they on top of things when it comes to recruiting. Recruitment can be tough when the market is hot as it would be difficult to get the right candidates but there are personal ways any recruiter can role model best intent to get the right people even in those tough markets. At the end of the day, a company wants a good talent pool who can passionately contribute to the organization and this is possible only with a strong recruiter driving things properly.

In these days, where there are more recruiting consultants than the available jobs, obvious if you get calls from different sources for the same position, recruiting the best need not be a challenge. There are enough smart talents out there who will be thrilled to join a good organization if approached properly and engaged professionally. The success of the team unfortunately is directly related to the recruiter one has and hence getting the most knowledgeable, ethical recruiter with excellent communication is the need of the hour.

How to buy an Inverter Battery – a layman’s struggle in India

This is March 2014 and already into summer in Bangalore and despite the fact that elections are coming later this summer, unadvertised power cuts have started regularly. And my old Amaron inverter batteries having pushed their limits are giving way after a little over three years. Now it was time for me to replace these batteries and I thought I would go with Tubular ones with their promise of longer life that comes with added cost. I managed to do some two weeks of extensive research to know the technical jargons and what they mean so that I can confront the dealers more intelligently – as Alexander Pope said “ A Little learning is a Dangerous thing”, I am treading ‘dangerously’ through this article but wish to share some knowledge with my audience.

For those of you lucky ones who do not need to worry about power cuts and hence UPSes and inverters, bless your soul. And for these souls I just blessed, if you want to carry on with me on this article, kindly do so. For us unlucky ones who see nightmares of power cuts looming after elections, thanks to the usual excuse of lack of water and power generation and bad distribution, here is some help from a layman perspective – feeling slightly ashamed of not able to use my electronics brain more prudently! .

(Power) Inverter put simply is a device that gives us power from the stored battery – it converts the direct current into alternating current, thus helping us run the electrical devices that are connected in our homes like fans, lights, TVs and even small home appliances. Although there are huge inverters which can run heavier electrical appliances, for a common man, it is enough if it provides for a few fans, few lights and a TV which you may want to work when the main powers are down and this is where my article concentrates. In my case, I have an inverter but just the batteries that needed changing and hence this article is how to buy a battery, that too in India. I am not going to talk about what INVERTER itself to buy as this may be more electrical oriented and may not be my cup of cake. It is not advisable to connect the heavy load appliances that work on 15A socket to the home inverter and when you do the electrical wiring to your house, have them separately on a different phase.

Before I go any further, there is an excellent source of info about inverters with questions and answers that can provide you a balanced opinion: www.upsinverterinfo.com. I have managed to publish a few points here and there from this site to make some of my points clearer. Also remember to do adequate research based on your requirements before you buy and avoid lots of ‘fake’ batteries available in the market – always go with the some sort of brand that have a good dealer network in your area and a decent warranty.

There are generally two types of batteries: Lead-Acid batteries and Sealed Maintenance Free (SMF) batteries. SMF are the “Buy and Forget” types where there are no emissions, completely sealed, does not need water topping and has a very short charging time. The downside of lead-acid is it emits fumes while charging as the battery gets heated up that is not environmentally friendly. Always remember to keep these batteries in a ventilated open cool space away from any heat source.

Even with Lead Acid inverter batteries, there can be two types – the normal flat-plate ones and the Tubular ones. Tubular batteries are more reliable, charges faster, comes with higher battery life(~1.5x) , has less water loss than the normal flat plate but all these come at a cost for the same aH rating. So, a prudent customer would like to negotiate price of the tubular to be < 1.5x than a good flat plate battery.

And in Tubular they have different form factors based on dimensions called differently by each manufacturers as Jumbo, Short, Flat etc. but think of them of being in two forms – TALL or Normal, and then check the dimensions. If you do not have more floor area, you need to choose the TALL one but they do not fit into normal trolleys. HADI that gets advertised usually come in TALL tubulars.

Before one buys a battery, it is important to understand what lighting fixtures need essential backup and what would be the total wattage consumed by them. This would set the limit of both the inverter to buy and the associated batteries to be used – one must have ENOUGH backup. Then one must think of how much backup time one needs for these. Let us say a few lights, fans and a TV add up to 400W and we want the backup for 3 hours.

No inverter converts power at 100% efficiency – meaning the actual power derived from the circuit is much higher than the real power delivered – we can call it efficiency although a better word is power factor(PF). Usually a PF ranges between 0.7 and 0.8 and you must add the additional losses due to the wiring itself which cannot be that easily factored in. So the inverter has to be a rated at 400 W / 0.8 PF = 500 VA. So, it is safe to buy an inverter that can deliver a little higher and go for a 600 VA inverter to run the 400W load.

The batteries available now in the Indian market are 12V and hence one needs to go for a 600 VA/ 12V x 3 hrs. = 150 aH battery. One needs to connect two or more batteries in series to get higher voltages (as some inverters would require a 24V or 36V DC power source) at the same current, and while doing so, one needs to ensure to use the same battery type of the Equal capacity(same voltage and same aH rating) and never mix makes and sizes. The weaker capacity causes the imbalance by quickly discharging and always the weakest link. This applies to batteries getting old – even if one battery is worse than the other, one needs to unfortunately replace both the batteries at the same time. Extrapolating from my previous example, for the same 150 aH and for the same 3 hours of back up time, if we use a 24V DC source, we will need a 1.2 KVA inverter. Once you have the inverter, look at its specifications to see if it needs 12V, 24V or 36V which would make you buy, 1, 2 or 3 batteries respectively.

The inverter batteries come in the range of 80aH to 150aH for flat plat ones, and from 100 aH to 200aH for Tubular ones in the Indian market. In the flat plate inverter batteries, we have TATA Green, Amaron Current and Exide Inverter Plus among the brand names. In the tubular types, we have Okaya, Exide (Inva Tubular, Ceil, Inva Red and many other groups), Amaron, Luminous Inverlast, Su-Kam, Prestolite and Amco. I did not see much of an action in the local Bangalore market for either Prestolite (Tudor India) or Amco. We even have local Peenya makers like SunTrac who seem to be providing batteries which are much bulkier. Exide seems to enjoy a premium in the market, thanks to the perception of higher quality, number of dealers and also in pricing. There is NO reason for one to match the inverter brand to the battery of the same brand, if they are producing both but it would help you in terms of service when a problem arises as they cannot blame each other for it. Among Inverters, the leading names today are Su-Kam, Luminous and Microtek, although it looks like Exide also makes them now.

When one looks for Batteries, we have either the C10 and C20 type which denotes the capacity rating of the battery, although I am still trying to understand what it really means – the former seems to be more tailored towards solar inverters(used on daily basis)) and the later towards the home power inverter(for infrequent power cuts) now. C10 is better than C20 as a lower aH rating of C10 corresponds to a higher aH rating in the C20 [Capacity at C10 = 0.8 x Capacity at C20, meaning 100 aH at C10 rating will have 125 aH at C20 rating] – C20 just inflates the capacity! Both of them offer the same aH rating under different load conditions and manufacturers publish them accordingly in their website. For the same aH rating, higher C rating translates to higher battery costs. C20 takes a longer time to discharge than C10 for the same aH rating which makes it more suitable for home applications. Please check this for more info: http://revanbattery.com/technical-information.htm

Now you have an idea of the battery rating and the capacity you want to buy, how many Tubular batteries and what dimensions based on the space available to store your batteries. Now let us get introduced to something more technical which most of the dealers and distributors themselves may not know:

The quality of the tubular batteries is on its spine tubes. These spine tubes have to be die casted in high pressure (100 bar +) – there is a machine from Germany called HADI that is used to do this invariably and most of the top brands use it, although I would insist on you getting this in writing in a specification sheet for the battery you want to buy. Only top brands can afford these machines and if you are buying from the local brands, it is usually a low pressure or a gravity type one which result in lots of voids and non-uniformity. HADI tubular have low self-discharge, corrosion resistant and have longer life.
# of Cycles of deep discharge at 80% Depth of Discharge (DoD) – higher the better. 80% DoD means these deep-cycle batteries can be discharged down to 80% repeatedly and the more charge-discharge cycles the battery is able to do it, the better it is.
Manufacturing date is very important – the older the battery has been in combination between the transit+Go-down+dealer, the more charge it may have lost just without being connected – this is called “ Self discharge” which decreases the shelf life of batteries. When the battery reaches your home, it has less than full charge which must be compensated at the dealer end by a “Freshening up” or “Top up”. It looks like the battery would reach you within 2 months from manufacturing best case and faster from the factory during the summer season when the new stocks arrive and when the needs goes up. Again, here HADI tubular works out better due to its low self-discharge

Now you are ‘knowledgeable’ and ready to buy but do not know which brand to get and here are some tips and my observations against each:

Exide – highest cost amongst batteries and lots of dealers and they take pride being marketed as a premium brand. I believe they are the largest battery manufacturer in India – the name itself stands for “Excellent oXIDE”. Their website is one of the better ones although they do not necessarily have all their product lines listed. You can buy online as well but only the flat plate batteries- their prices are higher online than with the dealer which is the case almost with any battery manufacturer- cannot understand the logic behind it. They also do have the “don’t care” attitude because once you start bugging them for information; they do not necessarily provide it and actually get offended by our “recently gained smartness”. Exide has the widest range to choose from. Their best line is Inva Tubular – the IT series, but they have the same batteries in another brand called CEIL that they do not advertise and which is much cheaper and with lesser warranty. They try to ‘sell up’ first – meaning offer the highest price IT series and then as you tell them about your budget, slowly come down to other series which are much cheaper. I have some great interaction with their Kolkota head office but cannot say the same about their local support. They do not even have any social presence in Facebook.
Luminous – has its Inverlast series and may have the lowest warranty in its class compared to others. Their website is not complete as they have a write up only on the LT500 but not on the other batteries in terms of cycle times, if it is HADI or not etc. Have a good Facebook presence and they seem to be active there as they respond to queries within a day. They have their dealer network advertised in their website which is useful.
Su-Kam – has their Bazooka and the BIG series, but looks like they are more selling into the people who buy their own inverters.
Okaya – very confusing website and their information contradicts each other in their website. Do have an online store which is more expensive than others. Have only one dealer in SP road here that can provide the quotes. But their support network is pathetic to say the least – they do not reply to queries. Generally cheaper batteries but they have some HADI lines as well. Sounds like a Japanese company but I believe they are from Hyderabad. Generally, if you Google for batteries, Okaya has lots of mentions of complaints – not sure how truthful they are though.
AMCO – nothing to write home about on their Cheetah series, not very email centric – more Chennai based and do not care much about other cities and not sure if they use latest technologies or not in their manufacturing. Nothing is written about them in their website.
PRestolite – again, little help from the website- has their product lines and you need to search under Tudor India. Their TALL lines are cheaper than most. Again, no detailed information about their batteries on their website
Amaron – has their CURRENT Series but starts only at 150 aH and above. Absolutely nothing on their website in terms of specification or product data.
SunTrac – talked with their manufacturing head and learned a lot about the process, their website does not read well and they are local manufacturer from Peenya – all their specifications are in C10 rating, much bulkier and it looks like they manufacturer for other OEMs.

Let us talk about the final stage of the buying – dealers seem to be much better off in pricing than any online stores. None of the dealers of any manufacturer would push you to make a sale – if you want to, buy it or get lost sort of an attitude. They give a price and that is it- none of the dealers I interacted with were able to answer or understand any of my question on technology and specification above to give a fitting answer confidentially. They drop the ball and disappear out of sight. They would even go to the extent and ask you if you are a dealer or a customer! Dealers feel intimidated by the questions being asked- they are usually happy with people who have not done their homework, who just walk in, buy something and get out. I was not willing to do it as this is not a small purchase – it costs anywhere between Rs 15K to 25K for a pair of batteries that I needed to buy and based on our usage, I estimated a life time of about 5 years for a good RoI. Also realize that none of the manufacturer or the dealer are very email centric nor want to commit to a written quote, nor have information about their batteries in detail on their website.

The way to start is to send an email to all the manufacturers about what you want and what you are looking out for. Some of them do reply and provide you with a rate and the name of a dealer you can work with. Demand that you need a dealer close to your house which is very critical because if you want him to top up the water every 4-6 months and if there are any issues, it is always better to have someone close by. Also ensure your dealer has been around for some time and not the run-of-the-mill type who is bound to close soon ( I have seen lots of battery shops disappear about a few months in my neighborhood itself)- you can easily get a feeling of wanting to do business (or not) from their body language and their store once you visit them. It would not be long before you realize that each dealer would sell one brand more because the commissions he gets out of them is higher and he would bad-mouth the other brands to convince you – so be aware of these and take them with a grain of salt.

At the same time, you can also send an email to all the dealers closer to you and ask them for the best price. Then visit them one evening to make sure you have your presence felt and they understand you are not just asking but can be serious for a buy. They would say : “ if you buy now, I would get you the best deal “ – do not fall into this trap as there is never a ‘best deal’ unless you do your homework. By talking to 2-3 dealers of each manufacturer, you may have an understanding of a ‘ bottom price’ close to which they would not do a deal within which you need to squeeze them. And do this for 2-3 manufacturers you have decided. Ensure you get a pricing that is all inclusive – taxes, delivery, and connecting.

Talk around for the best exchange your old batteries can get – again here, the dealers would make it look they are doing charity work whereas every battery is recycled properly and you can get a decent price for the same. In your final quote, ensure you pay the amount after the exchange. Once you buy the batteries, ensure you have the warranties for those batteries and they have topped-up the charge before delivery to compensate for any storage related self-discharge. Higher the warranty provided, the better deal you can get. The warranty is split between total replacement and pro-rata adjustment (discounts on getting new batteries) – try to maximize the total replacement warranty which increases your confidence on the product you are buying.

Incremental Innovations are good enough

Being in the R&D environment for close to two decades and having worked with some of the most innovative and result-oriented companies, I always ponder how to do something new that is better than what is available, be it a product or service. Every company would talk about wanting to be Innovative and developing that mind set and having it as one of the values, but how it is implemented in practice?

When I talk about being Innovative, literature always talks about two kinds at the high level – disruptive innovations and incremental innovations. Disruptive innovations, the term coined by Clayton Christensen, so far in the past few decades have been Automobiles, Television, Computers, Internet, Walkman, Search engines and mobile phones, to name a few products. The incremental innovation can be variations of the above like tablets, laptops, hybrid cars, etc. or a new way of doing old things, especially betterment in manufacturing or design process. Continuous improvements usually leads to incremental innovations and if the consumers enjoy a product better than the previous one but with identical or incrementally higher features, then this is a result of incremental innovation. Disruptive innovation usually displaces the way we consume things traditionally and heralds a new branch of consumerism as we know it. Innovation, mostly referring to incremental ones by me here, must have one or more of the following criteria addressed properly: lesser cost, easier to operate, faster than previous, additional features or different area of application of the same technology.

How does a company walk the talk of being innovative? First for innovation to be a cultural fabric of the organization, it has to be behavior that has to be consciously exhibited and a value that has to be supported by top leaders and must be made to trickle down the hierarchy. Being innovative is what makes you a recognized leader and differentiates you and your offerings from others. Innovation, as it means to an organization, has to be some research development that HAS to translate to product realization and revenue monetization – as simple as that. Hence every innovation to make sense, there must be a TIME FRAME that has to be monitored actively.

The first value that I look out for is the appetite for risks. You cannot have a conservative and risk averse culture and also be innovative. Failures have to be pardoned and encouraged but repeated failures have to be addressed effectively as well. The second most critical value is to have sound logical and analytical thinking in solving problems. Since innovation is something new, you would NOT have expected that the individual to have done it earlier but you can always analyze how one goes about doing newer things. At the interview stage in any company, it is better to ask some open ended questions which have potentially more than one answer and see how the person goes about solving it.

Do not think that ideas just come out of certain individual. Everyone does have some flashes of novelty now and then and it is always better to probe every brain and see what they have to offer. It is not the CTO that drives innovation – he is just a coach of the entire team that drives innovation.

From a process perspective, it always starts with a Funnel. Have all stakeholders into a room and brainstorm ideas with the end point being what your company does or wants to do – this has to be stated clearly so that focus is maintained. It has to be run by the right sponsors who are capable of putting some of these ideas into action and have the decision making power to invest in them. Put them in Post it Notes and start posting it up and slowly you would see higher themes or groups forming under which we can start shifting those post it notes. Once the funnel is ready, filter them out properly and look out for ONE thing essentially: REALIZABILITY. This realizability, much like setting objectives during planning process, must have the genes of achievability(is it doable, given the resources), measurability (can we look at small gains on the way to ensure we are on track) and solvability (what it is solving and what it is improving). You can club a few ideas thrown by individuals into bigger ideas and this way, you get the automatic support of all the individuals selected which is a win-win.

The next step is to run it as a PROGRAM that has an impact to Business Goals – must be a visible program that has the sponsorship of the entire senior leadership team. So, the time-boundedness comes in and the leadership must be able to see incremental results as you progress along the development. Constant feedback mechanism has to be in place so that if there is a hiccup, it gets addressed immediately or ways around it is found and the progress continues at a good pace. If you are throwing darts in thin air, now is the time to set the targets. If you have innumerable features to be implemented, using a spiral strategy would come in good. Realize one or two features, see the results and whether it fits the purpose, correct if it does not and then add more features moving along. This way, at any given point in time, we have something concrete to show and be proud of. Do pilot runs and once you see revenue potential, put the pressure on yourself to realize it on a product or a service right away. This gives you the early mover advantage. As you learn and adapt, try to capture them as your Intellectual property along the way by applying for patents then and there. Do not wait till the end game to see if a product can be realized. Applying smaller stresses along the way is a good way to keep learning and achieving great things.

IN my experience, I have seen lots of ideas being thrown at you, some of them are definitely realizable, but when you ask them to put the rubber on the road, not many takers are there. A clearly defined process can never be available for any innovative program but you need to come close and have discipline in your approach formally to enable results to happen – you must have a plan to address something vague and ambiguous into something distinct and clear. After a few products, some would have never seen the end, and many that would have made it, the whole organizations slowly gets tuned up to solve newer problems and this how the role modelling, behavior and value becomes a culture within an organization.

I am open to suggestion on this article – this could seem trivial for people who have been there and done that as it would feel that I am stating the obvious, but I have realized that without a process and with lots of good technical brains, we still stand to lose out on innovation. Disruptive innovations in technology happen once in one or two decades, but Incremental innovations can happen always.

House Re-Painting Conundrum in India

So, your house is showing up some minor cracks on the surface and hopefully things are not literally falling apart! Some of these cracks are air cracks (sometimes called settling cracks) that developed within the first few months of construction and has always been an eye sore but the others have started to go deeper a little. You are seeing more cracks developing from a door frame corner onto the wall or place where two different items are laid together like around the grills on the balcony. If you have a terrace where you can walk on or having pots on for terrace gardening, there are going to be cracks observed and hopefully they are not at the stage where it starts leaking through your roof. Assuming there are no major re-construction issues and the house needs re-painting as it has been anywhere between 5 to 10 years since construction, then continue reading this document.

As with the cracks, they are usually the air line cracks that are mostly superficial and not deep. If they are deep, then this may be due to improper plastering and inadequate curing of the cement during the construction stages or just pure aging. You would notice more cracks on the places which were done last as the contractor would have been in a hurry to finish up the house towards the end. From your perspective, the cracks gets worse as you move up the floors inside the house or in an apartment (the highest floor would naturally have been more hurriedly done than the bottom floors due to time pressure). Or there could have been an internal water pipe that would have broken and had caused water seepages in odd places. This is more worrisome as you need to trace it properly, remove the plaster till the water pipe is seen and do the necessary repair, replaster it, do the putty and then be ready for painting. The same applies for any cracks that appear on the terrace – has to be filled properly before any water proofing is done on it.

Now you have decided you are in for re-painting (I am not writing this for new painting but the process is somewhat similar, may be easier but the putty part is more rigorous). I am assuming all your construction problems are fixed through a proper civil work before re-painting starts.

If you live in the Western countries, you have a one-stop shop like Home Depot or Lowes where you can pick up your paints and accessories and then do it yourself (DYI) during the weekends and in phases. But unfortunately due to lack of these stores in India and because we Indians are not used to doing our own painting, we are at the mercy of the painting contractors. Remember, they all talk well but when the rubber hits the road, they seem to be up to their tricks, as always. It is time you played hard with them to get things done your way. Never assume they know what they are doing – they have learnt most of the stuff by doing it over and over again and any variation that you may have is not in their comfort zone. Also towards the end of the painting work, they would like to rush and walk out without proper cleaning and final touch-ups, hence be aware and be smarter to hold on to part payment till couple of weeks after the entire painting job is done. Ensure they send only experienced painters and not the guys they bring from their native place who have not seen any sort of brush before. And their supervision on a daily basis is essential and part of the contract. Please read this document carefully so that you can talk the same language with them that would immediately become a good bargaining tool for you.

And if you are doing both exterior and interior, it is better to have the exterior done first before they come inside the house. Ensure you start painting during a sunny season (or rather a non rainy month), especially for the exteriors. Peak summer may not be conducive for the workers as heat exhaustion would result in improper efficiencies and bad quality. It would take anywhere from a month to 45 days for a reasonable size house of two floors to be repainted both exterior and interior, and it may take only 10 days for a 3 bedroom apartment to be painted for interiors alone. Keep the wood related painting and polishes towards the end after all the interior walls are painted or even to the next season as a separate job.

There are lots of paint companies operating in India and have been around for a while. Some good names are Asian Paints, Nerolac, Berger paints, Dulux paints, Shalimar Paints and Nippon. There are many more but these are top few paint companies that are more known here. If you already know what Paint Company you used and what type of paint you used and what exact paint color and code you use while you originally constructed, it may be helpful information to have – this applies for both interior and exterior paints. If in an apartment, you would be more worried about the interior paint and if you are in a house, you need to take care of the exterior paint as well. Most of the interiors of the apartment are the basic distemper paints only. Exterior painting in an apartment is done after approval from their association that is maintaining their complex and various other factors may creep in. Many of these paint companies are getting more aggressive in the residential sectors as they seem to be losing out on the commercial complexes where the exterior is mostly of glass and Aluminum sheets now, and the interior is open with just bare walls. Hence, be aware that they would try to sell up to any residential customer to make more money out of you rather than choosing what is good enough for the price and quality you need.

If you do diligent planning up front in the re-painting process, most of the execution issues would be solved later while the actual painting is happening. First, get the catalogs from 2-4 companies for both interior and exterior paints, and browse their website for information. NEVER use the computer to choose the color of your paint as they get reflected badly on any computer screen – what you see on the computer display would be totally off from what the actual paint would look like. It would be difficult for the paint companies to give catalogs but convince them that you need to have their LATEST catalogs to plan something down the near future for your house painting. You can walk into your neighborhood paint stores and start probing for information – I would say you can gleam a lot of information by talking to 3-4 paint store guys.

First a few painting jargons to remember to ‘talk the lingo’ with the painting professionals and with your neighborhood paint store:

Crack Filler – if you find any surface cracks and if you see any water leakages, it is better to fix this first before you start re-painting. The cracks can be on roofs (sloping and flat), terraces, exterior and interior walls – they may not look like air cracks but more where the water seeps through. Take care of this first by grooving them properly, fill it up with water proof fillers and then let it set and then check for any water seepages by spraying water around them after couple of days for some time. Dr Fixit is the most commonly used filler by most painters.

Putty – Putty is something you put for filling holes and minor cracks in a small area before you paint. After plastering of the walls, they do not look smooth or regular and this is where we start using Putty around smaller areas. The surface must be moist to apply a putty coat using a putty knife, and this is a MUST for new painting jobs where they do two coats of putty. The surface must be sanded completely around the putty area after the application is dry and before further priming and painting happens. Some folks put a primer coat before putty work takes place in which case the primer has to dry before putty work starts – many painters do not believe to put a primer coat before putty and even some paint companies do not suggest to use primer both before and after putty – please read the instruction given in your putty box before you take a call. At least one coat of this is needed for covering major undulations in a repainting job.

All loose particles should be removed using the putty knife then and there. There could be a need for a second coat of Putty for finer finishing (usually associated only with new painting and not with re-painting) but do not confuse putty with a levelling material. Putty even if done very well may not result in a completely smooth surface. Putty needs to be applied on a clean, non-dusty and non-oily surface. If the putty is done well, there may not be any need for a primer although it is highly recommended for good adhesion of paint. Sand the surface for making it smooth for the primer coat. Since the putty usually contains filler materials which decrease the curing time, it is always better to do proper curing after the putty coat. Putty for exterior wall is different from interior wall – the one for the exterior wall is more water resistant and may be cement based. Some people even use Plaster of Paris instead of normal putty for the interior walls. Insist on using putty to cover those small cracks although your painting contractor would like to avoid using putty for repainting jobs. The most commonly available putty is the Birla Putty but each paint company have their brand of putty as well.

Primer – Primers are used to make the surface less absorbent so that it increases the spreading capacity of the paint. They must essentially also be done when you paint light color over an older dark color wall, or the other way around. If a primer is done after the putty work, the wall has to be sanded and dry before primer coat is given. If the wall is more porous and has signs of water damage, primer is essential and hence for exterior walls, kitchens and bathroom walls, one needs to add primer before you paint. One coat of primer is what one can expect in a repainting job and not two. There are different primers for exterior walls, interior walls, wood and metals.

Base Coat – start the painting process only when the walls are completely dry by applying the first coat called Base coat from the shade and color of your choice.

Top Coat – apply the second coat, called the top Coat, over the base coat after it is completely dry for 6-8 hours. If needed, because of bad coverage, a third coat may have to be applied.

The entire re-painting process , whether it is exterior or internal walls or wood or metal, thus would be High speed Power wash (only for exterior walls to remove mildew and algae) – Surface Preparation – Crack Fill and Waterproof Filler –Sanding – Putty – Sanding – Primer – Base Coat – Top Coat – 3^rd coat if needed.

For a new painting process, there would one more primer and putty round. At the very end after all the painting is done, it is imperative that there are touchups to be done, following the same process in an isolated spot, where there has been noticeably change in paint condition after the second coat. Touch-up and cleaning are the two last steps before the painting is considered done.

The first thing, in both interior and exterior painting, one needs to do is to scrap the old paints and remove any loose dust particles by sanding and prepare the surface for painting. For exterior first does a complete high pressure wash before you start preparing the surface. Check for any black patches which may be due to some fungal or algae growth. Fix this right away with some anti-fungal, anti-algae treatment. If there some dampness seen, which may have been caused by some internal water pipe leakages or seepage through the walls or terraces, fix them first with a good civil contractor. Use a good waterproofing compound to treat those areas that are affected.

There may be boils on the surface or even detachment of the paint films from the surface due to use of poor-grade primer previously on the walls. Check for any cracks (usually you near a hollow noise while tapping on the wall) – these are just surface deformities caused by just aging and settling of the construction compounds. If they are believed to be structural cracks (usually they are wider), again a good civil contractor has to break it and apply proper cement-sand paste to cover it and smoothen it out. If they seem to be non-structural in nature and smaller cracks, then any good crack filling compound can be used to fill the plaster cracks after a decent grooving.

After the surface is prepared and the cracks have been filled and all the fungal treatment done, it is time to do apply the putty. Putty is a paste that is used to smoothen the surface and to get rid of holes, dents and waves. Putty levels the surface to achieve the expected smoothness for painting. If the putty work is not done, walls would not have a smooth finish and if they are painted with glossy finish, then all the waves and undulations would be seen by the naked eye clearly. If you feel that there are undulations even after putty, then it is better to go with a Matte or Satin finish.

Now the wall is ready to be painted but we need to ensure the paint sticks on the surface properly. This is when we apply primers to help paints stick better to the surface. Primers available in the market are usually mixed with water in the same proportion before applying in both exterior and interior walls.

Now the walls are ready to get its first coat, called Base coat, of a great looking shade you have chosen. If you have bright sunlight inside the house, one can risk going with a medium or even rich shade for the inside, but if you live in an apartment where you have to constantly switch on your lights even during the day and if you have dark furniture, it is better to always go for a lighter shade. This base coat has to be applied with the proper dilution as listed in the directions of the box and must have a consistent finish.

After applying the basecoat, it is better to give it 6- 8 hours for it to dry before you apply the next coat, called Top Coat. There would be pressure from your contractor to apply this top coat within couple of hours of the base coat – please ensure that this is not the case and you state it clearly to him up front to wait a day between coats. While preparation of the surface of the wall during a re-painting process, the painters would generally not sand the entire surface of the wall but just the places where they observe cracks or deformities – ideally they should do it the same way they do it for a new painting job – that to sand the entire wall. Due to this irregular sanding, even after the top coat is applied, you may still see aberrations of any old paint remaining or the color does not match the expected color for you wherein you may have to do one more coat of Top Coat (the third coat). Ensure your painting contractor is aware of this – let him know it may take 2-3 coats of paint while fixing the contract and he must agree to it on paper. If the Top coat shade color is different from the Base coat shade color, which is a possibility, then you may have a dual tinge to your wall which may look excellent in one case and awful in another.

How to choose the shade color? Are you going to paint the entire exterior with the same color with borders differently, or use two colors for the exterior with a third border color. Using more than two colors for the outside would not look great. As a resident you are more concerned with the interiors, but people always make impressions and talk-their-tongue with the color choices you have made for your exterior. Remember again, do not get fooled by any computer modelling of the different colors – they will give you an idea but they are NOT exact by any means. The only hope is to get shade cards of the colors you want and make a decision – again here, they are closer to reality but not the exact one. Once you have made your choice of colors, it is always good to negotiate samples to be put on one wall for real so that you know what the exact color would be. The samples come in small 100-150ml ml plastic boxes and there would be a 5% variation to the real ones that come in 1L or 4L or 10L boxes.

If it is an exterior paint, ask the contractor to apply to an exterior wall looking outside and then decide. If it is an interior paint, ensure this get applied to the exact room wall you want painted with that color. You can always do two colors per room inside, or just have one of the four walls in a different color – this contrast would look great. You can even apply the same color throughout the interior walls and have one wall in each room in a different color. You can always experiment with the sense of colors and ask for choices from various members of the family. Ask the kids what color they prefer in their room, and ask your old parents what colors they prefer in their room and give it to them. In all cases, kindly see to it that the walls can be washed properly with a damp cloth to remove stains. For ceilings, they generally use WHITE color with some Indigo drops on them so that it shows a little violet when they apply it. Once you are done with two coats of ceiling, you can get innovative and add the luminescent paints for the kid’s room that shows the planets and stars using stencils (do not stick anything as they fall off after 2 to 3 years and leave an ugly mark).

But ensure you have a contract that for every room, you would request 2-3 colors for sampling and they would be different in each room. Since you are going to paint your house only once in 7 to 10 years, it is better to pay a small price for the samples and get it right, before being stuck to the paint you may not like. Your likes and dislikes would certainly change every coming year and next time while re-painting, you can always do something more different. If you are big Vaastu believer, then you have certain colors for each room that you can apply and you can choose shades from that color. Whatever you choose, ensure your kitchen has a Teflon coating or enamel based color on the walls so that you can wipe the dirt and oil stains properly.

Now you know the jargons being used, have an idea about what is to be done and you have chosen your choices of colors from the catalog. Now you must ask for quotations from the paints companies directly and couple of painting contractors. I would recommend you get a quote of like grades of paints from two different paint companies (say Asian and Nerolac) and couple of KNOWN painting contractors (either someone you know personal or someone who had done your friend’s house recently). Remember, even if you get a quotation from the painting companies, they go only with contractors whom they say are certified by them (but when you ask for any certification proof, no one would provide you with one) and they enjoy a minimum of 20% margin for nothing (may be to employ a sales guy for a region). Some paint companies do not even seem to care and do not respond to any calls or emails at all and some try to ask for money to visit your site and give quotation – my take is, if they really want your business, they better come running and give you a quote free of cost. There is no way I am going to pay someone to give me a quote – I cannot assure them any business unless all the ducks are lined up and so should you.

Some paint companies try charge you for sending a contractor to give a quotation. Say NO. Especially with their slow loss of commercial business, thanks to the outside being non-paintable for most commercial establishments, they better be hungry for any and all residential business. The other thing they would do is to SELL-UP – you would start with their Extra Luxury brand and then with their Luxury brand and then with their Premium brand and they would not even suggest an Economy brand (which essentially is a Tractor Distemper). Usually their Extra Luxury and Luxury brands give you a glossy finish which would show the undulations if your wall is not properly puttied. So, I suggest go with a Matte (or they call it Satin) finish for your interior walls – go for something that you can clean stains with a wet cloth.

It is absolutely essential to have a contract written on paper as to what the process and the actual paints are , get it signed and put your own terms of payment, even it is with paint companies – if they agree, great. They would try to push for payments that is more convenient for them, but as I said, hold on to 10% even after the paint job is over for 2 weeks so that you know where the issues are that are remaining. You have every right to make your own contract and get it signed by them, and initialed in every page. You do not need to sign any of their contracts if it is disagreeable and not in line with your expectation. This would be to document that you would refer to for any mediations and pretty close to a legal contract. Do not go only with the ‘word assurances’ as invariably you would be holding the bag as they may go back on every word they said.

Now you have a quotation and have gone through the contract with the contractors to ensure all things are on the table and discussed properly – ensure this happens. It is time to choose your contractor now and from here on, it has to be execution and quality focus only. It is imperative that you and the contractor arrive at a schedule for each room and floor and you compare it with the actual progress that happens. It is also good to have your contractor tell you what he intends to do that day and the next day so that you plan accordingly. Emphasize on experienced painters and regular supervision. Give them one room at a time, let them do the putty, primer and the two coats including the doors, windows and any grills before they get another room. Or give them a pair of rooms – usually they would need 2 painters and 1 helper for every room.

Ask them to switch off their cell phones during work and keep them outside and let them use that only during their lunch period. Otherwise, it becomes a nuisance as not only it is loud when they get a call, and disturbs you when you are around, it wastes quality time in painting and they do not concentrate on the work. Also ensure that no one chews tobacco or smokes during the work day – they have the tendency to spit irrespective of where they are. A painter’s day should be a minimum of 8 hours not including their 1 hour lunch and two 15 minute breaks for tea. Let them complete a task or work before they leave for the day and not have a room half done. Ensure they follow the process very clearly in terms of how to paint and what is the curing time and whether they are diluting the water solvent paints to the right proportions. Keep on insisting on the same every day to ensure you get a consistent finish on your paints.

A good estimate for one room with 2 painters would be about 3 to 4 days. On the first day they would take out the furniture and other stuff from the room, sand and clean the walls and crack fill, and also sand and dust the grills and windows and doors. They would do the putty on the wall and the polyester putty on the wood as well and then do primer on everything. After the primer is done, they would be able to see more cracks that they did not find the first time and they would fix it with putty and sanding. Ensure they do the lofts and attics as well as they are doing it. The second day they do the first coat on the ceiling, the base coat for the walls and the first coat on the windows and grills and doors. On the third day they would do the second coat on ceiling, the top coat for the walls and the second coat on the windows, doors and grills and clean up the place. On the fourth day they would put the furniture and things back to the room that has been painted. Then they go the next room. Bigger rooms may take more time. After all the rooms are done, it is essential they come back to inspect each and every room and do the touch up and clean the entire place once with a good chemical wash.

If you are polishing the doors and not painting them, all polish work would be done at the end after the wall painting is done. It is always better to paint any wood surface if they get exposed to rain or water constantly, rather than polish. If you have an exquisite teak main door that is still exposed to rain, it is better to do polish them with Poly Urethane (PU) rather than with Melamine. Melamine polishes are usually done on teak doors for wardrobes and kitchens where either full teak shutter or plywood with veneer has been used. Remember, Melamine has the tendency to turn yellow in years to come. Of course, the base polish that all painters would use is the Sheenlac polish.

As for the metal grills, painting them with light colors would allow you to get more light in and paint them with dark colors would not reveal the dust that settles on them – it is essential that you dust the grills once in a month to get rid of dusts and keep it clean. For metals as well, wherever there is rust, they would fill it up with a metal paste and prime that area before they start their two coats of painting. If the rust is too much and has eaten up the metal, the only option is to weld that area with a metal bracket again carefully before primer is applied.

If you are intending to waterproof your terrace or roof slope, again, one can do it after all the painting is done (or when the polish work is going on). Dr Fixit NewCoat is the big name in waterproofing(and you have Perma Guard, Fosroc Brushbond Roof Guard and Roof Hyguard) and if the weather allows it, I guess, one can do it on their own by getting the materials from the local shop or have the painters do it as well. The process still remains the same – groove out the minor cracks, and fill it up with water proof paste, level it properly, apply primer on one day through the entire surface including some height of the terrace wall, and then start apply one coat of waterproof in one direction in one color and the other coat in another color the next day. Some waterproofing requires three coats in three or two different colors. The main reason that colors is different between the coats applied is to see after some years how much of water proofing is remaining and what layer has eroded off by constant rain water hitting on them. If you grow plants on small pots in the terrace, it is imperative you do an adequate water proofing (I have seen places where the roots have gone through the pots into the terrace roof) – I would suggest putting an Aluminum sheet under the pots and above the terrace roof. Ensure the waste water outlet is clear and sloped so that the excess water is taken out properly by proper drainage pipes. One can also look at putting some artificial grass carpets that are available on the market so that it reduces the heat coming through the roof and can be used with some lawn chairs for some small parties and can be easily cleaned.

If you have any stone cladding both internal and external, it is better to first pressure wash it at high speed with water, use some ordinary shampoo to brush the walls, treat them algae and fungus on them with chemicals so that it does not discolor the walls, clean with soap solution, and once it is dry, give it is a little shine with applying lacquer by brush or spray on it. If you have Mangalore tiles outside the home, first fix any broken tiles, wash them thoroughly with high speed water, treat them for algae and fungus, crack fill with waterproof materials and sand, and then all the companies have a Tile protector paint in various colors that one can apply two coats with.

To summarize for a re-painting job, the ideal agreed-upon process should be:

For Interior walls and ceiling re-painting : Chipping & Crack filling(with Dr Fixit) -> Waterproofing (if necessary) -> Sanding -> Touch up Putty -> Sanding -> Interior Primer -> Base Coat -> Top Coat.
For Exterior walls and compound walls (and any Mangalore tiles) re-painting: Surface Wash -> Brush cleaning -> Crack filling and weatherproofing -> Sanding -> Any fungal and algae treatment -> Exterior Primer -> Base Coat -> Top Coat
For wood(Doors and Windows) and metals (Grills): Dusting -> Surface preparation and Sanding -> Metal paste / Polyester Putty(Wood) -> Sanding -> Metal or Wood primer (most usually skip this step) -> 2 coats of enamel paint
- If one is doing Polish for their woodwork – Surface preparation -> Wood Putty -> Emery Sanding -> Thinner based polish (like Sheenlac) -> Emery Sanding -> more coats -> Final Hand or spray polish of Melamine or PU.
For any stone cladding: High speed water wash ->Fill cracks -> Algae and fungal treatment (check for any discoloration through sampling) -> Spray the lacquer to get a shine.

All the directions for applications are clearly specified on the paint, putty and primer boxes and cans – follow up them religiously for the best results. Ensure the contractor also follows the same and he is aware that this is an essential condition to be met without any compromises. In a hurry, they would decrease the time required between any coats drastically but do not allow this to happen. If you have given them labor and material contract, they would dilute the paint more than necessary.

As I write this in summer of 2015, for Exterior walls, one can compare Berger Paint Weather Coat All Guard with Nerolac Paint Excel All in One and Asian Paints Apex Ultima Weatherproof in the Luxury segment, Berger’s Weathercoat Smooth with Nerolac’s Anti-Peel and Asian’s Apex Weatherproof Exterior Emulsion in the Premium segment, and Berger’s Walmasta with Asian’s ACE Exterior Emulsion in the Economy segment.

For interior walls, one can compare Asian’s Royale Aspira with Berger’s Silk and Nerolac’s Impressions 24 Carat in the Premium Luxury segment all of which would give a high sheen finish, Asian’s Royale Luxury emulsion with Berger’s Breathe Easy and Nerolac’s Beauty Gold in the Luxury segment which are all with low sheen finish, Asian’s Apcolite Premium Emulsion with Nerolac’s Beauty Smooth and Berger’s Bison Acrylic Emulsion in the Economy segment which all have Matte finish.

For the metals and woods, one can find only two enamel products in each paint companies catalog – one with high gloss and the other one with Satin or matte finish.

Happy re-painting !

This article for compiled and published first in 2015

My Requiem to Selvi Jayalalitha

எங்களது மாண்புமிகு முதல்வரே

புரட்சி தலைவியே

எல்லோருடைய இதயக்கனியே

தெரியமான அன்னையே

சாக்கடை அரசியலில் மலர்ந்த தாமைரையே

திறமையான நிர்வாகியே

மக்களின் ஒரே அம்மாவே

ம் ஜி ரும் நீவீரும் இரட்டை இலையே

ஏழையின் தெய்வமே

தமிழ் மக்களின் பெருமை நாயகியே

இந்தியாவின் தலை சிறந்த பெண் அரசியே

எங்கள் இனத்தை காக்கும் புலியே

நீர் எங்கு இருந்தாலும் மலர்க

உங்கள் புகழ் ஓங்குக

Journey from a startup to an enterprise

It all starts one fine day, when a brilliant idea flashes, that you think may be socially relevant or monetizable or both. And you think over it and suddenly, what was once a simple idea has been converted into a viable business! Yes, you have just got the ‘start up’ fever. The bug has bitten. And just like any other fever, temperatures are going to rise, bad symptoms are going to appear, but at the end of the day, almost everyone survives a fever. But can you?

Before you go further in this read, more out of convenience, I am using he to denote both he and she, and using product more generically to denote products or services or any solutions that is being offered.

The general working habits of an entrepreneur are to be totally driven, committed to succeed and very assertive – he is not afraid to take risks, is very focused on goals and results, learns from his mistakes quickly and adapts to newer environment well; works well with people and other employees; and is able to juggle a lot of things at the same time. When an entrepreneur sees an opportunity, he immediately pounces upon it and successfully drives it to create something of social or financial value. Some characteristics that are typically associated for any successful entrepreneur are- persistence, resilience, good motivational power, great communication skills and a very high regard for ethics. For an entrepreneur it is important to realize that three things are non-comprisable – ethics, morals and legality of doing business.

Creativity, Innovation and risk taking are their DNA. They all want to make it big. I am terming enterprise as a company that earns money and is fairly large in size and offers a lot in value to their customers, and I hereby want to describe to the best of my experience how to turn a startup to an enterprise in years to come.

In a broader sense, an entrepreneur starts off as one of these three types or organization:

Non Profit – typically a non-governmental organization that wants to deliver to some social cause like – educating farmers to take on organic farming, setting up schools for under-privileged kids, etc. They are usually funded by some grants and managed by one or two highly socially motivated individuals. Such individuals could be highly successful folks who have left known enterprises to be driven by their own inner passion to make their community better – they may get some paltry salary to meet most of their living expenses.
Social (for Profit) – typically the undercurrent theme is the same as a non-profit but there is a little commercial side to things here, hence this type of an organization is also called a hybrid as it has both a social value and a financial value. A good example here would be a construction company who wants to recycle wastes and make buildings; installing water stations in remote villages that supplies potable water at low cost, a government library etc. They do work for the benefit of the people but they also have to work for small profits as they have to employ quite a few people, invest in some infrastructure and are continuously looking to grow. Any school or hospital, given that they are partly guided by the principle to serve the society has to operate in this mode, but do they?
Commercial (for Profit) – Examples are banks, phone or automobile companies to name a few. These companies may in turn give back to the community through their corporate social responsibility programs. This is what the default type is for most entrepreneurs- to build a successful organization that they can sustain for years or sell out strategically for bigger money. They all want to make money and plenty of it.

There are a few things a founder of a startup needs to understand and do business accordingly:

What type of company do they need to form and register?
What are the financial parameters involved in running the company?
How do they start the team and how do they grow as they find more footholds in the market?
What is their short term and long term plan for their business and how do they market and sell their solutions?
Who are the competitors now, both direct and indirect, and how to gather intelligence about them so that they can do better?

Here are more in-depth details about the factors –

Type of company – this can change as business grows or declines, but normally they start off as a proprietorship or a partnership company and go on to be a private company. One must be clear about the legal liabilities, financial reporting and tax obligations against each of these to ensure they are operating at the right type at any given time. I am not talking about the legal registration of the company but rather introducing the options that the founders can have while they start the company.
1. Sole Proprietorship – this is owned and managed by one individual (founder) who assumes all the risks and takes all the profits.
  1. One person company (OPC) – one can create a single person legal entity and allows the lone entrepreneur to run the business with limited liability protection.
1. Partnership – this is owned by two or more individual who share the risks and receive the profits in their proportion of partnership, and they have a formal partnership deed between them
  1. Limited Liability Partnership Company (LLP) – a form of business where the liability is limited to the partners and one partner is not responsible or liable for the other person’s negligence. The partners become shareholders of their company and they have the right to manage the company directly.
1. Private limited corporation – this functions as a separate legal entity and gets registered according to the local laws of establishments and is owned (and usually operated) by two or more individuals (called stockholders). The risks here are limited with accordance to their financial investment and the company is monitored by a set of independent directors to whom the stockholders have to report.
1. Franchising – totally an orthogonal type of company, where by paying a franchisee fee the individual(s) gets the rights to use the parent company’s name and sell their products and services, and is always responsible to maintain the same quality standards of the parent company. An example here is how the global fast food joints like Subway and McDonalds expand their footprint across geographies. Growth here depends on the volume of transactions that happens, and scalability is related to what the parent organization does.

I am not mentioning the other type (which is any public limited company) here as this article is about startups and generally, public limited company means that you have done an initial public offering with a lot of investors and this usually happens about 8-10 years after successfully starting the company and so are pretty close to becoming an enterprise.

Finance – It is all about funding needed at every stage and therefore is critical to understand the cash flow and to maintain a precise record of transactions to show revenue and profits. While I am no financial expert, I would like to introduce some commonly used jargons used in the daily life of entrepreneurs and what they mean in layman’s terms, without any deep accounting interpretations.

Terminologies:

Investment capital – The initial amount put into the business by the founders either through their personal savings or through an obtained loan. Usually one must have their first 6-9 months of operating cost covered by this investment capital.
- Sales is simply the money one makes selling their solution.
- Revenue: At the very start, sales and revenue would mean the same, but as days go by, any investment returns and royalties of your IP -to name two- gets added to sales to denote revenue.
- Profit (or Loss) is the money one has left (or lost) after taking care of all the expenses of running the business. The word earning is also used to mean profit.
- Gross profit – this is essentially difference between the revenues and the cost of goods sold.
- Operating cost: this would include the real estate and office space rental expenses, employees’ salaries, all utility bills etc. – this would always be there, irrespective of whether you are making money or not.
- Working capital: This is cash that is needed for every company to cover their operations cost. Efficiently managing the working capital in terms of faster receivable conversions to cash and lower inventory translates to better health of the company. A business needs to have this liquidity to continue its operations.
- Operating profit (or Earnings before Interest and tax – EBIT): This is the profit from business operations before the deduction of taxes and interests. This is got after deducting the operating expense from the gross profit. Operating profit is the best measure for running a company and it is best to keep both the labor costs and the manufacturing costs down.
- If you do have profit (also called pre-tax profit), you need to take care of the government by paying their dues in terms of taxes.
- Also if you have to grow the business, you need to reinvest in your business in terms of more employees or equipment from your profit.
- One needs to pay the interest part if the company has been financed by debt
- After all this, the money left is yours as post-tax profit, also known as Net profit.

Cash flow: Every entrepreneur has to understand the difference between revenue, profit (before and after tax) and Cash flow. The most important is definitely cash flow which is the one that pays your bills and salary. Simply put – it is the money coming in and going out. If you cannot manage your cash flow, success is almost unobtainable.

First the startup has to realize profit and then later find means to maximize the profits. Profits can be made through outstanding receivables but is realized only if it gets converted to cash that one can use. One can convert all the profits realized into growth through investing in the company through better equipment and adding marketing muscles, and still have no money left. Profits are also used to pay debts (interest on loans etc.). Profits stuck as receivables or on immobile assets do not help cash flow.

Funding patterns:
- Bootstrapping – basically from one’s personal savings
- Crowdsourcing – raising money from a few people
  - Seed – This is got formally from some professional angel investors in the early stage of your startup, usually smaller amounts compared to what a VC can provide.
- Equity financing – means you get money in exchange for part of your company.
  - Venture Capitalist (VC) and Private Equity (PE) come with a formal series of funding your company in exchange for stocks (of your company), which essentially means the founder’s ownership gets diluted at every step. They usually come in the picture at a later stage when you have built some credibility.
- Debt financing – one can borrow cash which needs to be paid back, irrespective of whether the startup is turning a profit or not.
  - This is done through bank business loans, credit lines, and even through VC debt
- Grants – usually given for any social development causes and are rare to find.
Various team structure as growth happens – with most of my experience being in IT companies, the numbers and timelines listed below at every phase are just ball park estimates and they do vary from industry to industry, and on the technology maturity.
Hi Octane phase:
- Team structure: Absolutely flat, everyone multitasking and all of them are high on energy to prove something valuable.
- Total Employees in company: 1-10 employees, essentially the founders and a few friends. “Men on a Critical Mission” being the work culture. Engagement model between the employees is just informal and everyone rolling up their sleeves and contributing, all in an ad-hoc manner.
- Approximate time period : First 6 to 9 months of the startup
- Customers : May not have one, but still searching for one or two
- Typical Funding: Mostly boot-strapping through the founders. No money is coming in and only outflow is happening and hence critical to keep operation cost very low.
- Maturity of product or service: Basically an idea that is given a form in terms of a novel minimal viable product which gets showcased as a demo or a pilot.

Confidentiality about the innovative solution is maintained by all the team members and nothing is documented during the process- they all know what final solution they all want. There would be some good feedback and ‘hazy’ acceptance (or not) in the market, which gets incorporated into the solution being offered to make it more robust.

“Survival or Death” phase:
- Team structure: Still flat, everyone is still multitasking but is also clearly responsible for some part of the solution.
- Total Employees in company: 5 to 20 employees, adding some dedicated test function, few more developers and your first sales and marketing person. Engagement model between the employees is transforming to be more semi-formal as they are held accountable for part of the overall solution. While hiring new employees, it is important to get folks who are entrepreneurial, have an appetite for innovation and are ambitious in their quest to solve problems; if the growth happens, this is the core team that would be leading and managing the company down the road including managing the entire execution of deliveries for future products. Small ‘undefined’ teams of two or three are developing parts of the solution and the founders are slowly getting the hang of leading and managing teams and products together.
- Approximate time period : 6 to 24 months of the startup
- Customers: Definitely have one, maybe two, and engaging with them closely and more regularly. The team needs to deliver a good product to them.
- Typical Funding: Again no money may be coming in and hence, there is a need to crowdsource from friends and family to survive.
- Maturity of product or service: First sellable product or solution is ready in accordance to the essential features that the market needs. You already know what the bull’s eye is and you are focusing on the same. Exiting this stage may throw a few surprises – having validated your idea as a product, now the rubber hits the road to check for the actual potential of your solution in the market.

Since some acceptance is happening, it is important to lock down one or two customers and work with them to make your product happen with proper non-disclosure agreements signed legally. As the team just grew a little, with everyone wearing an entrepreneur hat, they would tend to pull in different directions and hence, it is critical for the founder(s) to give them the focus to achieve their common goal.

As you wind down this phase, you may be shocked to find that quite a few competitors are offering similar solutions. Your solution may be better or faster or cheaper, or your solution has a unique flavor that is liked by many – in all scenarios, it is better to go back to the drawing board and make the suitable corrective actions speedily. If you survive, you are growing. If you are nearing death, it is time to start new ventures based on lessons learnt or do something else that one is more passionate about. Probably one can take the next step to growth if there are a couple of angel investors and VCs knocking at your door – it is time for to strengthen one’s financial acumen.

Sprouting (First growth) phase
- Team structure: One level hierarchy established and although not a true matrix organization, getting a specialized project manager would help to drive execution formally through a process. The founders feel they are not in total control, delegation of responsibility has happened and they start operating more strategically leaving the tactical execution to their managers.
- Total Employees in company: 20 to 50 or 60 employees, with clear functional responsibilities assigned to team leads or managers. Time to make the engagement model between employees more formal and a people office to manage talent is now in place (maybe two members – one HR and one recruiter). Start developing policies for the company and the values that you want to establish to highlight your cultural fabric of working. Also a dedicated sales and marketing team is in place to acquire more customers.
- Approximate time period: 2 to 4 years since establishing the startup.
- Customers: Handful of them to whom one starts delivering to or customizing their solution. Need to add lot more features to the product to make it more valuable, and maybe add parallel products similar to your original one, but targeting different industries or offers variations in features from light to heavy.
- Typical Funding: More crowdsourcing and funding from good angel investors, or may be a business loan to do some debt funding as a second choice. If angel investors are in, some dilution of equity may happen. Now is the time to contract out the financial part to a specialized expert to work for company and its well-being. Cash will start flowing in as the product is being sold now and it is time to get into proper financial planning – budgeting and forecasting etc. At the same time, the operation costs has also increased in terms of more salary and more marketing costs, and hence one needs to ensure cash flow is good and some reinvestment is happening.
- Maturity of product or service: Variations of the product are being sold, across industries. Lots of word-of-mouth feedback on the products going on in the market and newer avenues are opening up.

This is the real execution phase – it has to be ensured that all the solutions for various customers are delivered on time and with high quality. Good publicity around the product is happening due to various offerings at different price points for the customers. If operating in the services space, start expanding on the disciplines that one can offer solutions for and add different industries to the customer list. One would see an organization emerging here with some clear span and accountability. As long as the ‘novelty and utility’ factor of the offerings are not wearing out, one would be ahead of the completion with your own USP (Unique Selling Proposition).

Irons in the fire (More Opportunities) phase – honestly, the previous phase and this phase may be seen as one phase as they have a thin line separating them. But this phase is distinctively a steep exponential growth phase where there would be struggle to meet commitments. The offerings are rocking in the market, the goods manufactured are growing in volume and are respected for high quality leading to customers increasing business in the offered services lines. This is the best phase of growth where delivery skills matter the most – as long as one executes, they would be dancing to their bank.
- Team structure: Still at one level hierarchy but with a working model that bears distinct resemblance to a matrix organization with handful of project managers and accounts teams. The first formal organizational chart with vertical and horizontals is in place.
- Total Employees in company: About 100 to 200 employees, with managers having technical product leads to address each and every product or service line. Since 75% of the team is new, it is important that they get integrated into the company properly and they feel welcome and motivated.
- Approximate time period: 3 to 5 years since establishing the startup.
- Customers: About 10 to 15 customers now from various industries and of different sizes, asking for more and more.
- Typical Funding: Now is the time Venture capitalists and Private equity folks come in with their first series of funding, trying to get as much of equity from you as possible. If one can, it is better to always go through some debt financing through loans as a first option so that one can still preserve the equity and ownership properly. This is the time when lots of money is flowing in, and the first taste of profits is being relished.
- Maturity of product or service: Variations of the product are being sold, across industries. Many forces are pulling the company in various directions to deliver on their commitments and it is imperative that good customer relationship gets maintained in this process.

You are a mini-enterprise now. So far, all the growth has been organic or may be acquisitions of smaller entrepreneurial teams to close some gaps or add some value in the offerings to strengthen the complete portfolio. At every phase, the customer base is expanding. Your exit plan is to build it to a proper enterprise over time or get bought off by a bigger organization.

Gorilla phase – I term it in this way because on land, Gorillas are not that agile as the other apes, and this is true for your organization but they do have tremendous strength and power. Also Gorillas are very intelligent, can do complex tasks and can communicate with people. The Entrepreneurial founder is now sitting far away from the real action and there is a hierarchy below him to work his plan. Agility in execution may be lost or definitely get slower and hence it is critical the customers gets managed properly in this phase by the founders directly as there could be fallouts due to bad execution and improper communication.
- Team structure: Two levels of hierarchy with a Project Management office and a proper People Office in place. Recruiting is a challenge here as you need to have more people executing the planned work across many customers. An international office may also need to be created.
- Total Employees in company: About 200 to 1000 employees, with senior managers and managers responsible for most of the execution. Again here you would have 75% or more of your organization new and hence it is important they get nurtured, trained, feel important and motivated within the organization.
- Approximate time period : 5 to 8 years since establishing the startup
- Customers: Lots of customers, big and small, across various industries and various geographies.
- Typical Funding: The best case scenario is to fund the expansion through the cash flows and profits, or through more business loans. Or one may need the help of few more angel investors and VCs/PEs to expand at the cost of equity. The advantage with going the VC or PE route is they have an established network and can find synergies between many investments they may have and also have extensive network to sell your solutions better.
- Maturity of product or service: Many different products are being sold, across industries and many different services lines are making money.

At this stage, you are close to an enterprise and likely that you are taking your company public to ease any money pressures on the expansion plans. One must start thinking beyond their industry and comfort zone and may go after an additional industry or start some neat inorganic acquisition to expand the baseline. The company is now considered to be the top 5 players in the field they are are in and since loads of money is coming in, careful financial decisions needs to be taken to address all the objectives.

Reinvestment Phase – I call it so plainly because you are towards the tail end of the bell curve of your industry and hence not able to grow anymore. Classic example is when the PC market died, all the computer manufacturers moved to laptops and then as the laptops are in the stage of less growth phase now, now we see the same manufacturers in the field of tablets and smart phones – Lenovo and ACER are typical case studies here. Since the technology shifts so fast now, the timeline that one can become history is shrinking as well and hence one need to act smarter to expand with new technologies while still making money in the older one. It is time to revisit the whole startup phase again, but now with a newer technology and newer areas of investment. But there is no guarantee for success. Say for example Intel and Microsoft who are leaders in the computing have not been able to get a foot hold in the smartphone market yet, yet they still rule the roast in the enterprise and server market.

A one year and a three year Plan, revised annually – I see this being missed by most of the entrepreneurs. It is all stored up in their head and unless this is clearly articulated and understood by everyone in the team, engagement of employees does not happen. It is good to have a documented plan that gets revised regularly as to where one wants to see the company heading, who are the target customers and where do they see their products fit in the big scheme of things.
1. SWOT analysis – assess one’s strengths and weaknesses and capture one’s opportunities and threats. The reason I suggest this being done annually as an exercise is that most of the time, your strengths quadrant would be increasing as you start to innovate and learn new things and in this process, old weakness become your strength. You would now have new weaknesses though. Also, some the threats you would have captured earlier would not seem to be so, and newer and modified ones do come into the picture. Likewise, you would suddenly see an ocean of opportunities as you start tweaking and building your solution to address adjacent areas as well.
1. Business plan – Although a marketing and financial plan will be part of an overall business plan, one needs to do a careful analysis of the environment regarding the technology being used, the political and economic environment in the target market and how it may influence your product or service; and understand all legal requirements pertaining to your service or product. This detailed analysis of the business environment has to be done even before one start’s’ working on the demo or pilot. It is best to articulate who the potential customers would be, what markets to target and what would be the likely demand of your product or service. There are lots of free templates available online to write a good business plan.

A proper business plan is a golden document that gets revised every year, and gives a strong baseline to all the team members so as to have them all on the same page, ensuring everyone understands and is clear about their startup objective. This plan must also indicate key risks to their business, when they may get triggered and how to mitigate them if they occur.

Marketing plan – This is the part where one needs to clearly articulate their target market segments and how the new innovative products or service would be positioned and have a selling strategy around the product along with a proper pricing strategy. Get some intelligence about the competition, have a good promotional and distribution strategy and map out a proper marketing implementation of the product including the marketing budget, sales objectives and how one would be monitoring the translation of the marketing program to sales.
- Financial plan – This would show the burn rate of the cash reserves to cover your operations for the first few years on a monthly basis. Estimate a break even analysis when one would realistically see earnings for their products and service, the funding plan for a 3 to 5 year horizon and list all the expenses one would incur during these first few years. One should revisit this financial plan every quarter for due diligence purposes to understand where one stands and what corrective actions needs to be put in place to continue a successful operations. One needs to understand the usage of money coming in and the profits being generated so that reinvestment happens prudently.

Competitive landscape – there is an old adage that says if you have thought of an idea; someone is already working on it. The other way to look at it is if there is no competition, there may not be a market at all for that idea. So, before jumping into the arena, it is better to chart out your PIE in the bigger Eco-system and see where you fit in and what exactly you are addressing and if there is a credible market for the same. Once the idea gets firmed up, look at close competitors to understand what they are up to and try to incorporate something better than what they are doing in one’s solution. Remember, this world is all about the bigger fish eating the smaller fish.

If your business in not scalable, it may end up being a one man show throughout. For some businesses, this is fine. Scalability is not to be confused with growth, as the former is about the architecture of your product and the latter is about how efficient your sales force is. The former is about business models and the latter is about size. Growth happens usually at an additional operational cost whereas scalability does not need to be.

Self-proprietorship and franchisee companies are usually not scalable as they work on an individual’s offering of his expertise like a consultant, architect, accountant, shop-owner etc. You can still grow without being scalable but you would soon reach a plateau. Only if the business is scalable can you grow to be an enterprise someday and this is the SOLE CRITICAL criteria of startups that want to aim big and create more jobs and newer markets. You can fund your startup through external sources only if you show you can scale your offerings and have a plan for the same. And the growth has to be seen and realized either in terms of value they add or revenues they generate, or preferably both.

The latest trend I see with young folks is that to develop a mobile app in the latest operating system and sell it in an IOS and Android store – this is great and if the users like it, you are reaping in some good money. But this does not mean you can scale this app or monetize these apps otherwise. Having a mobile app developed does not mean you can run a business with it.

As an entrepreneur, you can offer a newer solution in an older technology, offer an older solution in a newer technology, create a newer technology by being the first to offer something in it, can make an older solution in an older technology faster or cheaper or better , offer a known solution of one industry to another industry where it is novel, manufacture products with high quality and better cost and cater to variety of industries, or offer your professional services to customers who want to engage and partner with you to develop products or solutions for them. Yes, the opportunities are vast. But an entrepreneur also will find it difficult to realize that he may not have the control of the organization as it expands and hence critical to have the best seed team as his first recruits that he can count on who would deliver what he wants every time with high quality.

And closing remarks, in most instances, I have never seen the startup selling the same product or service they started off with, but their learning experience on the way with the feedback loops involved at every stage would see them offering something that could be totally different from what they had planned. This is the irony of startups. What you start off planning is not usually what you end up doing and being known for.

Although it may look like I have simplified the journey of an entrepreneur through this write up, I’m just trying to put some formal process around how things evolve. Every journey is different and difficult but not very far from what has been documented here. I always see an abundance of energy and enthusiasm of an entrepreneur and his confidence rubs on other team members to make the startup work. Success is not always measured by whether the startup made money or not, but also by the experience and self-learning they go through which helps them in future and in other walks of life, beyond their career. And the pleasure of working for themselves is the best thing of an entrepreneur. The author is a business and technology consultant associated with Business Intellects, Bengaluru who has been privileged to assist a few startups at various phases of their journey. His passion is to help small and medium enterprises be more successful or turn around their business, and also does some value based leadership workshops and corporate training.

Diversity brings Stability and Innovativeness

We have seen a lot of leaders challenging the notion of a diverse workplace due to some inbuilt perceptions. Recruitment gets put on hold for months together for a role that is classified as ‘diversity friendly’. How often do we see colleagues squirming about ‘certain entities’ when it comes to recruitment? Lots of HR folks complain that managers are finding it difficult to lead a diverse workforce and it gets worse if the teams are in different locations. Far often than you wish you hear that there is a gender bias when it comes to compensation.

Gear up, folks. We live in a global workplace now and it is inevitable and unavoidable to have a diverse environment to work in, and it is imperative to adopt and welcome the diversity for one to be successful. Managing diversity is a top KPI for every person now. Everyone wants to do a stint abroad outside their home country to look good on their profile.

According to Wikipedia, diversity is used to describe “entities with members who have identifiable differences in their cultural backgrounds or lifestyles”. University of Oregon mentions that “diversity encompasses acceptance and respect. It means understanding that each individual is unique and recognition and exploration of these individual differences is key to nurture a safe and positive environment. It is about understanding each other and moving beyond simple tolerance to embracing and celebrating the rich dimensions of diversity contained within each individual”.

Given globalization and the breakdown of international borders in conducting business, every organization EXPECTS that there will be ‘broad based INCLUSION’ based on gender, race, color, religion and religious beliefs, national origin, ethnicity, age, marital status, sexual orientation, disability, social-economic status, gender identity, ancestry, ideologies or even veteran status, whether or not there are local laws supporting the same or legal acts specifying the same. It is a consorted leadership effort in almost all successful organizations to have all forms of inclusive growth in their structural DNA, thus gaining confidence amongst its employees and stakeholders. Every good organization strives to ensure that it is a SAFE environment for all employees to co-exist peacefully without fear of being ‘victimized’. If such ‘hostile’ behavior against a group or an individual does exist, be it direct or psychological, and is found to be deliberate, with the intention to ‘harm’ or ‘hate’, then such acts must be IMMEDIATELY dealt with to uphold the organizational value and integrity. Learning to tolerate, accept and work with different types of people leads to a healthy workplace. Remember all five fingers are of different shapes and sizes and the same applies to people.

Treat everyone as an individual who is valuable to you and valued by the organization, instead of having a ‘blanket umbrella that is based on misplaced perceptions of certain entities’. Compensate the employees proportional to the skills and values they bring to the organization.

In a recent finding by MasterCard (“Connectors Project”), it was revealed that Indians face a greater bias on account of their gender, ethnicity and religion when it comes to getting a job or securing a loan. A related study by Schick and Steckel (Dept. of Economics, Ohio State University) finds that tall workers do earn better than their shorter colleagues. All these discrepancies are due to ‘perceptions’ that we form based on personal experience or observation. By addressing this ‘push for diversity’, it is important to close this perception gap.

This topic is mainly confined to organizations where success is measured by higher revenues, better products, being a leader in their field and happy employees. On the other hand, Government has to address diversity in a mandated way to uplift the portion of their population that is not ‘privileged by some criteria’.

In India, there is ‘Unity in Diversity’. India is one big family living harmoniously as one entity although there are many different religions and languages that comprise it. India is a surprisingly stable country given its democratic nature of government, diversity, religious and cultural differences and the myriad of issues that inundate the news streams day in and out. Moving from one state to another is difficult even for locals as the language differs. Moving from one town to another town in the same state does not make life easier- the dialects are different. But a cohesive fabric, Indians have survived with all these differences for centuries now. India even gave the world a woman Prime Minister in Indira Gandhi in 1966 whereas England had their first in 1979, Australia theirs in 2010 and US or Japan till now has not got a women President or Prime Minister.

Given my experience living in Canada for a few years, as a well-accepted immigrant of a beautiful country, it was hard for me to fathom the fight over two languages (English and French). The cultural fabric is to engross in every Indian that despite the differences around, they chose to co-exist peacefully and been tolerant over the years – this is something I really feel every other country has to learn from India. Differences exist but are carefully managed.

At a high level, let us take the case of two countries, both developed and both an envy for other countries – one that thrives on foreign immigrants (heterogeneous teams) that enables an innovative mindset, USA, and the other that is relatively more homogenous in population but revered for the quality of its products, Japan. I would say the same thing about Bengaluru where more than 70% of the population is immigrants from other states, and hence the entrepreneurial culture is more distinct here, just like the best of the world comes out of USA. I am not implying by any means here that being homogenous does not lead to innovation and being diverse does not produce good quality, but more a generic appreciation of what these countries are more known for. Diversity definitely is America’s strength and all the major corporations like Intel, Microsoft, Google, Cisco, Oracle etc. have indeed a mix group of employees and were able to manage them well.

So, it is just not about diversity but also about proper diversity management that is instrumental for any successful organizations. Having a diverse workforce brings in different set of values and views, based on where they come from, how they were raised, religious beliefs, personal and professional experience, family background and so forth, and it is imperative that a good manager to be able to hear all pertinent views and be able to make the best use of them to enable a productive environment. Conflicts are healthy as long as they are managed well, and conflicts have to be constructively solved by having all the players on the table and combined reasoning taken forward keeping in mind the best for the organization. After hearing all the views, it is great to arrive at a balanced decision and I am sure without these various perspectives, the options one may think of is limited. Non-obvious options that come out from diverse views are worth considering kindling creativity within the whole team, thus being able to translate to a competitive advantage. Management must ensure that awareness is created to encourage these differences and to highlight the fact that we all get richer by these varied experiences. As an example, if four people stand in four directions away from an asymmetrical building and are asked to describe it, they would come out with different descriptions of the same building depending on where they are standing – they would easily miss out what they cannot see. This is what I mean by ‘bringing in perspectives through diversity’. Lots of management papers have been written highlighting that diversity does bring competitive edge to organizations – there is stability created in the organization due to a heterogeneous team.

Although stability by itself does not lead to progress, proper management of a stable organization can prove wonders in productivity and innovation. Pooling in a lot of ideas and funneling them properly does give every organization a rich set of options to ponder and invest. Homogeneity must not be confused with monotonicity. With segments like manufacturing which is very process intensive, it is better to be good at what you do and of course, you can do better than what you did through innovation in process.. But still at a higher level, manufacturing does look like a monotonous routine (I personally disagree though) –timesheets and prescribed output is sacrosanct. Eating the same type of food every day does get boring after a while, does it not?

A few examples to show how diversity benefits:

For those addicted to cricket like me, the case of Indian Premier League’s success can be attributed to the fact that there are foreign players within each team and for youngsters who want to come to Indian cricket, this is a great chance to mingle with a few best in the world and gain from their experience.
Take the case of NBA, it got better over the years thanks to an influx of great players from Nigeria, France, Australia and even China. People come to support them and they have managed to provide rich entertainment value. The coach (“diversity manager”) decides whom to play or not, depending on who is in form and who can make a difference… he makes a call if Yao Ming plays for 2 mins or 40 mins for the good of his team.
Even farmers in India do ‘crop rotation’ in their fields, almost 3 to 4 times a year. Depending on the season, and the best crop to plant and harvest, they make their decision.
Andy Grove (Intel), Sergey Brin (Google), Marcus Goldman (Goldman Sachs), Pierre Omidyar(eBay), Maxwell Kohl (Kohls) and Jerry Yang(Yahoo!) are all few examples how USA adopts its sons properly by giving them the freedom and opportunity, and who in turn give it back to the society in terms of generating lots of jobs.

It all shows that it does pay more to be GLOBAL than to be local, given the way business is run nowadays. As a diversity manager, it would pay to bet on your top horse but you must definitely allow all your horses to run and compete equally to ensure there is a level playing field. There can be positive surprises from unexpected quarters periodically. Equal opportunity, which is the recruitment motto behind any US organization, is a much better choice than reservations and quota systems as this provides an unbiased platform for everyone to be hired in.

Hiring the best out there is definitely more important than being diverse (for diversity sake) but the management has to consciously address diversity as part of their recruitment process. Not recruiting some group due to generic perception problem is wrong – treat everyone as individuals first and then it is the management’s responsibility to address each individual’s integration into a diverse group. Saying ‘(s)he does not fit in the group’ does not bode well for any management – this essentially means they have not done enough. By not managing diversity properly, there is a direct cost escalation to the organizations that has been well documented by management researchers.

Being just diverse just for diversity sake is also a bad option – that means valuable time to recruit and to execute is lost. Setting a diversity quota to meet annually is a bad move – only government can have ‘reservations’ to address some economic inclusions of certain segments of society. Mandating certain things at the grass roots level by the government in providing compulsory education to all their citizens is definitely an ace above having reservation of jobs for certain segments of population.

If the organization does have a need to meet some diversity goals, it is better to select and train from within, rather than wait for the ‘right person to walk in’. When expats usually get sent to other countries to maintain and impart the culture and values of the organizations, it is also imperative to have couple of potential candidates to coach and train to take over their role in couple of years, and it is a recommended practice to have a succession plan that is confidentially maintained but is being tracked from the first day of assignment.

To summarize, it is also about not letting your perceptions rule your decisions. It is not about just addressing diversity but also about managing them properly. Any day meritocracy supersedes diversity. Quality is needed to get the competitive edge and innovation is the key to attain leadership position.

Thanks to Manoj Vakeel for providing feedback after a detailed review, and to Malayala Manorama publications and University of Oregon websites for some reference data mentioned here. The author is a technology consultant, and a soft skills and leadership trainer, based out of Bangalore, India.

CUSTOMER RECOLLECT & RECONNECT

An interesting CRM business story

What do these establishments below have in common? How do they survive and grow?

A neighborhood specialty exotic pizza store that uses wheat dough?
An exotic flower boutique that provides bouquets for special occasions?
A made-to-order shoe manufacturer that does fit-to-walk shoes for you?
An organic fresh-from-farm outlet that gives you the most tasty fruits and vegetables?
A specialist dry fruit and nut store that sells around-the-world products?
A baker renowned for tasty and nutritious bread and biscuits.

Yes, you are right. They offer specialized services, not run-of-the-mill sort of solutions. They may all be family-owned and they may be one of a kind, and most likely, do warrant higher margins than the rest. They may be pricier than the common pizza or a florist or a normal baker which means they would have lower volume of business (not necessarily though) but definitely a particular type of customer who wants to enjoy the very best. They survive due to the patronage of these customers and their word-of-mouth campaigns.

But a growth question always bothers the owner of such establishments – how do I grow? Should I grow? What is the best way? As any consultant would say, the answer is simple – “It depends”. They definitely take care of all their customers who walk into their door well but going above and beyond this is something that is not in their DNA. Believe it or not, many of these businesses make anywhere on the upward of a quarter of a million dollar a year. I will explain to you how and it is simple- let us say on an average 50 unique customers order a specialty pizza and a drink at an average price of $15, which makes the owner get to the annual revenue an upward of quarter of million$.

My observation on these establishments is that even today, in these connected times, they do not seem to be going after customers, neither new nor old. Once they have decided to grow, all they need to do is to simple things would make their dreams come true. Let me tell you a real business story and how we worked with them to help them grow(some of them are already done, some are being done and some planned but I thought I would add this all up in this story)- there was this businessman in New Delhi who sourced the top notch variety of dry fruits, nuts and spices from Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan and other parts of the world etc. whose average daily revenue was $1000 (on an average he had 20-25 customers walk in to the store and buy items worth $40 to $50) – on weekends he made double. He normally sits at the front desk, had couple of helpers packing stuff for the customers and had one computer for billing. He had a small storage at the back- his “go-down” which was used to replenish the items in the store. His customers are from all walks of life – from tie-wearing executives to politicians to seemingly rich business men. They come to the store, look at the basket and based on their perception of freshness (all of the products are relatively fresh as there is not a stock for more than three weeks and he gets fresh products every fortnight) and their desire, pick up items, get them packed, get billed, pay the money and they are out – all within 10 minutes.

This dry fruit and nut man Mr. H definitely wanted to take the next step and grow. Honestly, he is not a typical client I get as I usually work with the manufacturing or information technology business, but I was excited and wanted to give it a shot. So, I verified with him if he can get a bigger store, can he sell online and hence can he work out better logistics and packaging for the same, can he get into a bigger social presence online, etc. and for all my questions he answered in the affirmative confidently. Then I had him do a desired sales projection on a monthly basis for the next two years. Then I asked him for the increase of input cost he sees as he has to source more materials and operations costs would increase due to additional helpers and packers, and he gave me a reasonable estimate. Then I knew he had it in him and he was serious – he knew all about WHAT is to be done, and I told him I will help with the HOW part and we agreed on a partnership and a financial relationship and we both would work on attaining the same goal.

There are three things that can be done to improve the way one conducts business, all of them related to one another:

Some low hanging change to the way one operates.
What can we do socially and online – either in person or through umpteen websites?
What extra can we do for our customers – the ‘above and beyond’ rule. In any selling business, statistics show that more than 70% are repeat customers – why cannot we make their experience levels delightful?

What can be changed in the way one operates his business?

From the first month on, he had one of his helper welcome each customer at the entrance and get their contact details – their phone #, email address, their social accounts their location of residence in New Delhi and important dates in their family (birthdays and wedding days) – during the wait time, they volunteered this information which was keyed into the system by the end of the day.

After every week, and every month, he had a summary tally of how much and what each customer bought.

He also started offering a card membership stating that after an overall purchase of 5 kegs or more, they are entitled for 500g of Golden Raisins. This made his customers stay a little longer inside the store which helped his store helpers push other items that they do not usually buy. The system automatically resets after they take this freebie and they are given a new card. Just like a Starbucks card!

After a few months, once he was getting good results, he started another shop in another corner of Delhi and had his son take control of this one. His son was also made responsible for all the online sales.

What did he do online or socially?

First he got into Pinterest so that he can start using PINS for his business and he also got lots of ideas from this social site from other store owners globally. Although Pinterest is not that prevalent in India, it gave him some exposure to other similar businesses and seeds ideas into his operations and offering.

Next he started testing the online market – he outsourced to develop a website for his store and also selling his goods in one leading e-tailer in India. After about three months, he added one more leading e-tailer. In both these e-tailing option, he captured the customer’s data to the level he could so that he can start sending advertisements to them during festival days. Now he has perfected his packaging in a more cost effective manner based on the initial feedbacks he got. After some initial hiccups in review, the customers started giving him good feedback. His only complaint was the credit time to get the money from the e-tailers is a bit longer, and his return rate either due to bad packing or some customer not liking the product was about 8%. Slowly he moved some of his e-tailing customers to his website as well.

He had a business page setup in Facebook and then he started adding the social accounts of the customers that were given to him. Every fortnight, he would suggest some recipe to be made out of dry fruits and nuts and spices, and also would send out an advertisement for his local customers of Delhi region.

Customer Delight:

This is the best part. He had info about most of his customers who visit his shop and the anniversaries. Whenever they had one anniversary, an email was sent out to them (as well as a Facebook message) to make their next purchase on which he gave anywhere from 2-4% off. If he is close to one of the two shops, he would deliver it in a basket. The customer just loved it. Due to this alone, his original customers just started selling his store everywhere in NCR region.

For his online customers, he made a database separately and asked for the same information about their anniversaries, social account etc. and although many did not respond as they preferred to shop through recognized retailer, he did manage to get some of them to his online store direct and had similar promotions for them.

During 4-5 festival days, he prepared an awesome newsletter stating his promotions, even interviewed the less known chefs of local restaurants that were famous in the Delhi and had their favorite recipes published (this was easily recognized by his Delhi customers as they identified with the restaurateur), health benefits data of his produces and a small write-up of the origin of his dry fruits and nuts.

Let me tell you, a year into this journey, he stood by his personal and financial commitments with me and he does send a sumptuous sweet box and a nut and dry fruit box on two festival days of the year – our New Year and Diwali. We did some more than what has been published here, and it takes the passion and diligence of the business owner to be sold on the suggested idea to make this happen. His intent must be clear combined with his passion and desire to grow, and then a small nudge by a consultant like me can help him achieve it. For me it was a great experience and first of its kind as usually I work only with the IT and manufacturing folks.

Due to him, a few of his business friends have started talking to me about their business. Just like practicing Yoga or going to a much needed training program, both of which can be accomplished as home through self-study, it takes a mentor or a consultant to guide you through the process and partner with for success.

So, RECOLLECT your customers for repeat buy and RECONNECT with them as much as possible, in a sensible non-intrusive way, so that there is a win-win both for your business as well as the end customers. Research has proved it takes 5 to 7 times more to acquire new customers (mostly advertising and marketing) than to retain repeat customers, existing customers spend 67% more than the new customers and 50 to 70% of the sales occur due to repeat customers. There is a Pareto figure that states that 20% of the customers provide 80% of the revenue, and 8% of the customers account for 40% of the revenue. Doing the math well, why should one have to spend 7 times to get a sales volume of < 30% if there is a high probability of a sale to an existing customer? You definitely need new customers for revenue growth and higher market segment share and this must be a key focus area as well. This is something I always preach the specialty segment that your uniqueness does sets you apart from the crowd but you need to have the momentum going your way to enable more business to happen by trying out small things in a periodic way with little investment.

The author is a co-founder of Business Intellects and operates out of Bengaluru, India and is a business and technology consultant and a corporate trainer. Their motto is “We Make Success Happen”.