Chief Operating Office (COO) – Responsibilities

     A COO is a Master tactician of a diverse organization managing complex operations on a day-to-day basis, with multiple stakeholders (and potentially Unions), that supports and oversees all organizational functions, but still not directly responsible for any product or solutions development, or sales and marketing.

On a daily basis, the COO:

  • Develops, implements and monitors key operational and performance metrics (and KPIs) of the organization to achieve desired and optimal outcomes and results, and also prepares key forecasting reports.
  • Manages projects, resources and risks.
  • Manages all the support functions like program office, HR, Legal, recruitment, and procurement managers.
  • If it is an NGO, startup or a government organization, leads the fundraising efforts by securing funding rounds and carefully manages capital.

   Ideally, he always reports into the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) or President and is an integral part of Executive Leadership Team (ELT).  He collaborates with the President/CEO in setting and driving organizational vision, operations strategy, and achieving organizational results.  Some organizations (mostly Government and a few education institutions) use Chief Administrative Officer (CAO) as an equivalent role, with very similar responsibilities.

List of Responsibilities – a Cumulative collection of many Cs:

  • Compliance:  Maintains full compliance to local and state laws, regulatory bodies and industry standards by establishing robust policies, procedures and controls, and by staying updated on any regulatory changes.  Risk management and mitigation is an integral part of this exercise for the entire organization.  One must be aware of all political, social, economic, environmental and technological risks and effectively manage them.   In some organizations, this role is exclusive to a Chief Compliance officer who may or may not report into the COO.
  • Commercials:  Manages all end-to-end commercial engagements, with all customers and stakeholders
  • Capital Management: Oversees and manages all local and global facilities and fleets (if any), plans and manage all capital projects, and leads all procurement and logistics support.
  • Commitment to Operations Excellence:  Upholds commitment to OpEx by adhering to financial targets, driving operational strategy, enhancing brand reputation and ensuring prudent resource allocation and cost control.  Aggressively manages the investment and expenses to ensure company achieves intended budgeted revenue targets and margin– this includes ensuring revenue and cash flow by negotiating contracts and meeting all settlement and collection targets (Business Development activities).  Develops budget forecasts and operations plans, assesses, and analyses operation capabilities, variances and ensures adherence to budget.
  • Change management – Develops and implements appropriate systems, identifies areas of process optimization and implements necessary changes to maximise efficiency (and productivity) and minimize costs.
  • Communications: Oversees all Corporate Communications through professional presentation, facilitations and interpersonal skills, thus delivering a consistent and clear messaging for the organization, both for internal and external audience.
  • Customer: Creates and executes the customer experience framework and is also responsible for the customer relationships and customer service delivery. A key metric (s)he drives is the CSS – Customer Satisfaction Survey.
  • Culture: Fosters a culture of employee engagements, continuous improvement, transparency and teamwork, thus building a corporate lifestyle of high performance and core values, accountability   and employee growth
  • Community:  Fosters community relationships by establishing grievance redress mechanisms and social safeguards for the organization’s work with local communities, if any.
  • Care and Confidence: Facilitates and respects the employees and cares about the infrastructure of the organization.  Inspires confidence to the internal and external stakeholders, including partner relationships and vendor management.  
  • (Working) Conditions: Accountable for the Occupational, health and safety (OHS) of the organization by assuring safe working conditions for all teams globally, including emergency/disaster planning and response, first-aid and emergency-response training and employee safe-behaviour training.

So, what is role is NOT?

  • Not a Chief Financial officer who analyses and reports everything financial, but a COO supports financial monitoring, planning, forecasting and budgeting, by receiving key inputs from CFO on a regular basis.
  • Not a Chief Marketing officer, but a COO does monitor all the key customer metrics including the Satisfaction scores.  IN some organizations, CMO reports into the COO.

Not a Chief Product (development) officer and not responsible for actual delivery of product or solutions to customers, but a COO does monitor all the programs that run within the organizations and ensures compliance to resource and cost budgets.

Select your leaders well

Many in their career have an ambition to get someplace high , that too quickly. No issues with that. They want to be somebody big at any price, which does become an issue. The guys who talk better and present well usually are more heard and hence fall in the radar for any promotions- if (s)he is backed by their credibility, great, but if not, this becomes a situation for the company. The cost encountered by the organization though may be disenchanted employees, attrition of the good ones, and definitely a lack of loyalty to the organization. I always say ” Coaches do not play, they need not have been great players either, but they need to bring the best amongst their players in the team – they must though know how to play “. Careful selection of the deserving does make this better. 

Digital Transformation – what is the buzz?

Over the past couple of years, with more focus on efficient ways of working, lots of buzz being seen around Digital Transformation (DT).  Lots of job opportunities exist in this space, asking for relevant experience, and this short overview just would give one the confidence you have done enough or bits and pieces, that fits under the enterprise DT umbrella.

    Lots of innovations and technological advances that have been happening around our environment over the past decade or so, each with tremendous potential, are all being integrated under one umbrella of Digital Transformation, a must have in any Vision statement of companies worldwide, an end-to-end goal to realize and a tool to smartly compete and go ahead in engaging and delighting customers.

  According to HBR and Salesforce, DT is a new mantra of using DIGITAL technology to increase customer experience, better and improve existing business processes or invent new ones, create more efficient, automated processes to bring about a new WoW (Way of Working) and a total operational change within the company. Although it may be one person who may be tasked with this DT journey inside any corporate, it is the joint and cohesive effort of all stakeholders to create a new way of doing things more apt for the even changing market requirements and business conditions, which in turn results in awesome customer experiences.

 There are three main ingredients behind any Digital Transformation:

(i)             (Digital) technology that is data centric, and is about “modernizing the legacy”

(ii)           Business Processes – ‘automating the repeated tasks’ and ‘simplifying the flow’.

(iii)         Customer experience – delivered real time, to create better business value

    Much to the popular perception, the IT department does not solely own this transformation. Their ability to drive changes depends on the business unit’s willingness to adapt newer technology to deliver better value to their customers. Although this enterprise transformation is pivoted around IT per say (IT team headed by a CIO with a CDO and a PMO office), the positive changes would be seen only with the business units it would cater and hence they need to champion this effort end-to-end to realize tremendous gains with the full sponsorship of the top leadership team. This eventually leads to a data driven decision making across the organization and more fruitful culture evolving that stitches this belief and trust together.   I am always of the belief that culture is a derivative effect of how things get done within the company and this acts as a glue fabric that makes effective team work with an end purpose in mind. After all this transformation, or as the transformation is bearing fruit, you would also realize a subtle change to a drastic change by within the company on the ways of working.  

     What are the new digital technologies that make DT happen? To name a few buzzwords doing the rounds presently,  we have Internet of Things (IOT), analytics and business intelligence, Machine learning and Artificial intelligence (ML and AI), Automation (RPA), Cloud (be it private, public or hybrid), Augmented and Virtual reality AR/VR(a much needed enhancement to how manufacturing, education and healthcare does things now), Blockchain, Big Data warehouses and data lakes, Edge computing, etc One must be able to use most of these technologies, join them through a flow chart flow and see how the entire company can benefit from using them to deliver better business value.

   Changing legacy systems within any organizations is never easy. If it is not broken, why fix or change? There can be a lot of criticalities and complexities involved in changing any infrastructure and systems, which has to be understood and approved, after which there has to be a roadmap that introduces changes in phases till the entire benefits gets reaped.   It is not about adding a new incremental change, but about a total revamp of existing to something newer and scalable that delivers better results and offer flexibility.

   With remote work slated to be the norm going forward due to this pandemic, transporting oneself for group meetings, account for logging-in and clocking work hours, sharing designs as a method of development, educational experiences of students, etc would all be something we would look forward to through VR/AR.  With Bring your Own Devices (BYOD) and smart phones and tablets getting into the computing space and not only restricted to communication, cyber security would be a concentration area for corporates to work so that no disruption occurs in their operations.   Manufacturing floors are monitored remotely from elsewhere, thanks to many sensors attached there and video cameras fitted across, which has led to lesser downtimes and higher manufactured volumes within corporates.

   All these digital technologies are centred around the new ways of generating and receiving data from many sources, in large volumes, at a great speed and verifying the truthfulness of these data to derive good intelligence from them.    Big Data and Analytics, and Business Intelligence, have been the fulcrum of many banking and healthcare companies now for the past few years in realizing how data can be interpreted to offer better services to their customers and patients. It is no more the classic databases but rather the newer data lakes and warehouses which contain not only the structured data but also the unstructured data like text, images, video from which actions are being taken real-time (like chat boxes for customer support, and tele medicine for administering remote surgeries and health consulting, or object detection in autonomous vehicles).   If you have the entire organization taking decisions based on true data, I guess a significant transformation has been brought in place.

  Processes, ‘the needed evil’ in many companies, deliver a consistent way of doing things and they get updated regularly to make them more efficient. You must be able to connect various activities happening in various teams together to make something of value, and this is possible only with established processes within the organizations. Radically re-engineering existing processes, and automating repeatable tasks (RPA – Robotic Process Automation) are happening, benefiting both Time to Market (TTM) and better efficiencies.   Given the COVID pandemic lessons, it is imperative for companies to think about remote work as a permanent option (not all work of course, can be done remotely – lab support and manufacturing for example needs to be at the work place) and start changing human resources policies and processes accordingly.

 No business would get sucked into any change, the primary premise of any transformation and hence it is imperative to quantify the before and after with a significant business value that looks rational and real.  This business value can be quantifiable with increasing productivity or efficiency, increased revenue numbers, good customer scores, and better TTM, to name a few and any or all of these would certainly invoke interest to any sane business leader. As long as you have satisfied customers (first) and delighted customers (next), one can get an edge over any competition and this can just translate to better $ numbers. Customer experience starts from time you got them hooked, to engaging them throughout your combined journey to meeting all commitments with high quality consistently.       

   Stitching the technologies, data driven approach, efficient processes and better customer experience effectively is a test for the resilience for many companies and doing this together as a whole team would be the mission that makes this transformation happen.  Choosing the right technology for every problem and integrating them all as a whole needs a good technical team to be the backbone for this transformation.  Most companies fail because they do not have right talent to make the transformation happen, or they do not invest much in their own people. The only way to can get the entire organization to buy into this transformation is to show proof through smaller gains in phases and including all of them to be part of this journey.

  In conclusion, anybody who is into such IT transformation is accountable for the technology transformation of all the systems of the organization to support growth of the business and increase operational efficiencies. A senior role like the CIO is to champion and drive organizational and technological changes by building and maintaining strong relationships with all the appropriate business teams, thus partnering with them to serve their customers better in a more agile manner. 

   With proper collaboration with the entire organization, they should be able to identify solutions, prioritize roadmaps and deliver to commitments, with all the stakeholders in the loop.   It means modernizing the IT infrastructure to support good user experience, automate repeatable processes, and at the same time keeping security and scalability as a critical feature that cannot be compromised. Through AI powered Bots, aim to get maximum contactless sales and service for the organization, and create unbelievable user experience by maximizing real-time decisions (for example through awesome APIs and microservices, any organization can drive their e-commerce business along with a stable logistics backend).  

    Drive a culture within the organization that makes data drive all the decisions.    One should be on top of innovations by conducting business digitally and experimenting with the changing digital trends and audience preferences.

 The author comes with 25+ yrs of experience and is an active consultant and a trainer, an information seeker, and a yoga enthusiast.

Nokia and Alcatel-Lucent – an integration challenge

Nokia recently in mid-April announced its intent to buy-out Alcatel-Lucent for Eur 15.6B (then valued at $16.6B, and recently at $17.3B, thanks to the Euro slide against the US$) to become the second largest telecom infrastructure company in the world, behind Ericsson from Sweden.   The Chinese giant Huawei is seen as their biggest threat presently ranked third and they are growing rapidly in all technology fronts.  Given that all these giants are seeing their mobile infrastructure business coming down and there is a huge potential in the IP/cloud /TV & Media area, this consolidation may still be questionable as originally Nokia had wanted only ALU’s wireless business, if insider reports are to be believed but they ended up with ‘all-or-nothing’ package.

    For some background, Alcatel –Lucent (ALU) has about 52K employees worldwide, of which 6000 are in France approximately, and was facing weak growth prospects having not turned a profit for a while now. Nokia has a worldwide strength of about 62000 of which 6900 employees are in Finland.  Hence it is safe to say that the employee strength in their ‘head-quartered’ country is about 11-12%.  Nokia (the former NSN) and ALU have a market cap of about $26.3B and $11B.  ALU’s revenue was pegged at $15.4B and they have about $6.8B in cash.   Remember that ALU was still going through their SHIFT Plan for the past couple of years – this plan made them concentrate on four areas: IP routing and transport, Wireless, IP platforms and Fixed networks.  Looks like executing to these plans had been their challenge recently.  With this acquisition, Nokia gets a significant boost in their North American market, their research capabilities (thanks to the former Lucent labs) and also gets to add on to their Optical business, which is a big win for them.  As for ALU, not sure what their gain is.

      Given that Nokia approached ALU with a buyout target which was a couple of billions lower than the one announced, and before meeting with the French President , it is safe to say that there has been some good monetary provisions made for any potential ‘structural repercussions’  if this transaction goes through.  France, a much loved labor oriented socialist country, has announced there would be no job loss there but it is up to anybody’s guess as to what happens in a ‘protective’ European community  

    Let me digress a little about Nokia and sync up the readers about they are now – they are not what we know them to be (a mobile company).   This is the Nokia Services Network (name changed after Nokia bought out the share of Siemens from Nokia Siemens Network) and the original ‘mobile’ Nokia Research division (Nokia Technologies) and the HERE (aka OVI or Services division of ‘mobile’ Nokia once, largely still the NavTeq acquisition assets).  HERE maps seem to be making a good business in the entire automotive and embedded navigation segment through the European vehicle manufacturers and since this does not fit into the scheme of things of the present Nokia, it is being seen as a unit that would be sold soon, if the price is right.  No suitors till date for this unit.   But they are making close to 300M euros.   And if the present Nokia does have thoughts of entering the mobile handset market again, through the Alcatel acquisition (yes, there are Alcatel phones but not sure if they are part of ALU), they cannot use the Nokia name for a few more months hence, according to the agreement with Microsoft.

     It had been an integration challenge both for Nokia and Siemens, and for Alcatel and Lucent when they decided to merge with each other.   When it comes to integration, my guess is Cisco has it to an art form as most of their business is driven through inorganic routes.  This Nokia-ALU combine may not put too much pressure on Ericsson at this point as they are already structured along the future potential  Cloud, IP and TV/media areas along with being the leaders in the BSS/OSS segment and in the Radio systems area.   If there is a hole in Ericsson strategy going forward, it may be on the Optical side where lots of companies like Ciena, Infinera etc. specialize and in the network energy space that takes care of Data centers (given the boom of E-commerce, esp. in the Asia region).   

    Before I look one level down from their individual structure of Nokia and ALU, let me highlight where Huawei stands.  They, like Samsung of the mobile client world, seem to be pitching in all areas to cover their wide base.  They seem to have a solid Wireless (BTS, Small Cell) and Wired (Fixed Access, Datacom, Transport network) stream, carrier software (aka BSS), Core networking products, Data center and Network Energy (hot field of interest now), IT which encompasses both cloud and storage, and all enterprise products (to compete head-on with Cisco) as well as a reasonable consumer division (which takes care of most of the client like mobile, media and home).

      Now when it comes to Nokia and ALU, there are lots of high level domain redundancies in their IP networking and Access suites like Customer Experience Management  (ALU had acquired Motive a few years ago), Small cells , Subscriber Data management  and their IP Multimedia system.  Of course, the usual operation support function like HR, recruitment, IT support, sales and marketing would all have deep impacts.   But a good part of recent investments by ALU in Analytics, Cloud, and content device management would stay and grow together as Nokia has not yet concentrated in these segments along with their recent alignment towards anything Internet Protocol.   The original Bell Labs of ALU would have to merge with Nokia Technologies and form a giant of a research division that would be regarded as the best in the world.

     Nokia would like to compete effectively with Ericsson with their Global Services arm, and would make Core networks, IP (to do a lot of homework here with ALU’s arm to have a cohesive story) and Transport networks to be their contribution to the merger and have ALU bring in expertise through the future areas with high potentials highlighted above and their RF, wireless and optical product lines.  If these two European entities combine and integrate well, they can be a formidable company going forward.

    Convenience and availability must not be the force to drive any mergers or acquisitions, but must be a carefully thought-out process, both on the strategic front and also on the execution front on the merged product lines.  If I make a comparison to the world of Tennis, the top two singles players combining to play doubles will not make them the best doubles pair.   The markets they want to operate in, the areas where there are potentials upticks that they need to invest, the ‘cash cow consolidation’ wherein what is making money  today can be combined to partly pay for the future,  and the technologies that can give them that extra push are the main thrust areas to look into before any mergers happen. 

     Telecom , per say, is a highly capital intensive segment, and with the huge payments done by the Operators to acquire spectrums, they would have little in terms of investing for the future by buying newer technologies offered by these telecom infra company .   Adoption of newer 5G or Nanocore technologies esp., in the emerging markets is going to be slow.

Microsoft and Linkedin – not an obvious slam dunk

        Microsoft recently this June has reached a deal to acquire LinkedIn for $26.2 Billion and not going too much into whether the shareholders and regulators would approve it, let us assume for this blog this is a done deal.  Yes, slam dunk used here intentionally as the NBA finals where Cleveland managed to beat the favorites Golden State is still fresh in everyone’s mind.   And the title is relevant another way as well because Paul Allen, one of the founders of Microsoft, owns the Portland Trail Blazers team.

      Microsoft is buying LinkedIn at a price that is about 25% less than its all-time high, but still at a 50% premium from where it is presently.  There are about a third of all the global working professionals as members of LinkedIn.  Although we see LinkedIn as more a professional C2C social network, of late, it has been trying to get into the social space much to the annoyance of the members already there.  For that, the LinkedIn members believe there is a Facebook.   What may not be obvious it that they are already big in the B2B space in terms of recruitment which  seems to be their cash cow today.

    Yes, LinkedIn gets most of its revenues through licenses and subscription charges from the recruitment space with their Recruitment platform and the Talent Solutions offering.  It has been faced with hard reality recently – slowing growth and has been offering weak financial guidance, and they would have been eager to jump on any sugar daddy that came their way.  Salesforce, a CRM giant, was also in the reckoning to buy them, as admitted by their CEO, but their valuation of LinkedIn was much lower.   By selling at a premium, LinkedIn seems to have made its shareholders rich given this may have been its only option, as even the ads business was slowing down.  Office 365 for Microsoft has been growing well for the past two years and has displaced Google in this space – a big enterprise cloud play by Microsoft.  Ah Hah:  Licenses & Annual Subscription + Office 365 = Good Synergy in Business Model?    Also their combined strength may also give them better revenue in the ads space.

    When one does the math, Microsoft has paid about $60 for each of the 433 Million members professional data (mostly), their connection details, their group subscriptions and some of the personal information that one has shared(contact numbers, education, email etc.).  If the premium was not there, your information was only worth $40 for Microsoft.  And Microsoft rightfully feels they got a steal.  Compare it to what Facebook paid for WhatsApp in 2013, $19B for about 600 million users, which works out to approximately $31 per head and that too only for your phone numbers!  Some social network experts said Facebook paid only $2B for WhatsApp users which works out to $3.33 for each phone number, and 4/5th of the money paid was more out of “Goodwill”, whatever that means.  When Facebook got Instagram the previous year for $1B for 30M users which worked out to $33 per user for the photos they shared but an evaluation by a leading bank couple of years later put that value at $80 per user as it had grown well and big under Facebook (Facebook announced they had 1B active mobile users in Instagram in April 2014).  Not bad for Mark (What a purchase, he can say!), whose main revenue source is ‘ads’ and more the user, merrier he can be.  Once he integrates his acquisition well, a business model would eventually evolve to monetize the entire user base and they get to strike gold.  Remember, there is no such thing as a free lunch is the old adage and it still applies.   Can you and I live without WhatsApp now – we are all hooked and addicted which is making Facebook smile. Every corporate need to make money for their stakeholders and for the rich to become richer, right?

       LinkedIn on its own had made some purchases recently – Lynda which offers video tutorials and training and a great online medium for learning, and Connectifier which  uses AI and machine learning  solutions to search for appropriate profiles for talent acquisition.  Again, once integrated, with a solid analytics engine, this can be a money bagger for anyone who has the names, their connections, what they want to learn, and whom they want to recruit, with all data available open without any privacy issues as you had built your own LinkedIn profile, viewable to all. And campus placement would just get easier with the lowering of the age of LinkedIn membership to 14 and the Student portal available so that students have access to all the best places they want to join.   

       Recruitment in years to come is never going to be paper resume based, it is purely going to be a social recruiting through digital profile play – by going digital, we get to see the associations that the person has, conference and groups (s) he attends and recommendation he may have from previous bosses and sub-ordinates which may speak a lot about the candidate.   Hiring processes can become very fast and even passive candidates who seem to be better fits can be lured into new opportunities.  Data analytics of unstructured data would make Microsoft guide you what you want to learn next, whom you want to meet next, what you want to write about to get noticed, and above all, unknowingly the next job falling on your lap without you even applying for it.  In short, if all works out great, LinkedIn may be the sole or primary Learning and Development, and Recruitment solution of the WORLD. Whaav… now it is making some sense, is it not? They would wish that everyone pays them to avail their services.

      Microsoft, mapping it back to the 1980s has either acquired companies for the information, data and content that they possess or to kill a potential competitor that is the wings. They acquired top software engineers from Xerox to develop their WORD, bought out Forethought which had a presentation program to develop PowerPoint and bought out Fox Software for their FoxPro and had Access use their database engine.  They acquired Hotmail with 8.5 million subscribers then in the 90s and integrated them to their MSN services.  Their later bigger acquisitions from 2000-2015 like Visio for their graphics software, Skype technologies for their VoIP service Skype, Nokia for their smartphone hardware capabilities and Yammer, a smaller version of LinkedIn for their intra-organization social networking utility have not paid them much dividends.  In fact, Nokia acquisition may have been their biggest mistake to date.  Consumers do not want to see a Desktop like UI on their phones as well and they would like to pick and choose what apps and games they want to possess and the Store part of the Windows story did not offer them much. With an enterprise mindset that Satya Nadella comes with, I guess their phone business would just be an also ran but cloud software and services is where they want to invest and capitalize on.

     With LinkedIn, they may have hit a jackpot, depending on whom you talk to.  They get a huge free database of about a third of the world’s workforce, with a constant profile page for every professional and a reachable email to connect with, and a sense of their network across the world – they get your digital business card stored which is paper-less and easily accessible, and they can keep track of you and manage your relationship as well.  For now, LinkedIn is their CRM bounty.  They get to build their own bigger CRM around LinkedIn, many of the relationships already coming in for free.  Combine that with the fact that they would own the single biggest asset of the world in terms of recruitment and learning and development that you and I have to pay for to use, they are smiling to their bank all the way.    And I am sure there is more to it in this acquisition than what I can infer as an outsider through this blog.

     Just as a baseline, the top four  staffing  and recruitments companies(Adecco, Manpower, Randstad and Allegis) generate a combined revenue of about $70 billion and up, and even if LinkedIn gets 10% of this in the next 5 years, $7 billion revenue is not something to be sneezed at.   Talent solutions (Hiring and L&D) division today generates nearly 2/3rd of its total revenue and is in the order of $1.9B the year closing 2015 with projections in 2016 to be around 20% above this number.  For a $93B company like Microsoft, adding another 5% to the total revenue over the next few years would take them to a privileged $100B club just through LinkedIn. They seem to be SMAC on target.

   Integration being a challenge in any of these large name companies coming together in terms of employees and organizations, that apart, once a cohesive story builds up around the combined entity in the next couple of years, we would most likely see a subscription model that everyone has to pay for, and they may not be alone with Facebook also likely to follow that route and users like us are stuck because we need to pay for our addiction for these cloud services. It would not be big news if they get to invest in some telecom company for their technology and infrastructure so that they get to rule the way we communicate globally all the way. Google would not be sitting and twiddling its thumb either– we will have to wait for some action on their front and their story to fall in place.  Stay tuned.

    In the meantime back to basketball, we are in the fourth quarter of the seventh game of the conference finals and the scores are tied.  It is time for the real players to make it count and win the game.

   How it all started?  On the evening of the day when the news of acquisition came out. I was sipping coffee with my friend, and asked him a simple “Why”? He drew a blank, just like me, but his wife sitting next to him who works for a leading job portal said “The value is in recruitment, stupid”. Now I get it, that too after a week… Whoever said “A woman can never be wrong” is absolutely right!

 The author of this blog is a business and technology consultant and a corporate trainer for Business Intellects based out Bengaluru, India.

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 –

  1. 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.

  1. 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.
  1. 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.