Multimillionaire entrepreneur and owner of the stockbrokerage firm Gardner Rich & Co., Christopher Paul Gardner was once penniless and homeless. At different times, he, with his two-year-old son, had to take refuge in a church and the washroom of a subway railway station. He was interning with stockbroking firm Dean Witter Reynolds at the time, at no salary. From there, he went on to become a businessman of international repute and was the inspiration for the film In Pursuit of Happyness.
So, what saw him through? Passion, perseverance and self-belief. Or something more? “Passion only goes so far as to be a springboard,” says Vijay Anand, organizer, Proto.in, a platform for budding entrepreneurs. Manak Singh, executive director, The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE), a non-profit organization that focuses on promoting entrepreneurship, is poetic. “It’s like the fine art of storytelling—from the concept, vision, execution, results, customers’ response and critics’ comments,” he says.
Managing an enterprise takes more than money, grit and passion. Here are a few things that can take you a long way.
Be ready for challenges
Most successful entrepreneurs do their homework well to ensure they have the answers before problems arise. Strategizing for the future always pays. Says Ravi Shankar, organizer, Proto.in: “For an entrepreneur, there are no defined roles or processes. It gets rather easy to lose focus on key areas.”
For M. Mahadevan, managing director, Oriental Cuisines, planning for the future paid off. In 1979, the marketing teacher at Jain College, Chennai, used to work part-time with a hotel, where he learnt the tricks of the trade.
“Food was my passion, but I didn’t jump into the business before planning for it,” he says. He made his first move in 1981. With Rs85,000 as the start-up capital, he convinced his landlord to lend him a small space to open a takeaway joint of Chinese food. The deal was that he would share 15-18% of the profit with him. In 1989, he flew to Mumbai to rope in Parmeshwar Godrej to do the interiors for his new venture in Chennai. The Cascade was a 70-seater restaurant with Chinese, Thai and Malaysian dishes on the menu. When Godrej showed her reluctance, he offered her a 15% share in the Rs22 lakh project for sharing her design ideas. The restaurant went on to become a hit. “The glamour quotient helped us match our prices with five-star hotels. Our menu was only 10-15% cheaper,” he says. Today, he runs 13 different brands of food products under his flagship company.
Be resourceful
Cost monitoring and a bit of ingenuity add up to profits. When Vrinda Rajgarhia of Sweet World, a candy store with a turnover of about Rs8 crore, saw that mall rentals were going up, she cut the store format to 25% of its previous size without reducing the number of candies on display.