A hearty, warm welcome to rodinhood.com – the business and experience blog of Alok Kejriwal. Please enjoy the blog posts as they feature below.
Also, please pay a visit to the social ‘twin’ of this site called ‘The Rodinhoods’ – http://therodinhoods.com which is updated daily and is a social network of enterprising people!
Have fun, and prosper!
I’ve lived an exciting life so far. Especially, as a lucky online Entrepreneur!
This blog is a collection of some of the most interesting conversations I have had in my business life and the lessons I learnt from each of these conversations.
1. There has to be some differentiation!
Circa –1996.
Place – The Leela Kempenski Lobby (Powai), Mumbai.
People present – A Director of Courtaulds (a large UK Textile Company that supplies textile goods to Marks and Spencer), their Socks & Knitwear Manager (a Mr. Khan), Anand Kejriwal (my dad) and me.
Situation – My dad and I were representing our socks business and impressing Courtaulds to do a joint venture with us.
When I was 17 years old, a real estate agent – M.M Goyal of Jaico Real Estates in Mumbai told me a Hindi dialog. He said ‘Vyaapari woh, Jo Bechta bhala’.
Translated, it means “The businessman who knows how to ‘Sell’ is truly successful”.
25 years later, I couldn’t agree with him more.
No matter which profession or job you are in, you have to know how to sell if you want an accelerated career.
Here are seven compelling reasons I have learnt personally:
1. Sales make you believe in yourself.
When I started an unheard concept of creating online contests (contests2win) in 1998, I couldn’t even explain the idea to people because the online world was alien to them.
In a famous meeting I had with Gunender Kapur (GK) of Hindustan Lever (that lasted for one hour), in which I pounded the idea of online promotions for the Annapurna Brand that he headed. He finally exclaimed, “I like you, I like the idea of ‘contesting’, but pray tell me what is ‘online?’ GK did not know what the Internet really was!
I did hundreds of meetings like those during 98-99, only to face rejection, doubts and outright bewilderment. But each meeting made me hone my skill of explaining my idea in more detail; it forced me to add so many more dimensions to my concept in more ways than I had even envisaged. It made me learn my business better and reinforced my conviction in it!
In the past few days, I have become obsessed with the RPM (revolutions per minute) dial fitted on car dashboards. It’s also called the Tachometer.
I’ve asked many people if they know its use or if they even notice the RPM dial in the first place.
While some friends have given me some unconvincing answers about how the RPM dial helps them decide when to change gears in cars, what is supremely baffling is the role that an RPM dial plays in automatic cars!
With a bit of digging, I found out that the Tachometer was invented in 1817 to measure the ‘speed of machines’. Since 1840 it’s been used to measure the speed of engines.
So what’s it doing in cars in 2011?
On the last day of my ICSE exam (10th standard finals), my Nani (Grand mother) offered me a free seat into the Marwari Business School. I was 16 and I had the opportunity to go and sit in my Nana’s (Grand father) office.
I took up the offer.
These are the seven subjects I learnt:
M = Monetization Mentality
For Marwari’s, money pretty much means everything. It’s the ‘currency’ of success – pun intended. People are sized and measured not by their waist sizes but by the width of their balance sheet. A Marwari’s religion is making money and they meditate on it.
What Monetization and its terms means is also unique for Marwari’s.
For instance, I learnt that Revenue was not what you ‘bill’ or ‘pass-thru’ or ‘recognize’. Revenue was always what you ‘net-net’ earned that came in your coffers.
Revenue is bottom line for a Marwari – not top line.
Also, the facets of revenue became very clear to me. Every capital investment (be it land, or machine or even cars and computers) had a ‘monetization expectation’ attached to it. You could spend on things only if they made money. Hence ordering flowers for office tables in a typical Marwari office would be disallowed (despite the plea that they enhance profitability).
This ‘monetization mentality’ made me create what I believe was the most detailed costing breakup of any socks factory in the world. I took 3 years to ‘post mortem’ the cost of everything we incurred (whether real or notional in terms of interest lost) and link it back to revenues that were being earned. So, I could tell you that if you ran extra air-conditioning in the office building, then ‘X’ was the revenue that needed to be generated to make a PROFIT on that extra spend.
Also, I learnt that revenue was something to be always ‘improved’ – not just by price hikes alone. If collecting money from debtors were improved by 3 days, then there would ‘X’ reduction on bank overdrafts and hence extra income to the firm etc.
Mobile2win- China and India
By 2005, a company I had co-founded called Mobile2win (originally started in China in 2001 and then brought into India in 2003) was sailing…
We were first movers in the India Mobile VAS (value added services) space and things were looking up – thanks to all our learnings in China. The first Indian Idol voting platform had been successfully handled by us (and ever since) and Sony India had made us a long-term partner. We were partnering with lots of media companies, selling our mobile games on Vodafone and creating creative marketing platforms. Rajiv Hiranandani – head of the business was doing a great job.
The success was also creating a sweet problem:
The business needed a series B investment to scale and my existing investors – Siemens Mobile Acceleration from Munich and Softbank Ventures from China were not at the best of terms with the management of mobile2win.
Bakra & Bakri (B&B) – two successful entrepreneurs had just started an e-commerce business to sell their sheep wool online and were a happy lot. They had negotiated their term sheet with Mr. VC (read the prequel to this story) and were sitting back in their cottage backyard, nursing single malts. They always drank “Ballantine 17 years”.
Bose’s garden speakers were playing ‘don’t stop thinking about tomorrow’ by Fleetwood Mac.
Bakra’s iPhone beeped; a message from the VC read ‘Check mail. SHA attached’.
Even while he was pulling away the wool from his eyes, Bakra forwarded the sms and the mail to Rodinhood – the Prince of Entrepreneurs who lived in the forest of Enterprise. Rodinhood was a friend of all the Bakras and Bakris who guided and consulted entrepreneurs in their start up life.
Rodinhood read the message and immediately got down to work.
As he opened the SHA (share holders agreement), he took a deep breath. This was the most important document for any entrepreneur and he was determined to be thorough and fair in his perusal and remarks.
Inspired by Rodin's Thinker and Robin Hood the Doer .
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