Entrepreneur India » Strategies

7 Ways to Whip Your Website into Shape

Team Entrepreneur — Mon, 21 May 2012 11:37:15 +0000

When was the last time you read your own website? No, seriously—the last time you looked at every page, clicked every link and read every word on it.

If it’s been a while, it’s probably time to refresh both your site’s content and its look. Here is a seven-step program for giving your site a tune-up—some tips are courtesy of David Rusenko, CEO and Co-Founder of the site-building platform Weebly, while some are my own:

Simplify

Do you have three sidebars crammed with different widgets? Get back to basics.

Look at each page of your site and ask yourself what one action you would like visitors to take—sign up on your e-mail list? Pick up the phone and call you?

Whatever it is, make that the only action to take on that page. Too many choices cause confusion and make prospects leave.

Fix the problems

As websites get updated, things tend to get hinky in the design. One page uses a different color or font. Another has different margins or a different template. Links get broken.

The next thing you know, the whole site looks chaotic or sloppy.

Take the time to check each page, smooth out the bumps and make sure that the information is accurate and the links are working.

Get a makeover

If your site hasn’t gotten a new look in several years, it’s probably starting to look dated, Rusenko notes. Customers become bored and feel nothing new is happening at your company. Consider a redesign that reflects your company’s current direction and attitude.

Add news and stories

Want some free media coverage? Start putting out press releases and posting them on your site. When reporters visit, they’ll scan those and get the sense that your business has a lot going on. Each of those releases might spark media interest on their own, too. For extra credit, post a specific media contact name, so reporters know just who to call.

Refresh the About page

Your About page is usually the second-most visited page of any site, which means it’s an important page that needs to put a friendly ‘face’ on the company. Rewrite it to include fresh company news—awards won, new products introduced, offices opened or new team members who’ve joined.

Blog—or don’t

If your business website has a blog that hasn’t been updated in three months or more, it’s time for a serious talk. Blogs can drive new prospects to your site, but a dusty, dated blog doesn’t send a good message. Make a decision to either kick that blog back into gear—posting at least once a week—or get rid of it.

Don’t be mysterious

You wouldn’t believe how many business websites I’ve scanned where the phone number, address, contact names, product prices and hours of operation are either hard to find or missing altogether. Check your site to see if your vital info can be easily found. Get those contacts in bigger fonts, up higher, and visible on every page of your site, not hidden under a ‘contact’ tab.

Is There Proper Etiquette for Video Conferencing?

Team Entrepreneur — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 09:07:34 +0000

The hierarchy of communication in descending order of effectiveness: talking in person, yelling in person, talking on the phone, yelling on the phone, video conferencing (while talking or yelling, take your pick).
Video conferencing is one of those things that we all generally endorse but is still new enough that we haven’t fully adapted to it. We’re not yet sure where to look. We’re not sure when to speak. We’re not used to seeing exactly what we look like when we’re pretending to be interested.
And that’s the thing: Video conferencing assumes that seeing people (and ourselves, if we want) is a virtue. We could argue against this. We could argue that seeing people is totally overrated. But we’ll do that some other time. Anyway, video conferencing allows us to see things, too. Which can be extremely helpful. Especially if the thing is a product we’re trying to get someone to buy. Or a handy chart on an easel. Or a thumb in the up position.

How to Behave
Video conferencing isn’t a combination of talking on the phone and meeting in person. It’s its own thing, with its own set of rules, which pretty much come down to this: “If you’re not speaking, you have to remember that the other five, six, seven or eight people participating are also watching you,” says Bob Kirk, CEO of Avistar, a visual communications provider based in Calif. “People tend to forget that if they’re not speaking, they’re also still being viewed.”
And this: “Video has a ‘multiplier effect,’” says Lew Epstein, general manager of advanced applications at Steelcase, a furniture products company in Grand Rapids, Mich. “When you add a multisite call, you’re looking into several rooms simultaneously and vice versa, so each impression you make when you enter that room is magnified and multiplied.”
Video makes everyone a subject. Even when we’re not speaking. So, consider some rules about just being in a video conference:
It’s an instinct to look at the person you’re speaking to, but on a video call, it makes you look squirrelly. Acknowledge what the video-ergonomists call “focal difference.” When you’re not speaking, look at the screen. When speaking, look at the camera. If you don’t, you look like you’re looking off in the distance, which is what people do when they’re lying.
And no multitasking. “That is painfully obvious,” says Avistar’s Kirk. “You can tell because their eyes are wandering across the screen.” You can also tell because you hear the sound of clicks, which indicates using a mouse, typing an IM or practicing a tap routine, none of which imply respect for the subject at hand.
And if you’re at home, maybe don’t sit on the couch. Or lie in bed with the computer on your chest. Both of those positions create what the painters call a “foreshortening,” which is not flattering. The human form is not meant to be gazed upon in this way. Nostrils get involved. And chins.

Your Environment
The most underrated part of a video call is the area around you—your immediate milieu, if you will, and if you’re pretentious—because your setting says as much about you as the points you’re making. Before the call, take a quick look at what’s in the camera’s field of view-especially if you’re videoconferencing from home. Or if the meeting is a momentous one. Tidy up a bit. Train the camera on an area free of plush toys. Maybe throw Self-Hypnosis for Dummies in a drawer. Move the Oreo Shake a few inches to the left, out of the way.
For advice on staging a background for video, we could look to the presidents. Take the Oval Office address, for instance. The president is not sitting in a high-traffic area, first of all. And behind him you only see curtains, maybe a little lawn and a credenza with a well-considered array of objects-emblems that suggest certain values: framed family photos (Obama, both Bushes, Clinton, Reagan); small busts of other presidents (Clinton); a pair of metal objects resembling andirons… possibly trophies… possibly bowling trophies (Ford); or nothing at all (Carter).
The point is this: Think about your environment. Know what’s on your credenza. Maybe throw some framed family photos on it. And if you think you don’t have a credenza, you do. We all have a credenza.
In summary, the video call is an easy situation to master, because the expectations are low. You just need to check the picture-in-picture to see what others see. You have to be aware of what you look and sound like, and what your environment says about you. And once all that’s taken care of, maybe say something really smart-after a pause of exactly two seconds.

Beyond the Bubble (Tea)

Team Entrepreneur — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 06:59:38 +0000

The early years of this century have already seen two significant downturns: the dot-com bubble-and-burst, and the housing-crash-led recession of 2009. Terry Pham launched his first Dallas-area bubble-tea store during one and survived them both.
Now Pham and many entrepreneurs like him are weighing the risks of running—and even more daunting, starting—new businesses in economically perilous times.
Pham’s lessons learned—based on his experiences and losses as a child of immigrants and rounded out by more than a decade of running the unlikely success story of a specialty tea shop in central Texas—tell a tale of perseverance, loyalty to family (and co-workers) and optimism in the face of adversity. His story offers guidance and inspiration that apply to any business cycle.

A Brief History of Bubbles—
and Bubble Tea
In a story about economic bubbles, it seems fitting to be discussing another, more fanciful source of bubbles—so-called bubble tea. Originated in Taiwan in the early 1980s (two shops vie over claims to be the original source), bubble tea is simple enough: a base of tea usually mixed with fruit and/or milk.
The concoction is typically shaken to mix up those ingredients, resulting in the “bubbles” at the top of a cup of bubble tea. But it’s another addition—so-called “pearls,” or chewy balls of tapioca starch that float on the bottom of the drink and are sucked up via wide straws—that is the most distinctive part of bubble tea.
Bubble tea spread through East Asian countries first, offering shop owners a fun and fruity tea-based drink to target younger, non-tea drinkers. It spread over to the U.S. soon after, hitting college towns and, in particular, Southern California in the 1990s, echoing the juice bar and yogurt store trends of the time, Pham says, before petering out well short of becoming a widespread phenomenon.
Indeed, perhaps because bubble tea is so unique and remains slightly foreign—despite attempts to “Americanize it”—in its look, feel and taste, the drink concept never hit the level of a full-on national franchise. Jasmine Smoothie World and Bubble Tea is the largest franchisor, with more than 20 stores nationwide, while Chill Bubble Tea started down that path as well, with stores in Arizona, Texas, Illinois and North Carolina (though it isn’t accepting additional franchisees at the moment). Beyond that handful of mostly mall-based franchise locations, bubble tea is most often available via Asian-catered stores, though consumers can also find it in tea and smoothie shops and in a handful of independent bubble-tea spots—like Pham’s two Dallas-area Fat Straws stores.
Pham launched his first Fat Straws store in 2002, amid the fumes of the dot-com bubble burst. He had been working in IT and was looking for something new to pursue on his own, he says. After a childhood spent in specialty retail—following in his mother’s footsteps at 7-Eleven (more on that later)—he felt comfortable starting a retail business of his own.
Why tea? Pham credits the time he spent as
a boy back in Vietnam with his grandmother as
his inspiration.
“It was a ritual, drinking tea with grandma every evening,” Pham says. He started his second store in 2007, again riding out the times-are-tough, dollars-are-tight recession of the past few years. This time, he brought his mother, Mae, in to run one of his stores (Pham’s wife contributes her graphic design expertise, and someday his three young children may pitch in as well). Fat Straws survived those tough times and is cautiously eying further expansion. Family, tradition and hard work are just a few of the ingredients for Pham’s bubble-tea success.

An Immigrant’s Tale, with Twists
Terry Pham’s mother, father, two brothers and sister fled Vietnam just days before the fall of Saigon (Terry was born in the U.S.). His father, who served as a fighter pilot in the Vietnamese Air Force, worked various odd jobs before becoming a commercial pilot on small charter planes. Tragically, he was piloting the plane carrying the University of Evansville basketball team in 1977 when it crashed, killing everyone onboard. That left Terry’s mother with four small children and few prospects. With the help of a local church, the family made its way to Garland, Texas, a suburb of Dallas, where Mae found work with 7-Eleven. She began working behind the counter, eventually advancing to a field consultant, managing multiple store locations. Terry followed her to work. “I was a kid of 7-Eleven,” he says, “cleaning shelves and mopping floors.”
It was that retail experience Pham shared with his mother that ultimately led him to open his first Fat Straws store
in 2002. “Dallas might be the last place you’d expect bubble tea to be successful,” Pham says, but he’s made it work. Among his first decisions was scaling down from the typical 150 to 200 flavors many tea shops hawk to 15 or 20 most palatable to his customer base.
“2002 was a tough time; a lot of people were looking for work,” Pham says. “We didn’t need a ton of capital to build out and get started. We were able to launch and
be profitable early on, growing every year 15 to 20 percent.”
Fat Straws faces plenty of competition, including coffee chains like Starbucks, smoothie shops and ice cream stores—really any retailer selling a Rs.225-or-so treat in a casual atmosphere. To attract that skewed young customer base, Fat Straws feels a bit like Starbucks: comfortable
with plenty of couches and magazines to encourage lounging, albeit with a more carefree, jovial feel, reflecting its more whimsical product.
In 2007, Fat Straws launched its second store in the north Dallas area and continued on a growth path—even in 2009, Pham says, at the height of the most recent recession. “That was a scary year,” he says. “We did start to see our regulars drop off. People were starting to be more selective with how they spent their disposable income. The word on the street was that most restaurants were losing 20 percent or more of their business.”
Pham pulled the staff of his two stores together to discuss the future. Many of them were longtime employees who started as high schoolers or college students and had been with the company for some time, becoming like family. Rather than cut back or retrench, Pham says they ramped up quality control and service. “People were losing their jobs and homes,” he says. “If they chose to come in here and spend five dollars on a drink, we wanted to make the experience everything they expected—and then some.” While a nearby Jamba Juice and Cold Stone Creamery closed during the most recent downturn, Fat Straws survived. Pham credits his focus on creating a superior customer experience. “We wanted the drink quality to be impeccable,” he says. “We live and die by every single drink we sell.” Just as important as product quality or store cleanliness is creating strong relationships—not only with customers, but among store employees as well. “It may sound hokey, but we tell our staff that we have a reason to exist behind making money,” Pham says. “We’re about creating relationships. And that includes our staff. Kids start working with us in high school, and they stay with us.”
In the end, Pham says, the strategy that worked for Fat Straws was one focused on growing sales as opposed to cutting costs. “We ramped up our advertising and tried to use social media to really tap in directly to our customers through Facebook, Twitter, Groupon and LivingSocial. It ended up paying off because we were able to get more people in the door that might not have otherwise come to Fat Straws, and we were able to capture a new audience,” Pham says. “Many times when business starts to contract, people have a reactive response, which normally equates to cutting labor, watching food costs and other cost-cutting measures. We have just tried to do the opposite,” he signs off.

The Need of the Hour is to Create Integrated Cities

Team Entrepreneur — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 05:53:36 +0000

Entrepreneur (E): What is the Delhi Mumbai Industrial Corridor (DMIC)?
Amitabh Kant (AK): India is building a dedicated freight corridor which will link up Delhi to Mumbai over a distance of 1,483 km. It is the first time in the country that a containerized train will come into existence by December 2016. This will enable goods produced in the northern parts of India to be put to the ports through double and triple stacking at high speeds. At present all goods produced in northern India either move through passenger trains or through the highways and the road network, which means they take about 11-12 days to reach ports. This also means the logistics costs in India are very high compared to other parts of the world.
A completely new route between Delhi and Mumbai has been identified and this opens up the possibility of creating manufacturing infrastructure on both sides of this dedicated freight corridor. It opens up the ability to plan, develop along international standards outstanding infrastructure and create new industrial cities on either side. When you create industrial cities you do not only look at manufacturing but also at workers, managers and the family setup. Much like Mumbai, Kolkata and other cities were created at one time; the need today is to create integrated cities which are great to live, work and play in. The DMIC is developing trunk infrastructure on either side of this train, which will be run by the dedicated freight corridor. In the first phase, we will develop seven new cities. The corridor passes through six states of India which account for 50 percent of India’s GDP and at least one city will come up in each of these states, with an additional city of Dighi Port in Maharashtra.
We have moved ahead in six of the cities that are to come up and the only state where we have not been able to make much progress is in UP. Spending Rs.50,000 crore, the government of India is now creating this new train.
E: What has the planning and implementing process been like so far?
AK: A year and a half back we took it to the stage of master planning for each city and took approval from state governments. We brought in global master planners since it involved concepts of a city with new technologies.
If India has to grow at 9-10 percent over a long period of time, then its manufacturing sector has to grow at about 15-16 percent and if manufacturing has to grow at 15-16 percent, one has to create jobs. A McKinsey study says 350 million people will get urbanized by 2030, 700 million people by 2050 and, so, if you do not create jobs, your existing cities will become slums. A huge amount of urbanization is likely to happen in India, so it is important to create jobs. Cities will account for nearly 70 percent of India’s GDP by 2030. We are developing seven nodes to develop cities. We have tried to benchmark it against the best new industrial cities across the world. The first city to come up will be Dholera, which will have a population of about two million with eight lakh people finding employment.

E: How will such a city be developed?
AK: When cities were developed across the U.S.A. and Europe, gas and power were cheaply available. This is not the case today, which means one needs to do a sustainable development around the transport axis. For Dholera, we are creating a transport axis which will connect from Ahmedabad and go up to Bhavnagar. Within the cities, there will be broad roads for cars, walking and cycling. The key here is that we have planned for both industrial and residential aspects of the city. The basic premise is also on reducing commuting time for workers and ensuring that they are close to working areas, looking to recycle things, energy sufficiency, smart city real time control and governance amongst others.
We are focusing now on creating trunk infrastructure like drainage, sewage, roads etc and getting private players to come in. We are doing six gas-based power projects, two solar projects, and several large multi-modal logistic hubs.
We are also doing several technological initiatives in these smart cities where digital technology helps you create a central command room to run power, water, safety and security.
We are working with several Japanese corporations like Hitachi, Mitsubishi and others to develop an IT-based city.

E: What about the financial aspect?
AK: After the master planning, we did the financial planning and it was clear that it was not possible to do everything on a public private partnership. We have decided to do the trunk infrastructure work using government resources which would be 30-40 percent of the work needed to build a city. These cities may take a long time to break even, as long as 15-16 years, but once they do, they will generate such resources that we can create many more cities with that money. That is what we intend to do. We have looked at the sources of funds and the spending of funds but the key is that if India was to create new cities and have instruments of debts for 12-13 years, it can create many new cities and then use the upside earnings.
The challenge here is to monetize land value and use urbanization as a business model. This is what DMICDC (Delhi Mumbai Industrial Corridor Development Corporation) is planning to do across cities. The governments of India and Japan have, for this purpose, created a revolving fund worth approximately Rs.40,000 crore where the Indian government is expected to contribute Rs.17,500 crore and the Japanese side is expected to contribute about Rs.20,250 crore. This fund has been given the option to raise more money through capital grants, bilateral resources, infrastructure bonds and multilateral sources. DMICDC will develop and do projects across functions like power, water etc and at the city level, states will bring in the land. Getting land is a state function.
The trunk infrastructure money will not come as grant but either as debt or equity. The main aim is to break even in around 15-16 years and then ensure the proceeds come into this revolving fund.

E: What are the opportunities for the private sector while the project is being implemented? What happens after the city is created?
AK: Nothing in this project is being done through the government. Government funding is being used only to structure the project and bid out projects. Some projects will be EPC which the private sector will do. There is opportunity for financing companies, opportunities tech companies, opportunities for PPP projects and for program monitor.
This project will enable you to bring in large and smaller players to contribute. Cities get made over 30-40 years in different phases but initially an industrial city will have to be managed through an SPV between central and state governments. Therefore, both the state and central government will have to manage it effectively.
I see many aspects like municipal services being outsourced.

Persian Paradise

Team Entrepreneur — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 11:50:38 +0000

Sheraton Bangalore Hotel at Brigade Gateway has done itself proud with an 80-seater rooftop restaurant, Persian Terrace, giving diners an enchanting experience in authentic Persian cuisine. Shimmering chandeliers, colorful lanterns and candles flickering atop tables coupled with a mix of cane chairs and cabana style sofas make dining atmospheric to say the least.
With 10 years of work experience in the Middle East, Executive Chef Gustavo Murali joins us to share his take on Persian (or Iranian) food. First up we were served the mezze platter, a wide assortment of traditional dips, along with pita breads, Mutable, made with roasted eggplant, sesame seed paste, olive oil and fresh lemon juice; burani spinach, consisting of spinach, garlic, yogurt and crispy brown onion and mint sauce; the ever popular hummus; babaganoush made with roasted eggplant, red and green capsicum, red onions, garlic, fresh mint, lemon juice and extra virgin olive oil; and finally moust mooser, medley of fresh pressed yogurt flavored with mint, shallots, black pepper and sea salt, and extra virgin olive oil.
While options for vegetarians are limited, this cuisine’s specialty lies in grills and stews. “Iranian food is all about tasting the meat,” says Chef Murali. Onion and saffron make up dominant flavors of Persian food, and all meats, we are told, are tenderized with juice from pureed onions. Meats are typically charcoal grilled on high heat adding to the final flavor of the dish. To get a sense of this exotic food-type, go for the Iranian mix kabob, which is a chicken, lamb loin and koobideh served with bagali, zereshk and white rice. And if you’re herbivorous then the panir sabzi, a plate of imported feta cheese, walnut and fresh herbs will be the closest Persian experience for your palate. The restaurant also has Kabobs made from fish and seafood such as mago e kabob.
For the main course, we tried the Ghemeh Bedaenjan, a Persian stew consisting of fried eggplant cooked in tomato gravy with yellow peas served with onion sauce and braised beef accompanied with basmati rice.
Its dessert menu is limited to five choices of which three are authentic. We tried the sholleh zard, Persian rice pudding with saffron and then there’s the om ali, a typical Arabic sweet.
The entire menu has over 50 items including starters with 80 percent comprising of non-vegetarian selections.

Bars and coffee bars

Team Entrepreneur — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 12:40:26 +0000

Single Malt & Co. Bar and Lounge at Hyatt Regency Pune
This bar is really the place to be in, when business calls you to Pune. The location of the bar within the hotel premises has been done in such a manner that it entices you from the moment you step inside. As the name suggests, the bar serves a connoisseur’s selection of aged single malt whiskies and other liquors, wines, beers and cocktails from all around the world. The lounge is elegantly done up, and also serves a round-the-clock dining and snack menu, specialty teas, coffees and light snacks.
The best point of this bar is that you can actually have a serious meeting here, without loud music jarring your sensibilities. The ambience is one of calmness and the mellow drinks helps in making this a favorite meeting place for entrepreneurs living in Pune and those who travel to this city on business. The bar is open daily from noon to midnight. The lounge is open 24 hours.

Encounters at Taj Krishna, Hyderabad
Taj Krishna, located at Banjara Hills, a prime residential area of the city, is nestled amidst beautifully landscaped gardens. And Encounters serves as a beautiful setting for your quick business meetings. The all-day dining restaurant offers buffet meals as well as an al a carte menu showcasing global favorites.
It has an interactive counter that serves pastas, pizzas, dosas and pancakes. It is open 24 hours. Apart from Encounters, Taj Krishna’s fully equipped business center also has all the facilities that you may need. Equipment like TV, DVD, video coverage, audio recording, audio cassette, LCD, OHP, 3m OHP, 35mm slide projector, masked screen and cordless mike are available on rent. The board room I can seat 15 persons for a tariff of Rs.15,000 plus taxes; while board room II can seat 10 persons at a tariff of Rs.10,000 plus taxes per session.

Le Pain Quotidien, Mumbai
The name of this café means “the daily bread” in French but the meeting place scores quite high in the Indian context. Le Pain Quotidien is a thriving community of more than 150 bakery-cafés throughout the world, and is enjoyed in neighborhoods in over 19 countries. Apart from the wide choice of breads here, the café also serves soups, salads, tartines, entrées, desserts, homemade drinks, beers and wines. The menu includes many vegetarian items.
It is open throughout the day for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and offers takeout items. It is open all days a week, from 8 am to 11:30 pm.
Le Pain Quotidien’s rustic, farmhouse atmosphere is conducive to quick business meetings. You may not want to join in the long, antique-style communal table that encourages a relaxed, informal atmosphere, but there are enough seats where you are guaranteed some privacy if you are having an important meeting with a client or a quick brainstorming session with your team.
The café also scores highly on location, Dhanraj Mahal being a heritage building near the Gateway of India, in Colaba.
The area, a bustling shopping hub well-known for its art galleries and British-influenced architecture, provides the perfect setting for Le Pain Quotidien.

Seagull at Vivanta by Taj –Fisherman’s Cove
This multi-cuisine restaurant and coffee shop offers Continental, Chinese cuisine as well as coastal favorites from the region. Seagull is popular with entrepreneurs, thanks to its open, interactive kitchens and inside/outside dining that overlooks the pool. A must-try is the salmon grain bread here. Another USP here is the World Street Eats buffet every Saturday for dinner that comprise street food from the Mediterranean, Orient and more, paired
with Indian beer. This buffet is priced at Rs.1,050 plus tax per person.

Greatroom at Pune Marriott Hotel and Convention Center
The Marriott greatroom is really the hotel lobby, but it serves as the perfect meeting place for entrepreneurs. The hotel understands this too, and the comfortable seating arrangements and clustered sofas help create the mood. There is a bar at the far end, leading on to a restaurant, and the high, high ceiling and spacious interiors of the greatroom all add to make this one of India’s best meeting places. This hotel also boasts of the Pune Baking Company, which is also located at one end of the greatroom. This deli has a number of gourmet sandwiches and patisseries as well as a range of other food products. Bar 101 is another popular spot in the hotel, and offers an extensive collection of 101 whisky accompanied by premium cigars in its elegant lounge setting.

The Dome, Le Royal Meridien, Chennai
Step into Le Royal Meridien Chennai and you are sure to be floored by the spacious lobby which also overlooks the hotel’s outdoor pool and ornamental garden. You will find small groups of people or a solitary entrepreneur busy with their iPads or deep in discussion in various seats of the 52-cover area. The Dome is the bar and serves coffee too, and is located on one end of this grand lobby. Though the bar services do not extend to the entire lobby (just a few seats immediately outside The Dome are served), the entire lobby is a great place to catch up for a quick tete-a-tete. Though the hotel management is quite firm that it doesn’t allow entrepreneurs to conduct interviews or full-blown meetings in the lobby, this area remains busy throughout the day. There is a separate coffee shop, Cilantro, which is also located at the lobby level, apart from the business center, the boardroom and the separate VIP boardroom. The tariff for hiring the boardrooms is Rs.2,000 plus taxes per hour with basic amenities like tea/coffee, stationery etc thrown in with the package.

Koshy’s, Bengaluru
Located on St. Marks Road, this old-timer is still the favorite of entrepreneurs when in Bengaluru. It is over 60 years old, and has achieved an almost venerated status in this city. The coffee served here is wonderful, so is the atmosphere which is surprisingly conducive to a quick business meeting too. It even won the MTV Most Stylish Place award some years back. The location is ideal and the feeling of nostalgia that many people have for Koshy’s makes it a popular coffee bar in the city.

Threesixtyone at The Oberoi, Gurgaon
This all-day dining world cuisine restaurant is one of the largest in the country with a seating capacity of 210. The tables are not too closely placed, so that you are always assured of some privacy when you hold a quick meeting here. It has five show kitchens offering Japanese, Chinese, Italian and Indian cuisine. It also has a live patisserie. Two teakwood decks extend from the restaurant into the 36,000 square foot reflection pool offering an al fresco dining experience. There are other areas of the hotel which are also conducive to quick and, perhaps, more informal meetings. The Piano Bar offers an extensive selection of beverages with vintage wines, signature martinis, mojitos and margarita. You can also check out the Cigar Lounge, which offers a wide selection of single malts and a wide range of hand-rolled Cuban cigars.

Lobby Lounge at Hyatt Regency Chennai
This hotel is a relatively new entrant to the city. You cannot miss the fact that it is located right next to the Kalaignar TV office on Chennai’s Anna Salai in the Teynampet area. The central lobby of the hotel boasts of a wonderful and airy atrium. Eye-catching installations of beehives adorn the entire hotel. Open 24 hours, the Lobby Lounge is a residential-style lounge located amongst the lush green landscaping and serene water features of the hotel lobby. Here, you can have a quick business meeting in comfort and will also be assured of privacy thanks to the space between the tables.
You can also check out the hotel’s 24-hour business center, which offers video and teleconferencing equipment, secretarial services, dedicated reception desk and workstations providing high-speed internet access (Wi-Fi).

Bricklane at Express Sarovar Portico, Surajkund
This hotel is located conveniently in Surajkund, which though is in New Delhi, still manages to be nestled away from the hustle and bustle of India’s capital city. Bricklane, the all-day dining multicuisine restaurant here, is quite popular with business travelers to New Delhi. Here, the tables are spaced enough apart from one another to ensure some privacy for a quick business meeting. Since the breakfast and dinners are buffets all days of the week, it makes it simpler to host a small business delegation here, without having to bother about individual tastes and preferences while ordering food, which helps a lot, especially when you are dealing with nitpicking clients. Apart from the
restaurant, the Sarovar property has five fully air-conditioned rooms and business center with all amenities, AV support, private board room, stationery and video conferencing facilities. The charges for hiring Summit I, which can accommodate 14 persons, is Rs.12,000, while Summit II’s day charge is Rs.20,000. It can accommodate 16-40 persons.

Two One Two, Mumbai
Two One Two Bar and Grill scores heavily thanks to its location: a leafy, serene lane in Mumbai’s upscale Worli area. Go in for a meal in the afternoon or evening, you will always find this restaurant filled with a number of entrepreneurs holding either quick meetings or having an impromptu brainstorming session. With a capacity of over 120 covers, the restaurant has a private dining area if you wish for more privacy to host your meeting. The wine list is extensive; the food is paired well.

Café Piano at Grand Bhagwati, Ahmedabad
This hotel is located in the bustling SG Highway of Ahmedabad, and is always full of business travelers and tourists alike. Apart from the meeting rooms and banqueting facilities that the hotel provides, its café is also very popular among its clientele. The café serves hot beverages as well as a lavish vegetarian buffet, which helps appease the hunger pangs while you negotiate a tricky business deal or catch up with your valued clients.

MoMo Café, Courtyard by Marriott City Centre, Pune
This is the focal point of the hotel, and most hotel guests as well as walk-in guests, eventually make a beehive for this area. MoMo Café is the all-day diner multi-cuisine restaurant and offers its guests a variety of delectable options 24×7. There is an interactive show kitchen with a wood-fire pizza oven. The interiors of the café are brightly lit and full of bright colors. Overlooking the hotel’s pool, this café is full of guests all day long. The hotel also has a restaurant offering Pan-Asian cuisine, Red Zen, which has a community table. When in Pune, you can also check out MoMo 2 Go, the grab & go store which offers an array of sandwiches, pastries, pies, tarts and hot and cold beverages. This is ideal for a light meal and a caffeine rush. You can just pick up your food here and catch up on a quick meeting at the seats arranged thoughtfully at the small and cosy lobby of the hotel.

Peerless Inn, Kolkata
This hotel is one of the old timers of the city. It is quite popular among the city’s entrepreneurs and traveling businessmen as it is located in the prime commercial hub of the city. There are a number of special packages you can choose from if you wish to host a meeting here. The preferential conference buffet lunch rate applicable would be Rs.700 plus taxes and charges as applicable on per person/day/session basis. This package includes buffet lunch, two complimentary times tea/coffee rounds with cookies during conference time.
Writing pad-pencil, mineral water and podium mike as are included in the package. The usage of the hall is levied as per the hall allocation from morning 9 am till 6 pm. The preferential buffet dinner rate applicable is Rs.900 plus taxes as applicable on per person (head)/day/session basis.
This package includes welcome drinks (mocktails) on arrival and buffet dinner, snacks for a circulation of one and a half hours; usage of the hall is levied from 7 pm till 11 pm. Alcohol, if required, is charged extra.
As for the hall rentals, you can hire Summit I and II, Conference I and II, board room for Rs.10,000 plus taxes; Jasmine, Victoria and Chowringhee can be hired for Rs.15,000 plus taxes. Another dining area of the hotel which is quite popular is Oceanic, the hotel’s 24-hour coffee shop cum multicuisine restaurant.

©Entrepreneur October 2011

How to Enter a Room

Team Entrepreneur — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 11:35:02 +0000

So, we’re assuming you’re on time and you know why you’re there and you know exactly what you want from the people in the room and you’ve Googled them and found out where they went to school and that according to LinkedIn they made a couple of questionable professional moves in the early ’90s and at least two of them tweet.

What we’re interested in is that pregnant series of moments that lasts for around a minute and is ostensibly about introductions and handshakes and the offering of beverages and, if you’re lucky, a Danish or something, but is really about the beginning of potentially important relationships. The main problem with entering an unfamiliar meeting room is that it’s like leaving a bar when it’s still light outside. Things seem a little too bright, a little overwhelming, a little disconcerting. Yet no matter how thrown off you feel, the guiding principle is: It’s your room. For the next, oh, 30 seconds to a minute, you’re in charge. Even if it’s their room, you’re in charge. Even if your earnings are a 10th of the salary of that guy you’re about to shake hands with, you’re in charge. You’re not the only one determining the mood of the room, but you have to take responsibility for it.

Consider a lesson from the forest. “Pretend everyone’s a bear in the woods,” says Robbie Pickard, a Calif.-based comedian who spends his career entering rooms full of people he needs to impress. “If you look scared, the bear is going to attack you.” Which we always thought involved yelling and waving your arms and stomping the earth and throwing a Coleman lantern. But what he’s saying is, offer no apologies or expressions of trepidation or false humility. Protect yourself with confidence.

Confidence makes you look comfortable. It should seem like there’s no other place in the world you’d rather be. At this moment, more than any other moment in the meeting, you’re your own agent. You’re saying, “I’d like you to meet myself.” (Note: Do not actually say, “I’d like you to meet myself.”)

Bill Clinton is a useful example. The man knows how to enter a room. He might not know how to leave, but he knows how to enter. Two out of the two former press secretaries we called for help with this column (we figured they might know something about the subject of entering meetings, since they’ve seen people enter the most important rooms in the world) mentioned Clinton as the best room-enterer they’ve ever seen. Which is pretty easy to do when you’re the president of the United States, but still, there are lessons in his approach.

“When Bill Clinton entered a room, he owned the room from the second he walked in,” says Dee Dee Myers, Clinton’s first press secretary and now a managing director at The Glover Park Group, a D.C. communications firm. “Because he was curious, he wanted to talk to people and would totally engage them. And pretty soon all the energy in the room was running in one direction.”

Marlin Fitzwater, press secretary for Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, says, “Clinton was probably the best I’ve ever seen. He walked in and demanded the attention of everyone. The lessons of Clinton are: Don’t be aimless, don’t be casual, don’t be flippant. Let your audience know they’re important and that you’re there because you have a message to give them.”

So, it’s an act, yes. But it’s not entirely an act. The act is supported by an important psychological underpinning: actual curiosity. “You have to be curious,” says Thomas Huseby, managing partner at Seattle VC firm SeaPoint Ventures. “Most entrepreneurs are thinking about what they want to teach or what they want to convey, and everybody would much rather talk to someone who is curious. It’s amazing what that attitude does.”

That’s how to enter a room. With curiosity. But not necessarily about the business at hand. Meetings at Esquire often start off with questions about the view from our conference room on the 21st floor of a tower in Manhattan. If the person we’re meeting asks anything about the city, we take them to the window and give them a quick tour of the buildings around us, including that statue of Ronald McDonald that ended up on the roof of a four-floor walk-up on Eighth Avenue. It’s a rich, interesting conversation.

Who wouldn’t want to be in a room with you now? You’re amiable and confident and pleased with the way things are going. You’re ready to talk and to listen. You haven’t given them any reason why they couldn’t see themselves giving you a lot of money or offering you a contract or partnering with you in some way. You’re someone they could see themselves doing business with, is what we’re trying to say. All that, and you haven’t even sat down yet.

Customers First

Team Entrepreneur — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 10:56:32 +0000

When Ariel Seidman left Yahoo last year to start his own tech company with two former co-workers, he knew that success out of the gate would hinge on having some big-name customers already lined up. So he spent most of his time in Silicon Valley coffee shops or on conference calls explaining the idea behind Gigwalk—harnessing the power of millions of iPhone users to create what the company likes to call “the first on-demand mobile work force”—and gauging the market need for its services.

By the time Gigwalk launched in May, Seidman—along with co-founders Matt Crampton, the chief technology officer, and David Watanabe, the chief of design—had lined up TomTom, the Amsterdam-based maker of satellite navigation devices, and MenuPages, the online restaurant directory.

“It took on a life of its own after we started going out there and talking to people about it,” Seidman says. “When you actually launch, having customers you can talk about usually gives confidence to other potential customers. They figure, ‘If a brand like TomTom is willing to use this new company, then I’m willing to use it as well.’”

Based in Mountain View, Calif., Gigwalk relies on iPhone users across the country to take pictures and provide data for clients. The workers, or Gigwalkers, find gigs by downloading the Gigwalk app. Gigwalkers earn from Rs.135 to as much as Rs.4,050 per gig, and their pay goes up once they manage to establish their Gigwalking credentials.

Seidman and company figured early on that the best customers would be local business sites and mapping companies—staples in the online business world. But the more they discussed the concept, the more they realized Gigwalk could serve a far wider market. An ad agency wanted to compile a database of billboards in Manhattan; the state of Florida wanted to verify its wireless and broadband coverage. Financial services firms, travel and real estate offices, app developers—all thought Gigwalk could work for them.

There’s no single method for startup hopefuls to generate customer interest before launching their business. Seidman’s experience illustrates the value of the pre-launch period for drumming up support from customers and investors.

Perhaps most important, it shows how entrepreneurs can fine-tune their business prior to launching, helping them better serve their customers right out of the gate.

That’s a lesson Michael Burcham holds dear. Burcham directs the Nashville Entrepreneur Center, a public/private partnership that provides entrepreneurs with office space and a team of 100 mentors to advise them in all aspects of the startup process.

Burcham’s approach to launching a business can be summed up in three words: refine, refine, refine.

“It’s universally true for all entrepreneurs, no matter how good we are: When we put our business plan together, if true north is a perfect plan, all of us are off at least 10 degrees,” Burcham says. “As a startup, our job is to close that gap as soon as possible.”

At the center, entrepreneurs spend their first two weeks trying to identify a dozen potential customers. By the third week, Burcham has them arranging meetings. From there, the pre-launch process becomes an exercise in fine-tuning the business so that it provides just what its customers will need.

“We really focus a lot on customer segmentation,” Burcham says. “Who is this solution for? What pain is this solving? As potential customers give you feedback and you keep coming back with revisions, you get buy-in to the customer input. If it’s done well, that prospective customer is very close to becoming a signed-letter-of-intent customer.”

Burcham worked closely with Jackson Miller before Miller started Bizen, a Nashville, Tenn.–based software service that provides retailers with real-time cash register reports. Miller studied jazz and philosophy in college but left before getting a degree. He grew up around computers (“I just had an aptitude for it,” he says), and after he left school he worked as a business intelligence consultant and developed software for several startups.

Miller also is a partner in two Plato’s Closet franchises, which sell used name-brand clothing. Like other franchisees, Miller relied on traditional point-of-sale reports generated from the stores’ cash registers. But the reports didn’t give him the performance indicators he really needed. So Miller designed a software tool that spots trends and sends text messages that alert users to key events, such as when a cash register doesn’t balance or when the labor percentage of sales gets too high.

“What Bizen does is integrated with the point of sale,” Miller says. “In the franchise model, it allows you to benchmark against other stores in the franchise. It allows me to be a more involved owner even when I’m not in the store. I like to say we redefine RoI as return on involvement.”

At the entrepreneur center, Miller distilled his customer base with the help of Burcham and the team of mentors. Miller raised Rs.157.5 lakh in funding, and in May, shortly before launch, he researched the market for Bizen at franchise trade shows in Las Vegas.

“We could work together to come up with hypotheses of what the need might be, but only through talking with the target market—our customers—could we understand where the need really was,” Miller says, “By having those conversations with customers before you build the product, you can get closer to true north more quickly, without wasting time and money on guesswork.”

Laura Adamson went through a similar process to fine-tune her online shopping site, Styleoutsidethebox.com, before she launched June 1. After graduating from Penn State with a business degree, Adamson managed three pop-up stores in Manhattan before moving back to Lancaster, Penn., and striking out on her own. Her site features limited-distribution clothing, jewelry and accessories—in other words, stuff you won’t find at the mall—made by designers from London to New York City to Toronto. A jury team approves everything that goes on the site, Adamson says, and she only partners with designers who guarantee their work. “We’re trying to bring back that relationship between the customer and the creator of the jewelry,” she says.

Before launching, Adamson relied heavily on social media like Twitter and Facebook, sending as many as 10 updates per day. She quickly reaped the benefits, as designers and shoppers retweeted her posts even before the site went live.

“I really didn’t want to start my social media until we launched the site,” Adamson says. “You know what? I wish I’d started it sooner.”
At Gigwalk, Seidman, Crampton and Watanabe ran pre-launch trials of their own. Once Seidman convinced a potential client of the merits of Gigwalk’s business model, the company would run a small test of 30 to 50 gigs. If the test went smoothly, the company would try a slightly larger test. The trials showed prospects the value of Gigwalk’s services and gave the company the opportunity to fix any glitches. “Now we’re dealing with tens of thousands of gigs for individual companies,” Seidman says.

As customers began to sign on with Gigwalk, investors soon followed. The company raised Rs.7.65 crore from venture capitalists, including Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn, and Jean-Francois “Jeff” Clavier, the founder and managing partner of SoftTech VC in Palo Alto, California.

“It’s always an issue for investors,” Clavier says. “How many clients do you need to want to invest? In the case of Gigwalk, I was happy to take a chance because it made so much sense for me. In this market, if you wait, you play a losing game. If you want to win, you basically come with your checkbook and say, ‘OK, I like this. How much?’” And that, of course, is music to the ears of any startup entrepreneur.

What I learned from my customers
Gigwalk was halfway through an assignment when its client, online restaurant directory MenuPages, asked for a meeting with CEO Ariel Seidman. The company had hired Gigwalk to compile data on 300 Los Angeles restaurants—hours of operation, minimum delivery fee and iPhone photographs of the menus. But some of the photos were coming in blurry or with menu items cut off. The subpar images were traced to early-model iPhones being used by some of Gigwalk’s contributors—a mobile work force known as Gigwalkers.

So Seidman refined the terms of the MenuPages gig, requiring Gigwalkers to use the iPhone 4—then Apple’s newest model—to photograph the rest of the menus. MenuPages was pleased enough with the results and then ordered gigs in Chicago, Miami, Boston and San Francisco.

“They pushed us hard on a lot of stuff,” Seidman says of MenuPages. “They told us honestly what was working and what wasn’t working. They made us better. They made the product better.”

As Seidman discovered, customers can teach you a lot about how to improve your business, especially during the critical pre-launch phase. Laura Adamson learned that lesson during the three months she spent preparing a website for her new online shopping business. As a trial run, she watched 10 would-be shoppers navigate the site, checking to see if they encountered any trouble. They did. But Adamson was able to make adjustments and further trouble was averted.

Before Jackson Miller launched Bizen, he planned to provide end-of-day cash register reports to his retail clients. Not good enough, they told him. “What I learned from customers is that it’s more actionable if, in the middle of the day, a text message can tell them if something is out of whack,” says Miller, who reprogrammed Bizen’s software to deliver more up-to-the-minute reports.

Miller also learned an unexpected lesson from his pre-launch discussions with certain potential clients. “Not only did they teach me what to build,” he says, “they also taught me how to sell it.”

Christopher Hann is a freelance writer and adjunct professor of journalism at Rutgers University.

Lure top talent from big businesses

Team Entrepreneur — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 06:53:33 +0000

During the height of the downturn, many small business owners were too cash-strapped to hire workers, even if they saw the opportunity to grow with more staff. The economy is a bit less sluggish now so business is improving for some entrepreneurs. But a new study points to an irony: Apparently, the improved economy is making it hard to hire, too. Corporate-information portal Manta reports 57 percent of SMEs plan to hire this year in the U.S. But one in four of those entrepreneurs say they’re having trouble recruiting quality candidates because they cannot compete with big businesses. Top applicants are turning them down; holding out for big corporate jobs. Here are five ways to find great hires for your small business:

1. Network
Rather than posting a Craigslist ad and getting 2,000 resumes to wade through, let colleagues, family and friends know what you are looking for in a new hire. They may know someone who’d prefer a small-business environment to that of a larger corporation. Nearly 60 percent participants in the Manta study found their hires through their network contacts.

2. Consider recent college graduates
Recent graduates are often hot to find good work and thus pay off their student loans —and it’s one of the toughest hiring markets for grads in ages. If you have a position you could train someone for, then you could nab someone with great potential.

3. Allow telecommuting
This is an angle that attracts younger workers. A study from freelance marketplace Elance found more than half of Millenials consider telecommuting options important in selecting a job.

4. Create a flextime position
Many workers need to work odd hours so they can pick up their children from school or attend certain classes themselves. If you offer some flexibility in your work hours, then you might improve your chances of getting a quality hire.

5. Offer more responsibility and reward
What can you offer an employee that a giant company cannot? At a large company, an employee often is a tiny cog in an enormous machine. Smaller companies can consider offering a small equity stake as well as the chance to have a greater say in company decisions, provided these are worthy of implementation.
Both are things workers often cannot get in “corporate America” or “corporate India.”

How to Make Heroes

Team Entrepreneur — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 11:47:45 +0000

Marketers often look at their product as the raison d’etre of a company. “How can I get more people to fall in love with this amazing product?” they ask. Of course, that’s the opposite of how buyers see the scenario. A buyer is asking, “How can I be even more amazing?” The challenge, then, is to position your product as the element your hero requires to be successful.

But when you look at how companies market online, they still make the product out to be the hero. The e-mail you receive talks about all the amazing features. The Twitter stream is a raft of offers and quips about how great the products are, with zero engagement with their potential heroes.

Marketers need to use digital marketing tools to make heroes of their customers, not of their products. Here are a few ways to do that.

Video interviews and testimonials
YouTube is the second most popular search engine after Google (at least in the U.S.). If you’re not creating brief, interesting video testimonials with some of your success stories, you’re missing a great opportunity. Be careful to word the title of the video something akin to what someone searching for your product or for products in your category would use as search terms.

Also, if you really want to stun people positively, then you must allow for a negative review of your product or service, hopefully with some kind of silver lining to how things end.

According to Bazaarvoice, which is an online review and ratings platform, an absence of negative reviews and opinions will trigger a sense of a lack of trust, whether or not you notice it directly. And this will ultimately affect your business.

Profiles and content promotions
Want to make your buyer the hero? Write about the customers. Show recent successes. Don’t talk about your product. Instead, make it a piece about your buyer. That customer will bring their friends and colleagues to show off the profile, which is of course on your site and means they might peruse your offerings.

This content shouldn’t be sales material for your product; it should just be interesting content that is helpful to your buyer.

Blogger outreach
If you want to keep the hero story going, reach out to bloggers who cover the space your product serves. Not sure where to start? Alltop.com is the magazine rack of the internet. Look around for those bloggers who talk about your space and then build a relationship.

Don’t immediately offer information or access to your products. Rather, learn what the blogger writes about, comment where appropriate (not mentioning your product) and build a relationship. From this, more opportunities will arise.

You can make your buyer a hero, and that will ensure your future as a company doing good things for its community. What’s your story?

Chris Brogan has more than a decade of experience using social media, the web and mobile technology to build digital relationships for businesses, organizations and individuals. He is president of Human Business Works, a small-business education and growth company. Brogan is co-author of The New York Times bestselling Trust Agents, and author of Social Media 101. He blogs at chrisbrogan.com.