The Mumbai based accelerator’s Charter Angels program is meant to give a platform to graduating start-ups to pitch for on-going mentoring and seed funding by seasoned and active angel investors.

Shravan Shroff, Co-founder of VentureNursery said that “All of our Charter Angels have made several angel investments and understand its risks and joys. They are truly committed to mentoring young companies and giving them a fair opportunity to make an impact through enterprise.”

The other charter members are Amit Patni Co-founder and Chairman of Nirvana Venture Advisors, Anand Ladsariya, CEO of Everest Flavours, Arihant Patni, Director of Nirvana Venture Advisors, Ashok Kumar Damani, Co-founder, K Damani Group of Companies, Bhanu Chopra, Founder of Rate Gain, Kaushal Kumbhat, Managing Director of the FMS Group, Nitin Agarwal, Managing Partner of N M Fashions, Siddharth Raisoni, Executive Director, SGR Advisors & Fund Manager SGR Achievers Knowledge Fund and Sameer Brij Verma, Vice President at Nexus Venture Partners.

Raghavan said that “in India today for entrepreneurs who are just starting out, with an idea, little funds and probably not much else, there is a vacuum in the support infrastructure that they can tap into to further develop their idea and take it to market.”

Banka also said that “there is a visible market gap between ‘angel investing’ and ‘mentoring approach to angel investing’.”  VentureNursery instead he added is a platform, modeled on mentoring approach to angel investing.

1. Trust your instincts

There have been many occasions when I have led our team into markets that industry experts told us to avoid because the competition was too fierce or the cost of entry too high.

This was the case when we launched our airlines Virgin Atlantic and Virgin Blue (recently rebranded Virgin Australia), in 1984 and 2000, respectively. On both occasions, my fellow directors were nervous about our chances for survival, given the strengths of our competitors—namely, their market share and fleet sizes and experienced personnel. But I felt that our competitors had become complacent; that passengers wanted something different. With the right energy, focus and flair, we could make our mark.

Virgin Atlantic went from strength to strength, and now carries over five million passengers per year. In the case of Virgin Blue, we backed the plans of a former Virgin Express executive and entrepreneur Brett Godfrey, who first presented his ideas to me sketched out on a beer mat. After launching the business with just two Boeing 737s, we have built Australia’s second biggest airline, and now have a fleet of nearly 90 planes.

2. Focus on your customers, not your critics

It wasn’t just our team that occasionally worried about our stepping into tough markets. Over the years, our critics fretted about Virgin’s expansion into airlines, financial services and mobile phone services. What did our company know about these industries and how would we manage the complex issues?

I rarely paid attention (which also drew criticism from some analysts). My answer was always to focus on the customer experience, ensuring that we offered the best service, most innovative products and best value.

This worked especially well in mobile services, where most companies still require customers to sign contracts that are difficult and expensive to exit. We revolutionized the market by offering a pre-paid model. Our position was radical, but we were selling exactly what a number of younger and newer users wanted. Our businesses grew quickly in the U.K., Australia, Canada, France, South Africa, the United States, and more recently in India, expanding our customer base and brand far and wide.

3. Always support your team

In previous columns, I have discussed how crucial it was for me to find great managers to run our businesses. Day-to-day management has never been my forte, and my early decision to step back from operations gave me the freedom to focus on our main challenges and opportunities. This meant that I had to learn to trust the management teams, and to support them when they saw an opportunity. When Matthew Bucknall and Frank Reed came to us in 1999 with the concept of a family friendly health club, we decided to invest. Very quickly, they impressed all of us with their innovative approach to customer service and team building.

Soon after we opened the first few clubs, Nelson Mandela called me, asking if Virgin could rescue a chain of South African gyms. That seemed a stretch, because we had only a handful of locations in Britain, but Bucknall and Reed were confident, and such was our trust in them and their team that we signed onto the deal. And they were right: Virgin Active South Africa is one of the key drivers of that business’s growth.

4. Know when to say goodbye

It can be very difficult to know when to sell, since as a founder and entrepreneur you become very attached to your business and your team. Look into whether selling will be good for the overall health of your company, or if you need objectivity, ask trusted advisers to do this. But brace yourself—the answer might be yes.

We have sold a number of Virgin companies over the years. Probably the most notable occasion was in 1992, when we sold Virgin Records to EMI and used the cash to expand Virgin Atlantic and other companies in the group. It was a very emotional day for me—at one point, I broke down in tears. Looking back, it’s clear that we sold at the right time and the decision made sense for Virgin as a whole. That secured our group’s future and gave us a war chest for investing in new businesses.

Selling is difficult, and you will be tempted to hold on too long. This is one of the biggest mistakes an entrepreneur or chief executive can make. I held onto Virgin Megastores for too long. Despite the warnings of my management team, I could not bring myself to sell the business until a few years ago. By that time, DVD sales had collapsed and the whole industry had been revolutionized by Apple’s iTunes store. You can’t get them all right!

Finally, when you are facing a difficult choice or must make an important decision on behalf of your company, keep in mind that the answer might not always be yes or no—sometimes there are other options. Your job is to lead your team in the search for the best solutions, which are not always the easiest ones.

If you are a businessperson on entrepreneur, don’t count on either of them to help you on the road to success. Here are my seven don’ts…

1. Don’t expect how-to books or gurus to tell you what to do. Success stories and tips are for inspiration and analysis, not blind copying. But this rule is worth breaking for at least one book: The Halo Effect, by Phil Rosenzweig. This book demythologises all success stories by pointing out that the theories are retrofitted after success becomes apparent, not before.

Before the UP elections, no one knew Akhilesh Yadav would win. Now that he has won, everyone and the dog-at-the-lamp-post knows how his strategy worked. Are you any wiser?

2. Don’t try to be ahead of your time. Many entrepreneurs try to see what they can do first, before anybody else. Peter Drucker, perhaps the one management guru every aspiring entrepreneur should read, was always dismissive about visionaries. His advice: look for the future that is already here, and you are more likely to succeed.

Did Google succeed by predicting how the internet will unfold? No, they saw what was already happening all around them: people were searching for something or the other on the internet. They thus saw a business opportunity in helping people search the net. The rest is history. They discovered the future that was already there.

3. Don’t look for answers, look for the right questions. Many entrepreneurs presume they have the answers and get excited by bright ideas on a new product or service. However, no business works this way. It comes from asking the right questions. Who is my customer? Who is my competitor? Why should anyone buy my product rather than someone else’s? How do I know my product is better than my competitors’? Also, how will I know if I have succeeded? Is it about profits or market share or something else?

4. Don’t multi-task. One of the enduring myths of business is that you get better productivity out of multi-tasking yourself or your employees. Or your organization. I would recommend Drucker’s classic The Effective Executive for all entrepreneurs. The takeout is simple: no human being is capable of doing more than one or two major tasks effectively. Hence, focus is the answer.

5. Don’t forget the compounding principle. The key to winning over competitors is relative speed of change. It does not matter if your competitor is producing more than you today; what matters if you are growing faster, cutting costs faster, or improving market share faster.

Bajaj Auto forgot this when it saw Hero Honda coming up from behind in the 1980s and 1990s. ‘We are the biggest in scooters,” the management boasted. But they forgot one simple thing: Hero was growing faster, gaining market share faster. Now, Hero is No 1, and Bajaj’s scooters are gone. Honda is the overwhelming leader in scooters.

6. Don’t forget luck. Many big businesses court failure because they don’t keep an eye out for luck.IBM practically gifted the operating software to Microsoft, and lost out in PCs, a product it had invented. Infosys would never have succeeded without luck: the government was in a foreign exchange crisis in the 1990s and made its profits tax-free. But luck isn’t all. Once you see it, you have to capitalize on it. The Y2K opportunity was there for every software company to milk. Only four or five companies in India used it to catapult themselves into the global league.

7. Don’t forget to ignore all the above if something else works better. Ultimately, only you can know what success is and how to define it.

I have a theory—the bigger startups get, the more they start resembling big companies in the customer service aspect until they become behemoth, slow moving PSU-like institutions. Think about it. Most large Indian private and public enterprises have only that in common. Their customer service sucks equally.

But not anymore! Lo and behold. I have seen and heard the voice of God that makes these companies tremble. At first I thought that the voice only worked in theory, but I have now seen it in action.

So the other day, after much comparisons and discussions, my very close friend A decided to get himself a DTH connection from this telecom company which wants you to believe that every friend is important. As a tech savvy person, he did what any young kid today would do. He bought it online.

He could have basically called Satan to make a house call. It was on February 27 that A bought his connection. It was three days before a chap came home to install the DTH on March 1. Not too shabby, he thought, and expected the connection to be live within a few hours as the technician told him.

Wrong. The connection did not go live for the next 24 hours. What does the customer service say? “The booking had not been done. Online main yahee problem hain.”  Okay, he said, and like the patient man he is, waited for another 24 hours. Yes, no connection still.

On March 3, he called again, where a chap told him, “Live in a few hours sir. Did you get the connection online?” He waited a few hours. And then no connection still. He called again, when another exec told him, “One hour sir. And I will call back to check.” One hour later? No connection.

On March 4, a Sunday morning, our man hailed the voice of God. And the connection was set up and running by Monday morning with a house call made by a technician as well. What happened in between? Here is a copy of his Twitter feed that morning. Enough said.

@satantelecom I am writing here after exhausting all my options with you. Getting a DTH conn. from you has been the worst

@satantelecom Your people are inefficient, and liars too boot. I bought a HD conn on 27th Feb. Its the 4th of Mar. I still have no DTH.

@satantelecom It was installed on Mar 1. I was told the conn. would start in 12 hrs with the free ultra pack. On Mar 2. I called the CC.

@satantelecom I was told 24 hrs. I called on Mar. 24 hrs later. I was told within a few hours. I called Mar 3. 24 hrs later.

@satantelecom I was then told it would be done immediately. It did not happen. I called a 2nd time on Mar 3.

@satantelecom I was then told it would happen within the next 1 hr without fail. Its been almost 20 hrs since then. I have no DTH.

@satantelecom It is one thing that your people are inefficient. I have been put on 30 minute calls with 20 min holds.

@satantelecom In those calls, all your CC guys say is we’re getting it done in the next X hours. No idea about the problem. No solution.

@satantelecom I’m told my problem is that I bought online. Really? You’re a technology company? Are your people not ashamed to say this?

@satantelecom Here you are, sitting on Twitter with your bot and there are CC guys admitting that buying online from you sucks?

@satantelecom  As someone who has been watching you for a while, I have an advice. Give up.

@satantelecom  If it takes you 7 days to fix a DTH conn bought online, please do yourself and your shareholders a favor. Give up.

Game. Set. Match.

Humble start
Their unanimous thought that they should do something to lend professionalism to the completely unorganized flower retail industry in India led to the formation of Florista in 2003. To start up, the Dalvis invested `30,000 and started operations from a small loft above Sameer’s office in Parel, Mumbai.
The idea was to run a floral design boutique, have exquisite designs, source exotic flowers from all over and maintain high delivery standards. “We got a karigar from the Dadar flower market and hired one delivery boy. We also got a lot of international reference material for flower design and styling. We asked our friends and family to try our service,” says Dalvi, MD and CEO, Florista on the humble beginnings.
Innovating, Dalvi got the company’s delivery boy to wear clean white gloves and a neat and tidy uniform, which acted as a live promotion model for Florista wherever he went.
People would stop him and ask him what company he represented and where he was going with the flowers. Dalvi’s next move was to target corporate clients. “We started asking corporates to send flowers to their clients with a thank you note,” she says.

On the retail route
The company started gaining popularity and soon they realized that demand was far outweighing their ability to service it. “It was difficult to manage with just one delivery boy,” says Dalvi. Keeping in mind their primary target audience of corporate customers, Florista also opened its first retail outlet in High Street Phoenix in 2003.
“High Street Phoenix was an upcoming destination at that point. Lower Parel was full of corporate offices and it made sense for us to be there,” says Dalvi. The company leased 150 sq. feet space and operated the outlet from 2003 to 2006.
In FY 2004-’05, Dalvi put in an additional `2 lakh to sustain the business. She hired a shop manager and expanded the team. She also sourced several special decorative elements from Kolkata to complement the floral arrangements in the initial phase. But in 2006, the company moved out of Phoenix.
“The rentals had increased by about five times during this phase,” says Dalvi.
Though the outlet catered to several walk-in customers, the repeat orders over the phone dented the in-shop operations. Another persistent problem was the Indian office habit of delaying vendor payments. “Slowly and steadily, our outstanding amount started going up. We were also forced to write off some bad debts,” says Dalvi.

Smooth operations
Florista’s biggest lesson at this point was that the company needed to separate its call center and retail operations. The company leased a new space and moved its workshop and call center there. To strengthen its retail presence, the company leased a 600 sq. feet space opposite Phoenix and turned that into its flagship store in Mumbai.
By 2006, Dalvi had also decided to call it quits from her IT career and take charge of the business. “We revamped operations in 2007. We now had separate calling numbers for our retail outlets and the call center. We also started accepting payments through credit and debit cards, and fund transfers. We also developed an order and customer database,” she says.
Results followed. Their order execution time reduced, operations became smoother and the bad debts disappeared from the books of accounts. On the retail front, the company had introduced the kiosk format for the first time at Inorbit mall in suburban Mumbai in 2006.
This kiosk changed the company’s growth plan. Inorbit was the largest retail mall in the country for a long while and attracted visitors from all over India.
“Inorbit made us visible to a national audience. We started getting franchise enquiries from cities like Bengaluru and Jaipur,” says Dalvi on the reason for her taking the franchise route to grow.

Code orders
Today, the company operates 11 owned outlets and 22 franchise ones. It hopes to run 150 outlets by the end of 2013 through the franchise channel. It had its own share of lessons in this space as well. “Our franchisees have to start from ground one but we started from ground zero. We have tried, failed and then proved ourselves. When our kiosk in a Baroda mall didn’t work, we incurred a loss of `3 lakh,” admits Dalvi.
During the revamp, the company also decided to hire a full-time floral designer. In addition, Dalvi often had teachers from the Sogetsu School of Flower Arrangement (a philosophy of Japanese origin) coming in to train her karigars.
“A floral designer adds immense value in terms of design, style and color,” emphasizes Dalvi.
The designer also helped the company to code its standard floral arrangements. “Having a code meant the franchisee knew exactly what had to be done when we passed on an order for a particular code to him,” she adds.

Global stake
Dalvi went shopping for funds in 2010 and realized that no banks were willing to fund her as she did not have any assets to show and flowers as a product are perishable. “It was difficult to convince the VCs also due to the restraints of our business,” says Dalvi.
Finally, the company found a taker in Karuturi Global Limited, a leading global producer of cut roses with operations spread across Ethiopia, Kenya and India. Karuturi Global bought a 58 percent stake in Florista in January 2011.
Manoj Kumar Agarwal, CEO, Indian Operations, Karuturi Global Limited, says, “While our focus has been to grow our production business, we thought it is prudent to partner with a company which understands retail well and has good design capabilities.”
He adds that the company is looking at this business to evolve over the next seven to 10 years.
Karuturi is looking at investing in Florista outlets at airports and large public places. “We also want to start a full-fledged events division soon. There is a lot of scope for catering to corporate events like inaugurations, product launches, and weddings,” says Dalvi.
For 2012-’13, the company’s focus is going to be on strengthening its online presence and web operations. Dalvi is happy in her role as entrepreneur and knows that she has many more landmarks to achieve before bringing order to an industry often taken for granted on the streets.

How do you manage it all?
Whichever is your chosen industry,
the first project you deliver to the client teaches enormous lessons, both good and bad. Learn from it and set a simple process that works. The process should be easy to manage. It should also be people-friendly, at the same time it should let you to monitor, measure and manage on a daily basis. I have not been to Ivy League management
schools to learn about processes. I have learnt about it from successful businessmen in my hometown, who understood and followed the two fundamentals of the books diligently: income and expenditure. Get a hold on the incoming and outgoing flow, and you will do well. Financial discipline is key to business success.
Managing people includes clients and employees. As you begin to get more projects, managing everything
yourself will become difficult, so you will need to identify and hire the right people who understand your vision and grow with the company. This is the toughest part—getting talent that is both smart and committed. I have hired people from villages and small towns of India and trained them so that the company culture is built in, rather than hire smart talent from outside and spend resources on grooming them to fit into the culture, where usually there is a mismatch of expectations from both the parties.
A true entrepreneur knows how to bring people together. You may have the greatest product but the company is nothing without
its people. I would like to quote N.R.Narayana Murthy of Infosys, who said that at 9am Infosys is worth billions but at 6pm everyday, the company is worth nothing.

Fit for the role
Bootstrapping is all about being disciplined about resources, and this includes time, people, process and money. Just because you spent money doesn’t mean you get great quality people or products. It helps to be upfront with people about your expectation
on their performance.
Beyond these, there is one key factor that separates a successful
entrepreneur from a failed one: continuous self-motivation and courage to go on, despite challenges. You have to learn to swim your way through the waves and learn to fight the school of fish and avoid the sharks. Therefore, it helps to stay fit, both mentally and physically.
Often businesses fail, not because of the product or quality of service, but because over a period of time, business leaders tend to lose focus and belief in their idea.Once this happens, its time to say goodbye, and join the mourners in the long list of the have-been-there types. But it is such an unfortunate thing to let your dream die. Hence, you should revisit your dreams and reenergize yourself often.

Muki Regunathan is Founder and CEO of pepper square.

Opportunity
Entrepreneurs must pick spaces with potential. India Life did HR outsourcing but Teamlease is trying to fix India’s people supply chain; a big and complex problem. Hard work and smart ideas are important but there’s no point putting lipstick on a pig; you can’t scale a company beyond the potential of its market.

Team
Steven Spielberg was right when he said directing is 90 percent casting. Putting together a team is key and every entrepreneur has to kiss many frogs to find his princess. We did our frog kissing in India Life. In Teamlease, we not only got senior people early but we hired people who had diverse skill sets.

Color of money
Most entrepreneurs obsess about money but few realize that the color of money is more important than the quantum of money. Find an investor who understands that a company is not a spreadsheet and building one is hypothesis testing: you cannot prove anything right but have to prove it wrong.

Organization structure
Organizations with better metabolism—faster and more effective decision-making—have clear roles and responsibilities, forums for conflict resolutions and a leadership team comfortable with making trade-offs. The ‘everybody does everything’ chaos of India Life was replaced by clearer organization structure at Teamlease.

Ambition/risk
The biggest difference between India Life and Teamlease has been our appetite for risk. We are young enough to think about the next 20 years but old enough to have the credibility of having created a venture. We know that entrepreneurship is a leap into the unknown; if you are going to jump from the 10th floor you might as well jump from the 50th floor; the outcome will be the same! That is why our goal is to become India’s largest private employer and this star simultaneously beckons and motivates us. India offers unique entrepreneurial opportunities. Also, entrepreneurship is a journey with unique financial, spiritual and intellectual personal rewards. I’ve never met an unhappy successful entrepreneur but know many unhappy successful employees of big companies. May a thousand flowers—or babies—bloom.

Sixty-year-old Harsh C. Mariwala, Chairman and Managing Director of the Rs 4,000-crore fast-moving consumer goods major Marico Ltd., is busy working out at a gym in Mumbai’s Bandra suburb. A fitness buff, Mariwala is a regular member of the gym, and trains at least three days a week.

Only this Wednesday was not really like other days. Mariwala’s company had just snapped up the personal care brands of Paras Pharmaceuticals from the U.K. multinational Reckitt Benckiser, which had bought Paras in end-2010. The deal, widely speculated as being in the region of $100 million, gives Marico access to personal care brands like Set Wet hair styling gel, Livon hair conditioner and the Zatak range of deodorants. More importantly, it marks the entry of Marico—a major player in edible oil products and hair oils—into the fast-growing male grooming and hair care segments, potentially reducing excessive dependence on its traditional strengths.
But even as his team was putting the finishing touches to the deal, Mariwala was busy staying fit. Why was the Marico boss not at the site of action? Says Mariwala, with his trademark smile: “The team is doing it. I am not required to be there.”

This, in essence, sums up Harsh Mariwala’s business philosophy, one that envisions making oneself redundant at every stage in an entrepreneur’s path to scaling up in order to facilitate further growth. Indeed, Mariwala should know about scaling up, having taken the consumer products division of his family firm Bombay Oil Industries from a `40 lakh business in 1971 to the current `4,000 crore one. Today, Marico is present in 25 countries across India, South East Asia, the Middle East and Africa. In India, every month, products from Marico’s Consumer Product Business reach around 130 million consumers in about 23 million households, through a distribution network of more than 3.3 million outlets.

Ascent to new  ventures
Along the way, Mariwala transformed a sleepy, old-world family-run business into a fast-moving, exciting, consumer goods major with marquee brands like Parachute, Saffola, Hair & Care, Mediker, Nihar and Revive, with an obsession for innovation and an enabling organization culture. Today, as Marico expands its footprint not only in related areas but also globally, Mariwala is busy putting in place what is clearly another dream project for him.
By May, Mariwala will be unveiling Ascent—Accelerating the Scaling Up of Enterprise—a Harsh Mariwala Foundation, an ambitious initiative of grooming entrepreneurs and helping them scale up. The project, which could turn out to be a potential gamechanger and have a major impact on the Indian entrepreneurial ecosystem, is what keeps the challenge-hungry Mariwala busy these days. Says Milind Sarwate, Group CFO and Chief HR Officer of Marico, who is working with Mariwala closely on Ascent: “Whenever I come to Harsh to talk about other things, our conversation invariably veers towards Ascent. That’s how passionate he is about this project.”

The early years of scaling up
It is, perhaps, no surprise that Harsh Mariwala is so passionate about how entrepreneurs can scale up. Mariwala joined the family business of Bombay Oils in 1971, when the company had three distinct businesses—fatty acids, spice extracts and consumer products. The consumer products business later morphed into the Marico of today. “The decision to spin off the consumer products business to form Marico was the most important business decision of my life,” concedes Mariwala. The consumer products business had two factories—at Sewree and Mazgaon in what was then Bombay—producing raw and refined vegetable oils. Fresh from a degree in commerce from Bombay’s Sydenham College, Mariwala got into the business where his father and uncles ran the show. By the mid-’70s, he was put in charge of the vegetable oils business, which was old-world and a model based on bulk sales.
From the mid-’70s through the ’80s, Mariwala transformed this business into a more modern, marketing-centric one with continuous branding efforts and a strong focus on innovation. For instance, travelling across the interior markets in his early years, he noticed that retailers were dispensing vegetable oils ‘loose’ from larger tins to consumers. The market was disorganized. Taking cues from giants like Hindustan Unilever (HUL), Colgate and other consumer goods majors who depended heavily on branding and advertising, Mariwala decided to move from larger tins to smaller packs and take the help of ad and branding experts to create a positioning strategy for the Parachute brand of coconut oil, perhaps the first time a coconut oil maker was thinking of an ad strategy. Alongside was his strategy of making refined oil Saffola a national brand, focusing on its cholesterol-reducing properties.
Mariwala also quickly realized that tin packs were becoming uneconomical with the increasing prices of tin sheets. The answer lay in plastic (HDPE) packs. He virtually pioneered the edible oils industry’s move to plastic packaging which reduced costs and scored higher on aesthetics. But even as he went about transforming the business, Mariwala understood there were more challenges awaiting him if he had to scale up his way.
“We were a family managed company, not run professionally. The businesses of Bombay Oil did not have any synergy between them,” recalls Mariwala. “Because of this, there were conflicts between the businesses in terms of resource allocation, key decisions like remuneration for talent, the role of staff functions and image building. In our business of consumer products, everything was focused around talent. In the other businesses, it was capital allocation for putting up factories and things like that. So there was always a conflict in terms of what is good for the organization.”
These conflicts led to what he calls sub-optimal decisions. If he paid higher salaries to employees in his side of the business, the other businesses were then faced with problems with their employees. “We were also located in Masjid Bunder, the heart of the Mumbai commodity market. This was a major hindrance to attracting good talent. This also led to the inability to create a common culture across the organization. Besides, we couldn’t focus on one business and put in our entire efforts behind it,” he says.
Meanwhile, new competition, in the form of ITC Ltd, the cigarette maker-turned consumer goods giant, was growing. While ITC had launched the Sundrop brand of edible oil, Lever had come up with Flora, its sunflower oil brand which it marketed aggressively. Postman, the market leader from Ahmed Oil Mills, began making way for ITC’s Sundrop. The landscape had changed.

Marico and after
The changing scenario necessitated that Mariwala break out on his own and focus entirely on his dream of creating a consumer products business which had scale and an expansive footprint. In 1990, Marico was born out of the consumer products business of Bombay Oil, which gave Mariwala the opportunity to take a quantum leap. “Liberalization had started taking place, and we had to face competition in attracting talent,” explains Mariwala, stressing how his need to attract quality talent virtually left him no other option but to create a separate entity. “If we had to take on the larger FMCG players and grow, we would have to have the right talent. It was very difficult to do that being a part of Bombay Oil then, as four or five of my cousins had also joined the business,” he said. “Perception about the business and the speed of taking decisions were also problems. If you are part of a larger business you have to be sensitive to how one decision affects the other family members or other businesses. In that context, it was a logical step to spin Marico off as a separate company.”
Was the decision painful? “Whenever such major decisions are taken, there are always concerns about whether the move will be viable. We had to go about it in a gradual manner and explain to all the family members the reasons behind the move over a period of two years or so [between 1987-’89],” says Mariwala. “I have seen many businesses getting destroyed because the conflict within the family or promoters just pulls you down. It must be a part of the promoter’s DNA to ensure that he manages the stakeholders in a manner which does not impact the business negatively,” explains Mariwala about the emphasis he placed on getting everyone in the family on-board with his spin-off strategy. When two of the family factions exited in the mid-’90s, Marico went public.
“Looking back, going public was a good decision, because that puts you under far more scrutiny and has an impact on the image. I have no regrets about going public. Sometimes, there are views that going public puts needless pressure on companies. But I think the answer lies in doing what is sound rather than getting too sensitive about markets. When we launched Kaya (the company’s skin care services business) we had said it would impact short-term profits, but we went ahead. If we see the quarterly results as the end, it will drive you to behavior which may not always be good for the company.” Bold and unconventional words from the chairman of a large, listed FMCG company which is keenly tracked by the markets.
The investor community regards Marico highly. Says Sudhir Dash, MD of U.K.-based asset manager Investec Capital Services: “Marico has created a mark in the highly competitive FMCG space which is dominated by global giants like Lever and Procter & Gamble. The company is innovative and has made significant strides in both edible and non-edible oils.”

Innovation and the Marico culture

Today, Marico focuses on getting everyone to ‘be more’.  The vision is to try and transform, in a sustainable manner, the lives of those the company touches, by nurturing and empowering their true potential. In fact, innovation is at the heart of what Marico seeks to do, and so, whether it is making the shift from tin packs to plastic ones, creating a coconut oil usage explosion in consumer packs with HDPE, or introducing the ‘flip-top’ Parachute pack to enable easy identification of genuine parachute and leak-proofing of packs, or even market expansions through pouches and Parachute mini-B packs, innovation has driven most business decisions at Marico. The Marico Innovation Foundation, set up as the company’s corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiative in 2003 was based on the thinking that innovation is a crucial way of getting into the center-stage of global business leadership. Headed by Ramesh Mashelkar, the Foundation plays the role of a catalyst and works towards creating an innovation ecosystem.
“Innovation is one of the cornerstones for us. Even if you look at Bombay Oil, what did we really do? It was a series of innovations in packaging in coconut oil which enabled us to grow from a zero or one percent market share to become a market leader,” explains Mariwala. “But for those innovations, we would have been struggling.” The first 15 years of Mariwala’s success in business, he stresses, emphasized two salient points in his mind: the importance of people and innovation. “So when Marico began operations, we spent a lot of time in creating the right culture in the organization which basically meant getting the right quality of talent. Then we backed it up by innovation in a far more structured manner.”
Mariwala says innovation has different models. “One may be the Apple kind of scenario, where innovation is driven from the top. But that may be suited for a highly discontinuous environment which they were in. But we believe we need to create a culture so that innovation takes place on a regular basis. It need not be just in a product and could even be in advertising. People should go on thinking about innovation on a regular basis and the top management has to go on demanding innovation on a perpetual basis.”
Mariwala says the possibility of failure must be built into the concept of innovation. He himself has tasted failure more than once, with introduction of products which didn’t work, forcing their withdrawal. The most recent case was of Saffola Zest, a baked snack which was prototyped in a limited way in Mumbai markets and generated tepid response, forcing Marico to pull it out. “Maybe we gave an idea to many others who launched baked snacks later, but I’d say we didn’t execute it well though the idea was good,” he admits.
The other pillar, of creating a distinct Marico culture, was equally important. Marico went about putting in place one which emphasized on being open, informal (calling people by first names), participative, empowering, merit-based and apolitical. Gossip is discouraged, there is job rotation and learning and preparing for higher responsibilities and cross-functional exposure are in-built.

PSR, not CSR

In his own entrepreneurial journey from a commerce graduate who was not allowed to attend business school and joined the family business to being the boss of a listed FMCG major with a global footprint, Harsh Mariwala has seen all the phases an entrepreneur would: starting up, consolidation, and scaling up. It is this entire personal journey which is at the heart of his Ascent initiative. The Foundation, Sarwate says, finds its genesis in Mariwala’s personal passion of playing enabler to nascent businesses to help them scale up fast and realize their full potential. This, Mariwala says, is his Personal Social Responsibility (PSR) as distinct from Marico CSR, a model increasingly being followed by Indian business leaders, among them Azim Premji.
“I am passionate about innovation and entrepreneurship,” explains Mariwala. “And at some level there is a linkage between the two.” Two years ago, he realized he had to do something on his own, which would be his PSR initiative to try and make a difference. “Each promoter has to work on both (CSR and PSR). So I thought if innovation is being taken up by us at a company level, can I take up entrepreneurship on a personal level? I have been experimenting on this for the past two years; one was through women entrepreneurs in Mumbai.” This involved tying up with a business school and an industry chamber, getting entries from women entrepreneurs and even having an award function. “But I wasn’t too excited by that experiment and thought we need to change focus.”
Mariwala’s speech at a TiE (The Indus Entrepreneurs) event generated a lot of requests for mentoring and this led him to put together the basis of what today constitutes the Ascent gameplan. “I thought I could take on groups of 10 and mentor them. Individual mentoring would take a lot of time and would be complex. My whole thinking was how we can make a larger impact rather than through single mentoring sessions.”
Even at that point, some individual entrepreneurs came to him for mentoring. It was then that he found some of them were struggling with their business models but were too attached to let go. “They didn’t realize they were just burning money and that the businesses didn’t have any future. I had to tell a couple of entrepreneurs that I didn’t think it was viable for them to put in their savings in the business and it was better to shut shop. At some stage, you have to give them the bad news as well,” he says.
This experience of meeting people who were struggling with the business model stage itself made him realize that it would be a better option to mentor entrepreneurs who had proven business models. “We thought it would be good if we select them from those whose models are proven, has a topline and the bottomline is in sight but they are having difficulties scaling up. So I decided to try and work on scaling entrepreneurs. I took on two groups of ten each and started speaking to them.” Mariwala and some of his other team members, including Sarwate, identified about 20 topics and started talking to these entrepreneurs about these. How to attract and retain talent, cost management, growth, innovation, culture building, raising funds, information technology were among the topics identified for this. This was a good enough prototype and a pilot project for Mariwala’s Big Dream. As he got busy for a year thereafter with the presidentship of FICCI, he focused on one group and identified a few people from it to act as moderators. This group then began working together, learning from each other and tackling various issues pertaining to their businesses. “I saw that through this model, a lot of peer learning was happening. So now we want to scale this up. We want to take about 10 groups of 10 entrepreneurs, totalling 100. But ultimately, my dream is to have 1,000 such groups. But at this stage, it is a dream. We would like to start from Mumbai, then go national,” says Mariwala.

The Ascent initiative

As the starting point for Ascent, Mariwala has already got on board Manak Singh, TiE’s former Associate Director, to be Chief Evangelist. “He will spend half his time on this. He will be in charge of the backroom, while Milind and I will focus on the conceptual stage,” explains Mariwala. “We will talk to TiE and various associations and get about 300-400 applications from which we will select 100 or 120 entrepreneurs. We want to do all that within the next two months,” says Mariwala. The selection process may also include personal interviews. Ascent will carefully select only those entrepreneurs who have a proven/successful business model, potential to grow, and desire to learn and teach, through a roundtable mechanism. Members will be selected by a panel using both criteria, tangible and intangible, such as a strong sense of personal and business ethics, a belief that conscious professional inputs will help business to scale up, a proven business idea, with a current scale of more than `1 crore turnover for services and `5 crore turnover for products. These should have potential to scale up, determined by financial projections and a clearly envisioned future. “Willingness to collaborate will be a strong criteria for selection,” says Mariwala.
Ascent will be a Section 25 company, a not-for-profit entity, with Mariwala supporting it financially, on his personal account. There will be just a token joining fee. The fees collected could also be donated by Ascent to a suitable social cause. Members will collectively bear all expenses that their roundtable incurs on sessions.
The program, Sarwate explains, will leverage the power of the collective, rather than the power of individual guidance. “Ascent will thus provide facilities, resources and environment to roundtables of entrepreneurs, and not to individual entrepreneurs. It will however provide separate room for individuals to directly access resources: experts, mentors, investors and so on. It will shepherd entrepreneurs towards the right mentors, guides and domain experts, without itself being a service provider or directly running their enterprises,” he adds. The Ascent Member Roundtables will have access to Knowledge Partners and Consultants. “Ascent will also help members by constructively tracking their progress,” he says.
Mariwala points out that Ascent will endeavor to keep the composition of each roundtable as non-competitive and diverse as possible, in terms of age, background, industry etc, so that the experience set is rich and varied. “We expect that most roundtables will continue to function for four-five years. Members’ achievements will be recognized periodically through award functions or such events.”
Ascent may also form Special Interest Groups (SIGs) around certain themes and domains e.g. logistics, raising capital, HR and will use Information Technology to leverage, among other things, the power of portals.

The Ascent ecosystem
Mariwala also plans to set up an elaborate ecosystem of associates aimed at providing sustained value add to members. This will be done through:

“Initiators”—trained facilitation experts who will facilitate the initial few (3 or 4) sessions of each member roundtable. They will “shepherd” the initial working of the roundtables and will select their successors from within each roundtable, along with back-ups and help transition to successors who will be called Moderators.
“Moderators” will facilitate sessions of the roundtable in the steady state, that is, after the initial few roundtables. They would be identified by the Initiators and trained formally to facilitate the roundtables. “We will also have “co-moderators” who will act as back-ups to moderators,” says Sarwate.
“Facilitation Trainers” will be experts in facilitation who will train moderators and co-moderators.
“Knowledge Partners”—individuals with specific domain expertise and experience to be in a position to impart knowledge and wisdom to the roundtables through periodic sessions—will be empanelled by Ascent. Several concurrent knowledge partners, each carrying one or more domain specialization and accomplishments, will share their expertise and experience to enable entrepreneurs to accelerate growth by removing road blocks in the knowledge partner’s area of expertise.
In this endeavor, Knowledge Partners will not have any commercial arrangement with entrepreneurs. They will provide expert inputs to members across the entire business value chain.
These could be in the areas of corporate value creation, innovation, cost management, global business management, marketing and market access, operations, sales & distribution, governance, risk management, compliance, HR/OD, information technology and social responsibility of business.
“Consultants”—Individuals with specific expertise and experience- will be available to individual entrepreneur members or roundtables, at a cost to be borne by the individuals or roundtables. Consultants will render specific services or help. Ascent, on its part, will provide a facility (including an IT portal) where any individual member or roundtable can connect with consultants and retain them through direct negotiations. Some of the Knowledge Partners could be Consultants. The two roles will, however, interface separately with members and roundtables, Sarwate explains.

Peer power
Keen on the peer learning model, Mariwala says Ascent’s value proposition will manifest itself the most for members through the roundtables the member-entrepreneurs will have. “Meetings will be held every month at least once at a pre-determined date, time and venue. Initiators and Moderators will facilitate these roundtables,” he says. Each roundtable will access Knowledge Partners and Consultants at each monthly meeting, depending upon their roundtable’s schedule. Apart from monthly roundtables, there will be periodic multi-roundtable sessions to be addressed by a thought leader and an annual convention as well.
How will Ascent be different from other entrepreneurship initiatives? Mariwala says his initiative will be different from other similar organizations, like TiE, in that it will provide entry only to entrepreneurs with potential, denoted by a certain minimum scale, and use the Member Roundtable structure that leverages the power of the collective, and focus on acceleration, scaling up and growth.
Says Mariwala: “Ascent will play an enabling or catalytic role. It will never play a directing or controlling role. Instead of spoon-feeding entrepreneurs, the focus will be on letting entrepreneurs learn.” The chief idea behind the concept is to focus on creating the ability to grow from within the enterprise, using the power of “self-help” that a roundtable of entrepreneurs can leverage through learning from each other. “The focus is on collective learning rather than individual problem solving,” he adds.
While the finishing touches are now being given, Ascent will begin with a prototype in Mumbai and eventually pan out nationally. The initial target is 10 roundtables of 8-12 entrepreneurs each, comprising 2–3 social entrepreneur roundtables and 6–7 business entrepreneur roundtables. “Ascent is a new concept. Therefore its structure and targets will keep evolving,” explains Mariwala.

Proof of concept
Mariwala is not going blind on Ascent though. Far from the prying eyes of the mainstream media, and others in the Indian entrepreneurship ecosystem, Mariwala has used TiE to facilitate a pilot group of nine entrepreneurs.
Moderated by Kanchan Kumar, one of the nine and also the current Executive Director of TiE Mumbai, the group meets every second Saturday of the month in different locations. Kumar tell us that the group is just the right sample. “We have entrepreneurs from various fields. There is somebody from the fragrance industry as well as somebody from the extreme opposite end of energy management,” he says, adding that everyone has benefited from this new model.
Kumar says this collaborative model leads to proactive mentoring and guidance from one’s own. “We learn from the expertise of one another and, in time, have started to know each other and different businesses inside out.” But they do bring in expertise from outside when needed, for example, in the area of making business plans. “Till now, there was nothing for growth-stage entrepreneurs. The value this platform can add is immeasurable.”
TiE, Kumar adds, would work as one of the many support cogs for Ascent, as it would provide a way for its members could access the Ascent Platform. Its charter members would also be the experts that would bring in their expertise to the groups when required.
Chief Evangelist Manak Singh says he will bring in his years of experience within the ecosystem and “his passion for entrepreneurship to lead Ascent from the outside.” Also a fulltime entrepreneur himself, Singh says that his role would veer towards strategic consulting for the initiative.  
He reveals that the target is to have the first group going online in June. Ascent, Singh says, “is an acceleration platform for the started.”
There are challenges, of course. Singh knows that the core issue with any group would be the individual itself who may not try to fit in. “That is why selection is so important. It would be rigorous and would only look for people with the right aptitude and attitude. Once we select, the group would self filter out those who may not be fit for this collaborative model.”

Crystal ball gazing
Evolution is not new for Harsh Mariwala. For someone who saw his enterprise scale up and evolve dramatically, Ascent’s evolution could be the next milestone to cross. Mariwala says he could, if required, devote even 30 percent of his time to Ascent as the initiative becomes bigger. Who, then, heads Marico?
“Marico is run by the chief executives of the businesses,” he says. What about his son, Rishabh, who has already gone his own way by setting up Soap Opera N More, a premium handmade soaps startup? Or daughter Rajvi, who has moved on to sociological research? Both, incidentally, had stints at Marico before looking at new pastures. Is letting them find their own feet outside Marico his way of grooming his children in entrepreneurial skills and in scaling up? “Let us see what happens,” smiles Mariwala enigmatically, when quizzed about succession.
For now, Ascent is all he can think of. But then, Mariwala has always had a knack of surprising people. Watch this space.
(With inputs from Ankush Chibber)

This was after the duo launched parent company Easy Commerce in June 2011 (as investor partners with an investment of Rs. 1 crore) in partnership with U.S-based Magento that sells e-commerce software. The agreement gives them the right to sell these solutions to Indian customers.

Dinein.in which originally started as a proof of concept to Easy Commerce in late November 2011 has now hived off into an independent entity January 2012 onwards. To date, it has serviced 2100 deliveries on the back of its 20-member delivery team and six customer relations staff. The firm’s revenues have been doubling every month since inception and in April 2012 it clocked in Rs. 7.5 lakh. “We want to reach servicing 300-400 orders a day from our current capacity of 25-30,” said Chordia, CEO Dinein.in.

Magento’s software is basically a feature-rich, open-source framework for online stores which allows entrepreneurs to fit in their requirements for an e-commerce website. “The most exciting thing is it’s scalability as it has the ability to handle unlimited traffic and data,” said Chordia.

Dinein.in’s revenue model works around commissions, charged to partner restaurants on a per order basis, payable at the end of the month. “We charge about 10-15 percent of the order value as commission,” he said. Orders are taken through its website or unified call centre operational with 100 lines. Apart from logistical support, the company helps partner restaurants market themselves with its menu guide publication, printed bi-monthly and listing menus of all chains in its network. “So far more than 10,000 copies are being circulated,” he said. These consolidated guides are made available in all partner outlets and distributed at events too. Going forward, the founders want to look at inter-city orders. “We would look at portable food items which we can bring to Chennai from other cities,” he highlighted.

On the other hand, Easy Commerce operates as an independent entity as well and its revenue model works on implementation fee, wherein customers download the software and pay the firm programming and installation charges. So far it has launched websites for : askpundit.com, caratlane.com, and is under development with basicslife.com, studiotara.com, bollywoodvogue.com, and Yowdee.com. For Chordia, the opportunity was a gap in e-commerce space, with respect to challenges with back-end technology available in the market. “Magento’s platform allows users to add in as many features without touching the code,” he pointed. The company has already clocked in revenues of Rs. 45 lakh for the period June 2011-March 2012.

Chordia’s initial venture Records Guru, continues to function professionally and has recently brought in a round of private equity funding (amount and investor name undisclosed) for growth and expansion plans. The CEO will move out of his former operational role take on a more directional path here as he will be focusing his time and energy on the newly launched startups.

The event commenced with industry expert and consultant, Gibson G. Vedamani’s keynote address, followed by two panel discussions. The first panel – Is the Indian e-commerce eco-system ready for the next growth wave – was a discussion between Bharati Jacob, Founder-Partner Seedfund, K.Vaitheeswaran, Founder and CEO Indiaplaza.com, and K. Ganesh, CEO, Founder Smarthinking and TutorVista who exchanged views on the challenges and opportunities around business on the internet. On the whole, the panellists were bullish on the potential e-commerce has to offer for entrepreneurs. “What it offers is the fact that it gives you the ability to compete and a spark to create stuff,” said Ganesh. Also, the panellists highlighted the emerging trend in e-commerce initiated by companies like Zovi.com BlueStone.com and Donebynone.com who have created their own online brands. This they said is another opportunity for aspiring entrepreneurs looking to venture into this space. Speaking on the barriers to e-commerce, Jacob said that while entrepreneurs can copy U.S-based models execution of the same continues to be a challenge for Indian entrepreneurs. “Many venture capitalists are responsible for this herd mentality, especially those who come back from U.S,” she pointed. Entrepreneurs must think through the model in depth before venturing into this space. “Just making a website is not an e-commerce company,” she added. Vaitheeswaran pointed out a pertinent point

with respect to profitability. He said, “E-commerce requires a certain scale and therefore it’s hard to make money here. However, the good thing is there is a level of comfort in people when it comes to virtual transactions these days. While adoption may be slower, influences to a purchase will remain the same.”

Left-Right: K.Vaitheeswaran, Founder and CEO Indiaplaza.com, and K. Ganesh, CEO, Founder Smarthinking and TutorVista , and Bharati Jacob, Founder-Partner Seedfund on the first panel.

The second panel – How can new age physical retail co-exist and flourish with the e-commerce generation, focused on areas like new age retail, technology applications for retail brick and mortar companies, and new retail concepts like organic food, lifestyle and feeder enterprises to modern retail. The biggest challenge in India for physical retail is back-end and so creating a good supply chain, vendor base is an opportunity for entrepreneurs.

Often organizations make the mistake of building their DNA on the amount of money they have brought in through investors,” said Kabir Lumba, Managing Director Lifestyle International. Entrepreneurs were unanimously advised to make sure their business model remains simple.

Hemchandra Javeri, Executive Director Forum Synergies PE Fund Manager said the next wave for retail industry is coming to mobile platforms. According to him, there is an opportunity for IT enabled services, analytics, data mining and customer relations management.

Concluding the first half of the day, Amuleek Singh Bijral, Founder Chai Point, a chain of tea kiosks in Bengaluru, shared his journey in setting up the business centred around branded liquid tea for working Indians on the go.

Mentor and investor interaction made up the second half of the day. Entrepreneurs partook in one-on-one mentoring sessions around areas of: e-commerce, physical retail, mobile retail and payment gateways and logistics. Parallel to this, representatives from Seedfund, Venture East, Indo US and Indian Angel Network, presented their fund portfolio, investment strategy and perspectives on the retail industry.

Other speakers at the event included Kiran Nadkarni, Founder Kaati Zone, and Ajoy Krishnamurti, CEO Ishanya.