Overnight Success in Business

Doodling a business idea for some time now... make sure you are ready for the jump before you actually jump... here is a quick test:

1    1)  You like chaos, challenges and setbacks

2    2)  You like corner place, command and easy cheques

If you have selected 1), I think you should continue reading...

You should be ready to forgo vacations and do more work than a 9-6 job offer. You will be forced to change your role from a strategist to a clerical admin without changing your seat.

And on the softer side if you embrace your start-up with all your time and energy, be ready to miss the hugs and kisses from your home partner.

And on the harder side reality can suck... your sales presentations face repeated rejections and your potential buyers turn you down. Every nerve will be strained and tested as if you need to prove to them that you are still in and want to succeed. You better hang on!

And the toughest part is that you need to do this not just for days or weeks or months... buddy it could be for years... if things work out well... it will be less than 8 years!

Forgive me for yet another motherhood statement: “Achieving 'overnight success in business' takes a few long years!!”

~ Satish Chathanath Call : 9884011654 Mail : csadhy@yahoo.co.in

Who cuts the oxygen to your Ideas?

Wonder why great ideas are always booed away and shoed away?
Because it creates fear in the minds of people around you - peers and managers! They don't want your idea to challenge their pay cheque or authority or cosy zone.

In most corporates, most of the ideas are rejected for selfish reasons!

~ Satish Chathanath Call : 9884011654 Mail : csadhy@yahoo.co.in

Indiamart and the branding challenge

After a great run in India and ready to go global, Indiamart has suddenly found itself staring a big wall on its track. Currently, quite a few of buyers and sellers on Indiamart are in India. However, there has been constant interest from foriegn buyers and sellers from abroad to be part of Indiamart.com The only problem has been that owing to a brand positioning clash many companies do not want to become part of a site which has India in its name.

Well, to book a domain with a name like Globemart would not help as the hits and the high response from buyers and sellers around the world and particularly from India is on Indiamart and not on some new site which was unknown till now.

However, now the promoters Dinesh Agarwals and his team find it increasingly difficult to get a large number of conversions to jump onto the India brand if they are from other parts of the globe. The advertising agency and the A-team of the company is addressing the problem and is trying to arrive at a consensus as to how to leverage the brand and at the same time convert it into a global brand.

For one thing, Indiamart will not be able to have its cake and eat it too. It will either have to shed the India image or carry on with it and sacrifice its ability to attract buyers and sellers from a worldwide footprint .
The other option available to this company is to promote a site such as www.globaltrade.com and then redirects it to www.indiamart.com/global

So where do you think things went wrong. Is it at the domain registration stage or earlier? Jump in and let know your thoughts... what basic branding principles would have saved Indiamart from this chaotic situation?

~ Satish Chathanath
Call : 9884011654
Mail : csadhy@yahoo.co.in

Leading Green Brand !!

The global "green" enterprise IT study released by Strategic Oxygen and Cohn & Wolfe today reveals that Dell is the number one green technology brand, recognized for its extensive recycling program, the top ranked attribute sought by IT buyers. HP, IBM and Microsoft were noted for their energy efficient products and use of sustainable materials, while Apple held its position in the top five for designing products that are perceived to have a green look and feel.

"The technology brands that make the authentic connection between the environmental soundness of their products and their sustainable business operations and policies, will be long-term winners," says Claudia Carasso, managing director of the global technology practice at Cohn & Wolfe. "We also know that CIOs who are committed to green strategies depend more on blogs and forums than their non-green counterparts for gathering information on technology solutions. This is an important finding for product and service providers who are looking for current and credible ways to reach the coveted C-suite buyer."

GREEN MARKETING, is it????


~ Satish Chathanath
Call : 9884011654
Mail : csadhy@yahoo.co.in

Public in Public Relations ?

Does your PR agency reach your customers directly? Or do they still depend on the media to communicate your story?

In the US, PR success is measured on this challenging yardstick too. It is still nascent in India! So what do we do to achieve this. Do we have to rework the PR tools? Or change the PR agency ;) Probably, I think, both clients and the PR advisory firms need to change their mindset about PR. And bring 'Public' into Public Relations!

How easy it is to make such motherhood statements and smile at it innocently?!?!?

~ Satish Chathanath
Call : 9884011654
Mail : csadhy@yahoo.co.in

One-line Marketing Strategy

I had a chat with a start-up founder. He wanted me to act as a sounding board and as well give him a one-line marketing strategy.

"Serve a market that is an inch wide and a mile deep and not a mile wide and an inch deep."

How true!! Start-ups should follow this brick to brick or pixel to pixel!!

~ Satish Chathanath
Call : 9884011654
Mail : csadhy@yahoo.co.in

Digital East !!

In terms of total broadband users, the US leads the pack with more than 60 million subscribers. But second-placed China is fast closing the gap. From 41 million users a year ago, China now has more than 56 million and looks set to overtake the US as the world's largest broadband market this year.

There are more than 1.1 billion of the world's estimated 6.6 billion people online and almost a third of them are now accessing the internet on high-speed lines. According to the internet consultancy Point Topic, 298 million people had broadband at the end of March and that is already estimated to have shot over 300 million.

Digital west? East is fast moving north to beat the west. Sorry for the pun here. The whole business dynamics will change in the coming years and these numbers are only indicators !!


~ Satish Chathanath
Call : 9884011654
Mail : csadhy@yahoo.co.in

Sales Killers !

What do retailers do when sales killers are their customer’s companions? Some time back when I was shopping with my wife in a tourist location, I played the villain role unintentionally. She was looking around for handicraft show items. After a while I lost interest and almost parked myself near the exit door, occasionally urging her to finish it soon. After a few impatient glares, she decided to drop it altogether and walked out with me.

The poor retailer watched a sure sales scenario tripping into a no-purchase situation. Reason : the companion of the customer. And most often, I assume the culprit is the male gender.

Later that day, I was thinking about this unfortunate scenario. How would retailers engage the companions while the real customers make some serious purchase? Retailers should come up with clever ideas to keep their sales from being killed by the companions of their customers. Retalers, jump in with your ideas!!


~ Satish Chathanath
Call : 9884011654
Mail : csadhy@yahoo.co.in

Growth or ROIC or Both ?

Often SME companies are caught in the 'growth freeze' zone. For example, a 500 head count company will struggle to hit the next big target of 1000 people. They have to sustain as well grow as well create value for customers as well produce profits for the stakeholders. Big ask!! When you find time, read what Bin Jiang and Timothy Koller of Mckinsey got to say on growth pangs.


Here is the summary of the Mckinsey Article :

'Value-minded executives know that although growth is good, returns on invested capital (ROIC) can be an equally—or still more—important indicator of value creation.1 Yet even executives at the best companies often wrestle with strategic decisions in order to reach the right balance between growth and returns. We repeatedly come across executives whose companies earn high returns on capital but who are unwilling to let those returns decline to encourage faster growth. Conversely, we see executives at companies with low returns working to promote growth instead of improving their ROIC.'

~ Satish Chathanath
Call : 9884011654
Mail : csadhy@yahoo.co.in

Business minus YOU is delegation

Micromanagement is the enemy of Delegation. Your business or department or project should run without you. That is the power of delegation.

Brian Blomgren, owner of business coaching and training firm ActionCOACH rightly points out : "The first person to convince that you can have a business that works without you is yourself. If you do not have a vision of what that looks like, then how can you expect someone else to have that vision for you?"

Read Business Week's 'Smart Answers' Section :
"I have a small company and want it to grow, but have no experience trusting employees to take care of the details I now look after myself. How do I start delegating tasks once I start hiring a larger staff?" —K.G., Seattle

~ Satish Chathanath
Call : 9884011654
Mail : csadhy@yahoo.co.in

Is Europe Insulated?

Is the United States of America going into a recession or not? A million $ question!!

There are media reports, analyst briefings and of course scores of online surveys saying 'it is', 'it is not' and so on. We need to view all this in the right context. And as a business strategy, there are biggies going to Europe to beat the US recession. Let us pause here... how insulated is Europe anyways !?

For example take UK considered as a key economic indicator of Europe's financial health. Let us see what CBI has got to say about the trend there...
UK’s premier business body, the Confederation of British Industry, has just turned in a survey that shows that Britons are spending less than ever on eating out, gyms, entertainment, and bars, and consumer facing businesses faced the weakest volume and value of business than at any time since 2001 — even though Britons are continuing to go on holiday.

And if confidence has anything to do with tipping the scale towards a downturn, indicators are that things are on the verge of it, probably not, and so on.