I was an "accidental entrepreneur". In my last corporate role at HSBC more than a decade back, the thought of entrepreneurship was as alien to me as my son wanting to do Math on a Sunday. It was fortuitous that the publication of my first book in 2004 (Get Happy Now) compelled me to travel across diverse geography doing seminars around it. By the time I was done with the promotional tour, I was hooked. With something akin to an epiphany I realized that what I really enjoyed doing was interacting with people...making a difference...in some manner or the other. PeopleFirst(India) happened! It's been more than 11 years since, and I have set up businesses straddling different sectors - OD & Executive coaching, Education services, Learning, Media. Some of these have been gloriously successful and one or two of them have fallen by the wayside. The latter have taught me more about entrepreneurship than the successes have. While it is improbable if not impossible to list down all the learning's in a post here, I will endeavor to put down at least a few key ones. Here goes:

 

Find out what you are really passionate about - this might sound simple. But it is the key to everything else that follows. Many people stumble into a venture because they feel they like it or love it. Love is't enough. You need passion; deep burning pulsating passion that keeps you awake at night and makes you feel alive about what you are doing. Hearken back to your first love back in college. Multiply that feeling of deep desire quantum times and if that is how you feel about your venture, then you are passionate about it. Anything else is just not good enough reason to become an entrepreneur. You will end up forgoing the venture just before it begins to yield fruit, unless the passion exists.

 

Align your passion with your sense of purpose - A sense of purpose is more than a goal or a vision (damn those semantics). Sense of purpose is what keeps you alive when you are thrown into a Nazi camp (refer stories of survivors in Auschwitz). It is bigger than you. It is what makes you who you are; that gives you a purpose to go on when things no longer seem endurable. If what you have is just passion, you may achieve all that you want but at the fag end of it you may be left standing all alone, feeling whether it was all worth it. Align passion with your sense of purpose. It will ensure whatever you do passionately is tied in with your core Validate your idea and be open to making changes - No harm done in checking what you want to do with people. You may find that the core idea remains the same but you might just be able to pick up ideas and perspectives that enable you to do it more effectively. Having said that, turn a deaf ear to naysayers. They have been discounting their own ideas all their life and there is no purpose served in listening to doomsday prophecies from such people. But do be open to suggestions, even if those do not meet with what you have in mind.

 

Hire the right people - I balk when I hear senior folks in companies say "We don't have time to hire" or "We let the Talent acquisition team do all the hiring". That's the heaviest set of crap that was ever said by any one. Hiring is not the "talent acquisition" team's job per se. It has to be the responsibility of everyone in the company, and more so the folks who sit in the corner office. Steve Jobs once said, 'When you're in a start-up, the first ten people will determine whether the company succeeds or not. Each is 10 percent of the company. So why wouldn't you take as much time as necessary to find all the A players? If three were not so great, why would you want a company where 30 percent of your people are not so great? A small company depends on great people much more than a big company does'. This is not relevant just for small companies. Big companies are not immune to the law of crappy hiring. When you are hiring a few hundred people every year, all it takes is a score of wrong hires every year to skew the culture. That is why companies like Google ensure that majority of new hires go through a committee and are subsequently looked at by folks like Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt (even when he was CEO).

 

Give your employees a lot of power - If you have hired right, and the team is as aligned to your vision as you are, and if they are equally passionate about the business, there is no reason why you would want to keep all the power with yourself. Distribute it! When you share power, you invariably share responsibility. Now, they are as bought-into making the venture a success as you are. Theodore Roosevelt rightly said, 'The best executive is the one who has sense enough to pick good men to do what he wants done, and self-restraint to keep from meddling with them while they do'

Don't be daunted by what needs to be done - I see a lot of potential entrepreneurs holding back due to what they see as the enormosity of the job. Look, here's the thing, unless you wet your feet you ain't gonna learn how to swim, and that's the end of the story. Sometimes, you need to start doing things for them to become less daunting. Sergey Brin of Google said it beautifully, 'I feel there's an existential angst among young people. I didn't have that. They see enormous mountains, where I only saw one little hill to climb.'

 

Stay humble - If you do things right, know that it is not you alone who has achieved what has been done. There were a bunch of highly committed, creative folks who helped get you where you are. Newton once said, 'If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants'. Humility keeps you grounded and makes it easier for people to keep pulling you up when you begin your next venture, your next big thing!

 

As i said, there is a lot more one can put into this space. But the stuff mentioned up here is certainly very significant, at least in my limited experience. I hope this has been helpful. Here's wishing all entrepreneurs continued success and meaning in whatever they do....

 

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