I sometimes encounter something in some other business which makes me stop and think about my own journey as a business builder. I started walking the entrepreneur journey in June 1996. It’s been almost three decades, and now Remiges is a really good mid-sized software projects company with enterprise clients in India and abroad.
I come from an unremarkable educated middle-class Bengali family with a couple of college degrees and without an iota of business acumen in my background. I needed, and got, hard lessons, and I hope I was a good learner. I made lifelong friends among other entrepreneurs and learned so much about business that it will fill a book. All first-generation entrepreneurs feel this way.
During this period, I have seen many businesses not growing. Their leaders are sincere and put in a lot of work. I have tried hard to analyse why the growth doesn’t happen. (When I am talking growth here, I am talking about real businesses, not the VC-funded turbo-charged business models which are founded on PowerPoint and are grown on US$ 100m of cash loss a year.)
I remember one conversation I had with one business owner. We talked about the challenges of growth, and we were both frank enough to admit that the problem is really the founder’s mindset. Change for growth often means delegating control, learning new techniques of monitoring progress, and accepting new risks. Scary thoughts.
Growth, when it hits your company, works in ways which even you, its founder, cannot fully understand. At best you can see that a whole basket of moving pieces has fallen into place in a nice pattern, but try as you might, you can’t answer why all this happened now, not a few years earlier. One area where Remiges has been very lucky is in the emergence of a leader, Shraddha. Those who have worked with her know: Shraddha has your back, Shraddha doesn’t let go. But then Shraddha joined the company in 2001 and emerged as a leader a decade ago. What propels the growth today?
What do I do to make growth happen? The startup media is full of very high-energy words like “driving growth”, “visionary leadership”, “energy”, “dynamism”, “world-class”, and so on. They make for good copy, I guess. I don’t see all this when I look at myself. I see my role to be a facilitator and custodian — not a very glamorous picture. I try hard to get good leaders to join us and lead from the front, and I leave it to them to run the business. Each senior person looks first for a clean specification of what he is expected to do – he wants to know what is expected from him. Role definition and predictable and consistent signals are important. The second thing they look for is a feeling of safety and stability. Once they know their roles and feel safe in the organisation, they automatically start running, start working late, digging deeper, pushing boundaries. So my focus is to make Remiges a safe and positive place for everybody. I try to keep an eye on things, not because I know better but because if something falls through the cracks somewhere, others may not notice and it may blow up later. I also do this because picking up loose bits is not in the job descriptions of others. So I pick up these loose pieces and put them back in the proper places in the Remiges jigsaw, so that others can then deal with them. And the organisation seems to flow, carrying officers, clients and vendors along, as if it has a mind of its own.
There are two takeaways for me from all this. (You may be a different kind of person and your takeaways may be different.) First: it’s often hard to identify the causal connections between your actions and the growth engine which builds momentum and starts rolling. It’s often easy to see what brings a company down, but hard to see what pushes it forward. Don’t believe all these well-written stories where the founder is portrayed as some sort of superman whose Strategic X-ray Vision and 23-hour-days propelling the company to unicorn status. It doesn’t happen that way. And second: beyond a certain size, leaders need to stop trying to lead from the front, and focus on ensuring that the vessel – the company – is healthy. You can lead a small ten-member team from the front, but not a larger company. At this point, the organisation is like a big ship with valuable cargo. The captain on the bridge and the chief engineer in the engine room are not pushing the ship forward. If the ship is designed, built and operated correctly, it is moving ahead with its own energy. The captain’s job is to ensure that no storm blows it off-course, no leaks can sprint up, and fuel and provisions are in stock. Bootstrapped entrepreneurs like me have a hard time grasping this, because all our earlier instincts and all the glorious stories in the media scream at us to lead from the front. Some professional CEOs who fancy themselves as rock stars also have a hard time dealing with it.
If I may continue the ship analogy: the job of a captain is not to steer the ship safely for just one voyage. His job is to ensure that the ship and crew are in such fine form that they can do voyage after voyage. The captain may be present on the bridge in each voyage, but his focus should be beyond just the current voyage. In my business, the project managers are the ones in charge of single voyages.
One of the tough lessons a growth stage entrepreneur has to learn is how to monitor after one delegates lead roles. Delegating itself is the first hurdle, but entrepreneurs who cross that hurdle often are weak in monitoring what the Level Two leadership is doing. All entrepreneurs have strengths and weaknesses, and learning to monitor the areas where I was weak was what I needed. I’m good at technical leadership and project delivery. I’m weak in financial health management and business development. I have found leadership coaches to be invaluable here. I’ve worked closely with Kiran M Ajwani and also with Pankaj Bhargava. Entrepreneurs need coaching, period. But what a good leadership coach tells you can sometimes scare you — that’s the flip side.
I wish I could explain some of this to my entrepreneur friends who are on similar journeys. I suspect most entrepreneurs would choke if they have to see themselves merely as facilitators and custodians, and may never understand how this is a full-time, active role.
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