Six Trump Card Can Grow Your Start-Up Rapidly
Sanil Sachar is an entrepreneur, national best-selling author, angel investor, columnist, co-owner of global sports brand, Trusox, motivational speaker and leadership coach based in New Delhi.
“Less is more”.
“Build Value not Valuations”.
“Follow your (Customers) Gut”.
“Marry don’t just Flirt”.
“Acknowledge your Failures”.
“Data is the Best-friend we might not deserve but the best-friend we need.”
While these sentences seem like slogans from an abstract rally, they’re post-it notes I swear by for what the year 2020 has instilled as learnings to ensure the perfect 20-20 vision for businesses across sizes and sectors.
Learnings usually emerge from sudden and swift changes, usually occurred due to uncontrollable scenarios. Keeping this nature in mind, the next 6 minutes you spend will present you with 6 trump cards.
Less is more –
2020 ensured we looked into our costs closer than before. Trimming expenses led to creating sleeker paths on our bandwidth to complete all tasks. An everlasting takeaway here was to focus on the 80:20 rule of assessing 20% of the business efforts that yield 80% of the revenue and focus more on this, rather than spread bandwidth. In simple terms, reiterating the importance of quality over quantity, with a twist of adding the multiplier of efforts of quantity on the quality work we do.
Build Value not Valuations –
While I would need to fact check, but the element of building profitability over perception was a larger interest prior to 2020 as well. What 2020 enabled us to recognise is how we would run businesses in a world where we have to work on purely the reserves we have. Imagine a scenario where runway doesn’t seem like an intimidating word, and build a venture in bite sizes to begin with to see how far you can go in order to be sustainable. This tip is a suggestion I try and provide as many founders as I can in order to ensure they end up building businesses that help them yield returns, rather than chase valuations which over the course of flawed business models, find themselves crumbling.
Follow your (Customers) Gut –
If you or your someone in your team is not spending at least once a week listening to your customer, then you might need to believe me when I say that this customer might be someone who is listening to them.
What remained constant over the course of the pandemic was that the amount of time we could spend with a consumer increased significantly. Their behaviours have transformed as well and in order to capitalise on it, ventures whom we have seen outshine others have innovated far superior than the others. Innovation is a fancier term to customer feedback and customer input. Spend time with your customer, they’re a stakeholder who is the truest when they aren’t happy, and the best marketer when they are.
Marry don’t just flirt
Call it a pivot or a new business arm but create means of earning subscription based revenue in your venture. Think of a media portal you consume your daily news and updates from. There is a reason you might prefer one over the other, and then overtime you pay a fee to read what you can over a simple search on the web. Create that hook, it doesn’t matter if the price is small but to get subscribers in any way is a win because come a day where the reserve funds are needed, you can count on a loyal customer base to help you sustain and grow.
Acknowledge Failure
This one is quite self-explanatory and is best paired with the last point. All of us had a business set back somewhere within our venture. Reflect and learn. Don’t be rigid and let go off the heavy cargo, by using the method below.
Data is the Best-friend we might not deserve but the best-friend we need –As a team to our portfolio, one of the biggest areas of concentration for us is dissecting the data, and leveraging from it. There is a pattern in both work that gives bad results and work that gives good results. Focus on the patterns, learn from the data.
“Less is more”.
“Build Value not Valuations”.
“Follow your (Customers) Gut”.
“Marry don’t just Flirt”.
“Acknowledge your Failures”.
“Data is the Best-friend we might not deserve but the best-friend we need.”
While these sentences seem like slogans from an abstract rally, they’re post-it notes I swear by for what the year 2020 has instilled as learnings to ensure the perfect 20-20 vision for businesses across sizes and sectors.
Learnings usually emerge from sudden and swift changes, usually occurred due to uncontrollable scenarios. Keeping this nature in mind, the next 6 minutes you spend will present you with 6 trump cards.
Less is more –
2020 ensured we looked into our costs closer than before. Trimming expenses led to creating sleeker paths on our bandwidth to complete all tasks. An everlasting takeaway here was to focus on the 80:20 rule of assessing 20% of the business efforts that yield 80% of the revenue and focus more on this, rather than spread bandwidth. In simple terms, reiterating the importance of quality over quantity, with a twist of adding the multiplier of efforts of quantity on the quality work we do.
Build Value not Valuations –
While I would need to fact check, but the element of building profitability over perception was a larger interest prior to 2020 as well. What 2020 enabled us to recognise is how we would run businesses in a world where we have to work on purely the reserves we have. Imagine a scenario where runway doesn’t seem like an intimidating word, and build a venture in bite sizes to begin with to see how far you can go in order to be sustainable. This tip is a suggestion I try and provide as many founders as I can in order to ensure they end up building businesses that help them yield returns, rather than chase valuations which over the course of flawed business models, find themselves crumbling.
Follow your (Customers) Gut –
If you or your someone in your team is not spending at least once a week listening to your customer, then you might need to believe me when I say that this customer might be someone who is listening to them.
What remained constant over the course of the pandemic was that the amount of time we could spend with a consumer increased significantly. Their behaviours have transformed as well and in order to capitalise on it, ventures whom we have seen outshine others have innovated far superior than the others. Innovation is a fancier term to customer feedback and customer input. Spend time with your customer, they’re a stakeholder who is the truest when they aren’t happy, and the best marketer when they are.
Marry don’t just flirt
Call it a pivot or a new business arm but create means of earning subscription based revenue in your venture. Think of a media portal you consume your daily news and updates from. There is a reason you might prefer one over the other, and then overtime you pay a fee to read what you can over a simple search on the web. Create that hook, it doesn’t matter if the price is small but to get subscribers in any way is a win because come a day where the reserve funds are needed, you can count on a loyal customer base to help you sustain and grow.
Acknowledge Failure
This one is quite self-explanatory and is best paired with the last point. All of us had a business set back somewhere within our venture. Reflect and learn. Don’t be rigid and let go off the heavy cargo, by using the method below.
Data is the Best-friend we might not deserve but the best-friend we need –As a team to our portfolio, one of the biggest areas of concentration for us is dissecting the data, and leveraging from it. There is a pattern in both work that gives bad results and work that gives good results. Focus on the patterns, learn from the data.
