Improving Productivity

It is common to feel unsatisfied when a work day ends, due to non-completion of work. It is difficult to stay productive and feel satisfied at the end of each work day. Productivity helps you add hours to your work schedule and here are some ways to increase your productivity:

1. Complete the most difficult tasks in the morning, while starting your day at work. Do not leave them for the last. Leaving them for later would simply drive your intent from pursuing them. Always take up the difficult, lengthy tasks in the morning and the shorter, simpler ones in the evening.
2. One of the most important factors behind not feeling productive is lack of love for one’s work. If you do not love what you do, chances are you will never feel charged up and inspired to do it. Always choose a profile of your liking.
3. Don’t think too much about the tasks given to you. Just start the work without giving it much thought, or without getting dreaded to complete a certain task.
4. There will be times when you wouldn’t be as productive and efficient as other days. Think of it as normal and don’t get too worked up thinking about it.
5. Try to stay away from the Internet. Of all things leading you to an unproductive day, the Internet is one of the biggest culprits.
6. By making a list and prioritising your tasks, you would be much better off in handling them than going ahead without any written plan. Feel in control of your work and don’t fret.
7. Half of the generation today is sleep deprived. Make sure you get enough sleep before starting your day. Sleep away to glory on weekends and make do for the time lost on the weekdays.
8. Find time to exercise daily, even if that means spending ten minutes stretching your muscles at home. After a eight- or nine-hour shift, our bodies need oxygen. And only a good night sleep and exercise can guarantee that. Stay in shape and say bye-bye to lethargy.

These are some of the suggestions that can make your life sorted and work easier. Follow these on a daily basis to increase your productivity at work and also at home. If you have any suggestions, please feel free to write and add on to the list.

What Good Does Fear Do?

This particular post has been taken from Take Charge, Building an Entrepreneur Mindset by Gaurav Marya. And it has been written from the perspective of an entrepreneur.

Fear is a basic emotion; it remains with all of us. All of us face the same fears whether we have two lakh, two crore or two hundred crore rupees. We are afraid of losing status, reputation, market share, people, opportunity…. These are real concerns. We all have played a high-stake game while dealing with an obtrusive government administration, crumbling infrastructure, unreliable suppliers, uncertain market environment. . .All is cause for worry.

The fear is the same, yes, but the scale differs. For an individual, our family’s wellbeing rests on our decisions. For an entrepreneur, the wellbeing of those entire dependent on his or her enterprise rests on the decisions made.

For entrepreneurs, carrying on an enterprise set up by an earlier generation, the stakes for failure are higher. The spirit of entrepreneurship is burdened by the legacy of past success and often the second generation, and sometimes even an early entrepreneur, settles within the relative comfort of jobwork, for fear of losing what has been gained. These entrepreneurs fall into the ‘guardian’ role – living in the fear of failure and loss.

Fear is not all bad, it has its positive impact. Fear teaches us caution and keeps us away from complacence. It is fear that gets us on that early morning flight, fine-tuning our presentation on that cramped airplane seat, for that appointment with the difficult client. We could have just turned off the alarm and snuggled back warm in bed. So let us own our fears and search for the fun that makes life worth living.

What is Customer Equity.

The following extract is from Gaurav Marya’s latest book, ‘It Takes Two To Tango’, published by Entrepreneur India. It is in spirit of sharing his thoughts that he has authored two bestselling titles on subjects dear to his heart and central to his business: Take Charge! Building an Entrepreneurial Mindset and Franchising: The Science of Reproducing Success. This is from his third bestselling book, It Takes Two To Tango. Read on:

It was in 1975 when Robert Blattberg first became aware of the power of viewing the customer like an asset. In the book he co-authored in 2001, he wrote: “The customer is a financial asset that companies and organisations should measure, manage, and maximise just like any other asset.” He saw customer equity as the lifetime value of a customer for an enterprise. He differentiated customer equity from brand equity; as the former helped us focus on how the customer perceives us and is thus willing to invest in us, and the latter draws attention to the product or service we offer.

(In 1991, Robert Blattberg used the concept “customer-equity” in a lecture at the Wharton School. In 1996, the term was first used in an academic paper. In 2001, he co-authored the book; Customer Equity: Building and Managing Relationships and valuable Assets.)

I have always recognised the importance of seeing customers from a long-term perspective. The existence of a customer is a static fact created by a single purchase; when they keep coming back for repeated purchases, they become subscribers. Customers will come back only if the service that they are made to experience is satisfactory. Customer equity built on subscribers who are created by excellent service.

The importance of the concept of customer equity, and subsequently having customers become your subscribers can be seen in how the value of an enterprise increases by the number of subscribers it has, and the ticket value they bring to the organisation.

Vodafone purchased Hutch in 2007 to acquire the customer base the latter had and built up within the high-end segment of the post-paid user. Emerging as the second largest mobile services provider in India, soon after the purchase, enabled them to launch Vodafone Global Enterprise in India, which provided global mobility services to transnational corporations. This instance demonstrates how securing a strong subscriber base enables a business to widen the stream of value offerings that flow to them.

To be Continued…

Problems Exist and They Have to be Tacked - II

In the last post we discussed the ever-important need to evolve ways in which the retail investor, the micro customer and the small entrepreneur feel more empowered to design useful, profitable and desirable initiatives.

Let’s see what happens when individuals take charge.

Take the story of Mahesh Gupta. His children contracted jaundice, which is a water-borne disease. An engineer and an entrepreneur, having launched a successful designing and producing oil conservation equipment, Mahesh was not satisfied with the water purifying solutions available in the market. He decided to design his own water purifier and launched a new pioneering enterprise by the name of Kent RO that has introduced India to the reverse-osmosis technology.

Take the story of Vikaas Gutgutia. When he came from Kolkata to visit his girlfriend in Delhi, he was totally dissatisfied with the quality of flowers available. He went on to launch Ferns N Petals, a chain of boutique florists.

Phanindra Sama worked in Bengaluru and hailed from Hyderabad. One Diwali he could not book a ticket on a bus and hence could not get home in time. Along with friends, he launched Redbus.in that provides online bus tickets booking and has since delivered 1.5 crore happy rides!

Of course, every customer who is not content would not go on to launch their won enterprise. The simplest thing they can do is to vote with their feet, that is, they will discard the brand for an alternative offering. In a situation where the leading International brands are wooing the customers, can we afford to lose them? When many sellers are in the market, the customer dominates.

The Emergence of the Abundant Economy.

In continuation to the previous post on the current scenario, the era of abundant choice. . .

As students of school-level economics will testify, we have always accepted as a given that the “resources are scarce and needs are unlimited.” We are, today, witnessing the emergence of abundance.

A survey testifies to this: “the fast changing consumerism in India over the last two decades has made life ever more puzzling for marketers, analysts and policy makers who have been trying to understand the changing dynamics of the Indian marketplace. Gone are the days when Indian consumers could have been neatly slotted into different categories, since consumers and consumerism have turned into a more complex proposition looking for more value and satisfaction for their money.” (How India Earns, Spends and Saves.)

The survey report goes on to state: “The wheel of fortune continues to spin in India, with each level of household income set to move a notch higher by the end of the decade. The maximum impact of the growth has been estimated to be on the middle-income households.”

A McKinsey report in 2007 was more bullish in their projections: “Our analysis shows that if India continues on its current growth path, over the next two decades the Indian market will almost triple and India will climb from its position as the 12th largest consumer market to become the world’s fifth-largest consumer market by 2025.” (The ‘Bird of Gold’: The Rise of India’s Consumer Market published after a year-long research project.)

Quite frankly, I don’t really understand country-level statistics. For me, these statistics are a mere confirmation of the entrepreneurial energy I have seen in the many business shows that we, at Franchise India, have organised across the country. Last year, we did some 50-plus shows. These were not just in the metros, but also in the tier II and III cities and towns.

My marketing communication colleagues say that we bind India from Jammu to Cochin, (North-South) and from Pathankot to Dibrugarh, (East-West). These are shows where individual investors, early entrepreneurs and established enterprises come together to buy and sell business opportunities in franchise and retail. We have been doing this for 14 years now and each year we are not only revisiting old destinations, but are going to new ones. The show at each repeat destination has been bigger than the previous one.

I am not saying this in a self-congratulatory mode. We have done nothing except tapping into an overflow of entrepreneurial spirit that is welling up within the belly of our nation. Entrepreneurs are just waiting for opportunities. I am an optimist in that I know that the change for the better has happened and will happen faster. The change rests on the shoulders of the new entrepreneurs I daily meet; who keep coming forward to take on more challenges and build new businesses. It is this community of entrepreneurs that will build enterprise solutions to all the pain points we continue to face today, in India and across the globe.

We shall continue with more on the abundance economy, its problems and the ways to tackle those in our forthcoming articles. Write in to us for your feedback and opinions.

In Gaurav Marya’s, author of Franchising and Take Charge, third book, “It Takes Two To Tango”, which builds a case for how we have emerged into a customer dominated, shape-shifting world, there’s a mention of Karl Fisch’s “Shift Happens” video that sets up the premise behind the changing world demographics and the technological shift. Let’s read what it is all about:

Go to your favourite search engine on the Internet and type out the words “Shift Happens”. Amongst the first five items will be a presentation with the same title. Watch it! The moment I first saw it I liked it. It was this that inspired the foundation of this book. Let me tell you the story behind this presentation. In 2006, Karl Fisch, a schoolteacher in the United States was invited by his school administration to address the beginning-of-the-year faculty meeting. He decided to take the help of a friend and prepared a presentation that confronted his colleagues with dramatic, thought-provoking facts. A copy of the slideshow was placed on Karl Fisch’s blog on August 15, 2006, and it went viral.

By June 2007, five million people across the globe had seen an improved version of the original slideshow. Over the years, many versions of the audio-visual have been made. David S. Rose, who is the Chair for Finance and Entrepreneurship at Singularity University, and is also the Chairman of the New York Angels investment association, did version 6.0 in January 2012. By that time, more than 20 million people had viewed one or the other edition of the presentation. The structure of the AV is very simple. It starts with a simple question: “Did you know?” And then it presents facts based on a theme. This structure is repeated across various themes. In the original slideshow, though, the first part pertained specifically to Karl’s school, it has been removed from the versions available on the Internet.

One of the themes dealt with is changing world demographics. The case is made that in the foreseeable future, a majority of educated English-speaking population in the world will be from India and China. Looking back at history, we are reminded that the leading country in the world in 1990s was the United Kingdom. The implication is that USA need not always be the leading economy or paramount nation. The inference that viewers draw is that soon Asia, led by China and India, will be the centre of the economic world. The message is reinforced by facts showing that the US is lagging behind other countries in Internet penetration. This is a significant point as world over the Internet users are growing to become communities even larger than most nations. With 800 million accounts in December 2011, a nation of Facebook community is now the world’s third-largest country.

Technological change is making the twenty-first-century world witness exponential change. The first text message was sent in December 1992; the number of text messages sent and received today exceeds the population of the planet. The years it took to reach a market audience of 50 million in the era of radio was 38 years, for TV – 13 years, for the Internet – 4 years, for the iPod – 3 years, for the Facebook – 2 years and for Google+ — just a year!

The conclusion of Karl Fisch’s message is a simple yet profound one. He takes the American slang version of the philosophical French phase c’est la vie! (Such is life), which is “Sh_t happens!” and adds an “f” to it, saying, “Shift Happens”.

We have for too long measured customer impact in terms of demographics and market share. We need to focus deeper into the impact we make in the lives of individual customers. This calls for a more intimate knowledge of our customer. Write in to us in the comments’ section for your opinions on this.