Happy Birthday - Sagarius!

It was exactly one year before when I bordered a plane at Hyderabad, I was filled with dreams and thoughts about the unlimited possibilities lying in front of me. I became a businessman at once. I have spent about 20+ years of my life to become a what I am today. Having run business for an year now it's time for us to enter into a different world. A world which is more mature and well-planned.
Now I can understand that I must focus on the way I look at things and we must always remember the mistakes we have made in the past year.

Since the day we started the company we have tried different businesses. If business equals a means of making money, then whatever we have been doing so far could be called businesses. Practically speaking, all things we were engaged in the first year are just works and not businesses.

Once a business expert remarked, "unless someone pays for it is just an idea".

Yes! It's true we had a lot of ideas. But we did not possess the power to transform these ideas into economically viable businesses. It's true every business starts with an idea, but the metamorphosis from idea to business is quite interesting and a lot more complex than anybody could possibly imagine. It is exactly this transformation "we missed". We offered to try every idea that occur to us and I once wrote in my journal that, "thinking without penning is a waste". It has so happened that they are in fact a waste.

Businesses are not just born out of casual conversations at the cafes. But a true business is conceived in the minds of an entrepreneur and is well documented covering the essential steps. And believe me, there are quite a few essential steps which works irrespective of the nature of the business. Though I don't wish to look behind, there are a lot of things which could be gathered only from the past.

The mistakes we have made (lessons we have learnt)

I would like to specifically numerate the five mistakes we made in the first year.

1. Anything that pays for your time not equals business. It's a job!

If you're always looking out for means to make money, you are putting your best efforts to make yourself self-employed and you're not running business. This is exactly what we did. Instead of trying to build a company, we just tried to use our skills to make money instantly. Which means, we have been employing ourselves at the expense of not building a company at all. This is the very reason why sagarius is still a baby even past 365 days.

2. "Those who fail to prepare--prepared to fail"

This could be well cited with our efforts for doing open source based businesses. One fine day it occurred to me that we could make a lot of money by providing open source solutions to clients in Coimbatore and the very next day I found myself sitting in front of a client discussing the prospects of giving him open source-based solutions. There was no preparation, there was no business plan, there was no documentation, there was no consultation, no discussion, no clear vision, no mission and obviously putting it all together the business in itself carried no meaning.
Guess what, we abandoned it the same day!

Lesson learnt: Great business is not what you think is great--but your client!

3. Do not ask opinions from your friends and neighbourhood.

It always so happens with entrepreneurs, whenever an idea occurs the next thing on earth they do is gather a few of their friends and discuss about it. I'm not completely against this but it is not always a good idea because, you will invariably end up with thumbs up and a positive note. Everybody would have a go for your idea.

It's not because they are not genuinely interested in your well-being, instead it's like trying to sell a product to yourselves, you always end up selling.

Lesson learnt: Discuss your ideas with prospective clients.

4. Entrepreneurs are always in a hurry! They miss almost every signboard on the way, travelling faster towards the wrong destination.

Ironically all entrepreneurs tend to ignore the Wisdom literature, which contains proven formulas and hundreds-and-hundreds of years of experience. Yes! The world--our forefathers have left us with a tremendous source of knowledge and information upon which we could build our foundation.
But repeatedly we tend to ignore it!
Lesson learnt: Spend ample time reading books authored by leading business consultants around the world.

5. "No Golden Pyramid - No business"

I have been talking about essential steps before starting a business in a few paragraphs above. But I didn't specify any. The essential steps are collectively called "Golden Pyramid" principles. We failed to implement it for every business we tried and obviously we failed in all of them.
Surprisingly all it takes is the a few hours of the time plus a paper plus a pen, to come up with/complete the Golden Pyramid principles for any business. For those of you, who has no idea what Golden Pyramid is all about, you can consider it as a business plan.

Year ahead (2009-2010)

I have come up with few rules, which would keep us aligned and could act as a guide in preventing us from repeating the mistakes we committed in the previous year.

1. Plan, Plan, Plan.
2. Focus upon the results.
3. Capitalise on the wisdom of our forefathers.
4. Slowdown and proceeded at the natural pace.
5. Do one thing at a time and do it well.

Appreciable works:

Not everything we did our blunders. They are also areas in which we have performed exceptionally well! And here they are...
Human resource has been increased by 200% from a humble 2 (Nisha & Bala) to 6 with the addition of (Ezhil, Krishna, Tom & Thiyaga) in less than an year.
Sagarius dared to apply for a tender worth $4 million at par with established companies.
Successfully completed 15+ projects in a span of 4 months and raise funds close to 2L INR by means of it.
Quick to realise that, what we're doing is not worthwhile and immediately ceased all operations not related to Goddess.

In spite of all that has happened, I feel proud that we are still together and I know we will be together forever, of course building Sagarius!