 That you have to to become an entrepreneur. You just have to do it There's no point in thinking over thinking things beyond a point You can't do analysis if you feel that there's an opportunity if a gut tells you do it Just go ahead and do it but now let's assume you've done it. You've now taken the step. You've got your startup going and You're looking for funding. You're looking to get your product out there You're looking to get your first customer. So that's what I call in some ways phase one of any startup Or let's call it the survival phase. That's the phase in which you're basically checking out whether you have the ability to get your business From just an idea into reality So let's assume you get beyond that phase and you know in that phase of the survival part You really are not thinking about anything other than just get in the first step done Take the first step and move on and make sure that your business is actually able to thrive and go forward after that And so really that That phase is like say is a survival phase for most people it is once you get the first funding You are in some ways beyond that survival phase and you start then thinking about okay What comes after that and of course all of us think about how to keep growing the business how to take the business forward And I think one of the things that most entrepreneurs do not think about as hard as they should in their evolution Especially after they've actually crossed the first and the most difficult hurdle Really is how to build the organization as well and the reason I say that most people don't think about it is Because it is actually a very very critical aspect of growing your business and being successful in the long run But unfortunately we get so focused as entrepreneurs in terms of what we have to do on a day-to-day basis In terms of fighting all the business issues that we're dealing with that we don't actually think about what underlies Our company and that what underlies the company really is the organization behind it and Ultimately, it is the organization that has to deliver whatever you want it Whatever your aspirations are in the future and so my view is very simple that if you want to create a Leading business if you want to create a world-class business you cannot do that without creating a world-class organization And I think that's a very very fundamental truth that most entrepreneurs do not realize in their journey Part of the reason is that a lot of entrepreneurs are young And so therefore they've never really worked in large organizations And so therefore they perhaps don't understand the importance of especially as you become a little bit bigger What is required to run a large company or a growing company? And so therefore they don't have the understanding of what are the issues that crop up What are the issues that need to be addressed? For entrepreneurs like me who are let's say let let me say later-stage entrepreneurs in my case For example, I started my company renew power when I was in my mid 40s I had already worked for about 20 years in various large organizations I had you know seen what is you know What are the issues in working in large organizations and so as my company grew I was able to at least relate The problems that I was looking at or facing with some of the issues that I had seen in larger organizations And I was able to understand the kinds of systems and processes that you need to have to be successful When you become a larger company and so right from day one my focus always in renew power was how to make sure that we Build the same systems and processes so that when we become a larger company We have the right base in place And so in a way what I'm going to tell you today is not about the first steps that you take as a company But really more about what is required as you start scaling your company up and as you start really competing with the outside world And let's say larger competitors come in or you become much larger yourself And what are the kind of challenges that you might face and how to address those and how to make sure that you put In place the right building blocks early in the organization's evolution so that you're able to deal with some of these issues As you become bigger because once you've really crossed a certain size After that to try to go back and redress some of these issues becomes much much harder And I have worked in organizations that I've seen the consequences of what happens if you use every single part of your bandwidth For growth, which is what most entrepreneurs end up doing and you don't use any part of your bandwidth to construct your organization And if you if you go down that path and if you focus all your energy is only on growth Then the consequences of that could be that you get to a point where organization is actually not able to handle It does not have the capability to handle Some of the growth issues that then start throwing up coming up And so therefore it's very important to build the build the organization and that in that context So let me just tell you what some of those issues are in terms of building the organization, you know The question of course that comes up is what is an organization is an organization hiring people You know you go from 20 people to 50 people to 100 people and is hiring people just simply sufficient to say that here is my organization And I think all of us would say the answer to that question is not really It's not just good enough to hire people You also need to have the systems and processes that allow these people to interface with each other That allow different departments to interface with each other Right that allow a certain way of working to emerge between these people so that they're efficient and effective Because if they're not efficient and effective instead of hiring 20 people you may need to hire 40 people or you may have 40 people Eventually who are unsatisfied dissatisfied with what they're doing So you need to have the right systems and processes of how these people are meant to engage with each other and How they're supposed to interface with each other and work on a day-to-day basis So the question is then you now have two things you have people and you have systems and processes What else do you require in an organization to make sure that it is structured the right way? The other things that you require that are very critical is you need a culture and You have to make sure that you shape that culture within your organization. You cannot let a culture just evolve If you do that it'll happen in such a way that it may be outside your control You may find this functionality is creeping into the organization. So you have to make sure that you do very tangibly and deliberately work on creating the right culture within the organization Now what is culture you may ask, right? So to me culture is the following the culture is represented by What is the vision of the company? Where are you trying to get to do people in the organization know What the eventual aim of the organization is because if people know what the aim is they're able to then align themselves behind that aim And they're able to work much more effectively behind that goal If they don't know what the aim is they'll all be doing their little bits and pieces But they won't actually have a proper sense of what the organization is trying to achieve and therefore They'll be less effective in their jobs than they could have been The second thing is you need a mission, right? So what is the vision a vision is the overarching goal a mission is what are the five or seven or ten different things that you're going to do To get to vision. So it's important to tangibilize the vision into Some articulated mission steps that are easier to understand and comprehend that give people actionable steps and The next thing is you need to have a set of values in your organization Values are very very critical. What again does your organization stand for does your organization stand for? being high integrity Does it stand for looking after people? Does it stand for team-working? Does it stand for agility? What are the things that you want your people to focus on? So having a right set of values is very critical now in our company in addition to a Vision which we put in place literally one or two years after we got started along with the mission We also Put out a set of what I called work principles and the reason I put out the work principles is because I found that as the organization was growing The challenges on the people was changing and so the work principles that I put out really were nine work principles And these are meant to be really in some ways Guides to individuals working in our organization So what were those things that I had put down as work principles Which I thought was relevant in our company's context and therefore in any other company's context those could be different, you know and so on So in my case or in our case for me the work principles were number one throughput Get things done and get them done on time Because it is very important for us to make sure that project execution was on track at all points in time number two The second work principle was take responsibility because the buck stops with you I didn't want everything to keep coming up to me for decision-making I wanted people at different levels of the organization to be responsible for taking decisions by themselves Number three think end to end I found that when you give problems to people and when you tell them get something done for me Most people I found were limited in their thought process If you ask them for something they just give you that limited piece of information back Without trying to understand what you were truly trying to get at So if you're a smart employee you try to think oh this this this person my boss has given me this work to do What is he really trying to achieve here and can I therefore address the problem in its entirety? Versus okay, I've been asked to get this data. Let me pull it out and give it to him, right? So a lot of people I found tend to work in that manner And so therefore I wanted my employees to think a little bit more broadly about what was being sought And what are the challenges that you were dealing with? Then I wanted people to start managing risk themselves rather than throw you know not not be focused on risk issues So that was one work principle then I wanted people to focus on quality So I said one of the work principles was obsess on quality and One of the important principles was build the organization see whenever somebody does something especially in a growth organization You can just get something done yourself Right and the second time you have to do it and somebody else is perhaps doing it Then they can also rediscover us, you know a different way of doing the same thing Or when the first guy does that same job Normally does he do the job, but he also puts in place a process of how that job is meant to be done a second time And so the second time somebody else then does the same job He actually knows how to do it because it's a well laid-down process And so therefore a very important aspect was don't just do something the first time yourself Also put in place the right process to do the do it the second time And so therefore building the organization was something that I tangibly put down as one of our work principles And then the last the last work principle I said was that look this is not a nine to five Five-day job five-day a week job. This is essentially a job that is meant to encompass your entire life You have to keep thinking about this now, perhaps this was formed Aspirational thinking on my part that I could get all my employees to be as bought into the company And what we were trying to achieve as I was but certainly I put it down as something that people had to think about Now as you become bigger What you'll find is and let's say you've crossed two three hundred people of him, you know in terms of total employee strength What you'll start finding is that as a CEO and as an entrepreneur You perhaps had direct contact with everybody in the organization. You knew people's names You knew what they were doing You knew when they joined you knew about their family members and so on but as the organization becomes bigger Having that connect becomes harder and you find that there are people who you haven't actually met before who've been working for you For the last three months or six months and so the connect begins to decrease and so the big challenge becomes How do you transfer your own entrepreneurial mindset? Into the organization much more deeply so that everybody has the same what you may call the founders mentality How do you make sure that that cascading down the organization happens? So that's an important thing to consider and so then as a leader you have therefore have to find ways and means of reaching out to everybody within the organization very regularly and Interacting with them either through town halls or through interactions with different sets of people or meeting every new employee in groups When they join so whatever you may decide to do But you have to do that to make sure that you're able to translate your own vision to people when they come on board