What's in a visiting card?

 Pallavi, my wife and I were working on our presentations that afternoon. We were yet to move to our office so we had cleaned up the big dining table and converted it into our workbench. Suddenly my phone rang. It was lying near Pallavi so I lazily asked her to put the speaker on "sir, I'm speaking from *** management institute. We have our annual conference next month and we would like to felicitate you for your contributions in field of HR". We both looked at each other and chuckled. "That's very nice of you but I no longer head HR for any company- I've just started my own consulting practice" I could clearly feel the silence on the other side and then the brave young man said "no problem sir we would still like to felicitate you!". "That's very kind of you" I replied,"but I don't think its a good idea. You should felicitate professionals who currently hold an HR portfolio. May be you should talk to your professor and come back to me if he still insists". I knew somewhere on other side of the call I had saved an awkward moment for the young man who had committed a faux pas of not checking my updated profile....

Lot of my friends in the corporate world  have asked me about challenges faced by a professional while transitioning from corporate job to entrepreneurship. Well it is difficult to generalise on that question but I can answer it for setting up a consulting business that typically starts with your own expertise. First and foremost  entrepreneurship of this kind has an overhyped halo in terms of "risk" - till such time you are not infusing capital for building a scale there is no risk. If you are sure about your expertise in some area and a decent goodwill that any professional can accrue after working for a few years, you have a good starting point.

What's the real challenge then? To put it in simple terms you no longer hold a privilege of having a reputed logo on your visiting card adding depth to your title! When you carry your corporate visiting card with a reputed logo, its a privilege lounge pass which gives you an easier access to better things in life. I'm not essentially talking about the things that money can buy but the recognition that you get when people want to interact with your company. For example whenever I received a speaker slot invite for  a conference, I knew that people wanted to listen to the Head HR of my company and not me personally (at least till I build my own brand). Of course I will be a hypocrite if I deny that  I enjoyed that visibility. 

When you start enjoying the visibility and stature related perks of your title,  you need to be clear in your mind that this visibility / creature comforts are for the visiting card you carry and not for you personally. If you get too addicted to those perks letting those go will be that much more difficult. It is always good to keep a check in your own mind about what comes to you due to your visiting card and what comes to you personally. Once you have that clarity, transition from corporate job to entrepreneurship, at least in consulting, is not too difficult. 

Another critical aspect is you need to be ABSOLUTELY clear as to why people should interact with you - they are no longer going to do that for your title. You need to be clear on your individual value proposition. Sometimes the wisdom people thrust on us due to our titles can muddle one's thought process:-)

If your purpose of entrepreneurship is clear in your mind, then it's terrific excitement to start building your own brand! So after initial months of trying to build a brand, I got an invite to speak at a conference. When my turn as a speaker came, the LED display on stage displayed my company's logo - the emotion I experienced at that moment is little difficult to explain in words ....

Two stints separated by 15 years

After reading the first post on "Entrepreneur Diaries' Ashutosh asked me write about my first stint as well. Ashutosh is my friend for 46 years who happens to be my cousin, classmate etc etc - so when he said something I had to attempt it!! 

My first stint as an entrepreneur started way back in November 1997 with no experience of business development, no strategy- but with a strong desire to be an entrepreneur! Even with my optimism, today I do not dare to call the opportunity with which I started then , as an opportunity - one of my brother-in-law's friend was traveling to India and he had casually mentioned that if he gets right people, he might hire a few for his US firm. First lesson learned resonates with famous quote by the micologist George W Carver - "Start wherever you are, with whatever you have, make something out of it and never be satisfied" - the stint started with a reasonably successful first assignment which resulted in few of the zillion stupid incidents of my life - when my first client asked me to send an invoice, I went to my father to ask him about how to write an invoice!! So amused was he that he still laughs when he remembers that!

So how was entrepreneurship different for me in 90's? well in lot if ways - I still remember having a character based shell account where you had to use kermit commands to download a single word file - got my TCP/IP account a few months later and it was a big deal to have that in a dial-up mode!! General access to information was limited and there were no portals when I set up my hiring business! Voice calls still competed with mails as a mode of communication! 

I'm also grateful to that stint as it taught me vagaries of cashflow and it washed away my sense of entitlement! Just because you've done work you can't count the money unless it is in your bank. While my short stint of corporate life had taken me away from some ground realities, visit to bank due to lack of internet banking introduced me to the real world away from the corporate world! It was humbling to see small time traders and grocers dealing in more money than you with an ease! The biggest gift that stint gave me was to help me overcome my insecurities of any kind - you are just standing there  your own with no 'logo' backing you and no 'title' elevating you above the ground level! 

While I did well, I felt I cannot go beyond recruitment business unless I build some serious profile and get an exposure to the larger world! Thats when I joined back the corporate world to get my exposure!

While there are lots of differences in then and now, there are a few things common - I still believe in the best planning tools I had back then - the two i's - instinct and intuition. With a whole world of information at beck and call, I have come to believe in it even more! Entrepreneurship was lonely back then and with all due respect to social media, lonely even now - which kind of suits an introvert like me!

The way I see my entrepreneurship today is a continuation of my first stint separated by a great higher education program - hopefully I will keep learning now on the job!!

Monday is new Sunday!

Now it has been almost two years since I left my corporate job and living an entrepreneur's life. Just the other day one of my clients came down from US and was on a tight schedule. Being an extremely sincere person about the work that we have embarked on together, he was eager to catch up with me in person. So far so good ... the only problem being only Sunday was possible on his calendar. We quickly agreed and I decided to drive down to Mumbai which is about two and half hours drive from Pune - where I stay.

There is nothing out of the place about catching up work on a Sunday - all my friends who have spent enough time in the corporate world would acknowledge doing it with varying frequency. I myself must have done it 'n' times! If not actual work have travelled a zillion times on Sunday to save that precious working day!! What surprised me this time though was my own reaction to the situation - I was quite at peace with it without any sense of guilt. Yes - though I've always worked whenever  required on weekends, deep down somewhere it was never a preference as weekends was the only time one looked forward to spending with family, enjoying the process of your kids growing up! I would be hypocrite if I deny the sense of guilt every time I lived on the time borrowed from my wife and kids!

Being an entrepreneur has been a kind of emotionally liberating experience. Well, when you set up something on your own you are CEO - Chief Everything Officer - running from pillar to post developing you ideas, selling them, delivering on your promises to everyone including yourself ... and of course towing in line with your accountant with all 9 yards that come with it! But amidst all this chaos there is some peace - guess because you are purely working on your conviction and not in a mode to be answerable to someone at each step! Well, I don't want to romanticise entrepreneurship because it's too early for  me and life prior to entrepreneurship was also life I had chosen!!

Avoiding any unfair comparisons I would just say that I'm enjoying this as I've always been a fan of little unstructured life. This life gives me those little spaces hitherto unexplored! Working hard long hours has never been an issue - on the contrary always been a joy but it's great to then just start little lazy next day, catch up half an hour with your son and hear the fascinating stories about how he is going to play the next match, drop your daughter to college, hear her gossip and then just chill out with your life'n'business partner over a cup of chai (tea)- somehow these little spaces charge my batteries quickly than anything else in the world! If I don't get these spaces regularly I can feel extremely uncomfortable however good I'm doing professionally. May be it has got nothing to do with being in a job or entrepreneurship but it's just about finding those little spaces - a flexibility of moving your Sunday to Monday and vice-a-versa. May be its my infatuation for abstract and unstructured stuff. Converting your Monday into Sunday has been an interesting experience so far ... more of it later - have to catch up the daily Soap on TV I'm regularly following up with my wife ....