Next week I will be completing 3 years of having quit my IT job and plunging full-time into my venture CrackVerbal, a GMAT/GRE test preparation institute based out of Bangalore. I have had many people tell me that they admire what I have done and wanted me to share some tips.
I think it is important to give a background of where I started from.
I remember sometime in 7th standard during our English class we were asked to write an essay on “My ambition in life”. I had written that I wanted to be a businessman. I don’t remember why I wanted to be one but do remember my teacher admonishing me for what was a very non-alturistic goal in life. Especially since the others had written such noble professions as Fighter pilot, Fire-fighter, and Soldier. If you were a child who grew up in the 1980s the only people who did business were the bad guys. The stereotype was set in by the Bollywood. The villains – Amrish Puri, Om Shiv Puri- used to run Punjabi sounding companies such as “The Chopra Group of Industries”. These were the bad guys against whom Amitabh and Mithun would stand up to fight. This thought was further strengthened by the Tamil Iyer household I grew up in. The same patterns ran in the tapestry of our family – you had to be a Doctor (like my grandfather), or a CA (like my father), or an Engineer (like my brothers). In the 1980s I thought the only way you did business was being corrupt and evil. As I had taken up Science in 1990s at the height of the mass migration of software engineers to the US, I really did not think much beyond taking the GRE and getting to the US. It was not inadvertently that I choose to do an MCA (over an MBA which would have limited my options to go abroad). I also had a stint of over a decade in the IT industry before “retiring” as a Sr.Delivery Manager in a Product based company.
There are 3 things that were crucial in helping me make this transition.
1) Can you make a pen for 3 rupees?
My “business plan” when I was moonlighting with CrackVerbal in 2006 was to get 6 to 8 students who would pay Rs.3,000 each. If I was successful in doing that, I could think of the rest later. I have had enough and more people come to me and ask “So how are you going to disrupt the market” or “What is your vision for scaling it?”. I did not have an answer. Heck! After all these years I still don’t have an answer. And I don’t think you need one to start up.
Throw the business plan out of the window. The biggest problem with people starting out is they think unless they have a solid plan to make their business grow to $1mn in revenue, or get 100,000 subscribed users they should not start. WRONG!
As I grew up in Gujarat, here is the simple Gujju guide to making money “If you can make a pen for Rs.3, and sell it for Rs.5 then you have a business”. If you have an answer to that then forget what the experts tell you. There are more wannabe entrepreneurs struggling to get out of their cubicles in Infosys, Wipro, TCS, and CTS then you can imagine!
So shut out all thoughts of what you will do 5 years from now. If you are able to get paying customers then start now!
2) Do you have a Home Loan?
With a family to feed and a house loan to take care, the last thing I needed was the uncertainty of an income from business. I remember: before I quit I had made an excel with a column for revenue projections, and a column for my monthly expenses. When I dragged the formula in the 3rd column to show the difference – it started showing negative values after October 2011. This meant I had about 6 months of time. Before I go broke. Ample time to make things work!
I see people who think they can continue part-time till they make it big. But here is the truth – if you cannot quit your full-time job it means you don’t have the confidence that your business will work. If you don’t have that confidence then 100% your business will never work. Get some breathing space (in terms of finances) and get started. Worst case you can always get back to the grind of corporate life. I bet when you are 60 and look back, you will never regret this 6 months of lost income!
Would you be able to sustain your business for a year? If yes, then forget about the grand scheme of things – start now!
3) Are you sane?
I used to work in a fairly demanding job for 5-days a week. There was no question of compromising on what put food on my table (read as “what paid my EMIs”). But every weekend I would teach for about 4-hours and then some more hours spent on planning and marketing. Try doing 7-day weeks – week in and week out. For months together. For 2 years to be precise. Trust me – you have to be crazy to do what I did. The only thing that sustained this was my passion for teaching.
If you think that your “passion” is sucking up too much of your time/energy/patience then you are perhaps going to give up very soon. Unless……..you love what you do so much that you are able to put up with the insanity. Best 90-second advice I have ever got in life is in what Steve Jobs had to say on succeeding in business. View it here.
Is there anything else you would rather be doing than starting up? If no, then start now!