India a Land of Entrepreneurs

Doesn’t the word “karobar” sound crude & crass? Well quite literally, when translated from Hindi to English, it means the a very commonly used word ‘business’. Dhanda is a word that has been used over thousands of years in India, all through its rich history of enterprises.

Indian entrepreneurs are making waves all across the world. Indian business firms are making acquisitions abroad and spreading their tentacles in various corners of the world. Indian Entrepreneurs have proved all doomsday prophecies wrong and on the contrary have flourished under globalization.

India is known as a ‘Nation of Entrepreneurs’. It may have been hard to tell this in the days before the economic liberalization of the 1990s and the time of the license raj, but entrepreneurs existed even then. They were the vendors you can still find in country buses, peddling little plastic knickknacks and bottles of cure-all powders. And you can find them in rural settings—the craftsmen, the farmer, the traders—all managing their businesses without relying on salaries or handouts.

When we think of Indian entrepreneurs, we often think of the big success stories: Dhirubhai Ambani, the Tatas, steel baron Lakshmi Mittal or, more recently, Infosys founder Narayana Murthy. The smaller entrepreneurs may not be as sophisticated, but the neighborhood kiryana store lala, the beauty parlor owner and the neighborhood tailor have their business principles squarely in place. They could certainly have taught the dot-com boomers (and busters) a thing or two about how to create strong, sustainable businesses.

So how did these entrepreneurs create businesses from the ground up without huge capital? Yes and here are some important things we can learn from them:

First is providing value to customers. Are you offering the benefit of convenience or price? Or is your product unique in some way? And Managing operating costs. Keep them below gross margins.

Second, Taking advantage of one’s strengths—whether it’s location, low-overheads or building lasting relationships with customers.

Third is understanding that your business needn’t be high-tech to succeed. Rather, it needs to meet the needs of the customers in a way that would simplify and improve their lives.

Forth and the most important: Starting small and growing organically, while dreaming big.

You can gradually expand your business. If you are successful, you gradually grow and hire people. Dhirubai Ambani, Karsanbhai Patel and B. M. Munjal all built empires. It look likes this ladder of opportunity has no limit, you can always grow more.

India’s secular growth trajectory is being propelled more by domestic consumption than by anything else. In turn, domestic consumption is increasingly and rapidly being driven by middle India. Thanks to media exposure, telecom penetration, growing linkages with larger urban centers, rising incomes and enhanced distribution and penetration by consumer product companies, aspiration levels of this India are at an all time high. Growth opportunities abound across all sectors of the consumer economy – from personal grooming to retail to financial services to healthcare to consumer goods to education to…….the list is long. Not surprisingly, with the increased opportunities and awareness, interest in entrepreneurship is rising fast and by choice.

As entrepreneurs, when we are frustrated with dealing with the babus, it is worth remembering that the problem is not because ‘Indians are like this only’. It is, in fact, because we are dealing with an antiquated government system that was never designed for our benefit to begin with. We may take comfort in knowing that we will eventually overcome, because we start off with an undeniable advantage: entrepreneurship resides in our cultural code. The good news is that the situation is changing - more start-ups are happening now and the government system is working for a better future.