Visiting fundamentals

A CEO of an FMCG conglomerate spent a day with his retail salesman at least once in a quarter and visited every retail shop (like an intern) to learn the retailer relationship, sales volume, product display on shelves, competitors’ presence, pricing and sales trend.  He spent a day with customer service department, especially at front desk to listen the kind of complaints they are receiving.  He had periodical meeting and discussion with his collection department to know the issues and ageing receivables along with his finance team.  He ensures lunch with his factory workers once in a while to understand their personal issues. 

Within a span of two years, he increases the business to 400%, an amazing growth story of my hero of this article.  He had spent considerable time on two most important aspects of business and was immensely confident that he will achieve extraordinary results.  (1) Ensure the fundamentals are strong and not eroded in the acceleration of growth (2) Made his deputies to be their toes, because they knows that boss knows every single thing that is happening in his business kingdom.

Why do we need to revisit our fundamentals?

Visiting fundamentals are like recapitalizing the business.  Uninterrupted manufacturing productivity (productivity capital); Market and Sales depending on human intelligent (Human capital); Satisfying customer services (Customer capital) and Improving product quality (Brand capital) are key fundamentals that a CEO must visit every now and then.  These four capitals are primarily functioning with human resources and system.   Human resources are always vulnerable to fluctuations and the increase or decrease of productivity depends on emotional storage.  A system is as good as the operator, the human intelligence, and can be faltered if fundamentals are weak.  All key four fundamentals require constant monitoring and monetizing for growth.  As a business head, one need to increase all these four capitals to keep the business competitive enough, if not outsmarting the competitors. 

Visiting fundamentals are the major drive for two business consequences.  One is preventing unexpected or blind spots and other is perfecting organic growth progression or sequence.  Most businesses start disintegrating from within aided by external developments.  Meanwhile, most businesses able to withstand external threat when fundamentals are sound and well-coordinated.

Second is strengthening organic growth progression or sequence, a methodical performance action and supervision.  As a business head one need to sequence the progression based on company objectives, values; and operating market.  Primarily, the sequence should focus on:

1.       Cost effectiveness

2.       Technology effectiveness to increase productivity and customer relationship

3.       Smooth functioning of supply chain, logistics and manufacturing infrastructure

4.       People (productivity) measurement

5.       Adding value to customers or complimentary product services to improve product quality

6.       Moving to new customer segment

7.       Increase demand chain

8.       Expand business geographically

9.       Start over again like a cycle and add new elements in sequences depends on business expansion and progression. 

Revisiting fundamentals push and pull both productivity and marketing, in other word simply to ‘acquire more customers’, thus maintaining the company growth.   

This article is written by Mr. Akbar Batcha, Business consultant in Marketing, Advertising and Education Services.  He is also CEO and Managing Director of Maxvision International 

Success cannot be built on comfort

Living with average mindset and aspiring to become an extraordinary is the fundamental problem with many of us.  Most people are average in thinking and action but dreaming to become great.  Fundamental thirst to become rich or great or extraordinary is necessary provided the objective is kept alive.  However, ninety nine percent of us are continue thinking or living without actually moving towards the process of becoming extraordinary.   The main reason for being average is that we prefer to be in comfortable zone and hate to be uncomfortable.  We look for comfort in every nooks and corners of life.  We want to achieve greatness by being in comfort zone.  The truth is that no one can achieve the greatness or rich by being in comfort zone.

Every great human being in the history of mankind has suffered most and in fact used to live with difficulties.   Moses, Jesus Christ, Prophet Mohammed, Buddha, Mahatma Ghandhi, Abraham Lincoln, Ramakrishna Paramhamsar, Nelson Mandela, Steve Jobs to name few are all lived through extreme rough conditions in life.  There are millions of unsung heroes in our contemporary life living with extreme sufferings.  At times, their resolve and determination was about to be buried or lost in the doldrums of events that are beyond their understanding and control.  At every defeat they found something to cheer about.  At every lose they found something to be gained.  At every hopeless moment their in-built confidence rescued them.  But how is that possible?        

It begins with mental process of being ‘someone’ than ‘doing something’.   Many of us doing something one or other and it become our habits to do only those something and decided to identify the happiness with it.  Doing something is not the primary objective of mankind, but being someone is.  Many of us entered in the process of being great, but promptly reversed or returned or exited because of inability to remove the strong layer of comfort looking mindset.  Further, the process of being great or extraordinary is always derailed by failing to recognize the mistakes of life.  Recognizing the mistakes and learning from it would allow us to continue the progress.

I have been through a lot more mental analyses of my own mind map.  Many at times I locked within the vicious cycle of looking for ‘comfort’ in life.  Of course for many of us achieving some comfort in life is a great accomplishment and I am not belittling them.  Perhaps, achieving comfort is the great accomplishment to many of us.  But relinquishing the comfort is the beginning to become someone.  To be someone requires defining the objectives of life.  I am not sure how many of us have the distinction in deciding our objectives based on our own strength and resources.   

Every individual is dealing with at least three different objectives on average basis.  We always pick three different options and distribute our energy and focus on these three and call it as backups.  The fact is that we are not sure of which one is suitable to us.  The conflicting objectives are the course of sequences for a confused destination.  What I am, what do I need and what I am doing has lot more muddled than smooth sailing. 

The contradiction of being someone would never get along with comfortable life thinking process.  The fear of making mistakes is a neuron association deeply conditioned in our life by family, parents, society and education system.   We are rebuked by everyone when we make mistakes and receive very few encouragements.

Only the sleeping people don’t make mistakes.  If anyone afraid to make mistake will remain average and those who unafraid are in the beginning of being great.  Richard Branson was quoted as saying, ‘we are going where no one has gone before, and there is no one to follow and nothing to copy”. 

There are around 15 million millionaires in the world and most of them are self made.  They lived in poverty and their failures rate is more than the success rate.  Their failures are the stepping stone to be rich, great and extraordinary.  Ideas matters and make them in action, we would require getting out of our comfort zone.

Decide between comfort in life or ready to take risks to conquer the life.  Choice is ours.

This article is written by Mr. Akbar Batcha, Business consultant in Marketing, Advertising and Education Services.  He is also CEO and Managing Director of Maxvision International  

Do your business knows how to spy?

Flap of a butterfly in Brazil can create a tornado in Texas.   It’s a famous chaotic theory explaining the sensitive nature of business.  Too many small things or butterfly effects are unnoticed in business and let alone understanding the causes.  Most businesses falls into trouble due to failure in understanding the butterfly changes that is happening in and around the business.  External and internal changes are happening every hours and we give very little or no attention to it, because our mind is focusing on bigger disruptions, effects and failures.  Often, we fail to comprehend that a bigger failure is the collection of small failures that are happening in our business. 

While we may have one or two mechanism to uncover the internal warnings using strong business intelligence tools and holistic monitoring of data analyses, but we have very little control on external and sensitive developments.  Knowing the business landscape, market dynamism, instant and permanent vulnerabilities are paramount to sustainability.  We don’t need a tsunami detector, because it happens once in a while.  But businesses need to observe the butterfly effects, which has the power to unseat the business silently.
 

Further, in an ever changing business environment, we are constantly defied to create or extract opportunities from challenges.  Challenges are the best breeding ground for creating opportunities, but completely depending on the observation and interpretation capabilities.     

Observation, knowledge and capability will be useless or ineffective if we don’t have enough data and information.  However, the information and explosion of data are sometimes tiring and misleading and subsequently ignoring them due to lack of analytical mechanism.  Therefore, companies are losing focus and sometimes derailed.  Companies need to be connected with market on daily basis even if they are not in retail segments.  When and where and how to gather relevant information, tools and building storage archive is a monumental challenges.  Identifying the dark forces and block holes are another major challenge that every businesses encounters.  Meanwhile, we need the combination of data mining and human interpretation to understand the issues and build right strategy that has right proportion of rational and emotional findings.  The data’s are raining on your system on daily basis and all you need is to how to use those data for market intelligence and business developments. 

Market intelligence is a major arm in any business to gather, synthesize, interpret, learn and drive right business strategy.  This has to be built with internal sophistication rather than relying on external third party resources or software only.  The level of competition demands in-house research and intelligence set up.  All we need right minds, right software tools and right training.  Market Intelligence required working on daily basis and gathers all relevant and irrelevant information for text and data mining.  Data analytics with emotional interpretation can only give desired results and it is possible by customizing the data analytics according to business nature.

Maxvision International in association with Institute of Analytics, USA brings big data analytics including training and in house system development.  Our unique capability is that we will build the system, train your staff or recruit a suitable staff from our training institutes to give you ‘new insights and data interpretation capabilities’.  Most companies are stored with large number of data that are mainly used for newsletters and marketing campaigns, but seldom utilized for big data analyses.   But not anymore!  Here we are.   We have the tools and experiences for big data analytics and can undertake any level of assignments.  Our offshore and onsite teams managed from USA and India backend offices can help you to provide ‘mind blowing’ data interpretations using your own data base or from third party procurement.  

Building a right Market Intelligence with big data analytics with right tools are need of the hour now.

The flaps never stops and is either contributing or confronting somewhere in the corner of our own windows.  All you need is to recognize them to expand your vision of business and market strategy.

This article is written by Mr. Akbar Batcha, CEO and Managing Director of Maxvision International.  He is a business consultant in marketing, advertising and education management.  He can be reached at abatcha@maxvision-international.com