Business

Some time or the other, all the professional feel, if they would could have their own business.

Having started my own business with zero money in my pocket, I learned the hard way that the Businesses are Best done by two kind of people only and for all the others, it is still better to have a routine job.

The first are the Family Run Businesses with poor educational background which traditionally for centuries have been running their own businessesand the second are the Multinational Companies. In both cases Poor Educational Background is a Must and other strong quality should be shamelessness . The leap is not so big from a Family run business to a Multinational Business.

High Education is a very big deterrent in running a successful business. Because, then you would question the validity of many actions.

Now, if you make a survey globally on all the most successful businesses, you will find the owners were very poorly qualified .

Multinational Companies hire Brillant MBA `s from Top Business Schools and then one would argue, how come the poor education helps. The fact is that MBA is teaching, what poorly educated guy is already doing so successfully and better then the Multinationals. Hence the correspondence is equivalent. Second, you would have never heard a Family Run company going backrupt or rarely making a loss. But GM motor, Enron and similar clones falling regularly. The Japanese were smart enough to make sure that their class of Multinationals would be still Family Owned like Toyoda , Nissan, which were all Textile machine makers and then ventured to Automobiles. However, always Family held.

90% of the global business is still Family owned and 10% are Multinational owned and amongst the Family owned, may be 1% are professionals owned, who struggle to fight the Sharks of Multinationals and Family owned.

I will tell you a True Story of an American Company which took over a Glass Bottle mfr plant in Rishikesh , India. The multinational company was already running such plants in US, Mexico, Europe, Africa and with the growing Indian Economy, every such company is looking toward the pie in the cake in growing markets.

This American company was a supplier to Coke and Pepsi and other American brands and therefore thought , it would be simple and easy to capture the market and any case coke and pepsi were the dominant customers.

Nosooner they took over the plant from Thapers in India, they realized that this is not going to be simple. First the Unions, then the Excise and sales tax, then the skill set of management, then the quality and finally the customer.

The company had Top ranking professionals flown in from US to restructure the business and the best systems were put in place, the company worked on no nonsense policies and three years later was loosing millions of dollars. How and why is a very long story. Five years later, the company was sold out to a Family owned company , which ofcourse is running it profitably.

But in short, no matter, what your money in pocket, no matter what your qualification, no matter what technology, what systems, what quality and what prices. At the end, if you could not think like an Idiot and manoeuvre the situation, the chances of success are very limited.

Family run companies know that there is something more then normal standard operating procedure and surely Multinationals know it better.

You have to see it all over the world, how Multinationals have taken over the businesses of even very small objects like , Water, ( Aqua), Chicken, ( KFC, Mc Donald ), Ice Cream ( Baskin Robbins) Choclates ( Nestle ) Coffee ( Nestle ) Not to forget Coke , Pepsi etc.

I am amazed to see Noodles eating China , now has become Burger eating China. It is only one country, India, where KFC and McDonald both have not taken off on the same scale as in all the other countries.

Coming back, if you are a professional and planning to start a business, then first you have to unlearn quite a lot and come to the same stage as the street hawker. Ultimately, he is also doing business and the Big company is also doing business, the only difference is the scalability. Both don't believe in paying taxes , both know, how to manipulate the regulations and both know ultimately, that the customer is actually a cow to be sucked .