DARE - Because Entrepreneurs Do

I am sure you have heard many times that influence can be bigger than money.

Why do artists, media, entertainers, journalists and other professionals from liberal arts have disproportionate influence over our minds and life?

When I say this, what I mean is it being disproportionate to their money and business valuations vis-à-vis big business barons.

Anurag Batra

I never believed that one would be in the media business for clout. In fact, I believe that it does not work like that and the failure of many who tried making media a support business to their mainline business strengthens my point.

I am a media entrepreneur and I am in it as it’s my primary business and my passion for it leads to become my identity.

Now, here is the catch. The moment I say identity—the business that an entrepreneur is in assumes more significance than the size of it or the money it makes. I have always believed that influence or clout in a media business is like a savings bank account; the more you use it, the less you are left with.

Recently, I was having lunch with a communication entrepreneur in Mumbai who shifted to Mumbai from Delhi ten years back. We were talking of two prominent magazine publishers in the city of Mumbai and how they would be better off selling their businesses (publishing/media). My friend told me that unless they get disproportionate value for their enterprises, they will never sell as the money they would get from the sale of their businesses would not be proportionate to the value and enjoyment they get by owning these businesses. We reached the conclusion that the enterprise value that they would get would always be substantially lower than the “social currency” they enjoy. It was pretty amusing to me to look at a business enterprise and entrepreneurship from the prism of social currency.

The argument for social currency was that in one case the business magazine owner was single and needed to go out every evening and socialize. His magazine was his passport, his social currency to his evening outings.

The second entrepreneur is in the lifestyle media space and is a film aficionado and a well-known socialite in Mumbai and gets pecks on his cheeks from the wives of all the top industrialists. His magazines and their traditional superiority or nuisance value kept this entrepreneur’s social currency going.

Initially, I found this argument and logic little too frivolous and trivializing a very serious issue of owning your business being akin to having a child and hence the difficulty in letting go of the business.

Having been educated by fellow entrepreneurs, I now realize the role social currency plays in the life of an entrepreneur. The happy situation for an entrepreneur is one where the entrepreneur can translate his or her social currency into a business valuation and get monetary gains for himself.

In terms of valuations, when entrepreneurs buy out or invest in entrepreneurs, they must create mechanisms for keeping intact or enhancing social currency of entrepreneurs they are investing in.

I hope I can.

Anurag Batra is real life, first-generation entrepreneur who is Much Below Average (MBA) from the prestigious Management Development Institute, MDI. When he is not busy writing such columns, he can be reached at anuragbatrayo@gmail.com.
Anurag is the founder and editor-in-chief of exchange4media group which includes exchange4media.com.

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Role of an entrepreneur
written by Role of an entrepreneur, February 25, 2010

Banks and Insurance companies already rely on a highly invasive “Credit Score” to establish financial risk profile as a means of protecting their selves and their other clients. Why wouldn’t an airline use a social credit score to establish a social risk profile as a means of protecting their selves and the lives of their other clients

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