What if you start a venture and it does not go as planned?
What Elbert Hubbard said many years back applies to every entrepreneur’s venture: “Victory; a matter of staying power.”
 |
| Anurag Batra |
When and where do you draw the line if you start a venture and it does not go according to plan? I am sure this is something that plays on the minds of many budding and young entrepreneurs. Why just young ones, even serial entrepreneurs working on their second or third or fourth venture are bound to confront this question at some point in their journey.
I have always maintained that success in one venture does not guarantee success in a new venture. When you believe in a venture you have started and dreamt about, you believe in the venture's future growth and potential. This dream for the future is based on your understanding of your new business, your capability to execute in the macro environment, similar business models elsewhere and your ability to scale up and raise capital as the
venture progresses.
Sometimes a venture starts on the right note and for the right reasons, but does not progress to imagined potential. Most of the time the two big reasons for delayed progress are lack of enough management time and supervision and second, inadequate level of capital funding or investment at one go or over a couple of years. With changes in teams and many tries to scale up and raise capital, an entrepreneur starts to feel drained financially and starts to wonder if the project was the right one for him/her to do. There might also be family pressure, along with concerns from spouse, to either make it profitable or shut it down. What do you do? How far do you go? If it's four years already and you have lost money consistently, should you give it one year more? What will change in this one year? These are dilemmas I am sure entrepreneur of all sizes and scale face.
First of all you must, as dispassionately as possible, list down and analyze possible reasons why the venture did not grow and become profitable. You must also seek external help in evaluating it and estimating where it stands currently and how far it would go. The other question you have to deal with is where to raise short-term capital. At this stage, there is bound to be self doubt. How to deal with this and not let it come between an honest and right decision? What needs to change now that will make the venture self sustainable and profitable? What if it still does not work? Should one sell it to a big player? Who will buy it at this stage and why? You need to do some soul searching and be realistic. The leap of faith is putting pressure on you, and the answers are not easy, but this trial by fire sometimes brings out the best in an entrepreneur.
You have to take a call finally on how much you can stretch yourself financially and emotionally, and whether it is worth the while and whether there is a big prize at the end of the chase. No one else can decide this for you. Of course you should listen to all the stakeholders in your life and be sensitive to what they feel, especially your life partner and family members, as what you do impacts your family financially. But finally, you have to make your leap of faith a safe landing. There are no easy answers and I am still searching myself, but let me tell you that I think about this every day. Let me leave you with this thought from American psychologist and writer Marsha Sinetar: “Burning desire to be or do something gives us staying power - a reason to get up every morning or to pick ourselves up and start in again after a disappointment.”
_____________________________
meet Anurag Batra
Anurag Batra is real life, first-generation entrepreneur who is Much Below Average (MBA) from the prestigious Management Development Institute, MDI. Anurag is the founder and editor-in-chief of exchange4media group which includes exchange4media.com. To write to the author, please send an email to dare@cybermedia.co.in with the subject line ‘Anurag Batra’. The views expressed here are that of the author and do not represent the magazine’s.
Subscribe to this comment's feed
| Next > |
|---|
