Opportunities Galore

It sometimes rocks your mind on seeing opportunities lying around us everywhere. Right from selling shoes to selling food to selling clothes to selling cycles, we have enough and ample opportunities. The good thing is we don’t even have to stock or produce any material, mere by being a intermediary one can rake in huge profits. It just has to be a viable business idea to rake in market cap. Who knew that a 10 year old company can command a market cap of $100bn just because it caused a revolution i.e. google. Era of communication and internet has totally revolutionized these things. Internet marketing has huge potential and almost every 5 young enterprising guys can really rake in money rather than working for big MNC’s. Yatra.com, Cleatrip.com etc have totally revolutionized the way we shop and transact. Best part is we are not talking of setting up huge plants and getting in construction hazards, but we are only intermediaries helping people transact ensuring a win win for vendor, customer as well as these companies. One more excellent example is flipkart.com and seeing the excellent service and response they are getting, no wonder 5 years down the line people would love to order soap and hair oil over internet. Guess what is the investment these Yatra’s , Flipkart, Makemytrip would be making, that would be very less to the tunes of few crores. They don’t have to manufacture goods, stock goods, not to bother about pilferage or wastage as they directly negotiate from manufacturers, not to invest in R&D, the only significant cost they would have is invest in IT & expenses in advertisement. Definitely, the business model allows them to break-even very soon and have enough liquidity in their cash flows as most of the expenses are operational rather than any significant asset base. This business model also makes way for excellent customer service as word of mouth has done wonders for flipkart. It happened personally with me when while paying through net banking for flipkart, my transaction (bad gateway) failed after getting processed from my bank. The same thing happens regularly with irctc and you have to wait for 4-5 days for the money to be refunded in your account. But guess what, Flipkart got to know of the failed transaction and processed my order without any fuss. Within seconds I saw the message on my cell and delivery guy gave me the Kit the very next day.

Opportunities are galore and we only need to be gutsier in choosing what we aspire for. And that’s easier said than done and applies for me too

Marketing You

We live among brands day in and day out, play with them, sleep with them but do we think of branding ourselves ever seriously..

Especially in a corporate jungle, it’s far more imperative to brand one & to send a message continuously. We are too engrossed in branding commodities, products, but the most important thing which can take someone to places is branding oneself and that we don’t do or we do but are not consistent and intelligent enough to maintain.

To be terse, by branding I would say how you maintain your personality day in and day out. What people think of you in a home, what your spouse thinks of you, what your reportees think of you, what your boss thinks of you and above all what your organization thinks of you.

Especially in this era of twitter/FB we are continuously communicating with outside world thus making an impression on people. LinkedIn also has converged the office space to our private world. You may be a very tough & no nonsense boss in the office, but are pouring your family outbursts on FaceBook every day, so what your reportees may think of you?? May be I would think, that this guy is a loser venting his anger out on reportees. We are continuously communicating via mail, SMS, in parties, get together & networking sites etc. It may not be a formal communication, but body language itself may be a way how people recognize us and then treat us accordingly. The way how you start answering a call to the way how you stand in a queue to take you food to the way how you greet your seniors in cafeteria to the way how you dress up for a Friday everything says something of you..

This genre where people live their private life in public space and boast of 600 friends in FB, it’s a tough task, but I won’t be recommending do’s and don’ts for one considering it depends on the individual, but the less a person tries to fake who he/she is , the more successful and happy he/she becomes.. We are more concerned of what others think, but the day we actually start showing what we are in either walks of life, we won’t need to market ourselves:

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