I met Rubeena Singh, CEO of Iprospect, for an episode of the She Means Business Chat Show yesterday. It was an afternoon well spent talking to a driven, intelligent, charming and fit woman – the best kind of afternoons in my work life.
But during the conversation she mentioned 2 things which made me think a little about my own work. She said, and I quote –
As a leader, and also as a person, you need to be crystal clear on your strengths and weaknesses. Why? So that you bring your strengths to the table and surround yourself with people who complement you on the skills you don’t have.
A few minutes later she also asked me how I monetize the She Means Business content. I don’t, I told her sheepishly. I just make money off my corporate workshops which honestly I have been doing for quite a few years now.
But on the way back, both these points sort of came together in one BIG realization. I do excellent workshops. And I create decent content around the same subjects as my workshops. But I don’t have revenue or commercial smarts to create scale!
It has taken me a long time to come to that realization.
Malini Agarwal in her book wrote that she CHOSE not to be CEO of Miss Malini Entertainment, when she was scaling up, because she realized that she had the creativity and the vision but she had to bring in a CEO and CRO to help her monetize and give wings to her creativity and vision, while she focused on being the content champion as well as the face of the brand.
As small entrepreneurs, we often want to do everything ourselves without figuring out where our strengths lie. To explain this better – You may be a great cook but you may not have any idea on how to turn that into a scalable business proposition. Should you start a catering service and if you do, are you going to be marketing it, creating social media for it, designing the flyers for it, or are you going to be creating the food, the recipes, the dishes?
And if that is the case, then where do these complimentary skills come from? Will you hire?
That leads to the classic entrepreneurial chicken and egg conundrum – should you make some revenue first and then hire or should you hire first and let the people help you scale up? And if it’s the latter, how do you bear the cost? So you have to trust and assume that bringing in talent will help you grow enough to pay all the costs. Or you look at a business loan/investment etc.
All of this ran through my head on the drive back from the chat show shoot.
I know I am not alone in this situation. Thousands of women, and men, in small businesses continue to choke under the pressure of trying to do everything themselves.
Where does the solution lie? In my case, I need to figure out a person who has the network and bandwidth to figure out commercial scale.
It was a good interview. The video will be out next week.
Dipika, She Means Business
………………………………………………………………………………………………..