Focus, Execution and finding balance
This issues is about lessons learnt in the process of building an organisation. I am re-iterating them with added context and examples. Prior to this they were just tweets that sounded good and nothing more.
On Focus
I have been reminded of not being focused multiple times by people who took care of me. It has been an ever moving goal post which i seem to miss no matter how hard i tried. Probably, i lacked focus to be “focused”.
Focus of sticking to a strategy and saying no to most things was a hard lesson for me. It almost costed us everything while building Subjimandi.app.
We were trying to sell graded produce to multiple types of buyers by changing our offering terms to them. We were not making significant inroads to match the supply and demand because of orders from Buyers were less compared to supply from farmers. So, to gain more orders, we decided to sell to modern retail customers(supermarkets) by extending credit and discounting service cost.
The offering of produce being sold gradewise was not valued by them. To them, we were just an another vendor. This resulted in us running into cashflow issues and dance to the whims of the people at the buyer who handled vendor operations.
It took us some losses, personal reflection and team’s effort to rethink this approach and stick to our targeted segment “general trade”, your average mom and pop shops on pavements. We did turn things around and went on to not only bridge the gap but tilt the scales on the other side where the supply was less than demand.
Often times we get sidetracked. There is no specific reason or trigger for it. For us, it was trying to bridge a gap in the shortest means possible. The important thing to do when changing course is to build feedback loops that could calculate the deviation and project the expected outcome. If the results are not in favour, best to return to earlier state without worrying about too much on the failure. You could do this only if you are thinking about feedback right from the start.
Focus to stick to a particular aspect seems hard at the start or when in times of adversity. But, tiding through them provides you outsized return in terms of outcome. In our case, we created the only marketplace where we bought and sold produce gradewise from producer and to buyer.
Challenge of Execution
The other hard part of being an operator in a challenging sector where the nature of your survival doesn’t rest with you alone.
“Execution remains a challenge every single time”.
This came from a sense of struggle as I was trying to overcome aligning our team to the concept of standardising the produce (grading ) and marketing the model to their respective stakeholders at both source and consumption locations.
Multiple conceptual topics were explained to make them understand the prominence of standardising the produce. But, the failure of actual proof and live examples made it non relatable for the team.
So, I doubled down on economics and incentive structure for our concept to make logical sense. Then, we went broad covering the context with understanding the sector and interpersonal dynamics at play. Lastly, we settled down with the frameworks that are easy to remember and implement.
Still, the team believed in the messenger(yours truly) and witnessed real feedback of the concept when they implemented it. Fortunately, it turned out well and lead to positive momentum from us.
Balancing the Execution with Preparation
If given an opportunity to revisit the time spend on teaching our team the concept. I would reduce it by making them understand through the help of concrete factual/hypothetical examples as simulations.
The journey towards correcting my mistake was a long process and all credit goes to Anvesh(will be introduced in later posts) for drilling it into my head that examples help.
“Right amount of preparation leads to execution. Too much time to prepare leads to extinction.”
Our concepts wouldn’t have gotten the chance to get implemented if we spent time on making each team member completely understand the concept. We adopted our practices to expose the concept but make the team understand through examples.
The more i focused on bettering my explanation skills, the more I was certain that a balance of concepts and examples during the process helps speed things up. Examples help you visualise the process and capture effect you would like one to understand. On the other hand, concepts give a sense of clarity to implement the learnings.
If you are only focused on one aspect, you are limiting ones understanding. For example, the applicability of any concept when explained with “examples” restricts to same type of situations. It can’t be extended to pattern matching and clarity that an understanding of concept provides.
The correct balance basing the recipient to whom we would like to explain is the skillset that good operators should hone with continuous development.
Lessons by 3 Cuts
These 3 lessons were learnt through introspection post the goof ups. Yet, these 3 lessons help me operate at a higher level, now.
Focus is being steadfast inspite of multiple queries from people to be pulled in all directions.
Execution is how one prepares and explains the concept to the people involved in getting optimum work done.
Lastly, knowing when to switch between conceptual part and execution part is a judgement call that gets better as you increase your reps.
These 3 were part of a thread called “Morning Musings”. We will visit each one of them at later point of time for better treatment and more context surrounding them.
Until next time,
Vivek, reminiscing the past mistakes