'The right processes can turn your SME into a big business'

Ravi Kiran

In writer director Gauri Shinde's 2012 movie English Vinglish, Sridevi's character Shashi Godbole plays a second and powerful role besides being an affectionate and hard-working home maker -- that of being a home-based entrepreneur, who converts her talent of making delectable laddoos into a thriving small business.

Every small business owner would have identified with her -- the happy, proud, sincere and customer-focused entrepreneur, who knows how to juggle multiple roles with panache. The character also reinforces something we cherish and celebrate in every entrepreneur -- passion.

Follow The Right Processes

Unfortunately, an incorrect understanding of passion makes many an entrepreneur remain small for a long time, sometimes for a lifetime. While personal passion for making and serving the world's best tasting laddoos will win you several admiring customers, unless you have a passion for building business, you run the risk of staying as an SME forever. So how do you reconcile passion and big business, often considered cold and impersonal?

The answer lies in something that almost always represents the cold and impersonal side of business -- process. That's right; even after you have articulated an inspiring purpose, hired a good team of people, if you do not implement and follow the right processes, all your efforts may come undone. This is particularly true when your business is about to enter the two stages of high growth -- first, acceleration; then takeoff. Process is the third and a very important piece of the Building Blocks of Business (the 3P Framework), we spoke of in an earlier column.

So what's the big deal about process, you may say, "We have document formats, written rules and the CMD takes out a circular every once in a while, isn't that enough?" The fact is process-orientation is more than flowcharts and formats, it is a mindset to deliver pre-defined and desirable outcomes consistently and efficiently.

Importance Of Method

Businesses in their early stages -- existence, survival and early success -- do not typically have clearly defined and streamlined processes. As the organisation grows, however, so does the complexity of the business. The ‘madness' that everyone enjoyed so much when the business was small, can now pull the business down and play spoilsport. This is why a ‘method' needs to be institutionalised. We need that method in making decisions, communicating them, handling people, managing money, serving customers and many other critical business areas. It's easier said than done. Often, building a process‐driven organisation creates the impression of becoming bureaucratic, the promoter losing control and bottlenecks appearing everywhere. Indeed, badly conceptualised and implemented processes do create exactly this outcome. Fortunately, good processes do the opposite.

Organisational Culture

There really isn't a replacement for process orientation, much as there really is no replacement for passion. This means every ambitious business owner who wants to move successfully through the growth stage needs to embrace a process mindset and be able to make it part of the organisational culture, through a combination of authority and empathy, as indeed true leaders do. Good processes deliver consistent and high quality products and services, fuel innovativeness, make efficient use of money, managerial time, people energy and other precious resources, all of which are important during the growth stage. In our country, there is so much glamorisation of jugaad as a tactic to manage against odds that many business owners feel process orientation is a Western idea and should remain so. The fact is, even as the West learns the beauty of jugaad from us, we must learn and apply process orientation aggressively in our growth-minded businesses so we depend less on the ad hoc need for smartness and deliver consistent and productive growth.

Whether we want our business to remain like Shashi Godbole's or become a Haldiram's is really up to us.

Ravi Kiran is the Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Friends of Ambition, a middle India growth advisory firm

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