Why should you scale :
One day, during the early stage of Mindree, the Chief Strategy cum Marketing officer, shows a poignant slide to the leaders in the organisation. The slide plots the money that would be required to pay the future salaries of its employees, considering annual pay increases for next 5 years against the rate increases that Mindtree was able to manage in the past with its existing customers, extrapolated to the next 5 years. Message comes out loud and clear - Mindtree would very soon run out of business. This brings in the realization - What was needed was not the short change deals - the 5, 10 or 20 people projects that would last for an year or two, but large annuity deals that would deliver revenue stream for many years to come. Short change deals wouldn't even be sufficient to pay for the average annual pay increases in the company, leave alone investing in building new capabilities and such needed for growth.
The beauty of the 'Nothing to lose' concept :
In the early stages, Mindtree had worked for a small Dutch firm and had a credible relationship with the organization. Down the line this company gets acquired by another company, and that one in turn by a further bigger one - KPN. Net effect, Mindtree lost its business with the firm as a fall-out of the acquisitions. KPN happens to issue a large RFP to the two big players in india for outsourcing its 'Infrastructure Management' work. Now, Mindtree wasn't known to KPN folks. Infrastructure Management was an area that Mindtree had only recently got into, and the RFP process was already in progress. The Mindtree sales person was persistent and had got a meeting with the Vendor Management contact at KPN for the RFP. Now, in the meeting Subroto mentions, "it was the dog that fetched you newspaper daily, but when it was time to feed milk, you're instead looking for the cat" :-). This served as an ice-breaker and as the vendor management person sought to understand the relevance, Subroto goes 'bout explaining the history of Mindtree's relationship in the past and why they deserve to be invited for the RFP. Customer gives them a chance, and a solid proposal turns around and eventually Mindtree wins the deal with KPN. Moral being, go on, keep trying, you have nothing to lose :-)
Diversifying into newer domains :
This is the most common challenge that every company goes through at some time or the other. Here is how Mindree seems to have managed it for diversifying into insurance vertical. Sales persistently tries and gets AIG's RFP, Proposal response follows, though at this point, Mindree only had the technology capability and not really the Insurance domain capabilities. Mindtree demonstrates its learning process, builds an Insurance 101 course, demonstrates how it will build partnerships with experts who know the domain. AIG - impressed with Mindtree's technical capabilities & convinced of ability to build domain expertise, agrees to support Mindtree with the domain expertise until Mindtree built it in-house. AIG goes on to become a large customer for Mindtree. Persistence pays. To get into the banking space, they just seem to have requested the CEO of a bank during a meeting, if they would be their first angel customer in the banking domain for Mindtree. And it helped to open and pursue the dialogue and eventually the bank did sign-up as a customer.
While these are just a sneak peek, the book offers a volley of insights into many challenges that organisations go through during their growth phase and lessons from Mindtree's own experiences. Makes a wonderful read.
Happy reading..
