Our advisor, Jagdish Chawla was recently featured in the Small Medium Entrepreneur Magazine. You can find the full interview below and can read the article on Entrepreneur India here.
Do you think it is a good idea for retired individuals to go for second employment in start up firms
Startups are usually started by young enterprising individuals. Having senior advisors and mentors will ensure that the young team can leverage their experience and pursue faster and profitable growth.
Since start ups generally face a talent crunch, do you think retired individuals with their age and experience can help in serving the firm on their advisory board or provide valuable mentorship/training?
Absolutely. Experienced professionals have seen a lot of business cycles and have worked with people with different personality types and motivation. Bringing such experience to a startup can only be helpful.
Do you think it is viable to encourage such post retirement opportunities, keeping in mind that India is mushrooming with start ups?
A platform to connect Advisors/Mentors with such young startups would be very useful. There are angel investors and startup communities, but none for retirees.
Do you think there is any downside towards hiring ex-servicemen?
None I can think of. Its a win-win situation for both.
Research shows that there is a wide mismatch, a “generation gap” between the brains behind a start up firm and an ex-serviceman? Have you faced any such notable hindrances? If yes, have you to managed to overcome them and still be an active member of the firm?
Opportunities today are much higher than say 20 years ago. This has meant that youngsters are a lot more ambitious. While growth is critical, young startups should also focus on business fundamentals and cash flow management.
In what measure have you provided growth opportunities to the start up firm and helped it in its foundation days?
End of the day its the founding team which does all the work. As advisors, we can provide a good sounding board for key decisions
Gartner has recently reported that across USA, companies spend 10.4% of their revenue in marketing of which 2.5% of revenue (or almost 25% of their entire marketing spend) on an average is spent on their digital marketing efforts. The more interesting finding of this survey is that this number is expected to rice to 9% this year. The survey was done with over 250 marketing executives from across 6 industries in USA towards end of 2012. The complete findings of the Gartner's US digital marketing spending report can be found on their website.
The largest chunk of digital marketing spend went to digital advertising, possibly with Google Adwords leading on this spend. Such increased spends are increasingly being seen even in India. However this also means that ROI on digital marketing needs to be more specific and tangible than ever before. The digital marketing spends and efforts need to be measured with sales growth, brand recall and actual market penetration.
Gartner also reported an increase in spends on content management and content driving marketing. So while digital advertising pushes customers to the brand, content marketing actually pulls customers and creates a community where brands can interact and excite customers.
