Prof. (Dr.) Parimal Merchant’s words on this article “Excellent article. The wording of ‘raised to’ is superb and very appropriate.”
When some people around the world realized that there is a huge benefit of working together it lead to management concepts in Team, Groups and also shared knowledge. Today that concept is so much in practice that we find co-working and co-living as a routine.
However one of the root to all this “shared” and “leveraging someone else’s capabilities and resource” could be attributed to family business. In the Indian context, right from the traditional huge business houses like Godrej to the modern generation Munjal, all have one thing in common – integration of different generation (who obviously have different capabilities and potential) to take family business to the next level.
In a small town place in South India, there is family business of Ayurvedic medicine. Our protagonist is a female, who has been reared in great care and is very learned. She knows English, Tamil and Kannada but her father knows only Tamil. She wanted to expand the business and so did her grandfather and father, but there were two limitations. The first being, they were extremely traditional in their approach, so they didn’t know fancy packaging, they didn’t know any other language, and they didn’t know how to market. The second issue was, they were largely located in remote area, where logistics was a challenge and the nearest airport was located around 600 kms (where they could reach after changing two buses).
One day the grandfather told his son, that we both have grown old in this town and we will die also, but if we give the scope to your daughter and support, don’t you think, she would be able to do something great. The father was convinced, but the mother was not (for obvious reasons), but after some discussion, the girl was sent to study a management program in Mumbai. She came in touch with another 100 students of family business. In the first three months, she realized that she needed to learn Hindi, it was a tough call for her, she talked to her father and her father told her that now you are heading a family mission, so now you have to make it, we will support in every possible way.
She learnt Hindi, with the language under her fold, she gained confidence and so she approached some Ayurvedic healing centers in Mumbai and also some other parts of the country with the help of her friends. At some places, she got phenomenal positive response, but at some places, she received very poor response. She was not the one who would easily get hit by negativities, because every time she would be hit negatively, she would call her family and discuss and work to find solutions to the challenge posed by the other side.
With each passing month, she solved each of these issues in her own way. She created a team of young girls for marketing who were more versatile in communication and presentation. She hired a local marketing advisory company for packaging. She also took many trips to different parts of the country along with her father, wherein her father would be largely an observer and more of emotional support.
Today the business is expanded to 9 states of the country and the mother is completely gaga over her daughter and her grandfather was overwhelmed by the progress such a traditional business.
However lets understand couple of things, each step that I have written is not as simple as it’s written. I mean convincing the mother to allow the daughter to go to Mumbai to study, that itself is a goliath decision for them. For the grandfather to have trust in the capabilities of the daughter makes him hugely responsible for, if the she fails and gets into depression or such. For the daughter to learn a new language and met the negative customers and hear such heartening feedback from them. But they did it !!!
In a similar vein, in a very traditionally run foundry business, a second generation joins after studying literature. A foundry business is where the operations happen in extreme hot temperatures in which very hard metal such as iron or steel are molten to form particular shapes.
When this young man decided to join his family business of foundry, his father was resilient and said that, this is not a posh, AC cabin business. This is a hard business in which you have to deal with illiterate workers and work in extreme conditions. The young man said that I am ok with it and I will learn foundry operations. He went to a reputed engineering college and did a crash course for foundry management and operations. He then decided to attend to his factory on regular basis and he found that although they had great manufacturing processes, they were poor in marketing of it. He also found that there is scope for international business for his organization and hence, he decided to create a marketing and promotion strategy.
His father was doubtful of the strategy and told that this is a commodity business, in which anyone can do what we are doing, so what’s a big deal!! And to that, the young man answered, let me do something, which can differentiate us from the commodity. The father was happy to see the conviction of the youngster and thus gave him full support and freedom to experiment.
The young man created a good profile of the company, promoted it through the Internet to various potential international customers and converted a few. This achievement boosted his confidence and also the confidence of his father. He told his father that why are we not promoting the entire “foundry industry” to the second generation of existing foundry businesses and thus he became and active member in a business association to promote “foundry industry”.
Today he has taken public lectures on foundry business and its potentiality. His father feels great pride for his son.
That is the magic of “power of raise to”. Mathematically, 22+32= 13, but (2+3)2 = 25. The power of “raise to” works magic in family business. The “raise to” is the next generation and the base number is the earlier generation. Both need to know that only “raise to” cannot sustain or grow and only the base number cannot grow, hence the coexistence of different members of different generation in a family business gives them an edge over other types of organizations which gives them a fresh lease of life at regular intervals and also the scope to explore fresh opportunities.