The upside of the downturn !!!

Well, of course, all of us are either affected or going to be affected soon by the turn of events over the past year, and the coming year(s).

Some predict it to be a 18 months to 5 years time range for most economies to walk upright again.

Yet, in these difficult times, there need to be brilliant ideas that originate in and be developed by inspiring minds.

Our group has been pretty stagnant recently, what with the current state of the economy and therefore the minds !!!

I want to start this thread with the intention of throwing ideas that can turn out to be spark of an engulfing business fire !!!

So lets leave any inhibitions behind, and start afresh to look at every and any evolving opportunity !!!

Thanks in advance for sharing to this pool of ideas !!!

Inspiration - Nothing less will do !!!

March 11, 2008

Shah: The man who makes 'crorepatis'

Rashesh Shah is not your typical Gujarati businessman. He was among the first in his family to study in an English-medium school at a time when his elder cousins and siblings were in Gujarati-medium ones.
He didn't just step into his father's business -- manufacturing and selling school exercise notebooks -- as all good conservative Gujarati boys tend to. He went on to study higher and higher (he followed a BSc in statistics with a one-year diploma from the Indian Institute of Foreign Trade, and then a two-year MBA from IIM, Ahmedabad), something very few hard-core Gujarati business families consider worthwhile.
Then, he decided to marry Vidya, a Kannadiga girl of his choice, at a time when marrying even a Gujarati outside your own small community was frowned upon. And if all that wasn't enough, Shah convinced his father to mortgage their Peddar Road house in the mid-1990s, to raise seed capital for his fledgling firm, Edelweiss, a step that's brazen enough to give many a conservative Gujarati nothing less than a coronary attack.
Somewhere in his knack of breaking the mould, Shah's father probably spotted the inherent fire in the belly of his then 33-year-old son and though his father is not here to see the fruits of what he backed, the 44-year-old chairman and managing director of Edelweiss Capital has more than lived up to his father's expectations.
Edelweiss Capital today is one of the few fully home-grown diversified financial services companies (broking is one of its business; 47 per cent of its revenue is from treasury and wholesale financing), competing for clients and employees with the Morgan Stanleys and Jardine Flemings of the world.
It's set a scorching pace of growth: its revenue in the first nine months this year is Rs 680 crore (Rs 6.8 billion), as compared to Rs 370 crore (Rs 3.7 billion) for the entire 2006-07. It has a market capitalisation of Rs 5,500 crore (Rs 55 billion), an equity base of over Rs 2,000 crore (ten years ago, raising Rs 1 crore had been "quite a challenge"), 1,600 employees and over 40 offices all over India.
We are meeting at the Tea House of the August Moon, Taj Palace's long-surviving Chinese restaurant, where Shah has a lecture to deliver later that afternoon. We order two vegetarian soups, dimsums (a must-have at Tea House) and a vegetarian starter.
After passing out of IIM-A in 1989, Shah joined ICICI [Get Quote]. "I had never wanted to be a businessman. I wanted to be a professional, wear a tie and suit, work in a corporate set up," he recalls. His ICICI job exposed him to the best in the business. "I dealt directly with the newly emerging companies that were getting formed at the time -- Infosys [Get Quote], Bharat Forge [Get Quote], United Phosphorous, Mastek and their CEOs. I saw inspired people who were grabbing opportunities everyday," he adds.
It was also a key turning point in the economy. Then finance minister Manmohan Singh had started opening up India as never imagined before. The capital markets, thanks partly to Harshad Mehta, had started to boom. A host of high-quality entrepreneurs with new ideas were accessing them.
Shah and his former colleague and co-founder Venkat Ramaswamy kept toying with the idea of starting a home-grown financial services company, but Shah realised at some point -- after having lived through the coup in Uganda during a one-year assignment -- that "if I don't pull the trigger now, I never will." An avid tennis player, Shah quit in April 1995 (he was then with Prime Securities [Get Quote]) to give Edelweiss -- an idea that had been growing in his head -- his best shot and his undivided time.
Fate, however, played tricks with Shah. Just when he took the final gutsy plunge, the market started climbing down (it went from a peak of 4,600 to 3,000), interest rates climbed up and the early impact of lowering duties began to show on industry. The Asian crisis made things worse. By the end of 1995, the state of the economy was looking bleak.
No one can be blamed but a few of the other proposed partners (all of whom were to bring in equity) got cold feet. He had no silver spoon in his mouth and savings, borrowings -- all they had -- were proving short. That's when Shah asked his father to mortgage their house at Peddar Road with Citibank to somehow touch the magical Rs 1 crore figure.
The tiny start-up (with just three employees) was operating out of a grubby office next to Akbarallys in Mumbai's Fountain area. "No one was willing to join us. We couldn't afford to pay much. We were unknown, had no history, very low capital. The odds were against us. The first three years (1996-98) were very bad," he says. Personally too, it was a time when Shah was grappling with change; he lost his father and, in the process, his guidance and support and his responsibilities mounted with the birth of his first child.
Things began to look up a bit in 1998-2000 and by 2001, Edelweiss had grown to 11 employees. But things were to get worse before they got any better. 2001-03 was what Shah calls "the worst phase for Indian capital markets" (there was a massive drought in India, GDP growth fell to 3.5 per cent, 9/11 happened). "We hit real lows and I used to often think: when will this end?"
But what comes down must go up. 2003 proved to be a sort of take-off point for Shah and Venkat, and ever since, there's been no looking back. In the last four-and-a-half years, the firm has added 350 employees each year.
From a single sleek and gleaming new floor in Express Towers at Nariman Point in mid-2004, today it's spread to five floors and is threatening to slowly but surely take over the building. There are eight other offices at Nariman Point alone. Shah himself has moved from a 2,000 square feet leased flat to his own 3,000-square feet apartment in Worli.
What were his guiding principles and didn't he ever want to give up when the chips were down, I ask. Three golden pieces of advice from Infosys' chief mentor Narayan Murthy ring in Shah's ears even today ("he's had a deeper impact on us than even he may be aware of"). Do not give equity cheap, share benefits with your employees and attempt to build a high-quality organisation.
Shah says he's been very conservative with equity, except when it comes to his employees ("I think we have the maximum number of crorepatis as a percentage of employee base in India"), and that somewhere along the way, "organisation-building became an end in itself." The company compensates people with a combination of cash and equity (800 out of 1,600 own stock), so in bad times, costs are under control and in good times, you make hay while the market shines. "Hopefully, one day, it will be an institution," he adds.
Good advice is just one part of it. Hunger, says Shah, while picking doubtfully at his food. "We are hungry for growth. If the financial services industry has grown at 50-60 per cent for the last five years, Edelweiss has grown at 120 per cent every year for the last five years. One of our targets is to consistently beat the industry growth rate." His colleagues say that Shah keeps a little yellow notepad on his desk, on which he meticulously lists and crosses out his priorities every day. I picture it saying, "Make sure you beat the industry hard today."
Faith helped too. "You can't have an India story without robust capital markets. So, we kept our faith in the bridge," referring to the capital market, "the bridge between the providers and users of capital." And giving up? He looks at me so blankly I'm sure he doesn't comprehend what that means.
Forget giving up, Shah is quite willing to go through the entire ordeal again if he had to. "I have played tennis for 18 years and I don't like social tennis. I play to win."
He may play to win but believes that luck too has its own role to play. "No matter what you may or may not do, you need to be at the right place at the right time," he says. He says he's been lucky to ride the "India wave" from 2003 and there's definitely been an element of good fortune.
As he finishes his coffee, we open our fortune cookies and I find Shah somehow has two messages in his, while I have only one in mine. Clearly, lady luck is shining on him, in more ways than



http://www.rediff.com/money/2008/mar/11bspec.htm

Writedowns may be masking some good news

Here come more financiers' writedowns

Another day, another prediction of red ink for banks and financial firms. But some analysts caution against taking these numbers at face value.

By Colin Barr, senior writer

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NEW YORK (Fortune) -- Another winter writedown storm hit Wall Street Monday. Shares in Citi, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac sank after analysts predicted another round of multibillion-dollar losses at the struggling financial firms.

The expected writedowns, which reflect rising loan defaults and sharp declines in indexes tracking debt-related securities, come as falling house prices and a slow economy weigh on U.S. consumers. Shares in Citi (C, Fortune 500) dropped 2% after Oppenheimer analyst Meredith Whitney slashed her full-year earnings forecast to 75 cents a share from $2.70 previously.

Whitney, who made headlines late last year by being the first analyst to predict Citi would cut its dividend - which it soon did - said the bank's profits will be hammered by Citi's need to reduce the value of loans and bonds on its balance sheet. The analyst, who rates the stock the equivalent of sell, predicts "further writedowns to their carrying values of [collateralized debt obligations] related to sub-prime mortgages, further writedowns from leverage lending commitments, and further writedowns associated with on balance sheet consumer loans."

That's a lot of writedowns, but Citi isn't alone in facing big hits to its earnings. Goldman Sachs downgraded Fannie (FNM) and Freddie (FRE, Fortune 500) to sell from neutral, saying it expects $4.2 billion of writedowns at Freddie and $2.6 billion worth at Fannie when the government-sponsored enterprises report fourth-quarter earnings this week. The downgrade comes on the heels of a similar move Friday by analysts at Merrill Lynch. Goldman even recommended that investors short Freddie Mac shares ahead of Thursday morning's expected earnings release. And it also significantly reduced earnings predictions for other Wall Street giants, including Bear Stearns, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch and Lehman Brothers.

By now, huge writedowns are old hat for investors in the financial sector. In just the past two months, Citi took an $8.1 billion writedown of its mortgage-securities holdings, UBS (UBS) took $13.7 billion in mortgage-related writedowns and AIG (AIG, Fortune 500) took a $4.9 billion hit to its credit derivatives portfolio. The river of red ink comes as no surprise, as banks and brokerage firms find themselves carrying billions of dollars of loans and mortgage-related securities whose value has declined along with a sharp slowdown in the debt markets.

The mysteries of 'mark-to-market'

But some skeptics say writedowns may in some cases overstate the extent of problems at financial firms. Many writedowns result from the need to "mark-to-market" the value of illiquid securities - such as CDOs and leveraged loans - or the debt that banks took on to finance the recent private equity buyout boom. Because many of these securities rarely trade, managers are left looking to market indexes for guidance on the size of the appropriate writedown - as Whitney noted Monday in a discussion of the recent 6% drop in the leveraged loan index, or LCDX.

"The decline of the price of the LCDX reflects the markets' priced perception of increased credit risk of leveraged loans, causing a sharp pullback in investors' demand for these types of loans and has caused a backup of the leveraged loan pipeline and assets to build up on balance sheets of banks," she wrote in Monday's report on Citi. "As banks and brokers are required to use these indexes and other market data to 'mark to market' their outstanding loan commitments, we expect banks to be forced to reflect such market declines in their 1st quarter 2008 results further hampering results already hampered from the most challenging market environment most have ever seen."

While no one doubts that the market environment is challenging, some observers say the mark-to-market writedowns don't always help investors seeking to accurately assess a firm's health. For one thing, the writedowns generally don't reflect actual cash losses. In the case of Fannie and Freddie, Goldman sees more writedowns ahead in part because declining interest rates reduce the value of the hedges the firms use to protect the value of their mortgage portfolios - even though the declining rates don't cause Fannie and Freddie to lose actual money during the period.

Similarly, many of the leveraged loans now trading at a discount continue to perform; the drop in the index partly reflects investors' fear that debt-burdened companies will go bankrupt if the economy heads into recession. Similarly, the bonds underlying many illiquid securities such as CDOs continue to pay interest on time, even as related indexes show readings that would suggest widespread default.

Assessing management

That's why Christopher Whalen, managing director of Institutional Risk Analytics, calls fair-value markdowns "madness," saying they tell investors nothing about the economic value of a business. Jeffrey Miller, CEO of investment adviser NewArc Investments in Naperville, Ill., tells investors to delve into the details of writedowns rather than being scared away from possibly attractive investing situations by scary headlines. He says the fact that the banks are keeping loans and bonds on their books rather than selling at fire-sale prices indicates the value of the underlying assets may well climb.

A case in point comes from bond insurers Ambac and MBIA. Back on Jan. 16, Ambac posted a fourth-quarter loss of more than $32 a share, reflecting a $5.4 billion writedown of its CDO holdings. Ambac said about $1.1 billion of the writedown reflected credit impairment, but the rest was a mark-to-market loss tied to the declining value of its bond insurance contracts. "Ambac continues to believe that the balance of the mark-to-market losses taken to date are not predictive of future claims," its press release read, "and that, in the absence of further credit impairment, the cumulative marks would be expected to reverse over the remaining life of the insured transactions."

Similarly, MBIA last month posted a fourth-quarter loss of more than $18 a share, after a $3.5 billion writedown of its CDO holdings. The actual credit loss reflected in that giant writedown, the company said, was $200 million. If other financial firms have been involved in overstating potential losses out of a sense of diligence, that could lead to increased profits once markets stabilize.

The financial guarantors' situation illustrates the questions confronting investors in writedown-riddled companies: Is it fair to believe the portfolio will avoid further credit losses even as the economy slides toward recession? Is it reasonable to assume that the company is presenting a full and fair accounting of its situation?

David Merkel, chief economist at broker-dealer Finacorp Securities, urges caution. "It comes down to assessing management," says Merkel, not referring to any particular company. Though most execs surely make what they believe to be appropriate judgments, he says, "some are prone to fear and greed."

source : http://money.cnn.com/2008/02/25/markets/barr_writedowns.fortune/index.htm?postversion=2008022514

Don't Let Setbacks Stop Your Momentum

Don't Let Setbacks Stop Your Momentum

By Donald J. Trump

“The bigger your business, the bigger your life, the bigger your problems are likely to be. Being prepared for that will save you a lot of emotional turmoil . . .” - Donald J. Trump

I feel strongly about the importance of wholeness. It's a combination of all the components of life that make us healthy, happy, and productive. To my mind, the opposite of wholeness is failure. If it happens, and sometimes it does, the best remedy is to move forward, to realize that failure is not permanent, and to immediately focus in the right direction. Ultimately, a solution will show up.

I don't mean to sound like a faith healer, but there is something profound and yet simple about viewing failure as a lack of wholeness. I will also add that it's effective. Believing that a negative situation is temporary and wrong will give you the impetus to do something about it, to feel righteous and energetic about fixing it. Being unhappy and unproductive is simply not part of my game plan, and it shouldn't be part of yours, either. See a situation as unacceptable, as taking you away from wholeness, and you will be motivated to get out of it as quickly as possible.

When I had a financial setback in the early 1990s, I saw it more as an aberration from the norm than as a final sentence. I knew what it was like to be whole, and all I had to do was get back to that place. I felt that a comeback was what was expected of me, and I expected it of myself. All I had to do was take the next step and get my momentum going again, which is what I did. It didn't happen overnight, but eventually things started to sort themselves out.

I've seen some people get completely swallowed up by failures. The worst thing you can do to yourself is to believe that bad luck is your due. It isn't! It's not just intelligence or luck that gets us places, it's tenacity in the face of adversity. Some people see problems as bad luck, but I don't. Problems are a part of life and a big part of business. The bigger your business, the bigger your life, the bigger your problems are likely to be. Being prepared for that will save you a lot of emotional turmoil, unnecessary deliberating, and even illness.

I've known people who have come back not just from adversity but from tragedy. There's adversity and then there's tragedy. Thinking about both is a good way to get an objective view of what you may think your problems are. Your situation may be tough, but you can bet others have had far worse things to deal with. One way to pave your way for a comeback (or for a first victory) is to read about people who have been courageous against long odds. My guess is they felt they had an obligation to succeed, and in some cases, an obligation to survive. That's how I feel. I had the privilege of a great family and a great education, and I am serious about honoring those privileges -- which means expecting the best from myself.

You can have the same attitude, no matter what your situation or background. When failure comes your way, you must believe that you matter, that you can overcome it, and most importantly, that success is what is expected of you. You'd be surprised at what you can accomplish when that's your attitude. It's not just survival, it's not just success, it is your obligation. A sense of duty toward wholeness will go a long way toward your personal and professional success.

What I learned at the time of my worst financial problems is that I was resilient and that I had this indomitable sense of success that couldn't be taken from me no matter what the newspapers said. That brings me to another level of thought, which is faith. Faith is a bit like wisdom. People can help you along the way with it but above all you have to develop it yourself. Faith in yourself can prove to be a very powerful force. Work on it daily. Sometimes when you're fighting a lonely battle, keeping yourself company with positive reinforcement and faith in yourself can be the invisible power that separates the winners from the losers. Losers give up.

In summary . . .

Strive for wholeness, believe in yourself, keep your momentum at full throttle, and be strong and tough in your resilience. Don't expect anything less than that from yourself, and I can assure you that success will become a permanent situation for you, even when your external circumstances may not show it.

Never Give Up!

Midlife Madness (ii) - Masters of their own destiny? VIEWS AND COMMENTS INVITED

Masters of their own destiny?

Anjuli Bhargava / New Delhi January 19, 2008

Running your own business is a constant learning process, a few corporate honchos-turned-entrepreneurs.

Rakesh Seth, 49, quit the corporate world after 16 years with Nestle and three years with Pepsi, when he was 40. In November 1998, the government started the Freephone service (instead of the caller paying, payment was made by the called). That gave him the idea of setting up Finedge India, a call centre and brand activation company, in February 1999. Seth says the move from the corporate world to the world of business allowed him to strike a better work-life balance. �You can do things on your own terms. I follow a system but I follow a system on my own terms.�

In contrast, in the company, you do many things because �it doesn�t look nice�. For instance, executives often stay till their boss leaves � even if they have no work � because it doesn�t look nice. �In a large MNC, it�s all about impressions and how you manage your bosses. In business, it�s all about reality. And success depends on how you manage your clients and employees,� he adds.

�If one needs to be at work at 7 am, one will � no matter what anyone thinks. And if you feel like an occasional round of golf before office, well you can.�

Rahul Chadha, who quit the corporate sector five years ago after putting in 11 years � his last job was with consulting firm A T Kearney � to start CRS Health, a chain of drugstores, says that �being your own boss� was a primary driver but not as important as the opportunity to �take a concept to the market quickly�. The going, however, hasn�t been a bed of roses. �People can be a challenge. People, as in the powers that be; people, as in the demanding Indian consumer; people like those one interacts with in civil dealings�even attracting the right people is a challenge,� he explains.

But, unlike what many believe � according to Chadha, there is no going back. �Once bitten by the entrepreneurial bug, it�s difficult to imagine getting back to a job,� he adds.

That�s a lesson that needs to be kept in mind � while it may appear easy to return to the corporate sector in the unlikely event that your business fails, especially in today�s high-growth scenario, it is easier said than done. Once you�ve tasted blood, few can deal with the placid environment the corporate sector offers.

In this transition from having a boss to being your own, the biggest pitfall, many feel, is the quality of your peers and colleagues.

As an entrepreneur, you are mostly giving �learning� and shape to the organisation whereas as a salaried manager you are moulded by the organisation and colleagues.

�Getting good people to join you is a challenge; unless you go the VC way and start big, you will not work with the kind of minds you were used to,� feels Seth.

He chose to bootstrap his operations with his own funds (his company did a turnover of Rs 28 crore last year) and not to go the VC way because then the �VC drives you like he owns you� and also because he feels that �tension and risk� depend on the pace at which you want to grow. (It�s interesting that all the three examples in our cover story on page 1 have no VC funding as yet � though 9.9 Mediaworx could be the first to go that way.)

Seth points out that in the initial stages, small things like the type of office, managing your own travel bookings and so on � stuff handled by big administration departments typically � can get to you, but one gets used to it.

For instance, Seth has an administration department of four, but the quality of people he has is not what he was accustomed to. The other issue is that the buck stops with you. �I was running a 1,700-agents call centre for Hutch. In spite of all the administrative staff, if the toilets were dirty there, I could get a call. In Nestle, I�d be doing the shouting,� he explains.

Forget the shouting, you may even find yourself eating humble pie. According to Rajat Goel, CEO and managing director of Eye-Q, which was set up last year, �You have to be prepared to swallow your pride and stand outside your erstwhile subordinates� room for two hours to get business.� And mind you, you may not even like the guy.

Running a business requires you to be a bit of a �reasonable master-of-all-trades�. �You need some skills in every area � legal, marketing, finance, administration...� says Seth, so it helps to have worked in the corporate sector for a while before taking the plunge. It also helps you empathise better with your client, and he with you.

�I found clients want to help you out because they can understand your language. They prefer dealing with you rather than a hard-core businessman,� he says. Since Seth also knows the inner workings of a large company, it helps him frame his proposals in a way that the boss and the boss�s boss will approve it.

One of the major benefits of being an entrepreneur is that while as a salaried manager you are �selling your skills and time� and the organisation is benefitting from your value addition, as an entrepreneur you pay the salaries but keep the value addition each employee creates.

In the process, you create an organisation which will work for you when you are unable to, or choose not to work! Call it the benefits of a calculated risk...

Midlife Madness (i) - Sailing in the same boat? Anybody ready to take the plunge !!!

Mid-life madness

Anjuli Bhargava / New Delhi January 19, 2008

Why are successful, powerful professionals opting out of high-potential careers in favour of entrepreneurial uncertainty?

What makes a 42-year-old, slightly balding, well-settled senior executive in a steady, cushy job in a multinational set-up, rock the boat?

Someone with two kids going to one of the best schools in the city, a wife who hosts great parties and a career trajectory aimed straight for the top echelons of the company, if not the very top. Ambition? Money? Boredom? Opportunity? An urge to prove you can make it on your own? A burning desire to tell your boss to go, take a walk? Or as many of Roy K Cherian�s friends first asked when they heard he�d taken the plunge: �Is it just his hair he�s losing or maybe a part of his brain too?�

Roy says his wife Rani was �slightly scared� (yet brave enough to be supportive) when he decided to quit his new job with the United Breweries group in Bangalore. Prior to that, Cherian � a product of IIM Ahmedabad � had spent close to 13 years with Nestle and Ulka Advertising. Why then did he take what his friends and family think is an �outrageous� step? Cherian (he says his hair loss is genetic) says none of the above alone, or all of the above together, motivated him to throw in the towel.

�I wanted a sense of independence. The thrill of building an organisation and seeing the tangible results of one�s hard work excited me.�

His point � left unsaid � is that, in the corporate sector, you don�t always work for results. Almost everyone Business Standard spoke to felt that those in the corporate sector often work not for results but for their bosses. That can prove frustrating, especially when you�re stopped from doing something you know is the right thing for the business. That�s when some bravehearts jump ship.

Cherian and his partner, 39-year-old Anunay Gupta, set up Marketelligent five months ago, an analytics company based out of Bangalore. At least two parties have already endorsed their faith in what many think is a bizarre move � IIM Bangalore, which is allowing the start-up to incubate out of its campus, and their first client Zelcom, a US-based consulting company. Gupta, the analytics whiz, says he �felt the urge to do something unique and build something of value from scratch�. It helped that he was able to find the right partners to start the venture and leverage his experience and expertise in the business analytics space, an opportunity that, in India, is heating up and is at a stage similar to the software industry 10-15 years back.

Marketelligent is not VC backed; several friends and acquaintances have invested small and large sums, which the duo is quite nervous spending. Nor are Cherian and Gupta alone.

The entrepreneurial bug seems to have caught a large number of people � almost surely each one of us can think of at least a couple of friends or acquaintances who�ve taken the mid-career plunge.

What�s interesting is that in many cases, those opting out of the corporate rat-race had no apparent reason to do so. They had whizzing careers, most were already earning salaries that could feed a small village for a month, had one � if not two � real-estate properties in their name, and were comfortable in the corporate set-up. In all cases, money didn�t appear to be the motivator but a by-product.

Still, throwing caution to the winds mid-career appears to be the flavour of the season.

In a move that surprised many, 43-year-old Pramath Sinha, former CEO of the ABP Group and ex-partner at McKinsey, on �the ninth day of the ninth month� last year, set up 9.9 Media-Worx, a diversified media business. Sinha had worked 14 years in the corporate sector, at the very top of the pyramid, and had �never imagined I�d be an entrepreneur�.

He grew up in a fairly conservative environment where his father always said that �business is not for us�. Members of the family who�d ventured into business had been �spectacular failures�.

Then why did Sinha go against the family grain? One of his reasons, he says, is that the timing was correct. �India is opportunity-rich at the moment. So, if you have a new idea or have some insights on how to take forward an old one, this is a good time to do it.�

Also, setting up a new company � unlike in the old days � is easy. �Getting a company started today is smooth and can be done like clockwork,� he explains, something that often deterred prospective entrepreneurs in the old era of licences and red tape.

But above all, Sinha�s experience with the Indian School of Business (he set it up and was its first dean) set the stage for where he finds himself today.

�Initially, after the ISB experience, I thanked god that I hadn�t become an entrepreneur � the sleepless nights [on account of] 9/11, students not getting jobs, not enough companies coming to campus, and the onus of this great dream that had been built�� he recalls.

�In consulting, in contrast, you are an advisor and the buck never really stops with you. When I got back to McKinsey, I realised that all the excitement had gone out of my life,� he says.

Instead of �playing the game and being on the field�, he felt like a �commentator�. �As ISB started to do well, Sinha began to get credit for what he�d been instrumental in creating. He realised that the urge to create � once it bites you � probably never leaves you, and 9.9 is living proof of it.

Rajat Goel, the 42-year-old founder, CEO and managing director of Eye-Q, a super-speciality chain of eye-care hospitals, quit his position as director (surgical business) of Bausch and Lomb after 16 years, in March 2007. After being identified as a �high potential� manager in 2006 in a leadership course at Oxford and Rochester, and having been nominated as the best regional head within his firm for three consecutive years, he began to wonder, �What next?�

For 16 years, Goel had been doing the same thing, he says, but the clincher was something else. At Bausch and Lomb, his colleagues and he had, for 10 years, been promising an eye-care revolution in India. A visit to Rewari showed him the hollowness of that claim.

�No instruments, pathetic care � I found you couldn�t offer even a chair to the patient, let alone high quality care. Ten years of talking and we hadn�t made even a slight impact 70 km outside Delhi.�

He says this really upset him. Rewari (he studied there for seven years and it is �where my roots are�) was where he set up his first state-of-the-art eye hospital. Contributions from seven of his IIM colleagues in terms of their domain expertise and resources helped him start with six hospitals in the first year, which will be taken to upto 100 across India in due course.

When he first mentioned his plan (of setting up three-four quality hospitals), his friend � a former CFO of Patni Computers � laughed aloud. He said with the kind of scale he had in mind, he wouldn�t get anywhere. It was then that Goel and his partner started to think big.

One thing Goel says he was ready for was a loss of status; he talked to everyone who mattered in his life before he went ahead. �It was a bit like an arranged marriage. All my relations � my sister�s husband, my wife�s brother, my father, my wife � met my partner before backing me,� he adds.

He even discussed the move with his kids. �Carrying your entire eco-system with you,� he argues, �can make or break what you do.�

Goel�s life has changed in more ways than one, some good and some bad. He used to take eight flights a week in his old job; over the last year he�s taken three. He used to work 12 hours; now he works 17.

�Life has been extremely tough � but good. Most of the assumptions we started with were turned on their heads. There have been many moments of crisis. It�s been a great journey and an experience � and everyone is looking at me with new respect,� he says. Now, people tell him he�s done what they want to do too but haven�t been able to.

That new, earned respect is perhaps what�s motivating Sinha, Gupta and Cherian to step into an entrepreneur�s risky, challenging and not-so-steady shoes. They will now be in control of their own destinies � and will have no one to blame or to credit whether they flounder or flourish. Source : http://business-standard.com/general/storypage.php?&autono=