BusinessofCleantech - We will be fine

I have been off the radar. No…. don’t worry I am fine, the Pandemic and its impact, made me look at life and my journey in my professional and personal world more closely. In the initial days since my last article, I decided to spend my time looking back, as they say “ To know where you are heading, you need to know where you have been”.

In life through school and college one gets trained in different tools where you are trained to predict outcomes through probability, Feedback loops, predictive Models and rarely does one go ahead in life with a Black Swan event in mind. One builds contingencies and redundancies but rarely does one plan for a world where everything shuts down.

I know of startups which also didn’t foresee a world like this and least of all startups in the cleantech world. However let me share some learnings and thoughts over the last 30 days or so since I last wrote.

1. Cleantech Startup Entrepreneurs – You never had a valuation driven business model and you are lucky. You built physical products and real services which make a material impact on peoples lives. Your business should pay for itself. You never had the lure to build esoteric metrics for the sake of chasing VC money. So stick to the basics and sell to customers

2. Your business environment hasn’t changed – In fact after the pandemic, people will pay more attention to wellness and demand cleaner air, Cleaner Water and less carbon emission. Personal mobility will pick up and the next generation is extremely conscious of the need to lower carbon footprint. Hence the market hasn’t collapsed

3. Business is online – Clients will move a lot of work online including demos and meetings. Your partners and system integrator would have got accustomed to Zoom, Teams and Meet etc, so you will be able to reduce cost in travel and meetings.

4. Talent – Talent is available and will definitely cost less in the middle of a recession. Employees will trade the fancy cafeteria of a Venture Capital funded, hyper-growth chasing startup for an empathetic, secure work environment. Hire smart people, be nice and let them work.

5. People and Process – I always believe in the maxim “ throw process at problems not people”. I have in my career always understaffed my team by about 10 to 20% from my team’s internal assessment. I have always challenged line managers to look at processes and systems to ensure higher productivity. In bad times remember you will not need to lay off if you are conservative in hiring during the boom days.

5.  VC money will not come and its good – Products and services launched in the middle of a full blown recession, end up going through baptism by fire. If they take off in the bad times, they surely will bloom when the market picks up.

This is probably a moment in history that none has seen and no has been prepared for. The destruction will create new opportunities and startups that smartly manoeuvre their way through this crisis will see the fruits of success for a long time to come.