Category: Business

Caring about the right things

You cannot build a restaurant business without caring about serving good food to customers. You cannot run a successful boutique if you don’t care about making your customers look good. The only way to achieve sustained long-term success is to care deeply about the right things. A business exists because...

Building a high-performance team

This month, I got my hands on a copy of Amp it up by Frank Slootman, the CEO of Snowflake. The book is a follow up to his LinkedIn post with the same title. It was one of those articles, I shared with my team as soon as I...

The Excellence Mindset

“I wish I could clone this person.” If you have ever built a team, this thought would have crossed your mind at least once. Most teams have that one superstar – a bar raiser who excels in her work and sets standards for the whole team. The rest fall...

10 business lessons for start up founders from Cricket

Recently in our company blog, we published an article titled Top 10 Leadership & Life Lessons from Tokyo Olympics 2020. While it touched upon my learnings from the game of cricket briefly, this post is essentially a long-form version of it. Cricket is one sport that I have enjoyed...

Tenets of professionalism

Over the last 12 years, I have worked with hundreds of people. Here are some of the top traits I have seen in people that are true professionals. Tenets of professionalism Professionals take ownership of their work. Whether they are serving their notice period in an organisation or just...

When good billionaires become bad

Ruchir Sharma, in his book ‘The 10 Rules of Successful Nations’, talks about ‘bad billionaires’ and ‘good billionaires’. Bad billionaires owe their wealth to rent-seeking industries like minerals, petroleum, real estate etc. Good billionaires owe their wealth to innovative industries that boost productivity and improve the overall quality of...

Business Valuation in 5 minutes

This is a 5-minute read on Business Valuation for Start-Up Founders  looking to understand the basic mechanism behind valuation. Basics of Business Valuation There are 3 common approaches for valuing a business Cost Approach – What is the cost to build a factory or what is the cost to...

Margins – how they can make or break your business

Gross Margins, Net Margins, Profit Margins, Operating Margins are few of the terms thrown around when we talk about the profitability of a business. What do they mean? Why are they important? In this post, I will try to cover these in very simple terms. If you are a...

The resilience of Costco Notes

Recently came across a deck on the Resilience of Costco, I have tried summarising my learnings on the same below Gross Margin vs Membership Fees – How Costco Makes Money Costco is the second-largest retailer in the world by sales volume – 149B USD. Costco doesn’t make much money...