by Vijay Mahajan (Basix)

The single most important quality you need to have and cultivate further is to get up and walk every time you fall down. I am writing this the day after I turned down an equity investor from whom we have been seeking funding for the last several months, due to irreconcilable difference on terms. But while that deal broke up at 10 pm on Monday night and on Tuesday morning I was at the breakfast meeting with another prospective investor.

Likewise, one has to persist in terms of operational difficulties. Our expansion in Jharkhand state has seen many ups and downs due to poor law and order situation there. One of our field staff was shot dead by robbers, what did we do – we did not pull out. The day after the cremation, a hundred BASIX field staff, led by all of us in the senior team, went out doing our regular work – originating loans, collecting repayments, providing technical and marketing assistance to customers, etc.

But the second and equally important ability one needs to cultivate is the ability to learn – from experience, from critics, from competitors, from failures, from summer trainees, from mother-in-law and from regulators! Expert knowledge is useful, but increasingly has shorter and shorter shelf life. So what is permanent is the ability to understand a new situation and respond appropriately, using both learning from the past but also a fresh appreciation of the situation. Some of this comes from the self and some from others.

This brings me to the third point. Entrepreneurship is widely misunderstood to be a personal trait. It is so, to some extent. But entrepreneurship is a social construction – it is a phenomenon where certain behaviors get expressed in certain individuals, due to the support of their ‘eco-system” – colleagues, family members, investors, regulators, competitors and customers. All of these interactions cooked in the skull of the entrepreneur, make for the heady mix that all of you are after. So nurturing this eco-system and interacting with it are extremely important.

You go through several years of either nothing significant happening or you actually have setbacks. For me, there have been blockages in going forward rather than going back. But I know of several entrepreneurs who have had several setbacks. Basically they bounce back.

I realized that if we continued to remain dependent on grants for our own functioning, and government loans for the community, it’s going to be a very slow path. We won’t be able to control anything.

The kind of things that one does in an organization every five years, we were doing every six months. We thought ‘ki yeh fit ho gaya’. We have gone from a concept note to local area bank in two years flat.