Takeaways at the end of ten years, Dinesh Victor, Managing Director, SIP Academy India P Ltd

On the sidelines of the tenth anniversary celebrations of SIP Academy India P Ltd (http://www.sipacademyindia.com/), I manage to get the company’s managing director Dinesh Victor to speak about what he sees as the takeaways, the lessons, from his decade-long entrepreneurial journey.

The key is to be true to the idea that you started off from, begins Dinesh, an alumnus of the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, and the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. “That’s very important; and it’s just not the idea, also ensure that the idea is affordable, scalable, and something that is relevant to the customer.”Not easy, because you need to be able to take a lot of feedback, you need to change the way you started with your original idea, and you need to be constantly doing something which ensures that the people actually paying for your product or service are able to pay you the price for whatever value that you are adding, explains Dinesh.

To him, the second critical thing is the team. “You all know that it’s very important to create a good team. But the real challenge is that you don’t get good teams; you get people. How do you ensure that the team gets aligned over a period of time, and is able to focus on the task at hand? That’s not again a very easy job. You may have to let a few people go. You need to see how you actually give the right feedback so that you can improve, and the right inputs and the right training. And, for that, you yourself need to be trained to be able to understand what needs to be done. That’s all not very easy and simple to be taught in a short class. You learn and gain that over experience.”

The last key element is to ensure that you are very objective, says Dinesh. It’s not very easy at all, he cautions. “It’s very simple in our country, or any place, to be highly subjective, really very easy to be subjective, but a little more challenging to be objective.”