A room full of women

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU PUT A FEMALE PHILANTHROPIST, A BIOTECH SCIENTIST, A FINANCE WHIZ & A STARTUP FOUNDER IN A ROOM?

You walk away with some incredible lessons

A few months ago, I was asked to be part of a prestigious govt think tank jury that was honouring incredible women entrepreneurs across the country. These women comprised of college graduates, grandmothers, single mothers, corporate leaders, scientists, philanthropists and more. They have created successful businesses ranging from biotechnology, fin-tech, fashion, policy and more. I spent hours personally interacting with more than 30 of them, understanding their business but more importantly learning from them. I walked with uncovering some common traits that almost all of them, including myself shared. I have been fortunate enough to be part of this ecosystem as an independent woman founder & one thing I have always been thankful for is the immense learning I get from being around some incredible women.

Choose what you are passionate about

Ever seen a world-class cricketer who is also a trophy-winning footballer? You can be really good at a bunch of things but possibly great at only a few. Double down on your passion, go deep & in the process be okay with letting go of something. Why? Because choosing one passion point, being obsessed with it gives you a deep & unique perspective that in turn enables scale. Each passion point has a number of challenges, opportunities, be selfish with your attention & focus!

Be okay with failure

Failure is the yin to the yang of your success. Be absolutely okay to fail & treat every failure as a stepping stone towards success. But here are a few rules, first- you should be able to derive & apply learning from the failure to your next step. Secondly - go with piloting! Small experiments limit your risk and help you work on challenges before you scale up.

Be obsessed with learning

There's nothing more dangerous than satisfaction. If you wake up one day and think that you know everything about your business, you're in trouble. Having a child-like curiosity will help you bring some really innovative ideas to your business. Don't restrict yourself to learning from your peers or your industry. For e.g.- you can learn about customer service from a pleasant cab driver, learn about discipline from a dancer or even the art of negotiation from a vegetable vendor!

Invest in the people around you

Surrounding yourself with people whose success & scale you're invested in is one of the most important things you can do as a founder. This will help you in fostering an entire ecosystem that is dedicated to accomplishing common goals. You truly are as successful as the weakest link in your team or your ecosystem. It takes a village to raise a child, it takes an ecosystem to raise a business!

Flexible vs. Flaky

Change is the one true constant. Business, people, ecosystems are in a state of constant dynamic change. The sooner you adapt to this, the sooner you're poised for a higher probability of success. So it's key to wire yourself to be flexible. Be committed to your idea but be agile enough to change tactics, way of working or even entire business plans. The key, however, is to balance this, be flexible & not flaky. Being flexible would make you open to change in course that would help you achieve your goals, being flaky is constantly changing goal-posts to incorporate change.

- Upasna Dash, Founder & CEO, Jajabor Brand Consultancy