From home: Lake Villa, IL, USA 7:20pm CST
It looks to me in fact writing this daily blog will be useful in many ways as it will help to recapitulate and summarize what I've done during the day.
One of the main aspects of being an entrepreneur is that one should have self discipline as there's nobody to tell you what you need to do in a day...you can sleep the entire day or you can work the entire day...it's all up to you, unlike doing a job, where somebody will tell you what needs to be done.
I guess I should have more self discipline to manage my day effectively as I'm a bit out in managing my day effectively !! Writing this blog may bring some self management.
Today, gave a call to our MD (who manages the show in my absence ) and discussed on some financial issues and other strategy issues.....
You've to forgive me sometimes, as sometimes I may go back and forth in explaining our current situation.
In essence : This business and my current strategy and all it's ingredients and fundamentals are so excellent that I feel sometimes very lucky that I got into this business......sometimes it looks scary seeing so many problems...
Feel so excellent factors:
1. Health care is one of the basic fundamental needs of human beings
2. India is a growing place where there's no quality diagnostic services available
3. Wonderful scalable model where there looks an opportunity to open another 1000 diagnostic centers !!
Scary factors:
1. How to operate and manage all these small units efficiently, in an Indian environment (I believe it's a challenge anywhere..)
2. Highly capital intensive and requires lots of money.....
The current situation at Vijayawada and coastal A.P is a scary situation for any business operating from there places....since we're in health care atleast we're able to open our centers and the business is minimal...
Our current business situation:
We took a financial risk of opening Nellore center without any bank loans (because our banker stopped lending medical loans...) .....and we should be repaying this at the earliest possible, is putting us under lot of financial burden......and since I'm nolonger working in USA, my own perosnal dollar revenue is totally stopped..,which otherwise has been a breather before........but the good thing is we're doing a good business at Nellore and we quickly established oursleves at Nellore without lot of issues, when compared to all our previous centers....This is perhaps of not repeating many of our earlier mistakes...
We should be quickly improving our revenue from Vijayawada and Nellore centers, which will give us some financial breathing space and also the revenue at Ongole should improve because of some changes we did recently.
And another big challenge is opening almost 30 collection points across all the places....each of these centers to get break-even takes 3/4 months or more (provided running them with success ) and we're incurring lot of monthly expenditure to run all these collection points....paying the salaries for each employee at these centers ....and it's only 1/2 months we opened many of these centers....
And we streamlined and increased our marketing strength significently to create a true marketing department ( for every 5 sales reps one Area manager and for 4 area managers one Regional manager etc ) and other manpower ...all their high salaries and TA/DA etc has increased our monthly expenditure and which is putting us under lot of financial burden....
Our immediate goal is to run all these centers without pumping in more money everymonth...and so we stopped the rapid expansion until we're out of this fcurrent financial burden..
I believe we've invested in everything that required to capture all the locations....no it's time to work everyday with the people to increase the revenue...which I guess will not happen in a month with all the new changes in manpower into place but will take atleast 3/4 months...but will push to the maximum extent possible to quicken the process...
I'm now planning to talk and coordinate daily not only with the RM of marketing but with all the AMs also from today...
Our RM joined after I left India (Nov 25 th I guess..) and he's the first person having good sales experience dealing with Doctors..I'm really hoping he's going to streamline all the sales/marketing activities in all the 4 districts where we're operating and coordinate and manage all his team members (which is close to 25)...so he one the most crucial person that I'm going to depend on and so has been calling him daily discussing sometimes hours to-gether.....as I can't afford to make this person fail in what he needs to done.
My daily job working remotely is to keep a tab on the marketing team and other business activities as much as possible....
On a personal note: today volunteered at my daughter's school for the holiday christmas party for the kids for an hour and my daughter seems to like it as until now only my wife used to do all these things....and since now I'm at home I guess it's appropriate for me to do all these things...
I guess this should be enough today !!
Wishing for a mre fruitfull day tomorrow !
Bye for now,
Mohan
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