Dual professional life - contrasts and opportunities

Since jumping into entrepreneurial bandwagon, I have been leading a dual professional life - as a consultant and as an entrepreneur/ CFO/ Product Manager. Both of my assignments require a different focus and attention, and both are equally important to me. As a professional, I value retaining high standards in technical aspects of every assignment because excellence and quality is automatically derived with this approach. This has also helped earn the trust of my customers on my work. The challenge is to retain the focus required in each assignment while multi-tasking.

As an entrepreneur, I lead an organization (a startup) revolving around its products that can be accessed, potentially by a million simultaneous users/customers. I have to create product(s) understanding the economy, market segments, geography, competition and existing product gaps. The product features have to be tightly associated to various factors like using open source or create/buy product component, usability versus availability, competition & price, cost & infrastructure challenges, support, management and so on… The funding and organization structure has to be established. I have the responsibility, ownership and my decisions directly affect the cost, product and the organization.

As a consultant, I provide solutions to create  scalable enterprise applications for analytics in an environment where software product style development is more of a fancy stuff due to the nature of business. I would generally get an assignment to provide solutions for a problem and that becomes the immediate goal.  In most cases, I do have an available resource list that includes most of the above attributes to be used to deliver the solution. On the accountability front as well, even though it is imperative to deliver the best solution to the problem in hand, the customer often takes the responsibility for choices made and has the higher stake in the risk as well as rewards quadrant.

As an entrepreneur, many times I had to change my operating style to ensure that I took the right decisions at the appropriate speed to affect the outcome especially. This was quite challenging in my first year as entrepreneur, when it was a one man corporation that relied on a trusted partner to deliver the product framework 'Learnomorph'. Without enough experience or contacts in the entrepreneurial network, it was my own gut feel and analysis that I relied on besides discussions with friends. Learnomorph eventually became the basis for 'Gurukumo Inc' as I won the trust of friends who readily agreed to partner and form the new venture.

To successfully blend techno-functional management with a new organization and inculcate values that need to be practiced going forward required a decision making with a different thought process. I had to resort to my MBA class materials, cases studies of successful organizations, studies on how to do international business, etc. to formulate Gurukumo strategy revolving around innovation and products. There were various other activities that I gradually learnt after jumping into this value creating exercise - branding and brand management, challenges with outsourcing and managing virtual teams, managing transactions and government regulatory obligations to achieve offshore development, legal aspects of doing a business - especially global business, filing taxes, maintaining records and book keeping, building a product support framework, etc. to name a few. I also reset a few plans after understanding the ground realities of business environment.

Looking back, I do feel that I have created value for my organization as well as for my customers. While my experience as a consultant has helped me give the perspective of project dynamics in operations world where companies use software products in our product design, my entrepreneurial work helps me with the leadership required to deliver and maintain excellence in providing overall business solution to the problems at hand.  It is true that I have to continue with two full-time assignments for some more time. At the moment, I am enjoying the improved efficiency to deal with this, something I can experience because of the slight increase in my average sleeping hours over the past month. This is something that I would want to increase with time.