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| Nhuchche | Posted
on 18-Dec-02 08:23 AM
Unique Business Style As the education was not much of a help, the businesses of Raj Bhandari have been based on innovations and learning-by-doing. He learned to program on his own, i.e. without the help of the teachers. So much so that also the CRM (Customer Relations Manager) and Predictive Dialer needed for one of his latest companies, Serving Minds (a multi-media call centre), were developed in house, thus saving about one million dollars, though spending four months and four people. Also in the email business, his team experimented with all kinds of technologies, before more stable technologies came into the market. “We provided free email for about a year because we didn’t know how to bill. It needed UNIX, TCP/IP for the billing but we were Novell people, so we had no idea about now to bill for the e-mail”, he recalls. Similarly, the Mercantile brand computers, the first Nepali brand in personal computers, was launched after a full nine-month of learning on top of the 18 years of selling computers. As one of his unique style of doing business, he mentions innovations. “I always start something new. I innovate, I don’t replicate a business that is already in the market”. The innovation however need not necessarily be a product; it may also be simply a process. His second unique style of business is that he runs a highly decentralized organization, which should be regarded as something really unique in the Nepali context where the mangers and business-owners are notoriously poor in delegation. But Raj Bhandari also laments that due to such centralized organization he has lost the direct contact with his customers. And his is a self-help organization. There are no secretaries. “We tried with secretaries for about six months but we found that it was not effective.” Raj Bhandari keeps long-term relations. “Most of the companies I’m working with are with me for more than 10 years and most of the key managers with me are there for over 15 years”, he boasts. Another of the unique style of Raj Bhandari is to prefer hiring people who have not worked anywhere else. “I prefer fresh team though I’ve to spend a lot of time and money to train them”. Next, he likes to build his own infrastructure, so that he does not have to depend on outside parties for the crucial infrastructure. This may have something to do with the philosophy of shunning the government. Management by guts Raj Bahndari says, he goes by the guts feeling rather than by the projections made by the consultants in the spreadsheets. “The spreadsheets lie”, he repeats, but does not mean that he does not believe all the consultants who come up with their spreadsheets and the projections. “I believe them only to extent of their specific domain. But when they cross their respective domain and start preaching all sorts of things, I avoid them.” He uses the gut feeling also when hiring the people. This is because he believes again that the CVs lie. “One can draft a splendidly beautiful CV with the help of so many facilities available. So you should not depend on the CV.” Then how does he hire good people? His suggests: “Meet first a person who knows the candidate. Still, just because the person says something negative about the candidate, do not reject the candidate right away. If he says the candidate is not honest with cash, just decide that you will not put him in front of the cash register, but do not reject him altogether. Make final decision only after you meet the candidate in person.” But Raj Bhandari laments that he lacks the other types of guts. “That is why I’ve missed many opportunities.” In this regards he gives the example of PumoriPlus, the banking software that his company developed. “I didn’t have the guts to invest in regional infrastructure and marketing that was required to make it successful.” Similarly, the offers that his company had received for regional ISP franchise was not utilized, again for the some reason: the lack of the guts. “In fact, that time we knew a helluva lot more than other people around this region, including the Indian companies that started ISP in India in 1997 or 98”, he recalls. Other weaknesses “I think I could do better if I improved in consistency”, he notes, but also says, “that is perhaps the ‘boss psychology’, because the bosses everywhere change their mind a lot”. The next weakness he says is that he does not give enough attention to the details, perhaps because he is more interested in doing the business than on refining the idea to the perfection. But Raj Bhandari has improved in this count in recent days as illustrated by the long time devoted in preparation before the launch of the Mercantile brand of PCs. Business failures Why do the businesses fail? Here are some of Raj Bhandari’s experiences. The Data and documentation Centre of the early 1980’s did not perform well because “I started the business without proper idea about the business”. Then in 1993, he started with GIS (digital mapping), but it failed because he had started it too early. “I started it before the Internet was there. Perhaps it is far better viable now.” Then in 1996, there was Cybermatha Tea House opened. Again it failed. The reasons, according to him, were wrong location and wrong pricing. Also a failure was the mini computer sales that his company tried during 1985-95. The reason this time was the wrong selection of the product for a country like Nepal. Also unsuccessful were the Dot Com projects such as Cyber Pasal, Hotel Sewa, Business Gazing etc., according to him, and the reasons for them were "the lack of market study and impractical business model”. Other Business Involvements Besides the information and communication technology (ICT) sector, Raj Bhandari is involved also in media, spreading all across the print, radio, video and internet. But his involvement in all the companies in these sectors – Himal and Wave magazines, Hits Radio and Himalaya Films, nepalnews.com - are at the board level only. Moreover, he is also in environmental sector projects such as Pumori Agro-forestry in Parsa of Chitwan and Electrical Vehicles (EVCO). The latter serves as one more proof to show how the government kills a business that is initiated by the private sector, points out Raj Bhandari. Now the government has stopped registration of electrical vehicles within Kathmandu valley’s city area. Thus this business is “officially murdered”, he says. He likes to keep secret his involvement in the social service sector. “We have a specific policy not to flash it out. Even our employees, except a very few, don’t know about it”, he says, but confides that he sets aside between two to four million rupees every year for such projects and at present he is working for the construction of an extension at Martyr Gangalal Memorial Heart Centre. He has already helped in Dhulikhel Hospital and Kathmandu University. But he takes only one project at a time and selects the project largely on the basis of who the leader is in the project. (Based on a presentation Raj Bhandari made at the October edition of the Entrepreneur’s Forum, organized by Business Service Aadhar (BSA) of GTZ-Private Sector Promotion Project.For more on Aadhar, click on: www.aadhar.com.np ) |
| Nhuchche | Posted
on 18-Dec-02 08:23 AM
 Management by Guts  After about 20 years of experience, here is what Sanjib Raj Bhandari advises those interested to start their own businesses: First, don’t let your business depend on the government. “Don’t expect the government to help. Expect it to be an impediment rather.” Second, don’t be Kathmandu-centric. “The notion that 70% of the business is in Kathmandu is misleading. Don’t forget the vast market that lies outside the capital.” Third, don’t depend on spreadsheets and CVs to make your decision. “Both spreadsheets and CVs lie.” Fourth, listen to your customers, especially when they complain. “While complaining, they are almost invariably giving you hints about the opportunities.” Fifth, keep the costs low. “For this put a finance guy on board.” And there are specific experiences or examples to share from Raj Bhandari to attest the value of these advices. Govt & Business If one asks Raj Bhandari about the ethical problem of to bribe or not to bribe, his advice is to shun the government as far as possible. This way one can avoid the problem almost entirely. Raj Bhandari has shunned the government to a large extent and he claims that only about 2% of his revenue comes from the government. But what about the compulsion to go to the government, for example for such services as electricity, telephone and water? “ Then you have no choice. But I defend the private sector if it pays the government people for such services in which there is no other choice. It is something like a payment made for your survival. But if the payment is to gain some undue advantage over the competition then it is unethical.” But the idea of shunning the government is related not only with the ethical question. Raj Bhandari says, “If your business plans are dependent on the government making the first move, like building infrastructure or passing new laws, you have very small chance for success.” For this he gives the example of now closed National Computer Centre (NCC), and says, “The NCC did everything to kill the private sector during the first ten years of my business.” The experience is neither better with another government entity Nepal Telecommunication Corporation (NTC). Learning and Doing After completing “O” Level from St. Xavier’s in Kathmandu, Raj Bhandari went Bombay and pursued B.Com. degree. But he says though he took four years to complete the course, the actual days of his stay in Bombay would total only one year. “Most of the time, I would be in Hong Kong or somewhere else in connection with business that I wanted to learn.” He still does so, going away that is, to attend trade fairs, seminars etc. “Sometimes I go from one seminar straight to an other.” Born in a business family, young Raj Bhandari went into family business in 1982 after coming back from Bombay, but was not interested in it because it was a shop-keeping type of business. He went for computers because, as he says, he was fascinated by them. Of course everybody among his relatives tried to convince him not to go for computer business. “One relative in Hong King took seven days trying to convince me like that”, he recalls. “But I don’t blame them, because nobody knew about computers that time”. But as Raj Bhandari was determined to go his own way, he started his own business in computer in 1983, first as a division of Mercantile Traders, the family firm, and selling Apple and Victor computers and SilverReed printers. There were no IBM computers in Nepal at that time and it was Raj Bhandari who later introduced them here. The story of bringing in the first computers is very interesting, and Raj Bahndari loves to tell it. They were brought in as typewriters: there was no reference price or customs sale in the Nepali customs office for computers to decided the customs rate. It took about four months to get them through the customs, and they somehow allowed them in as typewriter. But a person at the customs was still asking him at the customs gate, “if these are the typewriters, where are the rollers?” Then followed the firm Data and Documentation Centre set up in 1984, which was involved in software development, training, word processing etc. But the training business was quickly shut down because as he says “it needed a different business model in which we were not tuned in”. Then was the Mercantile Office Systems set up in 1985, which started with systems integration, and sales of Victor/IBM computers and Novell specialty networks. “I was personally involved in all the installations, maintenance, software/hardware support etc. We used to put in almost 16 hours a day because no one, even the engineers, had actually known the computers. So we used to make a lot of mistakes. If there was any chance that there was going to be a mistake, there was a mistake. The Murphy Law loved us very much.” Therefore, to learn more about personal computers Raj Bhandari went London, but he says that was a mistake. “It turned out that the PC was just recently introduced there. What the teachers knew about PC was less than what I already knew.” |
| Nhuchche | Posted
on 18-Dec-02 08:26 AM
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| czar | Posted
on 18-Dec-02 06:50 PM
Much as I respect Sanjeev and Rajeev Rajbhandari for their business achievements, I would point out that insofar as the Mercantile PC being the first Nepali PC, that is factually incorrect. That distinction goes to a PC marketed by Muni Sakya in 1985. Its BIOS was modified to support Devanagari script, and it even had support for an MS DOS based word processing software called Word Star. As for the first Devanagari font, it was initially developed by a German doctor who worked in Bir Hospital but dabbled in computers. This was a scalable True Type font, first supported in the then recently released Windows 3.1, all in glorious VGA colour ! 640 x 480 x 256 colors, and if you had a non-interlaced monitor in 1988, you were king of the technological heap ! The font was quickly adapted for Apple computers and Mr. Bhattachan and his Apple dealerships helped to give rise to desktop publishing in Devanagari. It was the ultimate killer app for Nepal at that time. |
| safasaja | Posted
on 19-Dec-02 05:48 PM
Whatever it is, my hats off to mr. bandari. I wish we have more of them to explore IT. |
| khai_k_vanu | Posted
on 19-Dec-02 07:34 PM
Thank you Nhuchche for the article. We need some success stories like this one ! |