Business
I had the pleasure of speaking to Abhijeet Vijaivargia, Founder of Global Lancers. Abhijeet and I spoke about a variety of things during the interview. We discussed how he started Global Lancers, the importance of team building and focusing on your core competencies. Abhijeet started freelancing while in College and that led to him forming Global Lancers while still in college. Global Lancers was started as a partnership with someone that he knew while he was in college. After Abhijeet left college he started to work on Global Lancers full time. When Abhijeet was originally working on Global Lancers he identified the area of his business where he had the most competency or skill. Abhijeet was able to identify that his greatest strength lied with networking and communicating with different individuals. That was the role that he ended up filling when he was founding Global Lancers, while his partner filled in other areas. In every business that someone forms there is going to be some part of the business that the owner or founder is exceptional at. I am an accountant in my full time job so I would be exceptional at running the numbers or determining how much things cost, like this podcast. I would be extremely weak or incompetent in other areas of operating a business. A perfect example of this is copy writing or writing sales copy I can learn how to do it and be competent after a significant amount of time. When I am saying a significant amount of time I mean 20 hours enough time to be able to be “competent” in this skill. I am using the time period of 20-40 hours because of a TedX interview that I watched said it would only take 20 hours, you can find the link here. By being competent at a skill you are able to do it as well someone that has been just been hired and has no direct experience related to that skill set. There is no way that someone who has just become competent could achieve the same level of skill that people with 10,000+ hours of experience. The person with 10,000+ hours of experience has achieved expertise in this type of skill as long as they have worked to continually improve their skill set. This is another trap that many new business owners fall into when they try to do everything instead of being excellent at one thing. This can lead to burn out by the business owner because of a new business owner trying to do everything. If there is enough money to be able to afford to hire or bring on board someone with different expertise than you it’s recommended to do so. If you don’t have a variety of people in your network or team then you will be limited onto how large you can build your business. Another reason that businesses fail are due to focusing outside of the core functions of the business. The easiest way for me to think of this is what is the minimum amount of activity that you need to be able to make a sale. It’s easy to focus on non-essential activities which don’t contribute to selling or making any money in your business. It’s easy to get bogged down in non essential activities like building a website. The example that Abhijeet used was a café. The core activities of the business are 1.) taking the customer’s order, 2.) making the coffee and 3.) receiving the money from the customer. This is the minimum amount of activities that are needed to make a sale in the café. Other activities like building a website, advertising online, looking for a bigger area to sell more coffee are non-essential activities. The majority of a new business owners time should be spent on essential activities to be able to get the business off the ground. If you want to find out more about building a team or freelancing then you can reach out to Abhijeet Vijaivargia here.