Category: Idea Lab

Leveraging Your Relationships #2: How To Achieve Better Relationships

Now that you have got the idea what leveraging is I want you to know how you can improve upon your relationships? Most of you would know might these simple steps and may know that it is not a rocket science.

The day when you make your first relationship (the day when you are born) you grab the attention of your mom by crying. This practice of grabbing attention stays but the mode with which it is attained changes with age.You give a smile, and that’s the beginning of a positive relationship. But to sustain it you need and later utilize it, it requires certain efforts.

Some days back I had a target to complete a project, simultaneously; I had to make a presentation, both the tasks were of high priority. I asked a colleague of mine for some help to make the presentation. I just asked her to make a skeleton for it and I would add the rest of the details. But to my surprise she completed the whole presentation for me and I got out with both the targets with flying colors. I didn’t forget to appreciate her in front of the team for the help she provided me.

This was a leverage of my relationship with her. Over the period of time I have developed a very positive rapport with my colleagues that we have a very healthy competition and a great helping team.

I achieved this by following certain simple steps.

Respect: You should be giving respect to the other person; it comes by talking with respect, sticking to time or being punctual with appointments and keeping your commitments. You never know how much it hurts the other person when you don’t keep your commitments.

No disparaging: You should not disparage your friends, colleagues in front of others and even behind them. You never know when your deed reaches your friend/colleague and in what format.

With family members it’s even simpler.
Working closely with family: any assignments or a group activity should be participated with full heart.

Reminding some good old moments: When you are out of touch with a colleague or a friend you can make him remember certain cherished old moments and repeat them more often.

Show interest in future endeavors: Whenever there are discussions in your family/office team show genuine interest and put relevant inputs after researching that subject. This would also help develop your knowledge base.

Help: Try to help from the bottom of your heart as your eyes will surely say whether you are genuinely interested in the tasks/talks or not.

If you don’t want it the straight way to build relationships then you learn to kiss ass from Jon.

Well, I follow a mixture of these tips and I am growing at a decent pace in my organization as well as sharing a beautiful relationship with my friends and family members.

I would pose similar questions to the readers; how well they are with their relationships? and are they in a position to leverage it? And do you think you can add to the list that I have provided above?

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Leveraging Your Relationships #1: Defining A Leveraged Relationship

Debt! This is the most commonly word used on this blog; I have used it in the context of how to reduce it, effects of debt and in various other forms. Paying off my debt is my number one priority. Debt is not necessarily as bad as I have mentioned before, by definition it is a leverage that you can utilize to enhance your return on investments, provided that the debt is invested and not consumed.

This post is not about debt but about leverage. You would have seen this word leverage in many financial books and novels. Some authors have written about leveraging money and some have written about leveraging time. These are primarily called as other people’s money (OPM) and other people’s time (OPT). Today I want to tell you something about leveraging our relationships.

Have a facebook, linkedin, myspace, or orkut profile? Then you know the concept of social networking. If you ask a question why these sites are so popular? you would get the answer as A network of like minded people with similar interests can give you further opportunities in your career, or You can remain in touch with those who are close to you but physically distant apart or you may find some other answer for your question. Nonetheless, you have an online social network.

In today’s world when networking is the happening phenomenon, people are resorting to virtual networks too as in Secondlife.com and There.com. If you go to the conceptual level then you will see that you are forming a community and want to share the relationships in those communities for mutual benefits.

Simply put, you want to use your relationships to improve your life.

The social networks are useful in long term but have you ever used or tried to improve your personal relationships that you created throughout your life? You have a debt of X amount, over which you are paying an interest, can’t you use your existing relationships with your close friends and family and borrow some money from them and pay of the debt. You might say that this would be rolling over your debt but this would be done at a lower interest or no interest (if you are in India).

You can leverage the relationships at workplace too. Ask your colleagues to do some minor works when you are in some work pressure or some deadline has to be met. This would provide efficiency in your work and you would be working as a good team player.

Now you would say that this is OPM and OPT but the underlying fact is that this is neither borrowed money (for which you pay interest) nor outsourced work (you pay for service). It’s just getting things done with your strong relationships. Now you cannot borrow huge amounts but you are borrowing relatively smaller amounts based on the strength of your relationship. Same is true with the work that you will ask from your colleagues.

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Restructuring My Blog

Now that I am officially out of my credit card debt and my mind working at better speed than before I realized that I should be simply regular at my blog postings. I was analyzing my blog and came to know that it has nothing to offer in particular. It has just some odd posts which attracts users once in a while to my blog. Irregularity is my hallmark :) . So I thought I should also give it a try to reach people with rich content and ideas.

The structure that I will follow will be based on certain themes like reviews, personal finance, investing and new ideas. I have not yet decided upon the timings of each but I feel that it will fall in place with time.

I will review books, websites, bogs, advertisements, magazines and whatever I feel that I can review and has relevance to money.

Personal finance would again be concentrated towards money saving, frugality, taxation, funds, case studies (If I get to review some).

Investing would generally be concentrated to stocks and derivatives (I am not into derivatives till now but soon hope to be into it.)

The new ideas shall be… well! No one knows, but it will be picked from various sources including me that I will dig through the internet.

I hope I am not making big promises to myself. But I feel it’s high time that I organize myself and structure my blog to make it worth reading.

Wish me luck :)

A Five Stage Process of Getting Debt Free

It’s over a year and a half that I am in a bad debt situation and surprisingly it’s nearly one and a half years that I am into a paid job. If I correlate the two then I can conclude that steady income flow increased my debt taking tendency. In other words I will say that the security of getting my paycheck made me to overspend.

When I gave it a thought so as to find the reason for the above I could come up with only one reason I can pay it later when I get my paycheck. If I talk in time frames then I was spending future money into present but the problem with this concept is that you cannot account for future expenses (always) which come as an emergency e.g. bike/car repairs, health problems and many such unforeseen incidents/events.

So what happens next? I have already spent that money in the past and now I am stuck with a high credit card bill with no money to pay for, the result a bad debt and more importantly a way to a debt trap.

The cause: credit card spending! No, the cause here is trying to afford that you can’t just by assuming valid reasons for buying at that moment, but later in debt trap you feel that you could have deferred your purchase. For example, I need a new car, (mental process: the car I am driving is making sound, the mileage is very less and asks for more maintenance so why not replace it, I am getting a good deal with XX dealer). Next day you are with a new car along with a big debt on your head.

Now you are desperate to get out of it but you can’t as you cannot overclock your debt reduction process due to a simple reason, you don’t have any extra source of income and the debt brings interest and other charges with itself which further enhances it.

In this case my mind stopped thinking constructively for alternatives for reducing the debt as it is already preoccupied by the huge debt. The result, time wastage over trivial things and not be able to devise a plan. So what should I do? Well there is a way, which I am following and trying to get out of debt. Continue reading →

When ideas make money

Abrush, a bucket and an idea came together. Sandeep Gajakas knew it was an inflammable mixture. He was on to something. He would start a laundry service for shoes. His father did not like it, but Gajakas, 26 then, was beyond being dissuaded. The boy who has been a fashion choreographer, event manager and club-level football player, wanted a way out of the rat race his friends were ailing from. Sandeep was working in a call centre when the idea struck him. He quit his job and started distributing handbills asking people who wanted to clean their sports shoes to contact him. The response was tremendous. The Andheri resident would get calls from all corners of Mumbai. He would then run to their houses, get the shoes, scrub them clean in his bathroom and deliver them for Rs 100 a pair.

That was in 2004. Today, Sandeep is 28 and owns a business called The Shoe Laundry. He doesn’t need to wash Keds anymore. Nine boys trained by him do that now and they follow his ten-step cleaning procedure which involves everything from tagging to drying and even repairs. He has even tied up with the dealers of Reebok and Adidas for after-sales services. Sandeep has raised the price per pair by Rs 20, but there is so much demand that he is saying no to corporates who want tie-ups. He has reached a state where he uncomfortably says that he cannot disclose his turnover. He simply says, “I make 40% profit.” People like Sandeep are mushrooming all over the country. In a way, they have arrived at the right time. If an idea is good, people are willing to spend.

No one in India really thought cleaning windows could be a business until Bangalore’s Suhag Khemlani introduced her spidermen men who use mountaineering equipment to abseil down a building and clean. The director of India’s only facade cleaning company, Technoclean India Private Limited, Khemlani thought of the idea when she attended a training course by UK’s International Rope Access Training Association. She wanted to assist her father who was in the business of selling façade cleaning equipment. In the UK, she discovered that window cleaning was an established industry. For the idea to work in India, she knew the first step was to “change the mindsets of Indians.But 29-year-old Khemlani, the spiderwoman who has cleaned the 47th floor facade of the BBC building in London, took up the challenge and along with her father formed a joint venture with the UK facade cleaning giant, OCS. Technoclean, that now has branches in Pune, Chennai, Delhi, Bangalore and Mumbai, boasts of a growth rate of 60%.

The ideas of these entrepreneurs may seem outlandish but they execute them in very conventional ways. They begin by researching the market. Wasiff Khan, 27, who runs Home-Care, a homecooked food delivery service for pet dogs, began by posing as a market researcher for a company that did not exist at that time. From his surveys he learnt that though there were branded cereals and processed foods available, there was a strong need for fresh food. And Home-Care was born in 2004

Khan would cook rice, vegetables and meat with no salt or spice, and try the samples on his friends dogs. When he saw that it worked, he bought a bicycle, hired an assistant and ran a local delivery service in Bandra. He displayed his cell number on a box behind the bicycle. Since then he has been busy. He has nine workers today who race around Mumbai in scooters that resemble pizza delivery vehicles. The meals that are divided into two categories regular and premium cost anywhere between Rs 30 and Rs 120. Khan now has over 500 clients including top politicians and film stars.

The goal of these young offbeat entrepreneurs who do almost every task that their staff does, is to see a seed of their idea grow. After achieving that they get obsessed with making their enterprise larger. They are getting used to media interviews, MBA projects and blog attention. Sandeep Gajakas, who has even received an on-air marriage proposal during an interview, has now learnt to deal with questions about the secret of his success. I just wash shoes, he says and that’s all there is to it.

Source: Times of India Jan 22 2007