Aditya Kothadiya's Blog

Targeted Audience: Entrepreneurs, Students, Recent Graduates.

When Sunil Bharti Mittal started in business more than 30 years ago in Ludhiana in Northern India, he borrowed $1,500 to make bicycle crankshafts. Today, he heads the $5 billion Bharti Group, whose flagship company, Bharti Airtel, is India’s largest mobile phone operator. Forbes magazine, which estimates Mittal’s net worth at some $11 billion, ranks him among Asia’s self-made billionaires.

Mittal spoke with India Knowledge@Wharton about the leadership and entrepreneurial lessons he has learned during his career.

Here are some key inspiring points that I would like to take away from this article –

Importance of partnerships

I realized very early on that you need to tie up with some large entities — much, much larger than yourself. From there on, we set up a string of partnerships, and they were all with very large companies, multi-billion dollar corporations.

Innovation is the real differentiator

And one of the theories that I’d built around my entrepreneurship was to do things that have not been done before. Because if you are competing with the big boys in areas where they are strong, there’s no chance for you to succeed.

Benefits of entrepreneurship

Tough, but as an entrepreneur you get trained on everything. You understand import policy, you know how customs work, you know excise laws. You practically learn to do everything yourself. You hit roadblocks, you have difficulties. I had to open my own LLC, take my own consignment, taking the material on trucks myself to the market. An entrepreneur gets a huge amount of experience.

It’s the speed stupid, not the perfection

I think, very clearly, we could have never claimed that we had more capital or better technologies, because everybody was buying the same technologies; GSM is a set standard. We couldn’t claim that we had massive brand or distinguishing strength in the market. The only thing that we needed on our side was speed, and we used that to great effect.

We were in the market ahead of competition. We brought new products on the market ahead of competition. We rolled out our networks. We begged, borrowed, stole, put things out. And while they were never near perfect, they were first. And that gave us, to my mind, a lot of advantage.

Our theory was: If you’re caught between speed and perfection, always choose speed, and perfection will follow. You never wait for perfect positioning, because in business you don’t have the time; especially if you’re small, you can’t do it.

Read the complete article here – Bharti Group’s Sunil Bharti Mittal on Lessons of Entrepreneurship and Leadership

Related articles about Startup and Entrepreneurship:
How to Start your Company and Keep Your Day Job
Lessons Learned From Startup CEOs
36 Startup Tips