Monday, August 29, 2011

Working with promoters

Working with the promoters of an organization on a daily basis has a lot of advantages like being a part of the larger picture, getting to know how business decisions are made under uncertainities, getting to interact with important people of the organization, getting to know their management style, etc.
While all of this is true, it also has some disadvantages:
1. The promoters do think along a lot of things simultaneously and it becomes difficult at times to catch up, especially when you have promoters who do not give away all the information to the managers. While reporting to them you have to be thorough with not only the current work but also work done previously. You never know when their mind will race from one project to another, from marketing to strategy to operations and finance.
2. Promoters generally do not reveal the complete picture to one person, specially to a newly joined person. Hence, it becomes most important for him to keep a track of all the current happenings of the organization through networking and work accordingly in a dynamic manner.
3. I have generally observed that promoters have a firm grip on numbers. One must be sure before passing on numbers to them. They quickly do mental calculations and use thumb of rules to come at approximate answers. Also, one must be very careful while passing off numbers because major decisions are taken based on these numbers. So, whatever work you do must be carefully done.
4. One must be very careful when disagreeing with the promoters. They are the ultimate authority in the organization. (Except the shareholders of course) it might lead to serious consequenses. Also, the work assigned must be done in as timely manner as possible, else getting into wrong books of a promoter can be detrimental.
5. Working with promoters and getting to socialize with them is a great experience in itself - you get to go at expensive places, know about their lifestyles, etc. But here the employer-servant distinction clearly becomes visible and might also cause inferiority complex at times.
6. Promoters generally work under uncertainities. They have to take decisions using limited amount of information. A person reporting to a promoter has to do the hard task of collecting the data good enough to help them take decisions. At times, the getting the relevant data to take logical decisions becomes very tough and might test your patience in case you have tough task masters as promoters, which generally is the case.

These are some of the things that could be issues faced by a person reporting to the owner/promoter. Yet, the task is highly rewarding and an ideal platform to learn a lot of things about business.