How to be a successful entrepreneur: K. Chandrasekhar, Founder & CEO, Forus Health

What are the things that make entrepreneurs successful? Market, ethics, team, and vision, says K. Chandrasekhar, Founder & CEO, Forus Health Pvt Ltd. Read on.

MarketThe most important thing is the market. At the end of the day, whether product or service, you are trying to sell to the market. I think a very strong understanding of the market is the most relevant. It’s better to make a product to suit the market, rather than make a product and search a market for that. I would always give a lot of importance to the market. The deeper you know the market, the better product or service you can bring out.

Ethics

Ethics and integrity are the most critical thing. I think you would have lot of tough time as an entrepreneur. There will be many occasions when your integrity will be questioned, and you will be forced more or less to take the other side. But I think if you don’t succumb to that, and continue to be on the positive side, long-term returns are extraordinary. It’s very easy to make the statement but very difficult to follow, but I have kind of gone through it several times. Fortunately, sticking on to ethics and integrity really helped.

Team

The third important thing is having an extremely good team. So you need to actually have people who work with the same frequency, with the same energy, with the same amount of passion in whatever you want to do. Even if you have one or two people – not even two, even one – at a very senior level who are going to be a problem, as the organisation grows, it becomes a big nuisance. So, I think it is very important to handpick your team.

Vision

Be very clear about what your mission or vision is. In the short-term, you may have to do certain things for cash-flow, certain things for proof-point, certain things for satisfying investors. But I think, very importantly, if you set something as your long-term mission, continuously keep showing to the market; and, more importantly, keep showing to yourself that you are going in to that mission, because unless you show it to yourself that you are continuing in the same path that you started, I don’t think it would percolate down. You would have made the mission with a lot of thinking and you would have spent a lot of time on that. And, in the anxiety when you get in to the operational level, the chances of your missing it out are very high.

Stand, therefore, in front of a mirror, and re-evaluate it yourself. May be every quarter, every month, whenever you find time, ask yourself: This is what I said, this is what I have done. Am I in line with what I thought? I think if you do that, probably, you will be a very successful entrepreneur.