On Saturday, I did a presentation to the Jain International Trade Organization (JITO) at their Annual Growth Summit. I spoke on the topic of ‘Building Winning Team’ (presentation to be uploaded). The following was part of the talk.
While internalizing the topic, a wonderful chart depicting the ‘cycle of business’ got scribbled in the notebook, the final version of which came out as shown below. The importance of a team in a business can be visualized by looking at the chart.
The chart shows four tangible entities which are the main constituents of a business. Each constituent is in it’s own quadrant.The inbound arrow depicts movement or utilization of a resource. As owner/CEO, you create the business. The Team which you hire creates the product or service. This is consumed by a Customer which brings Money to the business. The Money in turn funds the Team. If the Team is weak or inefficient it would impact the product or service. Even more, an incompetent team may consume the money unwisely thus hampering the overall cycle of the business. Though the business revolves around the presence of the Owner/Founder/CEO, the continuum of the business is maintained by the efficiency of the team.
The upper right quadrant is the most important one — more than customers, if you build a great team, great products would come out with efficient use of capital. So, build a great team, manage them well and sometime later you probably don’t need to “actively manage” the business no more.