Fellows Friday is a weekly series on the TED Blog that profiles one TED Fellow each week. We have asked the Fellows to answer our question below to share their knowledge and advice with other social entrepreneurs, innovators, and changemakers who are coming up with big ideas that can change the world.
Band manager Vijay Nair is revolutionizing the independent music scene in India. In an industry heavily dominated by Bollywood, Vijay has resorted to creative techniques like printing instructions of how to pirate one of his band's CDs on the back of the disc. Though his quirky company has had a lot of success, all start-ups make the same mistakes at first – and they should, he says.
Sokunthea: There are many aspiring social entrepreneurs out there who are trying to take their passion and ideas to the next level. What is one piece of advice you would give to them based on your own experiences and successes?
Vijay: If you’re a social entrepreneur or an entrepreneur in general, the first piece of advice is that almost all of us end up making the same mistakes in the first few years. And that’s absolutely fine. If we hadn’t made the mistakes we made at Only Much Louder in the first three to four years, I don’t think we would be where we are now.
The first mistake everybody makes is trying to do everything yourself. The biggest mistake and the silliest mistake is not having an accountant. When we sat down and looked at it, the better we did in every year, the less money we saved. Because we just didn’t know what was going on. We didn't have the right kind of people taking care of the right things.
Second is trying to scale up too fast. You try to do too many things because you have many different ideas and want to do everything together. So you try to do a big project and it fails miserably. From that you learn that even if you have the greatest idea, start it one step at a time. Get that completely right, and it’s easy to scale up later on.
Those things can only be learned from mistakes. It’s just important that no mistake is big enough to pull you down. When those mistakes happen, it feels like it’s the end of the world. It feels like it doesn’t make sense anymore.But there’s always something else that comes, and you find another opportunity. From my experience, I see that people who hold on to it and really push it, survive.
The second piece of advice is that it takes time. I see a lot of people who want to do this and give it one or two years, then say, “It’s not working out.” I think the important thing is, if you’re really in it, if you’re passionate about it, it’s going to take a lot of time. We’ve been doing this for eight years and we still consider ourselves a start-up. Because every year you’re learning something new and trying to scale up. Give it time and patience.
Third, and most important, is the people and team that you build. So if you find the right kind of person, do whatever it takes to get him working with you. I think that’s the rarest commodity out there: finding the right kind of people to work with you on every level - commitment-wise, mentally.
Read the rest of Vijay's Fellows Friday interview here.
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