Women who work from home can boost their productivity by setting up a comfortable and efficient workspace at home.

By Prerna Malik

For most career women, the office and home tend to overlap. Whether you’re a high-powered executive who brings home projects from work or a working mother with a home-based business, chances are you have a niche that you use to work in.

A home office can be a dedicated room with a door that shuts out the television and the household sounds or it could be an area in your dining room. Regardless of how big or small your home office is, here are ways to organize and improve it to boost your own productivity and efficiency:

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Many older women are starting businesses quite late in their lives and becoming successful at it too. A heart-warming look at some such senior entrepreneurs. 

By Nisha Salim

If you think that all Indian women in their golden years spend time singing bhajans, babysitting grandkids or watching saas-bahu soaps, you couldn’t be further from the truth.

On the contrary, many are working their way to success, generating jobs, contributing to our economy and also giving back to the society in a way that most young people cannot.

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First-time entrepreneurs are often overwhelmed by the paperwork and processes involved in starting up. Some help to sort out your registration blues!

By Vandana Chatterjee

Plain vanilla Sole Proprietorship, Partnership, Partnership with registered deed, LLP and Private Limited – many such terms confuse the first-time entrepreneur.  Add to this, issues such as Sales Tax registration, Service Tax number, personal PAN, Company PAN, TAN number, lawyers, accountants… phew!

Truly, the ‘business’ of starting a business can kill many an entrepreneurial dream. Yet several women have overcome these seemingly insurmountable obstacles to start and sustain their own ventures. How does one decide which route to take while starting off on one’s own? To answer this, we spoke to three women who operate in diverse spaces, about how they structured their companies and what they would advise other people starting out.

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A co-founder is a critical component of a business and finding one can be quite a challenge. Some pointers to help you out!

By Nandini Hirianniah

“Help me find a co-founder.” “Where can I find a good co-founder?” – a couple of common requests/questions I am challenged with. I say ‘challenged’, because in my opinion you cannot find a co-founder. A co-founder happens to you naturally. I know, it sounds like old-wives tales; “love happens” or “you’ll get your perfect life partner when the time’s right”. But my experience tells me that this is indeed it. Let me explain further.

Do You Really Need A Co-Founder?

When working on a startup venture, a good partner/co-founder is very important to have. A co-founder’s role could be all pervading, ranging from picking a suitable business name to making vital strategic decisions. Entrepreneurs often face paranoia, super-multi-tasking, Murphy working at his best and a dozen other things that fail as you move tiny steps towards success. Now, in this frenzy having a wrong working partner only slows things down and many-a-times this is the SINGLE reason why startups shut down or give up! Continue reading →

Time-stressed entrepreneurs often find both business and home suffering! Here are some tips to sharpen your organizational skills and improve productivity.

By Jessica Chapman Clark

As a woman entrepreneur, I know how challenging it can sometimes be to manage all of the staff, vendors and tasks I have in my business. Not to mention the after-hours family obligations!

We wear about 20 different hats and spend so much time on activities to make our business run that when someone tells us to step back and strategically evaluate what’s working and what’s not working, it seems like a waste of time and energy. After all, you’re profitable. It doesn’t matter that you’re also exhausted, does it?

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Public Relations is important to develop any business and more so for small businesses. Having a sound strategy in place is indeed essential.

By Surekha Pillai

There is no greater work satisfaction than being your own boss (and runner, depending on the situation!) but small businesses often come with the challenge of limited resources. Public Relations (PR) is an invaluable tool to entrepreneurs who would like to build credibility and increase visibility on a limited budget. However, PR does not come ‘cheap’; it offers great flexibility and is immensely resourceful, adjusting itself to the demands and limitations of businesses. Irrespective of the money you invest in PR, it has to be approached strategically to benefit your business.

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Converting your hobby into a successful enterprise is tricky business, but achievable with planning, setting goals and professional execution.

By Vandana Chatterjee

Vandana Chatterjee turned entrepreneur 4 years ago with Skan Consultants, a professional executive search firm. More recently, she has launched Beehire, a specialist recruitment service for startups and SMEs.

Being able to convert a personal skill or talent into work is perhaps the happiest state of being. To be paid for doing what we love! Yet, even though the business may be based on a unique skill, it will still be a business, and all the due diligence that would go into starting any other enterprise, has to go into starting a hobby based business as well. Is there a large enough market for my product/service? What is the unique slot I can occupy? How much money will be required to start? What sort of equipment will I need? How many hours per day would I need to dedicate? Who will supply me raw materials? At what cost? How do I market my product/service? These are just some of the questions you would need to find answers to.

A recent highly successful movie Band Bajaa Baraat highlights the typical issues faced by entrepreneurs converting a personal passion into a business, and what makes them fail or succeed. In the movie, a young woman passionate about event management, ties up with a friend and starts a business. Their flexibility, nimble-footedness and ability to scale up both their operations and personal capabilities takes them from zero to being an established name in the market. The same team then falls out due to personal reasons, and is unable to separate their personal issues from the professional. They lose clients, start undercutting each other and eventually lose their credibility in the market. While the movie ends on a happy note, let us look at the reasons for the failure of their venture, Shaadi Mubarak:

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Don’t let fear of failure and losing money stop you from turning entrepreneur. A start-up founder shares her learnings on Costing your business.

By Vandana Chatterjee

Increasingly many women are getting bitten by the entrepreneurial bug. How often do we get feedback from friends and well-wishers that if only we could bottle and sell our skills, we would have a ready market? These skills, when converted into practical working models, have the potential to create huge value for the entrepreneur as well as the economy at large. Just as often, the biggest obstacle to starting a sustainable business is       M-O-N-E-Y.

This is because of the fear that a business failure could end in losing one’s carefully put up savings. In this article, I will be sharing my learnings with would-be entrepreneurs on what elements of cost and money they think to think about before starting a business.

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Some businesses in food, fashion and other “typically female” areas have an interesting story to share, one with a slight twist from the norm.

By Kiran Manral

What can a woman do if she decides to turn entrepreneur? She can cook, bake, stitch, embroider, design or teach – so go the “traditional” accomplishments that women usually turned into a livelihood. While they bring in much-needed income, a few women have reinvented these skills into something unique and far-reaching than your neighbourhood boutique or catering business. Here we bring you some ‘women’s businesses’ with a difference.

Two tables and four handblock printers: Ritu Kumar

She started off wanting to revive textiles and dying traditional weaves and embroideries, got into designing and never looked back. Ritu Kumar, the doyenne of fashion in India, draws on her training in art history and museology to redefine ancient textiles and weaves into contemporary fashion. “I started with two tables and four handblock printers,” she laughs, thinking back to the early days.

Today she has a brand that is renowned globally, has taken Indian candidates to Miss Universe and Miss World titles and a boutique chain that started the concept of boutiques here in India. The boutiques happened by chance. “I had the textiles and the garments, but couldn’t find an appropriate space to retail them, and knew that if I had to showcase them appropriately, I would need to get into the retail space on my own. There were no retail spaces which were focused on ethnic fashion,” she says.

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On International Women’s Day, we bring you 3 inspiring stories of mother-daughter duos who have created a successful and satisfying business together.

By Jaya Narayan

We are used to hearing of fathers grooming their sons or these days, daughters to take over a business, but mother-daughter pairs working together? Those are rare to see! For me, writing this article has been an enriching experience, as it allowed me to interact with three very interesting mother-daughter duos – of Under the Mango tree, a restaurant and cafe in Bangalore, of Vibha, a designer textile boutique at Chennai and Chocoholic, which offers homemade chocolate delicacies and bouquets in Mumbai.

Nirmala Balakrishnan Martin, 32 and Rishika Bhatia, 24, the founders of ‘Under the Mango tree’ and Chocoholic respectively, asked their mothers who were playing a passive role in the business to formally come on board. Vidya Balakrishnan, 49 joined her mother who was running Vibha, an established family business instead of going in for a salaried job.

A common thread in their story has been to work towards common goals keeping each others’ interests in mind, and with a strong focus on making customers happy.

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