Entrepreneurship thrives in a recession

The Delhi chapter of The Indus Entrepreneurs recently concluded its flagship event – TieCon, its annual summit on entrepreneurship.

The conference was a sellout. Surprisingly, in a recession year, paid registrations were up by over sixty percent. Hundreds of people paid eight thousand rupees each to attend a two day schmooze fest on entrepreneurship. Clearly interest in entrepreneurship is thriving - never mind the state of the economy.

It is commonly said that some of the best companies in the world have been started or have grown during times of recession. This has been repeated so often that it has now almost become an adage. Examples that are often quoted are those of Google and Federal Express.

Logically any sane, rational person would prefer the security of a salaried job, during a downturn, to the uncertain world of entrepreneurship. After all during a downturn – competition has excess capacity so there is fierce price competition, customers buy less so there is soft demand, funding is very hard to come by and then if you do get it you get poor valuations, cash collection from clients becomes harder and so on. So it should be a bad idea to become an entrepreneur during a recession. The smart thing to do would be to hang on to your cushy, safe job.
The real world however is counter intuitive.

Why is it that great success stories come out of hard times. And why is it that interest in entrepreneurship is up despite a recession.

The reason is that while a recession causes pain it also creates opportunities for small, entrepreneurial companies to prosper and grow.

Take our own example – in the last recession Naukri grew sixty five times in sales during the last recession. It should not have happened – companies don’t hire during a recession. We should have been killed. So how did Naukri grow.

The point is that a recession causes companies to change the way they do things – it is a time of churn. In our case from 2000 to 2004 there was doom and gloom everywhere and companies were downsizing. However many companies that were firing were also doing some small hiring. IT services companies for instance were retooling their skill sets depending on the projects that they had. A company that was letting go of 2000 people because there was no project in hand for those skills was also hiring 200 because they had landed a project for which they needed those people. And because the project was already in hand they needed to hire really quickly – companies could not afford to maintain a bench. In the years prior to the meltdown there had been no firing – only hiring. It had been an era of large benches and excess staff. Now the downsizings made the news headlines but the smaller hiring that was taking place did not.

Added to this was the fact that during a recession companies are very careful about all costs including cost of hiring.

It was this opportunity that Naukri exploited – we went to customers and said “reduce your time and cost of hiring”. This pitch really worked with prospective clients in a recession.

Of course we supplemented this with some really smart new product development and we rolled out a network of sales offices and that really helped us grow too.

But if the opportunity had not existed we could not have grown.

Meanwhile our competitors downsized, they could not raise their next round of funding, some exited India. There was a lot of pain.

We were able consolidate our leadership and really became a dominant player in the last meltdown.

While the recession crippled some in our industry it actually helped us.
So the message is that if you read the tea leaves correctly and are able to spot the right opportunity during a recession and then execute well you can actually win big precisely because there is a recession. If however you are unable to do this you can get hit by a truck.

During recessions industries see a shakeout, a consolidation. Recessions show no tolerance for mediocrity and redundancy. Companies go back to their core and stick to the basics. All businesses that are “nice to do” and not “need to do” are dumped.

It is a time of cleaning up.

Recessions separate the winners from the losers.