dot.com crash of 2001: As Internet business models soured, the World Wide Web still grew 33 percent

Divali bonus given today… …

The year was good … …

None of us are from a business family. We learnt to do business by the seat of our pants. We did make a few early mistakes but mostly succeeded. Over past 5 years we have been called, ranging from, affectionately a momma papa company* to snidely a small town middle class company

Several of the policies we follow we later learned, have been expounded in tomes. I am sure most of them are already taught as basics to business management students.

One of the most important things we learned was to keep our burn rate** as low as possible. This when coupled with middle class psyche give interesting results.

Like – An average employee is more happy to receive a one time bonus of Rs15k than a Rs2k hike. So we give Divali bonuses to everyone in our office, the bonus is linked to the company performance and individual hierarchy rather than individual performance!! Somewhere down the line Swati discovered the importance of Gold in an Indian household. So this bonus is in the form of 24 Carat Gold coins. Keeps the mothers happy and will keep the wives happy in future.

Just as I was about to post this Swati came up with this quote

Our employees are more productive because they feel that they’re in an organisation that values the complexity of their entire life and tries to do something about making it a little easier for them to balance all the conflicting demands.
David Hillenbrand President and Chief Executive Officer Bayer Inc.

* Because we took Aasim (he was 18 months then) along to a first contact meet and Swati did not hesitate to bottle feed him in middle of everything 🙂
** a.k.a recurrent expenditure