“Small businesses can bounce back and recuperate in the pandemic”

The communications industry had its fair share of setbacks. Small businesses got the brunt of it – some on the brink of closure. We felt it was time to speak to someone who had lived the situation and then bounced back. In this episode of Mrigashira, Charu Raizada speaks to Priyanka Gupta Zielinski, Director, MPIL Steel Structures Ltd, and author of ‘The Ultimate Family Business Survival Guide’. Together, they discuss how SMEs in the communication industry could pivot back and survive during the pandemic.

The ultimate family business survival guide – the topicality and relevance of the subject could not be more pertinent than now as it will be small businesses, which will show us how to navigate through this world of unpredictability.

Listen to the podcast here: https://open.spotify.com/episode/6fXK0X1ES7pppPR09okDIK?si=HAxDL7PRSUuB_NzqUfRVKw

What prompted you to write this book?

I wrote this book because I wanted to encourage the next generation of India to pursue their passion, and to understand what different opportunities lay ahead for them. I wrote the book for the next gen to realise that it doesn’t necessarily mean that they have to reinvent the wheel when they want to enter into something entrepreneurial. There are lots of existing resources and knowledge that they can leverage. And there are lots of networks that they can use to launch themselves in whatever field they want to. Family businesses offer one such platform – community groups within the same type of business or industry. Going forward, it is going to really, really help us rebuild our businesses, the more we rely on finding common themes and ideas as a community. So, I wrote this book to encourage the next gen to choose the right career path for them, and to make a success of it.

Could you share with us your personal experiences and lessons learned?

Adversity is something that we are constantly faced with, whether we are a small business or a big business, and especially when we are in the start-up phase, or whether we are an entrepreneurial setup, because the path is never linear. On a daily basis, there are lots of things that we have to troubleshoot. For me, when I joined the business, that was happening every day, and it seemed to me that it was only happening to us. But now I realise in hindsight that all businesses deal with such challenges. It is tiring, it felt exhausting to see that despite everything that we were trying, nothing was sticking.

It is very difficult to plan linearly because we cannot change the demand patterns. Demand comes and we have to cater to it, demand doesn’t cater to us. So, that was a hard lesson for us. Also, to work with constant constraints of capital, constant constraints of time and resources is also exhausting. We always hear success stories of how companies are forming billion dollars, but we never hear success stories of people who went from two crore business to six crore business, we never hear the success stories of the small businesses. But those are the stories that most of us need to hear the most as these are the businesses that actually persist against all odds.

You are so vulnerable when you are a small business, that any small decision could shut your shop. Despite these challenges, businesses do last, so there is so much value for us to learn from it. And I will tell you something about the grit of small businesses in India, they never think I’m going to close my shop; they never think that is an option. We think of ‘okay, I tried this and it didn’t work, what can I do now in my shop? What can my shop do differently? How can I leverage? Who can I call?’ That is our natural instinct in India. We don’t file for bankruptcy and these kinds of things easily in our country. So, we are used to persisting and this pandemic is showing us now more than ever in the way that businesses are course correcting. There is tremendous value in just surviving and that power of persistence is what I want to really highlight.

This is also the time for us to leverage the network we have. We should be talking to all our clients, ex-clients, future clients, and we should have the most honest conversations about what is working, what we can do. There is no harm in asking for advice, there is no harm in brainstorming, because that is how we are going to realise what we should be doing next. The value of persistence, to me, is a value that is not novel for us. It is something that we are used to, and we just need to believe in it, we do not need to give up right now because there is now light at the end of the tunnel.

What are the biggest pressure points facing the next generations of India?

There are lots of challenges facing the next generation of India. One is that the next generation has modernised at a rate that we cannot even comprehend. They are so much more digital, much more connected globally. The value systems of the next generation in India are heart-warming, because of which they want to make a social impact. But they are also afraid of letting you know their family members and their loved ones down there. They’re afraid of success, and they’re afraid of failure.

While there is a very strong hunger for success, there is a little bit of impatience. And the problem with the next gen is that there is a big gap in communication with the previous generation. They are at an interesting junction, and they need to navigate a lot of different forces going forward. But you know, they are also totally carved out for it. We just need to make sure that these challenges are addressed, articulated, and then the right solutions are put forth for the next generation.

Given the uncertain times we live in, a crisis playbook for small businesses is what we need, and your tips for entrepreneurial businesses to survive during and post the pandemic is something we would, really want to know.

I want to tell all the communicators, event managers, marketers, that we have got to embrace it. If things are not physical and they are not moving, we’ve got to embrace whatever the next thing is. Who would have known that the tourism industry could offer online virtual tours, that we could have stylists and wedding planners do most of their planning and consultation on Zoom sessions? We have got to embrace it, we have got to think creatively. Like we don’t need to always offer a package that is for the top corporates.

So, what can we offer to the SMEs? What can we offer to our peers? How can we change what we are offering to suit people’s budgets, because you know these budgets are also shrinking. And the demand for PR support, the demand for digital communication especially, is not going to go away. We just need to know how we can fit ourselves into what is, going forward. Once we have our products, our positioning articulated perfectly, we are going to see there is a big demand. There is a lot of opportunity for us in this and while the size of business is shrinking, we need to also understand that the cost might be shrinking, we now do not need to do things that generally would require a bigger budget. So, I would encourage the entire community to look at this as a big opportunity, because this is going to be the style of things going forward for a very long time.

*Edited for length and clarity

(Mirgashira is a podcast for Indian PR and Communication professionals anchored by RadhaRadhakrishnan and Charu Raizada. To listen to all episodes visit https://www.digitales.co.in/industry-insights/mrigashira-podcast/)