Entrepreneurial Success: Lessons from Athletes' Mindset

Naveen Kukreja, CEO of PESA Bazaar, emphasizes athlete-like mindset's importance in business success through perseverance, self-belief, and continuous improvement.

### PESA Bazaar CEO Naveen Kukreja on Building a Business with an Athlete-like Mindset
* 🎾 Like athletes, entrepreneurs need to put in years of practice and **"hit many, many tennis balls"** through relentless execution to succeed.
* 🎾 Entrepreneurs should not be in awe of competition and must have **self-belief to create differentiation** and become **market leaders**.
* 🎾 Being prepared to face more bad days than good and responding to challenges with **self-belief and nimbleness** is crucial for survival.
* 📈 Constantly evolving and staying ahead is essential for longevity in business, as **what's great today may quickly become outdated**.
* 📊 The importance of **measuring and improving what you measure**, with a focus on identifying and rigorously tracking the **right metrics for key actions**.
* 👨 Building a business also requires **sacrifices and support** from not just the team, but also from the **families involved**.

[Music] Foreign [Music] athletes unique. Muhammad Ali once said, The fight is one or lost far away from witnesses, in the gym, out there on the road. But before I dance into those lights, apart from the natural ability that the athletes have and the talent they possess, some unique skills they have: tremendous self-belief, mental strength, and focus. They have perseverance, they have tenacity, they have discipline and diligence, toiling in day in and day out for years. Imagine an entrepreneur with the same mental makeup. Imagine an entire team, an entire organization with the same athlete-like mindset. I think they would be pretty hard to stop. Hi, I'm Naveen Kukreja, co-founder and CEO of PESA Bazaar, India's largest marketplace for credit products and credit score. And today, I want to share with you my story and how an athlete-like mindset helped us on the way. Number one, be prepared to hit many, many tennis balls. Serena Williams was only four when she started preparing to be a professional.

tennis player. She won her first Grand Slam when she was only 18. Imagine the number of tennis balls she hit in all those years. Malcolm Gladwell talked about in his book on a 10,000-hour rule, which basically says that to become an expert at any scale, it's a matter of ten thousand hours of practice. That is basically three hours of practice for 10 straight years. Like sports, in business too, there is no magic formula, there is no secret sauce, and entrepreneurs like athletes have to perform, make mistakes, learn, improve all the time. At PESA Bazaar, we call it Relentless execution. We have over 30 million consumers who've taken a Flagship credit score product from across 823 cities in India. If I had these numbers in Singapore, that will be more than half the population of Singapore, probably the entire adult population. We feel very proud of these numbers today, but when we started, it took us 14 months just to go from idea to go live. We were working with credit bureaus who were

essentially B2B Enterprises. They were used to having planned downtimes. They were used to infrequent queries. They were used to batch processing. What we needed them to be was 24/7/365 available for customers. When customers apply, respond within five seconds. Post-launch, it took us a lot of tennis balls, uh, to be hit sometimes well, sometimes not so well, to get us to where we are today. Number two, don't be in awe of competition. Nadal won his first Grand Slam in 2005. At that point, Federer had already won six. In the same year, there was an 18-year-old Novak Djokovic who was ranked number 83 in the world. In that year when he started, he had all the ingredients that I talked about, but he also had a lot of self-belief to not be in awe of these greats. What he gave us along with Rafa and Federer was probably the best men's tennis era over the next decade and a half when you're starting.

and especially if you're not the first mover, it's important to have Djokovic-like mindset. When we started, we were number five to enter the marketplace. We were not the largest, we didn't have the largest funding, we were not the most established, but we had self-belief. And our first principles-based approach allowed us to be very clear on what we wanted to offer. And the gap in the competitors' offering allowed us to create differentiation. It took us three years of consistent effort to become the market leader, and since then we've only built our lead by focusing on what consumers desired and have tried to innovate and execute to get better. Number three, there will be bad days, more bad days than good. How you respond to bad days is what defines you. All great athletes have bad days. They run out of form, they have injuries, their abilities are questioned, sometimes they're written off, but they always bounce back. Entrepreneurs and startups, you will also have your bad days. You may lose clients, your funding

May dry up. You may lose employees. They might be tough external environment or something else that you didn't think of. You need to be prepared that this will happen and at that point in time you need to have a lot of self-belief and probably co-founders help each other in that time. You need to be nimble to act in that situation. On March 23, 2020, India went into a total lockdown as Covid-19 started. That was probably the most severe lockdown across any country. The lending industry in India came to a sudden halt. We lost 90 percent of our revenue in one month between March 20 and April 20. We had no idea at that point on how long and severe this would be. After taking a little time to accept the civility, my co-founders decided that our first priority should be to survive. Survive with minimal food and use the crisis to become leaner and fitter. Backs to the wall and a desire to survive helped us make some of the best

decisions we made. We cut out all the non-core costs and most variable costs. At the same time, we focused on preserving the most core team, which we knew would be very valuable as the tight turns. We digitized ahead of the industry because we had more bandwidth in absence of regular business and changed some of our commercial terms to become more robust from a long-term perspective by adding renewable Revenue stream. In a strange way, as hard as it was, the covet period actually really helped us. Our volumes are today at the highest level, our margins are stronger, our product is more digital, and we are very close to profitability. Number four Evolution equates longevity stagnation equals Death. In 2007, Fortune Magazine did a cover story on Nokia. The headline of the story was, can anyone catch the cell phone King. Nokia had reached an astounding 1 billion consumers in that year. Incidentally, in the same year, Apple launched its first iPhone, and we all know what happened over the next few years. The truth is that today the cycle

of redundancy is getting shorter from decades to years. F1 is another great example from Sports where the technology is evolving so fast that today engineers and technology in the cars play as much an important role as a driver behind the wheels. Where they support your business, things would continue to evolve. What's great today may get outdated very very fast. Staying with the credit score example that I took from our business, we were very conscious when we launched the product to ensure that we stay ahead and are able to evolve our product over a period of time in terms of what customers value. From launching with one credit bureau in the country, we now work with all the four credit bureaus in the country. From a single one-time report, to now we have a lifetime free access with monthly refreshes. From a single language, to now having multiple languages to offer the credit report. From a vanilla report, we now offer exclusive pre-approved products and premium inside products, and so on. Number five, you can only improve what you measure. Today, technology and analytics are changing the world.

the book Moneyball told us a great story about Oakland Athletics and the team on how they use data analytics to drive the strategy and drive the selection of the teams and the players. They change the way players and teams were selected ever since. At work, I have a simple mantra: identify the right metric for every key action that you're taking and then measure it honestly and rigorously. There have been times when a colleague comes up to me and asks that this is too qualitative, how do I find the right metric to it, or I can't find it, and I say to them that think harder and you'll be able to find the right metric. Of course, there are times when it takes a lot of effort and multiple attempts to get to the right metric. I'll share a small example: when we started the brand advertisements and the brand campaigns and advertisement TV advertisements are very expensive affair, the agencies told us that the standard way of measuring a campaign effectiveness was at the end of the campaigns. The campaigns used to run

into weeks, sometimes more than a month. And I thought that as a digital brand, there has to be a faster and better way of measuring the effectiveness. For the next few months, we thought hard internally and came up with the right metrics for us. It was traffic and inquiries, which were available to us by the minute, by the way. And then user analytics teams helped to build a proprietary in-house 8-minute model. What it tried to do was predict the outcome or the effectiveness of the brand campaign from a medium-term perspective within the first eight minutes of running the first ad. It became stronger as we got more and more data and more and more campaign data. The results were awesome. We were able to respond very fast to the campaigns or the advertisements that were not very good and cut out and save millions in the process. While these were the five aspects, there's one more I wanted to include, which is rarely spoken about. Which is you read the story of any sporting legend and you see and you go

through what the families have to go through in the process. Like in sports, building a business takes a lot of toll and sacrifices from not only you and your team, but your family is in the process. Without their support, the road might be too steep. I know I won't be standing here if it were not for my family's support and those of my team. So, a big thank you to all of them and to all of you to giving me your time. Thank you. [Music]

5 ways how an athlete-like mindset can transform your business

Singapore FinTech Festival

The Impact of an Athlete-Like Mindset in Business

Athletes possess unique skills such as self-belief, mental strength, and focus, which are also valuable in the business world.

Like athletes, entrepreneurs need to put in relentless effort and practice to become experts and succeed in business.

The co-founder of PESA Bazaar shared how their relentless execution and perseverance led to success, acquiring over 30 million consumers in 823 cities, despite facing challenges in the early stages.

B2B Enterprises transitioned from planned downtimes to 24/7 availability for customers, emphasizing the importance of quick responses.

Having a mindset like Djokovic, not being in awe of the competition, was crucial for their success as the fifth entrant in the marketplace.

The recognition of bad days and the ability to bounce back was highlighted as a defining factor for entrepreneurs and startups.

Adapting and Thriving in the Face of Adversity

The company lost 90 percent of its revenue during the severe lockdown in India due to Covid-19, but survived by cutting non-core costs and digitizing ahead of the industry.

The crisis ultimately helped the company become leaner, more digital, and closer to profitability.

Nokia's stagnation and failure to evolve in the face of competition from Apple's iPhone led to its downfall, highlighting the importance of adaptation for longevity.

The Rapid Evolution of Technology and Business Strategy

Technology and data analytics are driving rapid changes in various industries, similar to the impact of technology in Formula 1 racing.

Businesses need to constantly evolve to stay ahead, as demonstrated in the example of expanding credit report services.

The key to improvement lies in identifying and measuring the right metrics, as seen in the transformation of advertising campaign effectiveness measurement.

Rapid Measurement of Brand Campaign Effectiveness

A digital brand developed a proprietary 8-minute model to measure campaign effectiveness in real time.

This approach allowed them to quickly identify and adjust poorly performing ads, saving millions in the process.

The founder also emphasized the often overlooked toll and sacrifices that building a business can have on both the team and their families.