기업가적 성공: 운동선수의 사고방식에서 배우는 교훈

### 운동선수와 같은 사고방식으로 비즈니스를 구축하는 PESA Bazaar의 CEO 나빈 쿠크레자
* 🎾 운동선수처럼 기업가도 성공하기 위해서는 수년간의 연습과 끊임없는 실행을 통해 **"테니스 공을 많이, 많이 쳐야"** 합니다.
* 🎾 기업가는 **경쟁을 두려워해서는 안 되며, 차별화를 만들어 시장을 선도할 수 있다는 자신감**을 가져야 합니다.
* 🎾 좋은 날보다 나쁜 날을 더 많이 맞이할 준비를 하고, **자신감과 민첩함으로 도전에 대응**하는 것이 생존을 위해 매우 중요합니다.
* 📈 오늘날의 훌륭한 기술이 금방 구식이 될 수 있기 때문에 비즈니스에서 장수하기 위해서는 **끊임없이 발전하고 앞서 나가는 것**이 필수적입니다.
* 📊 주요 작업에 대한 올바른 지표를 식별하고 엄격하게 추적하는 데 중점을 두고 **측정 대상을 측정하고 개선**하는 것이 중요합니다.
* 👨 비즈니스를 구축하려면 **팀뿐만 아니라 관련된 가족들의 희생과 지원**도 필요합니다.

PESA Bazaar의 CEO인 나빈 쿠크레자는 인내, 자신감, 지속적인 개선을 통해 비즈니스 성공에 있어 운동선수와 같은 사고방식이 중요하다고 강조합니다.

[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

운동선수와 같은 사고방식이 비즈니스에 미치는 영향

운동선수들은 자신감, 정신력, 집중력과 같은 독특한 기술을 가지고 있으며, 이는 비즈니스 세계에서도 가치가 있습니다.

운동선수처럼 기업가도 전문가가 되고 비즈니스에서 성공하기 위해서는 끊임없는 노력과 연습이 필요합니다.

페사 바자의 공동 창업자는 초기 단계의 어려움에도 불구하고 끊임없는 실행과 인내로 823개 도시에서 3천만 명 이상의 소비자를 확보하며 성공을 거둔 방법을 공유했습니다.

비즈니스 성공을 위한 필수 교훈

B2B 기업은 계획된 다운타임에서 고객을 위한 24시간 연중무휴 가용성으로 전환하면서 빠른 대응의 중요성을 강조했습니다.

조코비치와 같이 경쟁을 두려워하지 않는 마음가짐이 5번째 시장 진입자로서의 성공에 결정적인 역할을 했습니다.

나쁜 날을 인정하고 다시 일어설 수 있는 능력이 기업가 및 스타트업의 결정적인 요소로 강조되었습니다.

역경에 맞서 적응하고 성공하기

이 회사는 코로나19로 인한 인도의 심각한 봉쇄 기간 동안 매출의 90%를 잃었지만, 비핵심 비용을 절감하고 업계보다 앞서 디지털화함으로써 생존했습니다.

이 위기는 궁극적으로 회사가 더 간결하고 디지털화되며 수익성에 더 가까워지는 데 도움이 되었습니다.

노키아는 애플의 아이폰과의 경쟁에 직면하여 정체와 진화에 실패함으로써 몰락의 길로 접어들었고, 이는 장수를 위한 적응의 중요성을 강조합니다.

기술 및 비즈니스 전략의 빠른 진화

기술과 데이터 분석은 포뮬러 1 레이싱에서 기술의 영향력과 유사하게 다양한 산업에서 빠른 변화를 주도하고 있습니다.

신용 보고서 서비스 확대의 예에서 볼 수 있듯이 기업은 앞서 나가기 위해 끊임없이 진화해야 합니다.

광고 캠페인 효과 측정의 변화에서 볼 수 있듯이 개선의 핵심은 올바른 지표를 식별하고 측정하는 데 있습니다.

브랜드 캠페인 효과의 신속한 측정

한 디지털 브랜드는 캠페인 효과를 실시간으로 측정하기 위해 8분 단위의 독자적인 모델을 개발했습니다.

이 접근 방식을 통해 실적이 저조한 광고를 신속하게 파악하고 조정할 수 있었으며, 그 과정에서 수백만 달러를 절약할 수 있었습니다.

또한 창업자는 비즈니스를 구축하는 것이 팀과 가족 모두에게 미칠 수 있는 간과하기 쉬운 대가와 희생을 강조했습니다.