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Can small Indian companies compete against bigger sharks?

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Small Indian companies sometimes will have a charismatic boss and a highly skilled workforce. But, more times than not, there is a lack of communiation skills, and a lack of internal management. Big companies in India and MNCs that do business in India have the advantage of having professional management systems, expert communicators, genious marketing managers, and much more. If you are a small company in India, how an you possibly compete with these sharks?

One of the problems is that the owner will have to wear many hats himself. He will have to do public relations, hiring, firing, training, management, and more. This is a lot for one person to do. My message to smaller companies has always been to learn to communicate well, particularly on the phone. Stress communication. If your clients feel awkward communicating with you, they will dump you soon. The next thing is to be in touch with how your clients like their work done. If you don’t communicate, you will not be good at learning what they want. Listening is a big part of the battle here.

Bosses in little Indian companies tend to have very good English skills, but their workers can not function in English (or in any language) most of the time. This is a problem. It is hard to teach work skills, but how can you teach a language to someone who doesn’t know it, and who can’t even communicate in their own language?

If you are specializing in outsourcing to English speaking countries, or countries where their only means of communicating with you would be in English, then your language skills need to be good to survive. Americans can understand Indian English. But, what about French people who struggle just to understand “regular” sounding English. How will they be able to understand Indian English spoken by people who mumble, and are not really interested in communicating? You will lose a lot of clients due to this.

The solution is easy. If you cater to the West, then cater to communicating with the West. Communication is 30% of the job criteria if you ask me. The rest of the work doesn’t consist of communiation but RELIES on communication otherwise you won’t know what to do or when. HIRE people who can communicate gracefully with overseas clients. Listen to what people’s needs are and make a big effort to fulfill whatever they said their needs were. Most companies just do whatever they feel like. If you want to be profitable, do what your client feels like, and not what you feel like. If you are experts at communication and pleasing your clients you can compete easily with the big fish and eat them too.

Big fish eat little fish. But, if you are a piranha, then you can be a little fish who eats big fish and other big animals.