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Startup Challenges, Trends & Opportunities; a Quick Look into Entrepreneurship

Vicky Bahl
Associate Vice President-Avalon Consulting
Tuesday, January 26, 2016
Vicky Bahl
Headquartered in Mumbai, Avalon Consulting is an international management consulting firm that advises clients across the world on strategy, business transformation and innovation by implementing Big Data, Web Presence, Content Publishing, and Enterprise Search solutions.

What are some of the major startup challenges currently prevailing globally?

Talent is the biggest challenge - both in terms of hiring and retention. People were attracted towards the startup culture till a few years ago as the prospects of most of them looked bright - they were trying to disrupt the "way stuff works" for newer sectors. However, with investors now putting pressure for profits and business model challenges faced by many startups, talented individuals are taking a cautious approach on joining startups.

How can these challenges be overcome?

There are various different ways of overcoming this challenge. For startups having technology as the backbone and operational excellence as a critical success factor, there is a need to hire talent on short-term contract basis. For example, a restaurant delivery startup will need hundreds of people for on-boarding of restaurants initially, and these people should not be on full-time payrolls. There are various companies such as TeamLease that can help startups with short term hiring needs. On the other hand, startups need to build a home-grown culture and hire experienced and fresh MBAs directly from B-Schools for scaling up non-transactional/ core functions. People coming from B-Schools find it easier to fit-in to the culture which will be very difficult for lateral hires. The mix of contractual, fresh hires from engineering/B-Schools, experienced hires from B-Schools and lateral hires needs to be evaluated scientifically for each function.


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