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May - 2015 - Special issue > CEO View point
Going Back to the Basic Focusing on Business Techniques
Reggie Aggarwal
Founder & CEO-Cvent
Monday, July 20, 2015
With the resurgence of entrepreneurial spirit, more Indians are busy plunging into the startup bandwagon. The increased number of successful businesses and the tendency to get job satisfaction rather than tolerating brain-numbering work to earn daily bread and butter can be considered as the reason for this shift. However, most aspiring entrepreneurs don't know the real struggle that has to be put in order to make a business successful. Building a business requires sacrifice, dedication towards the goal; focus on basic business techniques such as hiring the best people, building the best products and services to your customers persistently and with consistency.

We sat down with Reggie Aggarwal, Founder & CEO of Cvent, to discuss the crucial elements for entrepreneurs to grow a successful business today.

Lessons to Learn and Plunge into a Great Business

To start with Reggie's entrepreneurial journey, the first lesson to learn is that it takes a lot of sacrifice to be an entrepreneur and it is not an easy journey. Reggie often quotes an old saying 'You fall down seven times, get up the eighth time—that's the number one lesson, you keep getting knocked down, but you have to get up.' True value is created at the intersection of multiple disciplines.

"As a CEO, you have to learn to be frugal, you have to also wear the sales person's shoes, look after your customers, and be disciplined in your approach," said Mr. Aggarwal "The next tip is investing on talent acquisition because your survival depends on it."

Mr. Aggarwal advises budding entrepreneurs, to understand their focus point, and the market they aim to address. "At Cvent we wanted to be the best in online event registration for the domestic market in U.S. and for the mid-market," stated Mr. Aggarwal. "We were very particular on what we focused on and built a solution that became the best in the market, and now servicing the largest fortune 10 companies. An entrepreneur shouldn't get caught up in a trend too much because they only give you the opening to build business, but it is difficult to build a business with trends, you have to build it in basic building blocks and for that being patient is all that is necessary."

Changing Business Requirement and Changing Trends
Trends are not constant; they keep on changing as per the business requirements. Right now the important trends to know are the cloud, mobile, social media. However, the fundamentals of business do not change.

"If you look three years ago, there were other trends," explained Mr. Aggarwal. "For instance, people thought social media was everything, but what we learn now is that it's a channel to reach customers. Trends are important to understand but the fact is you have to look back to the basic business."

A trend like mobile isn't a trend, it's a way a product or service is going to be delivered and how people use them. However, trends are important to know because you can build business on trends. The good news is that some of the trends are a lot about fundamental global, analytics. Cloud is a fundamental shift and this is going to be the paradigm to the future.

Catching on trends give entrepreneurs an open window but it doesn't allow you to build billion dollar companies; entrepreneurs have to do more than that. Many entrepreneurs think that they catch on the trend and build business over few years, and then they sell it, but that's not the way business works.

A Long Journey Before You Stop
Thousands of businesses are started each year and it takes a long time to build a great business. A budding entrepreneur needs to remember to keep patience. For Cvent a leading cloud-based enterprise event management platform, the founders were focused on creating value for the initial 10 years of the company. There's a lot of hype in the entrepreneurial community that has been driven by a few companies, yet only a few have catapulted to the moon.

"Entrepreneurs shouldn't build business banking on something that's a one in a 1000 chance," said Reggie Aggarwal, Founder & CEO of Cvent. "They should build it on basic business principles, which are to work hard, and know that it takes a long time to build a good business. Entrepreneurs should be ready to face the ups and downs, be patient, and hold a strong belief in the business."

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