An evening with Ms Anisha Shastri
On Friday, January 24, 2025, we had a very interesting session by Ms Anisha Shastri, Executive Director of Intense Technologies Limited.
About Ms Anisha Shastri
Ms. Anisha Shastri brings a wealth of experience from her work with large enterprises, SMEs, and startups. She is an expert in developing corporate and product strategies with a strong consulting experience for large clients in the BFSI, Telecommunications, and Healthcare industries. Ms Shastri combines rich domain expertise with a passionate approach to solving complex business problems. She holds an MBA in Entrepreneurship from Babson College, USA, and a Bachelor of Engineering in Information Technology from Osmania University. Currently, she drives business strategy and oversees growth initiatives for Intense Technologies. Her forte is to create impactful solutions and foster innovation at scale.
On the lessons she has learnt
Intense Technologies does mission critical work for banks, insurance companies, the government, etc. Since Ms Shastri joined Intense in a leadership role, the company’s revenues have grown several times. She has learnt that the most complex of problems often have the simplest solutions.
Know the business
Ms Shastri started her career with Accenture. Then she moved to Intense in an entry level pre-sales role. That role gave her exposure to things on the ground: how people and relationships work, what is working and not working, and so on. So, the first point made by Ms Shastri was that we need to know our business in and out.
We cannot be a master of all. But we need to have an overall understanding of the business. More so in a tech organization. It's very easy for the techies to say: this is not possible, or this feature can't be built in so much time. But when we understand all the pieces of our business, we can challenge our teams. We can review them and then guide them in the right direction.
Build a good leadership team
If we try to do everything by ourselves, we will become a bottleneck. Our business will not scale. We will not be able to step back, get the big picture and move out of the transactional mindset. So, it is important (probably the most important role of a CEO) to build a good leadership team. Then these leaders can build their teams, which can then execute on the vision of the organization. Ms Shastri took almost a year to identify a good chief revenue officer. Talent does not come easy.
Once we identify the kind of talent that we want, we should be able to sell our vision. They can work with a Google or a Microsoft, or an Oracle, or any of the other great tech companies. So, we should identify the right people available in the market, and then convince them to join us, to execute our vision.
Sell solutions, not products
Often, people are trying to sell products. But customers are not buying products. They are buying solutions to their problems. We should understand what the customers really want, their pain point. What are they willing to pay for?
Once Intense invested about 4 or 5 years into building a cool, novel healthcare product for physiotherapy which incorporated a variety of features like ultrasound. The team spent 4 or 5 years trying to master it only to realize that that's not what the market wanted. Physiotherapists cater to 5 people at the same time. So, they want five machines each with a specific functionality. With the new product, they were paying much more but they could not treat multiple patients together.
So, it's important to talk to customers. We must validate with customers before investing crores and crores of money into building something and going to the market.
Cash is king
It has become fashionable for startups to spend heavily to acquire customers. Ultimately, we are running a business to make money. There is no point spending crazily beyond a point. Some money must be spent at the beginning, but there must be a strategy around it. And at some point, we must get to unit level profitability. We should not be overspending on unnecessary things.
At the same time, if we are not spending enough, it means that we are not taking enough risk. So, there must be a balance. We need to be acquiring customers. The Americans spend almost 50% of their revenues on marketing spend. In India, it's probably 5- 10%.
For every employee, the 1st of every month is the most exciting day, when they receive their paycheck. And for every founder, that's their worst nightmare, because they must keep paying salaries on a monthly basis. So it is important to use cash wisely and deploy it in a way that is most meaningful to the business.
Customer experience
Customer experience is one area where we are not good as the Americans. Consider how much money the Americans spend on mastering user experience.
But Indian startups are learning from the Americans. Take the example of Swiggy, which offers to deliver the food we order in no time. Do we really need the food in 10 min always? No, but Swiggy is trying to delight us. if an item gets misplaced in our order, Swiggy gives us a refund, without asking many questions. Swiggy knows it may be burning money, but it realizes that customer experience is really important.
If our customers are happy, they will buy more and spread the word. Then investors will be happy, and our employees will get paid on time. So, customer experience is key.
We Indians tend to build the product and then work on the customer experience. While building a product we should build it for the experience. We should not try to add the experience as a layer at the end of the development cycle.
An engineer may want to pack the product with the best of features. But can the customer use it? Does the customer know where to click? Probably not. So, it is important to focus on the user experience. And that is what will help our product grow eventually.
Make people accountable
We must keep people accountable. If we review regularly, we can course correct immediately. Otherwise, things may fall through the cracks later. We should be reviewing people daily and if not daily, at least weekly. That gives us a deep understanding into everything that is happening in the organization. And it gives people the sense that someone is looking into what they are doing and is there to help us if we are stuck somewhere.
Take quick decisions
As a leader, we will be making many critical decisions. Sometimes, it can get stressful. People's lives may depend on the decision. But our responsibility is to make decisions fast. We should not be hasty. We must have our data in place and make a calculated decision, based on the data and our gut.
Often, when there's a complex decision to make, leaders sit on it, ponder over it for weeks and weeks together. They are haunted by the fear of failure. Due to such delays, the problem, instead of getting solved, only gets bigger.
It is human to make wrong decisions. But if we make a wrong decision, at least we can learn from it and incorporate the learning the next time we're making a similar decision. We should also not sit and ponder about why we made the wrong decision. That would be just eating away time from something else that we should be doing to help the business grow in another direction.
Four important stakeholders
There are 4 important stakeholders in our life: employees, customers, investors and family/friends. If our employees are happy, they'll keep our customers happy. If customers are happy, they will give us more business and the investor will also be happy. It is difficult to keep everybody happy. But we should see how we can keep all the three stakeholders happy. And if not all the three, at least two.
The fourth stakeholder is our family and close friends. For a CEO the top gets lonely. It is difficult to share our pain with people in the organization. So, it's important to have a confidant at home, or a friend. We need someone who we can share our fears and stress with. We should also share what we are doing with our family and what our business is about. We might be travelling a lot. They should know why we are travelling. We should share our ups and downs. So, they should also feel like they're contributing to what we are doing.
Note: During the Q&A, one participant, who has worked in the Middle East endorsed Ms Shastri’s views on keeping employees and customers happy. Happy employees do lead to happy customers.
Q&A
Ms Shastri’s father founded Intense when she was born. Right from her school days, Ms Shastri would have stimulating conversations with her father about business, strategy, etc. She was very inquisitive to know more about business. Babson had a cutting-edge MBA program in entrepreneurship. She knew she could get insights on how to manage a family business including the transition from one generation to the next. That is what prompted her to join Babson.
One mistake which Ms Shastri regrets is trying to run a startup, Reasy on the side even while managing the business of the parent company. Running a start up is a full-time job. On the other hand, running a listed company has its own nuances. There are many jobs on the plate. Any distraction or loss of focus can be counterproductive for the start up. Moreover, the fact that the parent company is there to back us can lead to a sense of complacency.
With respect to her start up, Reasy, Ms Shastri feels she has not been able to spend a lot of time. She now realizes that it is not easy to sail in two different boats at the same time.
Later during the Q&A, Ms Shastri added that she has now brought her start up under the parent company. She has built a team that takes care of the startup. She conducts periodic reviews like she does for the other departments. Ms Shastri admits that this may not be the most ideal arrangement for scaling. But given her bandwidth, this is the most practical one.
Most startups fail within 5 years. Why is that so? The life of an entrepreneur is not easy. There are more lows than highs. An entrepreneur must have the resilience to persist with her passion and not give up easily. In fact, investors are considering these characteristics while investing. Many start-ups fail because the founders lack the intent, passion and resilience. They decide to cut their losses and quit.
With each succeeding generation, affluence levels are increasing. The needs are being taken care of at a young age. With things coming so easily to young people, resilience is on the decline. Unfortunately, resilience cannot be taught through training programs.
There was a time when Intense was getting carried away by the needs of individual customers. Ms Shastri suggested to her product owners to go and observe customers. They did so and reflected and identified the common customer needs which then drove future product development in the right direction. As a result, only those features which really solved a customer problem and for which the customers were willing to pay, were added.
If we have the right processes and the people to run those processes, then we will not be scaling too fast. But without processes and people, we can get into trouble. Say, we are an online gifting company and used to handling orders of 5000 units. And suddenly, we get an order for 50,000 units during Deepavali. We can handle it only if we have the processes and people in place. Without people and processes, we will start to make mistakes. That will generate bad word of mouth, hurt our brand, and ultimately lead to failure.
We also need cash to support growth. We may have to make upfront investments and pay vendors in advance. On the other hand, we may not realize our payments until deliveries are made.
if the founder is doing everything, then scaling is difficult. But with processes and teams working seamlessly, we can handle scaling more effectively.
Once Intense bagged an order that was about 3 times the overall turnover. Everyone was excited. The company had to invest very heavily upfront to create the data centres. But the customer moved slowly, with approvals taking a lot of time. Intense invested about Rs 25- 30 crores upfront, with no sign of going live even for another 2 years. So, it took a lot of cash out of the operating cycle. And that put a lot of pressure on the organization. Intense had to go through pay cuts. The company had to fire people. It was a very, very stressful time. Looking back, Intense was not built to scale at that point of time.
Irrespective of the industry, the mantra remains the same. To scale a business, we must have processes in place and the right people to run those processes. Consider HCL. Founder Shiv Nadar did not try to manage the whole business by himself. He split his businesses and appointed the right leaders for each business. It's not something that one person can achieve by herself alone.
While scaling, we can lose sight of people even two levels below us. So, it's important to have the right processes and people and constantly review their performance. Whether it is FMCG, tech, healthcare, the same mantra applies.
In some organizations, people bring in the passion and commitment and help to grow the organization. And this works very well for startups. But beyond a certain scale, we need processes to be able to scale it further. A hero culture, where people like going and solving the problem and owning the crisis may save the day but does not help us scale.
The founder does not have control over what people below are doing. But everybody must be working towards a common goal. Processes and frameworks can help us do it. The founder can define and pass on the frameworks to their leaders. They in turn can pass it on to their leaders. That's how the framework percolates down and the organization grows.
The toughest decisions revolve around emotions. Ultimately running a business is about managing the emotions of customers, investors, and employees. An example of such tough decisions is letting go of people who have been valuable to the organization for a long time but who have not been performing well recently. Or letting go of a customer, who is generating good revenue but not profitable.
A leader must have the ability to say No. Startup founders are often so excited about mobilising funds that they take money without checking whether it's aligning with their business strategy. Instead of being focused on one thing, the attention and budget get spread thin over many activities. They may end up developing features or products for customers individually. This doesn’t really align with the long-term vision.
The world is moving away from SaaS towards Agentic AI. A decade ago, cloud was the thing. Now, AI is the thing. Within AI, generative AI is becoming important, and within that people are moving into agentic AI. We will have our own personal agent. That agent will communicate with all the background systems and get the work done for us: like creating a CRM entry or making a leave application in the HR system. India will take some time to get there. But SaaS as a business is gradually going to take a backseat.
CEOs come and go. But once they are gone, few remember them. Founders tend to create a lasting impression because they create jobs and livelihoods. They're making a difference to the world. The world is different from what it was yesterday, because the founders chose to get out of their comfort zone. For Ms Shastri, as a founder, it is important to take risk and go and change something. That's what keeps her motivated: the ability to make that difference.
In recent weeks there has been a lot of buzz about the L&T CEO, Mr S N Subrahmanyan’s 90-hour week. At some point our brain shuts off and we are not productive. Arianna Huffington of the Huffington Post mandates an hour of sleep at office. She believes that our mind needs to be fresh. So, employees have desks which convert into beds where they can sleep.
Everybody has a different threshold. For some people, that's a 30-hour week, for some it is 40 and for others, it may be 80. And those rules are for us, not for our team. If we are paying our team for an 80-hr week out of which 40 hours are unproductive, then we are not doing justice to our business.
Founders (and top execs) are strongly motivated to work hard. The norms for employees may be quite different.
In case of Desi cows, the farms are large. The chilling centres are located at the farm. There are also 2 central chilling centres for hybrid cow milk. In addition, for the farther villages, there are 15 village level chilling centres. In the villages, power may sometimes be available only for four hours.. Ideally every farm must have its own chilling station.
For Ms Shastri, it is very important to build a personal rapport with her leadership team. She makes it a point to go out for a few drinks every other month or call them up when their family members are sick. A founder has a lot at stake, more than anyone else. So, when we are bringing someone else from outside, we should keep them as passionate and as motivated by making them buy into the vision and feel like they are also part of a larger calling. We need to bond with them. In the office Ms Shastri does conduct workshops to enable bonding. But what really helps is really getting to know the person beyond their official work.
Ms Shastri believes she has a high sense of responsibility. While many leaders are driven by position and power, she is driven by a sense of responsibility. She feels good that what she is doing is impacting people beyond herself and her immediate family. She brings this sense of responsibility to work every day even if she had a low the previous day.
Founders tend to set a culture. For example, Reliance is known for operating with cost efficiency and offering competitive prices to customers. So, the founders set the culture. Then they build teams that start believing in that culture. Soon that culture percolates down.