Chai Biskut - a steaming success

I've been MIA for a week coz of the walkabout... it was cccraaazzzzyyyyy........ my partners and me were running a full fledged business... almost a restaurant! but it was fantastic... stretched me to the limit with all the college work and moreso the running of the tea stall..

Pre-event publicity consisted of:

• Print media
• Web 2.0 usage - emails, social networking sites like facebook, youtube, videos
• Word of mouth publicity...

Since we'd generated alot of hype, personally I was really anxious about how we'd manage the crowd on the first day... I'd never made tea in such large batches before... a part of me was actually hoping not too many people turn up... but even before we opened shop there was a throng of samosa hungry and tea thirsty people...

what was awesome was that so many people turned up to sample our products and support us in our walkabout....

there were alotta people who didn't know it was our walkabout and since we were doing it for the first time ever and had very limited resources our service was a bit slow... a student from the MDM batch actually thought we were running this as a vocation a la Jessica (the Indian food caterer) and told us off for taking time to serve him his tea...

our classmates helped out quite a bit.. I cannot even begin to explain how crazy the first one and a half hours were... I think I mustve made about 70-80 cups of tea and we sold about 120 samosas... all fried right there....

after that when we took a break and people complimented us on the food, tea and the ambience it felt so great!!!! and that's when I realized something... in an earlier post 'dignity of labour' I'd mentioned 'chottu' chai wala who serves 'cutting chai' by the roadside always with a smile on his face...I could kinda identify with his level of flow coz it feels great to be able to make something, even as mundane as tea, and have people appreciate it... not through words but through their expressions!

This walkabout (although it was more a business venture) has been such a fantastic learning experience... we actually used demand forecasting, accounts maintaing, marketing strategies (of course), experience creation through the ambience. Moreso, we even experiemented with our menu and came to an emperical understanding of what the best business model for the stall... the primary purpose was to conduct a feasibility study to demonstrate the profitability of the venture and I'm happy to say that we reached the best product mix and strategy to make the Indian Tea Stall a profitable venture on campus.

The walkabout got over yesterday and throughout the latter half of last week we kept getting requests to extend the dates... even today people haven't stopped requesting us to serve chai and samosas... in fact some of the seniors jokingly said that they'd take this up as a career option...

I've always maintained that I want to run a restaurant sometime in the future and our venture actually exposed me first hand to what situations I will face when I do so, albeit on a much larger scale... for starters.. I've really learnt to appreciate the good sense in clearly... and by clearly I mean explicitly... defining the firm strategy and more importantly sticking to it...

Conflicts are inevitable and there were a few times all of us (partners) didn't agree on things... I can happily report that we managed to resolve all differences amicably and had a good time doing the same...

Sourcing the raw materials was a great experience... I always thought that when it came to all those nitty-gritties I would buckle and wouldn't be able to go through with such boring activities but it was a plesant surprise looking for deals... looking for places to source the cheapest but best quality items...

Sustainance was another facet I uncovered... I was apprehensive about being able to sustain my enthusiasm and commitment beyond the first couple of days especially because we had limited capital and had lots of variable costs everyday... (fresh raw materials) which had to be taken care of...

Beyond all the visible aspects, maintainence was another area we had to take care of... start the shop before time... have stuff ready, clean up after the shop shut... all of these were extremely taxing coz after standing - whether facing a mob of customers, behind a stove making batches of tea or frying samosas which never seemed to satisfy the demands - for hours we had to clean up the place, wash the utensils and keep things ready for the next day....

My god... what a rush... I loved it... it tired every muscle and more in my body... but it's been a great experience... somehow my self-confidence too has gotten a boost!

Chai Biskut Promo

Have a lookie...

Chai Biskut and more

I feel like we're passing through a weird time-space warp... sometimes time speeds up and sometimes it just stands still... last week was quite hectic moreso coz we had to work out the nitty-gritties of our walkabout - the indian tea stall - christened 'Chai Biskut'.

I was super excited when we thought up the concept, totally oblivious to the fact that what we wanted to undertake was going to be super tough....

Why tough...

well for starters... we, at least me, are broke...

on top of that... milk, the second chief ingredient of our product - chai - is frickin expensive...

third... we're running the stall, very happily, for seven days... I have this nagging worry about the sustainability of our stall...

Due to the budget constraint, we've had to scrap some of our marketing ideas and make do with what resources we have at our disposal....

Well, we managed to figure out where to get what from and have gotten some pretty good deals... more importantly, we've managed to create a buzz on campus about our stall to the extent that everyday, everywhere we go people have started asking us for chai... I've gotten sick of telling them over and over again that it starts on Monday and not before that....

We did a trial run today... initially I was very excited and volunteered to make the first batch... Amit Mathur, our senior at college and a dear friend, agreed to be our tea taster... So I wen ahead and made the chai .... AND IT WAS DISGUSTING!!!

the sugar was whimsical... not matter how much I added the other stuff the sugar kept overpowering every other ingredient !!!

We threw away the batch and Rachna made the next one... it turned out great! In Amit's words, we found our gourmet tea brewer... so we decided to go ahead with Rachna's recepie and Shibani made the next batch... it turned out really good... I went next... petrified what my nemesis, the sugar, would do to my rendition of a good recepie... suprisingly the tea turned out good...

Now you'd think that all of this would've taken about 45 mins to an hour tops.... but we were at this for 2 and a half hours!!! That's when I realized how difficult our next 7 days are going to be.... To be serving an institute full of expectant people tea till 2 AM when we take about 30 minutes to brew a batch is a very daunting proposition!!! Although, in our defense its not the brewing that takes time but the washing coz currently there is no facility next to our stall.. tomorrow we're going to have to work that out....

I'm also worried about standing next to an open stove in the heat (AIM's spoilt us by providing us with round-the-clock AC facilities) for 7 hours!

God help me!

Chai Stall taking shape

This evening, after our third consecutive day of shopping for our chai stall, we started work on the buzz creating aspect.

But before I move onto that.... I'm amazed at how I've been working on handling this tea stall. I'm usually the kind of person who gets excited about an idea and then moves onto another idea or squanders away my energy. This process has always been on auto-pilot.

But with the tea stall ... I want to take it step by step and work on chunks of it or as MBA jargon would call it ... on functional areas (ahem).

I've been making lists (which I never make.. my mom would be so proud of me... she cried herself hoarse telling me to make lists)... I've been categorizing ... inventory, raw materials, assets, supplies!!!

The funny part is when I did that, I did it as a joke, but realized that categorizing it in that fashion actually made things easier and also made it recallable.

There's a sort of discipline thats gotten into my system (I just hope I haven't spoken too soon)

Anyway... coming back to the stall taking shape... we made our promo material... (will put it up by tomorrow or day after latest). The promo was suppossed to be made in secrecy but with the number of people all over AIM, you can imagine how difficult that was... add to that the attention grabing super kallan! I walked down with it and everybody started asking us if we were going to make chai! Then we needed a power outlet which wasn't available at our venue i.e. behind the SA store (Parasol garden I think it's called) and we ended up creating quite an unwanted 'buzz' with carrying the power points available in the dorm lobby to the cafe area... (it looked like I was taking a weird creature on a walk and with the cord wrapped all around me it looked more like the creature was taking me for a walk).

Finally we managed to diffuse the attention we'd generated and got our work done... it was so much of fun...

It felt best when people started telling us why don't you start you tea stall earlier... now itself!

Did I mention that the super kallan makes the tea stall sound like an authentic Indian tea stall ... I was supremely happy when we lit it today!

The countdown begins!

In exactly five days we run our week long walkabout - the Indian tea stall. (I'm writing as though I haven't mentioned it before in case there are readers who haven't gone thru' my prior posts... shame on you!)

Anyway, altho' I usually hate planning and making lists... doing all of that for this project has been alot of fun... I think it helps that the huge green-board in our dorm is my paper substitute. However, I have switched to more portable list-worthy apparatus. :)

Usually we're pretty bogged down by work and don't really get out of the campus much... but thanks to sourcing stuff for our walkabout - right from raw materials to (capital) assets (read Super Kallan ... our much-in-demand stove) we've been around Luzon quite a bit... first we went to Libertad - Pasay, then Baktikan Street and tomorrow we'll probably have to make a trip to UN Avenue and in the middle of all of this we gotta find slates and hay!

We've managed to get some decorative objects to Indianify our stall FOR FREE from our supplier...

So right now our room has a Super Kallan, an electric frier and raw materials... come tomorrow, it'll be filled with hay, fairy lights, et al... thankfully we have really supportive roomies...

I'll keep you posted! Watch this space for breaking news featuring exclusively our tea stall!

Walkabout Update

It's one thing to decide on the walkabout topic but its another thing altogether executing it...it's been alot of fun brainstorming about how we'll decorate our tea stall - but we realized that we couldnt really go bezerk with our costs and big picture people that we are... you can imagine how restricted we felt. And then came the arguments... could we include blah blah... lets also have yada yada... what should we call our tea stall?

The interesting part is.. I usually avoid conflicts at all costs... don't really like them too much... but while figuring out all this stuff with my fellow walkaboutees, I realized that conflicts are over-rated in the sense... people avoid them coz they (I) feel relations could sour or nothing of value will come out of it. Maybe its what I read in our HBO 'Conflict Management' class - "Polite conversations lead to polite solutions" that has changed the anti-conflictness in me. It's actually fun to see things from somebody else's perspective and when I say see things I mean understand where they're coming from, once you've gotten past the defensive stage...

So to cut the long story short...we've successfully managed to reach consensus on what we're going to have at our very own tea-stall here at AIM and also managed to agree on a name!

Now comes the execution... as long as its not our execution, it's all good...!

Techno-crazy

I'm not as much a gizmo fan as I'd like to be...the way technology changes and with my myriad interests its difficult to stay updated... Geez I already sound like a technognorant (my attempt at coining funny words - techno-ignorant)....

But in terms of business' dealing with this same phenomenan, I think it's going to be pretty challenging for all companies coz companies themselves today decide the lifespan of their products (inspired by Critical Change by Goldratt)... with emergent technology every few months there's going to be more of a 'generation gap', if I could call it that. I'm part of the 20-25 year old's and I know how the parents of our generation crib and complain about how they don't gel with technology coz they don't understand it!!!Very soon I see people of all ages complaining that they don't know as much as people a few years younger do!

This in my eyes is going to get corporates to design various kinds of products to cater to all levels of technology-know-how. Can you imagine the amount of product differentiation that would involve. Not only that companies are going to have to come up with more captivating ways of marketing a product with 'improved benefits'.

Things are getting interesting.

Uncertainty displaced

The world is pretty arbitrary... Quite often I find myself feeling disconnected with what I've learnt and what I see... most things, when you study about them in theory, seem pretty grandiose and oh so simple... but it's the Murphiness in life that disconnects reality from theory...

However, personally for me, the qualitative subjects here at AIM have exposed me to a more realistic perspective of things... not just postulates that ought to work...

Today especially I feel that there are absolutely no certainties with anything and its probably foolish to expect them to ever be there... I don't think it's possible to learn enough to know anything for certain... and I think it's a huge thing for me to digest and come to terms with...

Strangely, it feels good to realize this.

And so begin the Walkabout preparations

There's been something or the other going on pretty much every weekend this term at AIM (Asian Institute of Management). Finally Rachna, Shibani and me got down to getting some serious work done for our Walkabout.

A walkabout is kinda like an initiation ceremony that Australian aborigines go through to prove their coming of age... here at AIM it assumes alot of significance coz it has been adapted to the business-world concept. In fact our Associate Dean, Prof. Ricardo Lim spoke about the walkabout being a unique feature of AIM when interviewed by one of the leading MBA websites, pagalguy.com. (Check here for the full interview http://www.pagalguy.com/index.php?categoryid=51&p2_articleid=1506). Each student here has to do a 'walkabout', in the sense, not necessarily go off into the wilderness (although we were contemplating that) and 'survive' but do something that we've never done before, something that stretches us, something that changes us, something that makes us grow.

There are two ways of looking at it... one just do something you haven't done before or do something that you've always wanted to do but haven't had the b@#%%s to do before...

Our plan is to have a 'chai' stall right here on campus from late evening to early morning - why coz there's a need in the market for this product, at this time, done this way (I like using 3 adjectives, reasons etc... it feels poetic to me) - a good cup of tea (or is it a cup of good tea) can solve anything. (I agree with you Katti on this... we will forever remember our chai sessions by the poolside... won't we). As a rider, I want to add that I also think beer does the same thing.

We're nervously excited about it coz we're gonna have to micro-manage (bleccchhh) and time-manage (wow... if only I could do that).

Up until today we were figuring out what we wanted to do exactly with the stall and now that we have a fair idea we went in to 'source' our requirements.

Usually when you goto a shop, negotiating comes naturally to you... what happened today was that now that I knew we were being MBA-esque, part of me was doing it and the other part was observing, relating what we were doing to what we've read or studied and getting supremely amused.

Honestly I feel there's nothing new that you learn in an MBA... its primarily things you have been doing... it's just a shift of perspective to making it more non-mundane.

Anyway, coming back to our sourcing exploits... we've managed to get a good deal (cannot be disclosed... confidentiality and all that jazz ;-)) on raw materials as well as capital investment...

Encouraging Entrepreneurship

While looking for an Asian Sports Company for my Asian Business Systems paper here at AIM, Manila I chanced upon this website http://www.hotteststartups.in/coolestStartupsRankingList.do?method=fetch&businessFn=top50Startups. It's not surprising to see TATA at the forefront of such a contest. Apparently it's the first peoples choice type of contest. Brings to my mind the fact that today everybody wants to participate. Even if you look at the type of shows that people enjoy, it's mainly vicarious enjoyment through reality shows and game shows wherein people have to send in their vote. People's choice matters. Although I do think that currently since we're at the start of this participative trend, there might be a herd mentality. Very soon that should be replaced with informative participation and that is when companies are going to need to be more synchronous with their primary stakeholders i.e. their consumers.

Coming back to this website, some of these business ideas are really great and the internet allows these to be exhibited to a large mass. I honestly feel they should include courses in business schools on how to juice out as much as you can through Web 2.0 offerings.

Another thing that came to mind was a question that are more people looking to set up their own ventures in the face of lots of standardization and boredom with regular jobs? Have they realized that maximum value will come from occupying niche long tails?