Kruti School : Business plan and Stucture

Kruti School : Business plan and Stucture
Update on the meeting held on Saturday 01-March-2008
Raghav, Bijesh and Vilas
We had a good discussion on the Business Plan for the Kruti School.
I had my own concerns about the feasibility of the meeting and called Bijesh in the afternoon he readily agreed to join the meeting at my house. Vilas had already confirmed. Both came on time and we had good discussion for more than hour. We wanted to capture Vilas’s experience in managing a start-up and Bijesh’s fresh ideas from his “fresh” IIM experience. At the same time we did our best to go beyond “What we know “and “What we don’t know” , In fact Tata’s “Nano” was inspiration to go beyond !

Before I forget let me capture the Key points from Notes (from my new PDA!! )
Some the things which we need to define clarity
1. Parameter (in terms of size, scale and function)
2. Target Segment
3. Who’s who
4. Key Questions
5. Vision and Mission
6. Legal aspects
7. Personal Vision (Why?/context)

1. Parameter (in terms of size, scale and function)
One of the important factors to define the Business model and operational process is to looking at
- What is the size of the operation (like number of students, classes, duration of the classes)
- Definition and clarity of the Organization Structure
- Look into to pro’s and con’s of different structures like Trust, Charitable Trust, Society, Pvt. Ltd. And/or combination
- Action Item:
1. Study structures of various organizations like Manipal foundation, Ramayaa Institute, Natya Shankar , Nrutygram, Shantiniketan etc.
2. Identify list of relevant people and meet them and get further insights

2. Target Segment
We had interesting discussion about the target segment. Whether the school will cater to the Middle class / upper middle class / upper class and/or all classes together.
Bijesh and Vilas mentioned that Parents will have concern if we have students from different Socio-economic background and are taught together.
I’m sure Veena has different view on this concern. I was looking at it more from a financial model point of view. This we will take up in larger meeting. The outcome will be an input for the Business Plan.

3. Who’s who

What we discussed was we should be clear the Roles and responsibilities of each role and also the required qualification/abilities to handle the role.

4. Key Questions
We decided that to maintain list of questions that we are not clear about. We start taking actions to address these questions based on priorities.

5. Vision and Mission
Drafting a clear vision and mission statement is vital to base our activities. That needs to be taken up.
6. Legal aspects
This point also covers our structure to register Kruti as a legal entity. One of the ideas is to talk to some CA’s about this and get more details.
7. Personal Vision (Why?/context)
I was of the opinion that we all should look at answering the question “Why I’m doing what I’m doing right now?” especially in the context of setting up Kruti School. Few things which inspire me finding my passion in this process, may be like developing “Nano” , it is also like ‘omens’ in Alchemist .. I’m in search of the treasure and more interested in the journey.

Bijesh was requesting me “please don’t tell me do introspection”, I will just do it :-)

In the beginning we had discussion about leadership , whether we should have a one leader and he/she should have answers for all etc. Then we could see that Kruti School can be created with the collective leadership of the core team members.

Bijesh shared few interesting facts that normally organizations registered as Trust will not last longer than one generation. He was inspired by the Rabidranath Tagore and his Shantiniketan.

This is a brief update of the discussion and I will update the team during weekly meeting and start taking action on the action items.

Ooops – We did Discussion on Business plan without any numbers J
Last but not the least ….
Did we accomplish what we wanted to accomplish from the meeting?
I don’t know but we had lot of FUN!!!! :-)