So you want to Build a Business?

Proteus will be turning three this October. I am very happy to report that we have seen steady development. Our backlog looks good and we have few repeat clients. Water+Energy initiative has really taken off, with the energy sector now very engaged  and excited about the next frontier in Water-Energy Nexus. Proteus is also working on launching two new software in the coming months. Talks are underway on the design and development of a web-based Water Audit database system for Commercial, Institutional, and Industrial sectors. This will be great fun!

Today's post however relates to Entrepreneurship. I mentor several start-ups as well as established businesses who are looking to enter the water world. Most come to me for sector specific knowledge, but I also find myself coaching them on business development, and more specifically CEO development. I prefer to talk directly with the CEO, and when I do I check for the following traits:

Clarity of Vision

Incurable Optimism

Limitless Curiosity

Abounding Creativity

Loving Risk and Taking Action

Tenacious and Persistent

Adept Communicator

Leadership Intelligence

Work Hard/Play Hard

CEOs represent the company and I have found that if they don't exemplify the above mentioned traits, it is very difficult for the company to survive let alone flourish. If any of these traits are lacking, it will drive the company towards mediocrity, and often times failure.

For example, few CEOs just rattle off the product/service description when asked what does their company do. This is unfortunate in so many ways. It shows that there is lack of Vision and ability to Communicate, and sub-par Leadership skills. If they cannot tell me what the company does, how will they make the customer happy, and then how will they keep their workers inspired? I coach some of them to start working on the WHY of their business, and it is often a 'change the world' story. That is the crux of why the business will grow, customers will love it, and people would want to come work for them.

I also look for the CEO's diversity plans, and answer to "what next?" I want them to relate to me their road-map for the next few years. No, I do not need the numbers and a leather bound business plan with pretty bar charts for every future product. But the CEO should demonstrate foresight, once he has the market, what will he do next? How will he remain competitive? Where are the gaps in his industry, how will he produce product / service to fill those gaps? How will he branch out?

Successful entrepreneurs are always asking questions. I find them asking me more questions than we have time for. Along with the questions they ask, I see their eyes light up, I find them connecting dots and ideas springing in their head and new concepts flow. They start finding new pastures, define new work products. Curiosity and Creativity combine.

Living with risk is an amazing trait. These CEOs are willing to stand at the edge with faith in their offering. There are too many armchair prospectors out there, who sit and discuss ideas but do not have the courage to get up and make it work. I also find many such people stressing out about whether to go for a corporation or LLC, where to incorporate, how to get VC money right away, etc. These people usually don't end up having a successful business, they are too risk adverse. They are not willing to go out on the limb for the sake of their ideas, they are too attached to a steady paycheck and cannot accept a 50-70% cut and live on Ramen noodles. You did that in school, so why can't you do it again for a few years? Why do you need the extravagant lifestyle? You can't play it safe. You have to take risk, yes smart risk, but none the less, you have to be able to risk a lot to gain a lot.

Last but not the least trait of a successful entrepreneur is their ability to switch on and off. When they work hard, they put their all into it, nothing held back - sleepless nights working towards a sale, relentless pursuit of quality deliverable, attention to details, no attention to personal grooming / eating (Ramen), ... Then, when the deliverable is done, they switch off for real, and get back to the world, reconnect, hang out with friends and get a refill on nutrition and emotion.

This has been my experience, both as an entrepreneur myself, and working with others in this realm.

SmartOperations is the Future

Last week at CWEA Annual Conference, I had some very interesting conversations with leaders of our industry about the future. Here is a gist of my perceptions that I shared liberally with everyone.

The Future of the Water Industry, at least for the next two decades, will be all about Smart Operations. Over the last hundred years, Engineering was leading the show. This was because we needed to invent processes and technologies that can clean water from rivers, lakes, and oceans to make them palatable and safe for human consumption. Once that water has been through the 'human system', we also worked on technologies that will clean the water to a sufficient level safe for reintroduction into nature. We are there; we have figured out the basic engineering technologies that can effectively produce clean water. Yes, there are still some frontiers to conquer, such as trace organics and pharmaceuticals, but engineering on those frontiers will unlikely yield a 'breakthrough' and will most likely have diminishing returns. I am not advocating that engineers and scientists should not spend time on those peripheral problems, it is just that the industry will shift towards effective implementation of what is already there. Operations will take primacy over Engineering.

This is a major shift for the industry, you can compare it to the way water bodies turnover during change of seasons. All major institutions in the water world is currently dominated by engineers, be it the EPA, the major trade associations like AWWA,WEF, WateReuse, the regulatory agencies, the agency leadership, etc. Engineering consulting firms also dominate the direction that the industry takes. But this is changing and this transformation will get faster by the day. Engineering consulting firms are already facing the choice of just becoming Planning firms or to become Design-Build focused companies. Planning firms will develop program level plans and when needed work on 30% design of facilities. Treatment plants of the future will be more equipment driven and packaged than custom designed (as they are now). Design-Build firms will be led by construction managers and engineers will assist them to take those 30% designs to fruition. For engineers, the choice is to quickly adapt to this new model or perish.

Smart Operations will mean redesigning the water and wastewater agencies as businesses and focus on continuous optimization. Most water agencies currently react to water demand and supply stresses and wastewater agencies believe that they exist to maintain regulatory compliance only. Water agencies of the future will get ahead of the supply-demand race and work to control both the issues. On the supply side, focus will be on reliability investments, water grids will become smart grids just like the electricity grid with infusion of software and sensors, and the demand side will see an increased management effort. Wastewater agencies will reinvent themselves to be factories with three designer products to sell - clean water, nutrient rich fertilizer, and electricity. The technologies to get there is already available, the only limiting ingredient is the foresight and confidence of the operations managers.

Water SmartOperations
(C) PROTEUS Consulting

To make this happen, PROTEUS Consulting is working on building bridges between the Water sector and other sectors - Energy, Information Technology, Economics/Finance, and Communications. Before the end of this year you will see Energy and Water Sectors forging new paths, where water sector will act as flexible loads to help balance the grid and in turn get to access a new revenue stream independent of water sales. Software will play a very important role in SmartOperations with business intelligence, knowledge management, gamification, text analytics, data mining, learning networks, etc. taking the center stage. PROTEUS expects to usher the growth of software solutions for the water industry and we will also champion the use of open source code to enable the maximum benefit to these publicly owned and operated water and wastewater agencies. Economics within the water agencies and financing of infrastructure projects will change. Water trading networks, real-time value chain operations, infusion of private equity, are a few initiatives PROTEUS is working on. As for communications, gone are the days when the water industry was churning out calendars with 'save water' sketches, you will find art, literature, theater, cinema, games, and mobile apps flowing all around you. Stay tuned!

World Development and Change, the Pillars and Slabs

I am a civil engineer and much of my basic training was in structural engineering before I shifted to environmental engineering for my Masters. So I often tend to go back on analogies from my civil/ structural engineering training. Here is one of those analogies.

I believe that as we evolve as a civilization, our knowledge of the world around us gets more pronounced. Ancient humans were able to appreciate the world around us, their theories rested on empirical observations, and many things that they predicted based of these observations are pretty set on the mark. Science and Technology is relatively new and has found the 'reason' behind many a phenomenon over the last 3000 years. We are slated for even more fascinating times ahead.

This evolution of science and technology, I believe, has happened just like we build buildings. We lay a foundation, and then erect pillars, followed by a slab, then again pillars, followed by slabs, and so forth. For a structure to be stable, you cannot just go on building pillars, for without slabs, there will be no integrity and no use of the structure either. Slabs connect the pillars, transfer forces from one pillar to the other and ultimately to the foundation. Slabs are fundamental to the building as the pillars, they also enable people to make a home on them and live.

In the development of science and technology, the pillars are the discipline specific R&D that leads to great breakthroughs in those disciplines. For example, in the years leading to the Renaissance, there was development going on in physics, biology, engineering, astronomy, music, painting  and many such fields. When the Renaissance period came, a slab was built. The beauty of that period was that the foremost scientists and artists of the period started mingling with each other and sharing their ideas and approaches. That era afforded the opportunity and encouraged the cross pollination. As a result, there were many breakthroughs that can be directly attributed to the fact that the physicists sat along side the painters and discussed solutions together.

I think that we are at the threshold of another such era. We have made tremendous progress in individual fields, especially biology, IT, energy, etc. Now, it is time to share the discoveries across disciplines and cross pollinate again. The opening of the world due to the social networks make this even more easy to do. We need to build a slab that joins all the various disciplines and share the ideas and insights. This will yield a Renaissance of modern times. I sincerely believe this. And for this reason I work very diligently in the innovation space and consult with start-up companies. It does not matter if they are designing a new touchless mobile app for autistic kids to help them read books or if there is a group designing ground penetrating sensing devices to look for oil. It does not have to be linked to the Water industry, all I want is to learn about the edge ideas. This gets me thinking of novel applications in other fields, it opens up my mind to think differently and devise new ways to integrate technologies across disciplines. In that process I can identify for my start-up clients new markets, new possibilities, and have them be the defining and often disruptive technology in those markets. I enjoy this process a lot!

Watch this space, in the next few weeks I will be showcasing my fascinating discoveries at the WBT Showcase I am attending this week.