“An IIT guys bags off a salary of 1.2 cr.” or “Another guy from IIM has set a record by bagging off 1.5 cr.” These are some of the news flashes from the top notch universities from where the students get into these corporate work sectors. Apart from this, entrepreneurship and start-ups have altogether taken a new cool in India. Some even leave their high pay offs and go forward with their own start-ups. While, both of these two sectors have their own relative advantages and disadvantages, let us try to analyse and examine the work culture in both of the sectors.
Flexibility
Well, one of the very unique advantages you would perceive before getting into a start-up is that, you will be the sole manager of your own time. You are the one who will decide upon your working hours, your leisure time according to what fits best to your comfort zone. You don’t need to get pissed off working within the same stipulated time period, which otherwise you might be cursing yourself when you would be sitting before your laptop screen and typing some code (because you have a deadline to meet) when there would be a live streaming of an India-Pakistan match in your city. You hold your sole proprietorship. This however cannot disguise the fact that, venturing into a start-up will surge your working hours. Be very sure about the fact that your working time is bound to get doubled to trebled in a start-up. If you work 40 hours a week in your job, be very sure that in a start-up, the figure would be no less than 80 hours a week. But, whether you desire to be a night owl or an early riser is all your choice. Your flexibility is not just restricted to time but you also enjoy the freedom of working from your home or a random coffee shop where your mind may yield better results and that too in your comfortable tees and pyjamas, because after all, start-up is more about performance than a certain set of rules and regulations.
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Ownership
Now who does not dream to be an owner of a big company, getting down of an Audi, wearing a Rolex and enjoying all comforts that life has to offer. But if you work with a big company, it might take years and years for you to fulfill these dreams of yours, no matter how talented you are. Your hold turns complete upside down when working with or in a start-up. It tests your true potential and if you are really skilled and hard-working with luck playing a little role, you will reach the zenith of your success faster than you can even imagine. Now think about where Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg would land up today if they had joined a big company then. It’s all about the difference between the choices you make, a choice between whether you want to be a small part of a big company or a big contributor of a small one which may eventually grow BIG, very BIG.
Responsibilities
As the saying goes, “With great power comes great responsibility.” Yes, you are the owner, the CEO of a company that is just in the phase of learning how to fly. As such, you enjoy great powers on deciding what is good and what is bad for your firm. You enjoy a considerable control on all sorts of decisions. The success and failure of you and your entire team rests greatly on your adjudicator. If you take amazing decisions that will bring home great success, you will be applauded and appraised by all your comrades and partners. Whereas a small wrong step or insincerity will lead the entire company, pay for it. But, most of the start-ups prefer agility and speed to cautiousness. However, you can be assured that your mistake won’t get you into any trouble as long as you are on the right track.
Risks
Well a big company pays you a really huge sum despite the fact that it extracts everything out of you. You get a job security and a well-off living. In the same stand, if you are thinking of becoming a millionaire as soon as you start your firm, drop your idea instantly because joining a start-up is again a very risky and a daunting work because you do not have a path laid in front of you, rather you have to build one, the one in which you and your team have to walk. You are basically venturing into the world of the unknown. You are building something out of nothing. Under these circumstances, you are unaware about your own future. Generally the chances of success of a start-up are less than a percent. Gathering fund from the investors has become a mammoth task. Investors will find every possible excuse not to fund your start-up (after all it’s their money that is at stake). And even if your start-up gets funded, it cannot guarantee you success. You will start running out of your cash within 12-18 months of your start. You have a burden of paying off your employees before feeding your own pocket. Seeing some successful start-ups performing exceptionally well, you cannot blindly dream of the same in a matter of few months. Even those start-ups had to face atrocities and failures before reaching there. When cash runs out, you need to start spending from your own pocket i.e. you need to sacrifice all your savings (if you have any), in spite of such risks.
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Opportunities
A multinational company will naturally intend to converge, your focus into a little portion of the entire work, for which it pays you. Generalists do not usually perform very well in such companies as they demand its employees to be extremely good at the small portion you spend your entire time with. So your opportunity for an overall growth lags miles behind. Though even in a start-up, you require people with special skill-set, but the scenario has a different dimension there. Initially the number of members in a start-up is limited owing to the limited amount of resources. So they ought to make the best use of each person. An engineer instead of limiting himself to technical stuffs can also make his hands dirty by getting into marketing, financing or accounting. So in a start-up, you get a wider exposure, which helps in honing your skills vividly. It will definitely make you feel better something amazingly good than what your job simply demands from you.
Company Culture
You can never ever dream of changing the culture, the rules and regulations at your work place in a corporate world. But with a start-up, you get to decide and frame the culture of your own company. You have a say in every decision the company makes because you are one of its valuable member. You are free to share all your ideas, which are bound to be heard, which otherwise gets curbed in big companies. After all a company is an extension of its founder’s personality. A start-up culture fosters laughter, easy and non-political working environment and all entrepreneurs struggle to maintain this as the business grows.
Procuring
After joining a start-up, you will get the contingency to do a lot of interviews. Being a member of the interview panel, you enjoy the full freedom of choosing whom to hire and whom not to. You will be interviewing marketers, engineers, salesperson and possibly anyone whom you need in your company. You will be the one deciding their salaries and work. This gives you an amazing happiness which no money can buy you.
Being a part of a start-up is analogous to creating a small and a happy community, a small group of best friends. When you venture in the path of entrepreneurship, you possibly may be having nothing today except for your idea and enthusiasm to achieve it. But nobody can fathom the rate of your success in the near future. “A machine will not become a better one after working for years. It will simply wear out”. Similarly your work experience in corporate sector will serve you no good in your start-up. The more you delay, the lesser will be your chances of success. As Farrah Gray aptly stated, “Build your own dreams, else someone else will hire you to build theirs.”
