Be Empactful

Welcome to Season 2 of the Be Empactful Podcast.

This is Episode 3 of this season where we are exploring how to build Sustainable Businesses.

Sustainability has 2 sides  - one is for businesses to be focussing on economic, ecological, and environmental development; the other is to become stable, flexible, and resilient to be able to weather any market upheavals and bounce back to a growth path. This episode is focussing on the latter concept of sustainability - building resilient businesses.

Our guest today, Aparna Ramesh K, is an Executive Behavioral Coach with a mixed bag of experience across 26 years as part of the corporate world and later in the solopreneur journey. She has worked with executives helping them with career management decisions, improving their team performance, enhancing their leadership styles. She especially focuses on helping women in leadership roles gain mastery in self-awareness and develop an authentic leadership style

We speak about her journey from confusion to consistency, how she uses experiences from various facets of the professional and personal aspects of her life to realize her own potential and develop her niche in behavioral training and coaching for individuals and executives.

She shares her experiences of confusion during her time in the corporate world, then doing various things when she started her entrepreneurial journey and facing her failures with resilience to build her practice today.

For this interested to know more about Aparna’s story, and her coaching tips, check out her YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC70hnqbR7hEuDeQCeOOobRg. She has around 200 videos on how you can improve yourself, increase productivity and become more resilient.

Her 3 key pieces of advice to our listeners to build resilience in your business:

Let us know how you bounced back or are building resilience in your business. Reach out to us if you want to discuss, just share a thought or even a cup of coffee

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See with your Heart, Listen with your Mind. Spread your wings far and wide

Welcome to Season 2 of the Be Empactful Podcast.

This is Episode 2 of this season where we are exploring how to build Sustainable Businesses.

This episode will be exploring the role of communities in building sustainable businesses.

Sustainable Communities are a powerful tool in redefining societies and businesses. The power of compounded thought coming together for a fixed purpose has often been the catalyst of change across the world and throughout history.

In modern times, we first take a look at Auroville, in Puducherry, India, which is a community-built, community-driven, and community-managed society welcoming people from all over who are committed to their way of living and growing. This is a thriving society that is growing by the day. Check out more at https://www.auroville.org

A simple vision to build a business that focuses on engaging and developing local communities while also building a business that uses the environment around – that is truly disruptive. And that is what Nirvana did to put Kamshet, a local hillside hamlet, on the global paragliding map. Taking it further and to give their clients a wholesome experience, Native Place was born – a resort that is in harmony with the surroundings and engages the local communities for staff, materials, etc. Check out more at https://www.flynirvana.com/ & http://nativeplace.com/

When minds with different ideas and experiences but united in a common purpose come together, what is created is a unique enterprise that builds successful and truly sustainable business for themselves, the stakeholders, the community, and the platform at large. Dandelion Energy, birthed from Google’s Moonshot Factory, has investors, advisory, and management from multiple industry backgrounds to provide urban heating and cooling services using geothermal energy. Check them out at https://dandelionenergy.com/

And finally, when the purpose is to create a community that helps other product companies make Environment-friendly choices, Be Earthly saw this purpose evolve into a business model that is successfully supporting and growing Earth-friendly product companies to reach out to their markets. Check them out at ​https://instagram.com/beearthly_official?utm_medium=copy_link

Harnessing the power of community to build a business is not just for larger or more established companies or specific industries. The examples shared are from various industries at various stages of growth with inclusive communities that are growing

Let us know how you are using communities to grow your business or need our help in building your business through communities.

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See with your Heart, Listen with your Mind. Spread your wings far and wide

Welcome to Season 2 of the Be Empactful Podcast.

Season 1 was about the 4 KYC Framework and how you can build a strong business strategy by knowing intimately about your company, customer, competitor, and community.

Season 2 will be looking into how we can build sustainable businesses. The first episode of this season takes a peek into what are sustainable businesses in the normal sense of the world and the components.

Sustainability in business is not just about surviving or growing profitable - it is looking at your organizational or business strategy through the 3 lenses of Economical (Profit), Ecological (Society / People), and Environmental (Planet) impacts. Businesses need to create a balance between these 3 components: delivering growth to their profits,  development to people both within and outside their organization while maintaining or improving the environmental conditions around them.

Development of society and conservation of the environment cannot be an afterthought or outcome of profits - it has to be a part of the process of manufacturing the product or delivering a service and earning through the same

Profits - People - Planet - this needs to be a guiding mantra of organizations - big, small or micro, & we hope to be a catalyst to make organizations think that way.

So join us on this journey of Being Empactful - Creating Impacts with Empathy!! Share with us your journey or thoughts and ideas of how businesses can be truly sustainable.

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See with your Heart, Listen with your Mind. Spread your wings far and wide

Welcome back to the Be Empactful Podcast with us host bees, Shiva & Vineet!!

As the world is going through the rollercoaster ride, we have had our share of roller coasters in the journey which led us to this podcast.

As Season 1 comes to an end with 10 episodes (Episode 1 to Episode 10),

Here are some key pointers.

There are 4 KYC to build your BS:

Company

Customer

Competition

Community

The AEIOU of Marketing:

Awareness

Education

Interest

Opportunity

Ubiquity

5 key stakeholders in Community Building:

Infrastructure

Service Providers

Network

Knowledge

Capital

The world has gone online and the distances have been reduced by Zoom Calls. Remember, Marketing & Community Strategy is not instant gratification but a long-term journey.

Listen to the podcast episodes, read the blog posts & connect with us to share your experiences, comments, and stories:

Be Empactful:

Shiva:

Vineet:

Welcome back to the Be Empactful Podcast with us host bees, Shiva & Vineet!!

After covering the journey of the 4 KYC to build your BS and our friends Beevis and his brothers building Beehive X, delving a little deeper into the Marketing Journey.

Today we will discuss:

Why is Community a necessary part of the Strategy?

&

How can Community be Integrated into Strategy?

Community Building is a subset of Marketing Strategy & it plays an integral role in building and broadening the audience base where businesses are pooling in resources from multiple stakeholders and each one benefits from it.

Here is the Equation coined by Vineet:

PEOPLE + PURPOSE + GUIDELINES = COMMUNITY BUILDING + GROWTH

This becomes clearer from the 3 examples:

1. Salesforce

It is a global CRM solution that drives dollars & cents for the business.

But Everybody speaks about the Trailblazer Community as it is a strategic differentiator as people now buy Salesforce because they get this giant warm blanket of the global ecosystem wrapped around them in a global Community.

Erica Kuhl played a key role in nurturing the community at Salesforce for 17 years here’s 3 articles from an interview:

2. Facebook

Facebook is a social media platform that most of us have used and they have started investing into the community through Facebook Certified Community Manager (FCCM) Program which gets the tools and recognition to build, scale and connect communities more meaningfully.

Here is the link to the articles:

“Figure It Out” is the mantra given by Vineet on 18-Feb-21 in the “Real Stories from Community Manager” series in FCCM Private Group.

3. 91springboard

5 critical things needed for an organization to succeed - Infrastructure, Service Providers, Network, Knowledge & Capital.

This was shared by Varun Chawla, Co-Founder, 91springboard in “My Big Plunge feat 91springboard” - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7nfPzQAZeg

Which became the basis on which Vineet became a Community Professional.

We also share some experience on How Community becomes a critical piece in the Strategy  - but we are not sharing it here - you need to listen to the podcast for it :))

So let us know how you are planning your marketing journeys if you tried any of the tips we mentioned or have any other of your own!! Buzz us a line - we are waiting to hear from you and happy to help in any way we can.

Welcome back to the Be Empactful Podcast with us host bees, Shiva & Vineet!!

After covering the journey of the 4 KYC to build your BS and our friends Beevis and his brothers building Beehive X, today we delve a little deeper into the #Marketing Journey.

A Marketing Journey begins with creating a strategy that is based on knowing your company, customers, and competitors (Ep 2-7). Simply put, a Marketing Strategy is the plan to create awareness to engage your potential target market and convert them into customers for your company’s product or service.

Preparing for the Marketing Journey is similar to planning any other journey:

The marketing journey is a 5 step process - the A-E-I-O-U of Marketing that helps you define the journey to #identifying, #acquiring, #engaging, and #retaining the customer for a brand’s lifecycle.

A - Awareness - Let your customers know you exist.

E - Educate - Educate your customers to establish your credentials with information and knowledge.

I - Interest - Create Interest through engaging with your customers.

O - Opportunity - Create the Opportunity to convert your potential customer into paying Clients.

U - Ubiquity - Reaching out to the customers across channels and geographies – online and offline.

This AEIOU is not a single cycle but is a continuously turning wheel to build and rebuild customer engagement and refresh the customer relationships.

We also share some simple tips to get you started on your Marketing Journey - but we are not sharing it here - you need to listen to the podcast for it :)

So let us know how you are planning your marketing journeys if you tried any of the tips we mentioned or have any other of your own!! Buzz us a line - we are waiting to hear from you and happy to help in any way we can.

Be Empactful:

Shiva:

Vineet:

Thank you for joining us, the Host Bees, Shiva & Vineet on this journey of building Empactful Organisations.

We explored the building blocks for an Empactful Organisation - the 4KYCs to set your organization on the growth path along with the wise sayings of our wise old BumbleBee which helped shape our strategies at each stage or building block, while also helping our friends Beevis and his brothers in building Beehive X.

“See with your Heart, Listen with your Mind”: Ep 3 & 4 - Know your Company & Customer

“If you can’t be where you want to be, then flap wings with those who are where you cannot be”: Ep 5 - Know your Competitor

“See with your Heart, Listen with your Mind, Spread Your Wings Far & Wide”: Ep 6 - Know your Community

1st KYC - Know Your Company:

Answer the following questions objectively for all aspects of your business that you think are strengths or differentiators:

i)  Does this aspect deliver actual value or benefit to both your customers & your company.

ii) Is the aspect or feature rare to find or develop in the market – how easy or difficult would it be for a competitor to develop that aspect or feature within their company.

iii) Is this aspect of the value delivered easily to imitate or replicate by the competition - as stated in (i).

iv) Is your company able to fully use, develop and further grow this aspect or feature – do you have the right organization, structure, values & policies that allow the company to fully use this aspect.

2nd KYC - Know Your Customer:

Build the Customer Empathy Map, but don’t wait for the PERFECT Map to start.

3rd KYC - Know Your Competitor:

The Opportunity driven SWOT analysis requires you to first list all possible (& not-so-possible) Opportunities and then analyze the strengths & capabilities to seize the opportunities. Once you have the list of strengths and capabilities, analyze the 3rd step is to evaluate yourself & your strengths objectively. That will help build a list of opportunities to seize immediately and & which ones should be left for later - Check Ep 5 for details.

4th KYC - Know Your Community:

It has the power to extend your vision beyond physical boundaries and many a time, make the vision bigger & larger.

A successful community is built through Purpose on 5 blocks – Infrastructure, Service Providers, Networks, Knowledge & Capital.

Similarly, the 3 companies which came together as the pandemic restrictions were lifted in Ep 1 to deliver a new service, went through the 4 KYC framework to successfully design & deliver their services & build the business.

So listen to this episode and let us know your thoughts on utilizing the 4 KYC framework to Strategise, Position & Execute new processes and lead your organization on the Growth Path.

Connect with us to share your experiences, comments & stories:

Thank you for joining us, the Host Bees, Shiva, and Vineet on this journey of building Empactful Organisations. Over the last few weeks, we introduced ourselves, spoke about the 4 KYCs to build your BS, and explored Knowing your Company, Customer & Competitor. This week we explore the 4th & final C of the KYC - Know your Community!

This episode of “Know Your Community” explains the 5 critical components of an ecosystem required to make your business successful by identifying the right stakeholder to partner with by being part of the critical piece for your clients and playing a critical role in ensuring the success of your partners & stakeholders.

These 5 components are Infrastructure, Service Providers, Network, Knowledge & Capital. Each stakeholder contributes their part according to their capabilities and it compounds into bigger impacts.

“See with your Heart, Listen with your Mind, Spread your wings Far & Wide.” - sage advice given by our meditating Bumblebee to our friends Beevis & his brothers.

Identifying the stakeholders of the ecosystem and purposefully engaging with them on a single platform that provides the safe space to build trust and enable collaboration between them to help them spread their wings far & wide.

As Beevis & his brothers in the quest to make the best honey and make the world the greener place collaborated with birds, insects & other animals with the cross-pollination of pollen along the way creating a ripple effect far & wide in mother nature.

Similarly, we discuss an IT training & consulting company for a leading ERP provider who engaged with their training participants meaningfully that created a ripple effect far & wide.

So listen to this episode and let us know about the critical components of your business & its ecosystem and how you are spreading your wings far & wide with the Community to create a long-lasting impact.

Connect with us to share your experiences, comments, and stories:

Be Empactful:

https://facebook.com/beempactful | https://Instagram.com/beempactful.com | https://linkedin.com/company/be-empactful-podcast

Shiva:

Vineet:

Thank you for joining us, the Host Bees, Shiva & Vineet on this journey of building Empactful Organisations. 

Over the last few weeks, we introduced ourselves, spoke about the 4 KYCs to build your BS, and explored Knowing your Company and Customer. This week we explore the 3rd of the KYCs - Know your Competition!

This episode of "Knowing your Competitor" explores how you can partner with your competitor, analyzing your strengths and weaknesses with respect to the opportunities in the market, and analyzing your threats to see which can be converted into opportunities.

“If you can’t be where you want to be, then flap wings with those who are” - sage advice given by our meditating bumblebee to our friends Beevis and his brothers. With markets being widespread, companies cannot service customers everywhere.

While “Partnering with your Competitor” sounds like a business oxymoron, it is what multiple companies in the world have been doing - for mutual benefit and/or larger marketplace development. However, it is important that the competitor you are choosing to partner with has similar long-term objectives and there is the synergy between the companies vision and mission - in other words - you look for collaborators through the lens of “See with your Heart and Listen with your Mind”.

An important and basic tool often used by companies to analyze their market position is the SWOT analysis - which can be limiting your market opportunities to your defined strengths and weaknesses. A new way of looking at the SWOT is as below, which allows you to explore opportunities, that you may not have considered earlier and then evaluate where you stand to be able to seize those opportunities:

Step 1: Start listing down every possible opportunity that you can think of – Don’t limit yourself – think blue sky!! 

Step 2: Once you have the list, then write down the skills, attributes, and resources required to seize those opportunities. 

Step 3: Honestly evaluate yourself against each of the opportunities – strong, medium, or weak!! The medium are areas of improvement and the weak are non-existent in your organization today and need to be developed 

Step 4: The opportunities where you have the most strengths – are the ones that are ripe to be seized now – and these rest can be prioritized as per the strength evaluation!

An additional step is to analyze your threats, as you perceive them, as to why they are threats - the root cause, and then start putting in place the mechanisms to counter these threats, e.g., new skills or capability development where they lack, partnerships (even with competitors) for supplement or complement capabilities.

So let us know how you are flapping your wings with those who are where you cannot be and learning how to seize the right opportunity that the market presents to you.

Connect with us to share your experiences, comments, and stories:

Be Empactful:

Shiva:

Vineet:

Thank you for joining us, the Host Bees, Shiva, and Vineet on this journey of building Empactful Organisations. 

Over the last few weeks, we introduced ourselves, spoke about the 4 KYCs to build your business, and explored Knowing your #Company. This week we explore the 2nd of the KYCs - Know your Customer!

This episode of "Knowing your Customer" helps you to select your best #customers from a crowded marketplace, build an intimate understanding of the customer, and then engage with the customer to drive maximum returns - both for the customer and yourself.

Selecting the customer is akin to choosing the dishes you like from a large lunch buffet - where you select specific dishes based on your choice of sweet, source, spice, flavor, and texture. 

Similarly, you select customers based on who can benefit most from your product or service, while also realizing which category of customers you can serve best in terms of size, complexity, and other constraints.

Once you have selected your shortlist of customer categories to pursue, you build a customer map, with the aim of defining that customer to the lowest possible detail required for meaningful engagement. 

This includes, in addition to the customer industry, the exact department and designation you want to target, the role they play in the decision-making, process, the identifying the pain and gain points and what information they will require to make their decision.

Once the map is built, it is time to use that information in the best ways possible to engage with the customer. One of the best ways to engage with your customer is to help enable them to engage and satisfy their customer - building empactful relationships with far-reaching effects.

Connect with us to share your experiences, comments, and stories:

Be Empactful: https://empacts.live | [email protected] | https://facebook.com/beempactful |

                     https://Instagram.com/beempactful.com | https://linkedin.com/company/be-empactful-podcast

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Shiva: https://linkedin.com/in/shivakumarvs | https://instagram.com/valadisk

Vineet: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vineetngupta | https://instagram.com/vineatrepeat

Be Empactful - Creating Impacts with Empathy