Grow your business with your near and dear ones

Couple of weeks back I was enjoying a smoke with Nitesh Bhandari
of Texonic in the balcony of his well-appointed office in the leafy environs of
Mylapore, Chennai. He was very excited about the new exclusive distribution deal
he had signed up with a German company for computer cleaning products. He was so
engrossed in giving me the details of the huge potential these products had in
the Indian market that he lost count of the number of cigarettes he lit one
after the other.

Though I also tried to keep pace with him, I was more interested
in knowing as to how he would market the product all over this vast country when
Texonic's presence was limited to just Chennai and Bangalore. His answer was:
"but I already have offices in Mumbai and Kolkata". This came as a
surprise to me till he mentioned Sejutronics and Eastern IT. Even more
surprising was that Prakash Mody of Mumbai's Sejutronics and Jatan Baid of
Kolkata's Eastern IT were his uncles.

That got me thinking and I started asking around about relations
amongst different channel partners in other cities. I was astounded to find the
number of linkages amongst them spread across all nooks and corners of India.
And that resulted in us writing a whole cover story on this subject.

However, later on I realized that there was no reason for me to
be surprised about the linkages amongst the channel community.

I just had to revisit the cover story "how the Marwaris dominate the
channel community" and the situation would have been crystal clear to me.
Last year in October we had done this cover story, which got us tremendous
response from the market.

Considering the fact that Marwaris, who are the dominant force
amongst the channel community and the fact that they tend to give a lot more
emphasis to near and dear ones, this was a natural result. At the same time-as
we found out later-this relationship business is not just prevalent amongst
the Marwaris. There is a fair share of them amongst others also. We found
linkages between Bhopal and Chandigarh, Delhi and Ghaziabad, etc. Other cities
also had their fair share of instances.

This brings us to the question, how important is it to have
linkages in order to get a boost in business. Well, if you have relations in the
same business, go ahead and exploit them to your advantage. On the other hand,
if you don't have, no need to be unhappy, just go out and form linkages. After
all, the earth is round!

Asim Raina