It is of course true that passion and perseverance are instrumental in realising a successful enterprise. But ensuring that a business survives the test of time is a rather nebulous area where most start-ups experience a bitter end. In a solicited attempt towards motivating young entrepreneurs to follow a well tested roadmap for arriving at a successful business model, John Mullins along with Randy Komisar have come up with Getting To Plan B (Harvard Business Press, 2009). A professor of entrepreneurship at the London Business School, Mullins has been running a number of programmes on this subject in a number of different B-schools in India and abroad. In an interview with Alokita Datta, Mullins talks about the ideas that led to the formation of his book, why start-ups tend to fail and how it can be avoided (albeit not guaranteed) that they don’t and the future of entrepreneurship , especially in India. 
 
Getting To Plan B focuses on how most entrepreneurs’ initial business models tend to fail and need to be reworked to establish a successful enterprise. With extensive research, field experience and the right business model is it not possible to make Plan A work?
Yes, it is possible and sometimes Plan A does work. But out of the 22 companies we profiled in the book, there are only two for whom their initial plans worked out well. For instance, CelTel, the big telecom firm in Africa, very shrewdly figured out a business model that was unlike any other business model that was commonly in use in the West and was successful from day one. eBay with its revolutionary business model also worked but for most that is not the case because there are so many things that you don’t know about the business and once you learn them, you find that you need to change plans, more often than less. 
 
So is serendipity generally a factor in making initial business plans see the light of day and in fact successful?
There is some amount of serendipity and it is good stuff when you find it! But you can’t count on that as a business person. If I am a young entrepreneur starting a new business I don’t want to have to rely on serendipity because that is obviously very risky. So what I would rather have is a systematic and disciplined approach to get to a plan that is really going to work which is why Randy Komisar and I wrote this book. 
 
Generally, what are the shortcomings that plague an aspiring entrepreneur’s original business plans?
There are a number of common problems. I published an article last summer in the Wall Street Journal talking about five kinds of all too common business plans that go quickly into the rubbish. One of the main mistakes is to assume that everything about your business plan is wonderful. There is a terrific market out there and is growing fast, the consumers will instantly love your product and there will be no competition. You assume all these things but actually you have no evidence for any of them. Once you get evidence, you have to change course. It’s not lack of research however, because many people spend a significant amount of time doing research. But at the end of the day there is only so much you can find on the internet and real consumers aren’t easy to predict. Who would have said in the 1970s that we would all have personal computers today? Or that Steve Jobs could revolutionise the music industry when Apple in the 1998 was a struggling PC maker. Making your plan work has a lot to do with getting real data from real customers which can only happen once you enter the market. 
 
Between the two scenarios which is more difficult, following a conventional model with a product/service that has established itself and then trying to innovate or starting out with something completely new in the first place?
I don’t know if one is easier that the other, we see successful entrepreneurs of both kinds. CelTel was quite new; they were the earliest mobile companies in Africa although they copied ideas from elsewhere. In the book we tell the story of Starbucks which was a litle chain of stores that sold coffee beans for people to brew in their own home. Howard Schultz went to Italy on a vacation, saw the coffee bar culture there and thought that it was an idea that could work back in Seattle. It is Randy’s (Komisar) and my view that most things aren’t really new. So you can take what has been done before, change it and develop something of your own. The odds are very difficult in either case. It isn’t easy being an entrepreneur. We know the most common outcome of ventures — they fail. If we could just move the needle a little bit and be more systematic, We can put our vast entrepreneurial powers, which India certainly has, to work. Entrepreneurs need to be comfortable with ambiguity because you don’t know what tomorrow will bring. But on the other hand it is an enormously exciting career path to follow and it is something that India really needs because the jobs in India are not going to be created by large companies; we need entrepreneurs thus.

In the Indian context, majority of VC funding continues to be concentrated in the IT sector overshadowing other industries. For individuals interested in starting a (product based) venture, should angel investors be approached? Also how can angel investment be stimulated to encourage young entrepreneurs?
We are going to see a lot of angel investors in India in the near future. If you look at the West, where we can learn from in this case, Silicon Valley as a culture is only about 50 years old. In the grand scheme of things it is, therefore, a very recent phenomenon. Silicon Valley started out with small numbers of people, that we now call angels, investing in things that they thought they understood and could give value too. We will see that in India as well. I teach a programme in the Indian School Of Business (ISB) called Venture Capital Development Programme and its purpose is to generate the next generation of investors who can provide capital for entrepreneurs. The course is over subscribed every time we offer it. So, there is an interest and it is a matter of people learning to do things well, with structure since it is risky.