Thursday 8 September 2011

I have a business idea

It has been a boring Thursday afternoon for all of us. Now don't act like a busy bee. You are reading this from your office laptop on a weekday evening and I very well know how you felt when you clicked the link to this page. I saw the smile on your face. Now, for my turn here comes one on mine. Because I have successfully chaffed you, my faithful reader. I don't have any idea actually. I was just fooling around. This is not something like an April prank that we used to play when we wore cotton trousers and canvas shoes. The fact of the matter is that what I call a business idea is an idea in reality but it doesn't have ingredients for a business.

I was skimming through the pages of a decently popular magazine here and one sentence in one of those numerous posts triggered a thought process which I intend to popularize under the banner named "idea". Ok, I see the seething emotion and the urge to hand me a tight slap. No, no haste. I will get to the matter NOW!

Experience and Wisdom suggest that any business idea is worthwhile only when the right combination of people/skill comes together to address an existing social/societal problem in a creative manner. So sticking to those kind of basics, I formulate three different sets of people who form the core of my proposition.

1. Your father and your mother, My father and my mother, All fathers and mothers.
2. HR teams focusing on background checks and those other allied back office chores.
3. Those matrimonial sites with pictures of chicks on their home page such as Rina, 23, MBA and Archana, 25, Software Professional

In the present Indian economic scenario with youth driving growth and average age of working population floating around 25 and 26 (or whatever number it is..I know it's in the 20s) and these young people doing wonders but lacking real experience and what not, I propose to introduce our very experienced fathers and mothers into the equation. Those silky smooth females at the HR front desk and back office of numerous multinational firms in our tier 1 cities are finding it really tough to do background checks on prospective males in the age group of 20-30 during their hiring processes. If the guy is from a state like Andhra for instance, the probability of his degree/experience/both being fake is 1 and if the guy is from Tamil Nadu with an acquired and fake accent, the probability of the person who took the telephonic round and the person who appeared for the face to face meeting being one and the same is closer to the other statistical touchstone - 0. With so many engineers littering Mother Earth as part of modern civilization, the task of verifying identities is becoming a monumental one for those poor HR ladies.

So having described the problem in detail, here is my solution. Consider my neighbour Priya here. She knows her future husband Bharathan’s salary and bank account details down to the last zero, his smoking or drinking habits if any, his past record with girls from school and college, his credit card balance, the amount of petrol in his car's tank at present, whether there is any trace of diabetes or schizophrenia in his family for 6 generations and how much property she is due to inherit in the event of his death and how much property they(as an entity together) will inherit in the event of his father's death. So my point is, there is an information overload with Priya, her father, her mother, her grandmother, her aunty and her sister (the people who did the groundwork to gather the information). Now, here is the proposal.

HR departments should outsource the job of gathering and presenting information about prospective candidates to these well informed set of people. Please don't miss the point. There are two types of jobs created here. 1. Work-from-home contract jobs for retired fathers and mothers and 2. Full-time data entry jobs for their beautiful daughters. Bring in the marriage portals into the picture. They hold the databases for such valuable information. Give them a cutting (say 1% or something for every profile download). These MNCs can happily delegate a part of their work to the aforementioned experts and sit back. Speeds up the process of verification and related activities and streamlines the hiring process with a focus on quality.

P.S : As the idea originated from me, I get royalty on a monthly/yearly basis and readers who seem to like the idea can think of themselves as the next generation Warren Buffets. They turn investors and get a dividend when the company goes public. Anyone with the money can contact me. Others (whose purses are just as light as mine) can like this post and be contented with the dividend they are to receive over time). Works like a charm for all concerned. Doesn't it?

5 comments:

Raagini said...

http://www.ndtv.com/article/cities/pune-professor-who-married-3-women-arrested-132253


I think stories like these, renders your 'business' idea unfeasible!


:P

Unknown said...

Sigh! No dividend for you Raagini!

Vickynadaraj said...

Super idea ol'fruit!Cheaper than hiring a PI what?And all the good ol Maami's and Maama's can put their wonderful curiosity to good use.According to Steven Levitt in Freakonomics,crime rates are through the roof today because of the breakdown of this very system.I have escaped many a time thanks to these blessed folk.Too bad my love ain't blind.
Ok I have a dad who is partly retired.....

Unknown said...

Haha @Vickynadaraj : More like a positive vibe now, unlike Raagini :P.

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