O What To Be

"To be or not to be" was the question for Hamlet but that has been easily answered for me. My own business has to be for me but that is where the clarity fades and I am surrounded by the plethora of promising and confusing prospects that lay in front of me.

India currently being the land of opportunity that it is, there are new avenues opening up in every imaginable field and even some which were unimaginable just a few years back. There are opportunities in the new technology space, with an increasing number of the country folks getting hooked onto the internet it presents potential beyond imagination. Almost anything which was till now done in the brick and mortar way can now be done online. What one needs is to identify either a skill which one has and then make it available to the entire world through the web or if you find yourself like me, with no visible marketable skills, then create a marketplace for people with skills but lacking enterprise to get in touch with customers.

Then there are opportunities thrown open by the fact that disposable incomes within a certain section of the country have skyrocketed in the last couple of decades. These are the people about whose salaries and packages one reads about in the newspapers. "Rs 1 crore for the latest pass out from XYZ college" is a regular yearly headline that screams through the papers. So now our Mr One Crore has to spend all that money and trust me he finds ways to do this and helping him all along are a host of new businesses that exist to make his pocket light. These include adventure sports, exotic travels, exorbitantly priced clothes (with no other differentiation except that everyone knows the particular brand is unaffordable) to luxury accessories. These are very high margin products targeted at a niche segment and saves one the trouble of grass-root marketing and sweating it out in the sun on the congested India road.

For those not inclined at milking the super rich the trickle down effect of globalization has created opportunities at the bottom of the pyramid also. With opening up of the economy and more people working outside the government there is an increasing need of Health Insurance for self employed as well as those who though currently on their company health insurance post retirement will need to buy it from outside. With a dismal penetration numbers in India as well as stone age systems in this sector it offers a number of opportunities in data management, administration outsourcing to good old brokers.

But let us in this discussion not ignore the traditional shopper in the Indian household, yes my dear readers it is the lady of the house. With hubby dears salary rising exponentially my fair lady now has much more at her disposal to make herself fairer than ever before and that is why the Beauty product and services market deserves a special mention as a robust and high growth option that any wannabe entrepreneur should only ignore at his own risk. This is a recession proof segment and has been showing phenomenal growth in India; with Tier 2 cities just waking up to the beauty revolution another boom is just right the corner.

So where does all this analysis and talk leave me, am I a bit closer to taking the right decision. Nope I am still confused, believe the only thing I am now closer to is hitting the bed. 

Enough hard work for one day.