About Speaker-
Sujata Bogawat is Chartered Accountant and MBA with over 16 years of experience in financial management of manufacturing and services industries; including start-ups and not-for-profit companies. She is Senior Partner at Baheti & Somani which is a full-service CA firm headquartered in Pune. Also, she was Director at ADVANTAGE Business Consulting, Pune from Feb 2012 to March 2017.
Lecture –
Under Venture Center Startups 101 Lecture Series, Sujata Bogawat delivered a lecture on ‘Nuts and Bolts of Starting a New Business’ on 01st July 2017.
The talk was largely focused on legal structure of entity, registration and licenses of entity, business plan, start-up finance, balance sheet, investors perspective of investing in any business and funding.
The lecture begins with a very good quote – “Never go half-hearted if you are in business”. I really liked this line and the way she started her lecture. Then she talked about – who is an entrepreneur?
Once you have an idea and business plan then registering an entity which is very important part. These are the types of legal structure in India –
- Sole Proprietorship
- LLP
- Joint Venture
- Society/ Trust
- Partnership Firm
- One Person Company
- Public Limited Company
- Private Limited Company
After registration of entity, compliances are the important part and it leads to fines if fails to do on time. She gave a brief overview of how an investor look at any business plan when we approach them. She said investors don’t have time to go through entire business plan but they do check whether you have done your homework or not and look at Business Model Canvas which give them the overall understanding of business plan.
She talked about customer relationships, balance sheet, how to analyse balance sheet and cash flow statement. Cash is life blood of any business, if a business have cash it will survive. She said you don’t need lot of cash but you need sufficient cash to run operations.
How much Cash do you need?
Start-up Funds = (One-time Start-up costs) + (Monthly costs up to regular sales realization) + (minimum liquidity)
She briefly talked about why you need Co-founding agreement to avoid conflicts in future with your partner and how to build a good team.
About the Author: Pramod Bhurji, BIRAC Social Innovator at Venture Center, Pune