Puneet Nanda does not deal with deliberation. You’ll find that the moment you walk into his office at Dr. Fresh Inc.
“If you come to my office, you will see there is a big sign that says, ‘Yes or no,’” says the company’s founder, president and CEO. “It has to be a yes or it has to be a no. There should never be a maybe. I would rather not do it than say, ‘OK, we’ll look at it.’ We’ll never look at it. Either we’ll do it now or we’ll never do it.”
Dr. Fresh makes dental products that are targeted to children. Nanda doesn’t like to waste a lot of time talking to his 80 employees about the pros and cons of a potential new product. He has made the right call more often than not at the $50 million company.
“My six wrong decisions will probably make a loss of $30,000, but my four right decisions will make a profit of $70,000, so that’s where we are,” Nanda says.
Smart Business spoke with Nanda about how to put your business in a position to grow.
Don’t wait. As an entrepreneur and an innovator, I have had to take many risks in terms of new product development and costs incurred to develop a new product. There are a lot of expenses involved when you do a new product.
You have to take a risk, and then once you’re leading, you have to make an informed decision of, ‘Hey, should I do this or should I not do this?’ You have to say yes or no and move on. You can’t just keep the decision on hold.
I lived in Russia before coming to the United States. During my stay there, I developed a business from zero to 40 people in four and a half years. There was a lot of mafia in those days. You have to be very fast in whatever you do or you’ll be run over. You need to make a decision or someone else is going to eat your lunch.
Talk to your customers. The first question I ask my buyer is, ‘What is on your wish list?’ He says, ‘Oh, I’m looking for a denture adhesive that could save my shelf space and could stand up in the tube rather than a flat tube. Do you know anybody that manufactures it?’
I go back and I see if I can do it, and if I can, I base the product on his wish list. It makes the buyer almost fall in line with the product right away because I basically granted him his wish. We start from a demand rather than trying to force our product to the buyer.
The big companies, they make a new product through their think tank and they go to the buyer and they say, ‘Hey, you better keep this because we’re Colgate or we’re Crest.’
I go to the buyer and I ask what he needs and try to deliver that, and that’s why I get all the love and attention that the product needs. The buyer almost thinks he’s made the product and thinks it’s his baby.