The Way I Work : Vivek Madappa

As told to Pooja Kothari

Vivek Madappa ensures that he reaches office before anyone else, so he can use
the time to plan his day and get organised.

Vivek Madappa has a thing against lengthy meetings and smart phones—for one, they are both time-stealers. The CEO of HummingBird Suites, which runs apartment-hotels for corporates, would rather spend his time empowering people and playing an enabler’s role. A master of product re-launches, Madappa generated quite a buzz in Bangalore when he launched his corporate stay solutions company, along with his twin brother, five years ago. Started with a measly Rs 3 lakh in capital, the Coorgi brothers have grown it into a Rs 22-crore business. A firm believer in “collaborative entrepreneurship”, Madappa also invests his time into two other businesses—a restaurant called Orange Peel Food and a learning solutions company called 10on10 Education that hopes to demystify mathematics for students all over the world. Once every month, you can find him at one of his properties in Bangalore, having breakfast with guests and picking up valuable feedback.

I am an early riser and wake up around 5:30 every morning. I usually meditate for a few minutes. That acts like an energiser. Then I get some exercise. I practice yoga with a teacher thrice a week. On other days, I simply do some stretching on my own. I have a quick breakfast—mostly cereal and fresh fruit juice—and then get my 11-year-old daughter ready for school. I am a pretty hands-on father. I even know how to comb her hair—and do a good job of it, according to her teacher. I drop her off at 7am and reach office 15 minutes later.

I’m usually the first to arrive at work. It is almost a thumb rule I follow. The team starts getting in only around 8:30am. This one hour is my golden hour. It helps me get organised for the rest of the day. I usually keep my schedule flexible, so that I can accommodate the needs of all my businesses.

Earlier, we started work at 9am, but then everyone was inevitably late. In Bangalore, roads are clear at 8:15am. Get late by five minutes and you’re stuck in the rush. There’s no point staying blocked on the road and getting stressed. So I asked everyone to come in early and leave whenever they wanted to. Initially, they resisted the idea but now they have grown to love it.

My time with my daughter is sacrosanct. If I have to take her for a swim, I won’t give that up. I make up for that by working late nights. There’s no gun on my head to do things. I just schedule things smartly. To me, family’s very important; work is incidental. I carry a simple, Rs 2,000-phone. I don’t own a BlackBerry, since I believe that a phone’s job is to let you speak, not to show you mails. My friends have been trying to upgrade me to an iPhone for some time, but that’s not happening. I feel a laptop’s enough to serve my purpose. A BlackBerry always beeps into your peace. And the reply game is never-ending.

I don’t check my emails till I reach office. I usually put in eight hours at HummingBird Suites—the corporate stay solutions business I have built with my brother in the past five years. We started out with a capital of Rs 3 lakh in 2005. It is a business drawing Rs 22 crore in revenue a year today.

Every Friday, I have what is called a leadership alignment meeting. For two hours, I meet with the heads of departments to review the week that went by and get an update on previous issues. We plan for the week ahead and check if any areas need intervention. My other meetings are with people outside the company—basically board members, customers and potential strategic partners—meetings that can result in generation of more business. I meet at least two sets of people a day, each for about half-an-hour to an hour. As a company, we don’t spend too much time on internal problem- solving meetings. At most companies, people spend too much time on meetings, presentations and discussions. That’s such a waste of time. If you look closely, these meetings are usually called to collect, discuss and debate data. Someone proposes a number—the others argue over it. We don’t do that. We spend a lot of money on IT infrastructure, so that all key decision-makers have access to the critical information instantly on their dashboards. When we have meetings, we are armed with information. A meeting typically lasts just for 15 minutes to 30 minutes, and looks into issues that have been identified. This helps us run an efficient operation.

Once a month, I land up at one of our properties in Bangalore at a random time and meet the end customer—the person staying in the apartment—to get feedback. Sometimes, I might have breakfast with them. I do this to validate the feedback that is gathered by our structured process. These surprise checks substantiate the information in the reports sent to me and show up any filtration that might have occurred while the report moved up the hierarchy. It keeps everyone in the organisation agile and nimble. Whenever I travel, I stay at one of our properties and try and meet the end customer.

I believe in old-fashioned stuff, such as profit after tax (PAT). I don’t believe in scale and growth alone. Usually, start-ups replicate a large company, and acquire a CEO, COO, CTO—all possible heads, who in turn need two juniors each to make themselves feel powerful. But I believe a business should scale up based on its growth. My brother, Vinod Thimmaya, and I ran HummingBird all by ourselves through collaborative entrepreneurship. I don’t understand IT. So we got Inflexion Technologies to help us out. I don’t know food. So Orange Peel helps us there. They survive because of us; we survive because of them. The symbiosis works perfectly.

We work on a simple philosophy: give more and get back more. If you are trying to act clever with your partners or vendors, and want to maximise profits at the other person’s cost, the relationship is gone. We get more than good service—we get loyalty and people who are willing to go the extra mile. We have people working with us at ridiculous costs because they enjoy the trust we put on them and the challenging work profile we create for them. If we start policing people, or watching over their backs, that commitment is gone.

People are really important to us. So every recruit has to go through a final interview with either Vinod or me. It takes up half an hour of my time, but then, we don’t have to worry about him for years. It’s worth the time since one wrong hire could upset everyone and kill a lot of productive time.

When I interview someone, I go beyond what the resume tells; I test their attitude, ability to take risks, pre-disposition to life, etc. Usually, I like to question a candidate on how they spend their time. It’s surprising how much the answer can reveal about a person. I also ask them the one challenging thing they did and how they dealt with it. His answer tells me his ability to articulate; if he makes it interesting, it shows his ability to sell. If the person can tackle a tricky question well, you get a sense of his ability to think on the feet.

In a small company, you need people who can multi-task. You need a person who is comfortable being himself and can think through a crisis, even without rules and references. Our HR department exists to transform people, not to be a shoulder to cry on. People can decide their growth and salaries within a logical construct that’s being offered to them. We have a system under which everyone, including Vinod and I, has to acquire the knowledge of a new field every year and achieve one extra skill for doing something. This is our way of empowering people to choose their career paths as they go forward. Like in a consulting outfit, our people have to be ‘x’ level in five years, or they vacate. I personally try to acquire one skill every quarter. I can’t question others, if I don’t do it myself.

The reason I can build three businesses in parallel is not because I am maniacal about work. I just don’t lead my life through schedules. There’s a lot of impulsiveness, but I am painfully disciplined—discipline with regard to my time, discipline to say no when I don’t wish to do something. Very often, these are all time-stealers.

When time-sucking elements, such as meetings, are removed, spending six hours to eight hours in a start-up is actually too much. It’s not as difficult as people think it is. If you have a good team, you can trust them and empower them. I have the advantage of being the oldest guy on the team, so they listen to me. Then again, they just require someone to hold them together. By virtue of my experience, I know some of the things that can be avoided. So, I simply have to be an enabler.

One of the things that is very important for a start-up is to have a strong sales team. Most entrepreneurs struggle because they don’t have a strong sales team. Vinod drives sales like crazy. I take care of back-end support. When the company’s doing well, you are not stressed.

Thrice a week, I leave office at 3:45pm to pick up my daughter from school. My wife, who works in a multinational company, does that the other days. I try to wrap up everything before that. I hate sitting in a traffic jam, so it suits me to leave early. Once I reach home, I work on my other businesses. I put in two hours on Orange Peel, a restaurant I run with a friend of mine. Then, post dinner, I work on the other business, 10on10, which is a learning solutions company. It serves as a break because it is of a different nature. Sometimes, after both wife and daughter have gone to bed, I get some work done, or read something.

I like reading books that are introspective. I’ve read all possible management gyan in the past 10 years to 15 years. At this stage, I want to read stuff that encourages me to look at life differently, and look at issues in new ways. While I encourage team members to read about the Toyota way to total quality management, I prefer reading books such as Gurcharan Das’ The Difficulty of Being Good: On the Subtle Art of Dharma, which dissects each character of the Mahabharata and views how they handles dilemmas in life.

Every two-to-three days, my body gets tired, and I need to make up by sleeping early around 10.30pm or 11pm. The next day, I can work late night again. I usually don’t work on weekends, unless there are deadlines to meet—and even then, I work only because I don’t want to hold up someone else’s work. I don’t call up anyone on the weekend over office matters. I try to finish most of my work by Friday night, so that my weekend is free for pursuing things that give me happiness and joy. Even on a Sunday, I wake up early, if only to bathe the dog. Going out for parties or movies isn’t important any more. I have reached a stage when I can be alone with myself; I can be comfortable even without the presence of others.

I once watched a movie called Bucket List. It’s about two people— one filthy rich and the other a normal, hardworking guy who has slogged most of his life—both dying of cancer. They make a list of things they have to do before they die. After watching that movie, I sat down and wrote out my “bucket list” with 100 things to do and see before I die. And then, I started acting upon that list. I have gone to Agumbe and trekked through a 5-km leech-infested rainforest to see a King Cobra. I have taken my daughter to swim with the dolphins. I have visited Israel to see the Dead Sea. And I went to the Nilgiris to see the Kurinji flower that blossoms once every 14 years. There are still a few things I need to do like take a helicopter ride and a hot air balloon ride. In May, I plan to visit Borneo with a bunch of scientists and a BBC photographer to see an orangutan in the wild.

Today, I don’t have to work as hard as I did in the initial years of building my businesses. The first three years were really bad for us. I would stay up till three in the morning, working, worrying, problem- solving. But now that is gone. I’m not compelled to work hard anymore. The good part is that I have surrounded myself with people who love what they do. I just ride the wave.

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