1) Innovation is the buzzword in the startup world with young business leaders ushering in era of new businesses and high valuations. Housing.co is one such story, with its eccentric ex-CEO Rahul Yadav, showing the world how business are made from scratch. But the recent ousting of Mr. Yadav brings up few important questions. What would you have done if you were in place of Rahul Yadav? What early career mistakes do you think young business managers needs to avoid in order to land in such a situation?

Rahul Yadav was ousted from Housing.com simply because of his bad behavior and public display of that bad behavior. His final termination was consequence of many controversial incidents, the main trigger being his spat with Shailendra Singh, who is the MD of Sequoia Capital India. Rahul send a threatening mail to Mr. Singh with the following words:

“If you don’t stop messing around with me, directly or even indirectly, I will vacate the best of your firm. Also, this marks the beginning of the end of Sequoia Cap in India”

This sparked a huge controversy and showed utter lack of professionalism on the part of an upcoming entrepreneur. In his defense, Rahul was trying to protect his employees from being poached by other investors, but his method of doing this cannot be wider of the mark! Yet this was just the beginning.

In the course of this year we also saw Rahul Yadav feeding wrong information to the media about acquisition of Housing by Quikr just to play a prank. He called Mr. Alok Kejriwal, founder of Games2Win, “dumb” in FB and when one of his employees tried to malign Mr. Kejriwal’s image by adding incorrect information to his Wikipedia page, he defended it by saying “hey bacha are having fun. Please don’t mind”. This remark shows him in poor light. His outrageous FB posts and images portray that Rahul is not an worthy leader for Housing. His cheap gimmicks and public insults on other people blur the lines of ethical and unethical in the minds of his employees. He even went to the extent of calling his own investors “intellectually incapable”, which became the last nail on his coffin.

If I were in place of Rahul Yadav, I would have sent a more professional email to Mr. Shailendra Singh. I would have changed my attitude and become a responsible CEO. Furthermore, no matter how much one is at loggerheads with one’s investors, a CEO should never write derogatory comments about them. I should be careful of my personal details, posts and comments to my employees as well as on social media, as the latter are promoting Housing.com to millions of customers. I would not react to

other people’s criticisms or engage in verbal battle over social media, not even when I am defending my company.

Other early career mistakes that young business managers need to avoid are:

Do not choose an investor(s) who shares a different view point about the growth trajectory of the start-up than the entrepreneur(s).

Keep your internal business matters away from public eyes. This mistake made by the Housing.com CEO blew all the events much out of their actual proportions.

Do not take major flippant decisions like resigning, etc. without thinking through. The CEO of a company resigning today, rejoining tomorrow sends a negative message about the company to the outside world.

Your team should be like your family and should share your vision for the company’s future.

Links/Sources:

http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-story-of-Rahul-Yadav-founder-and-CEO-of-Housing-com

https://housing.com/about

http://forbesindia.com/article/30-under-30/housing.com-born-out-of-its-founders-house-hunt/37151/2

http://forbesindia.com/article/work-in-progress/rahul-yadav-unplugged/40629/1?utm=slidebox

http://forbesindia.com/article/work-in-progress/house-interrupted-rahul-yadavs-spat-is-not-new-in-the-startup-world/40377/1?utm=slidebox

http://forbesindia.com/article/special/housing.coms-rahul-yadav-apologises-withdraws-resignation/40203/1?utm=slidebox

http://forbesindia.com/article/special/housing.com-shows-the-door-to-rahul-yadav/40597/1?utm=slidebox

http://yourstory.com/2015/08/startup-failed/

http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-true-story-and-controversy-behind-Housing-com

http://tech.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/people/housing-ceo-rahul-yadav-fired/47893732

http://trak.in/tags/business/2015/07/02/3-ceo-mistakes-rahul-yadav-downfall-from-housing-com/

http://indianexpress.com/article/technology/tech-news-technology/housing-coms-ceo-rahul-yadav-fired-a-day-after-email-leak/

http://www.moneycontrol.com/news/business/endsaga-finally-rahul-yadav-firedhousingcom_1743381.html

http://www.scoopwhoop.com/news/rahul-yadav-fired/

5) Guess went public in 1996. As far as control goes, though, it remains as much a family-run company—family-dominated, really—as when it was founded in 1981. The Marciano brothers made Guess the sexiest name in jeans and themselves a $2.7 billion fortune at its peak. Today the family and business are in tatters. With the publicly available data, analyze what went wrong with the brand.

Guess was founded in 1981 by Georges Marciano and his brother Maurice Marciano as a garment stores in Beverly Hills. In 1982, Paul Marciano joined the business, and later brother Armand came on board. Paul introduced an innovative ad campaign for Guess where the jeans were worn by supermodels in various outdoor scenes. These models in black and white grainy images showing provocative poses created controversy for Guess but also brought it to the forefront of everyone’s attention. Forbes described it as "catering to teenage cravings for sex, power, attention and self-love ... electric not only with sexuality but with an implicit brutality and exhibitionism as well." Georges’ designer jeans set the market on fire and by the end of 1982 the brand has sold more than $12 million worth of jeans.

By 1984, their sales soared to $27 million. At this point, Guess has already entered the menswear market along with womenswear. To meet this ever growing demand, Guess sold 50% ownership of the brand to Nakash brothers of the Jordache Company. This move was made in order to acquire the needed capital and cheap labour to increase the production capacity of Guess. But the deal later proved fatal for the Marciano brothers.

From late 1980s to early 1990s, Guess was embroiled in expensive litigation cases with the Nakash brothers over the ownership of Guess. But even amidst this turmoil, Guess continued its expansion into children’s section and also formed the Georges Marciano label. After this the company went for a gradual downward spiral.

At present, Guess holds less than 0.5% of the apparel market in US. Despite continued expansion, the company has lost market share in the last five years. The main reasons for this dismal performance are Guess’ inability to beat competition, its accessories branch is not making much profit, it is following an erroneous retailing strategy and its online presence is insignificant.

Guess has six different store concepts where full-price retail stores and Guess’ Accessories stores account for 30% of retail sales. This full-price concept of Guess failed miserably as competitors kept on enticing customers by attractive offers, discounts and deals. Its online retail store was launched in 1999. But when majority of people shifted to web shopping from stores, Guess could not increase its online sales in similar proportions, nor could it draw enough consumers to its website.

Zara, Forever 21 and H&M are new progressive high-end fashion stores. They occupied a wide market space between the extremely expensive Guess apparels and low priced affordable clothing of Aeropostale and American Eagle Outfitters. This made Guess lose its sales considerably. Their merchandising issues and lack of assorted product ranges is also responsible for their downfall.

The company is now planning to shut down its 50 underperforming stores after losing further market share to land up at 0.45%. This step further shows that there is not much chance for Guess to improve revenues in the recent future.

Links/Sources:

http://investors.guess.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=92506&p=irol-reportsAnnual

http://www.guess.com/en/

http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/ges/financials?query=ratios

http://spot.colorado.edu/~shortk/guess.html

http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/guess-inc-history/

http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/chinablue/guess.html

http://www.fashionencyclopedia.com/Fr-Gu/Guess-Inc.html

http://www.torquenews.com/1084/millionaire-guess-jeans-ceo-loses-11-ferraris-and-things-more-valuable

http://www.bloomberg.com/article/2015-06-02/a.kHO4TwOXjQ.html

http://investors.guess.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=92506&p=irol-news&nyo=0

http://www.wset.com/story/29886243/guess-inc-reports-second-quarter-results

http://www.bloomberg.com/research/stocks/snapshot/snapshot.asp?ticker=GES

https://books.google.co.in/books?id=j7JgkqAZi_4C&pg=PA383&lpg=PA383&dq=guess+inc+sweatshop+litigation&source=bl&ots=Cge75IZ51F&sig=6iQXhdNAWNPhRV3g5CzF6Uw_owk&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CCoQ6AEwAmoVChMIr7m-uoTKxwIVC1eOCh2dCweu

http://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2015/02/03/is-there-any-hope-for-guesss-dwindling-market-share/

http://www.sweatfree.org/docs/Hall_of_Shame_Final_11'18'07.pdf