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Navin has created this website to be a useful resource for small business owners and employees working in small businesses world over to benefit from the knowledge that Navin has acquired over the past many years of working with small businesses and helping them overcome many business challenges.
For any information that you may need, please feel free to visit the following pages
Experience working with small businesses and business owners for more than 10 years
Navin Krishnan has more than a decade of experience of working with small businesses and small business owners. He has worked with small businesses ranging from small single person financial advisory firms to manufacturing firms with more than 50 employees. He has worked with boutique store owners, with traders who deal in various products, with food processing businesses, small farms producing specialty fruits, restaurants and cafe owners as well as with software development and IT services companies who develop software for large multinationals.
Navin Krishnan has spent over 5000 hours visiting small businesses and being a part of their day to day lives and operations. He has an intuitive understanding of how small business owners think, their day to day challenges and what keeps them awake at night.
Navin krishnan also comes from a family where his father used to run a small business that specialised in electronic products as well as energy efficiency consultancy. Navin has seen and experienced all the ups and downs a small business owner goes through and the impact it has on the family. He has seen his father get into debt, pay off the debt and scale the business successfully before selling it for a profit.
Navin’s extended family including uncles, cousins, brothers, in-laws and many other relatives are small business owners themselves which has provided Navin with a sneak peek into the inner workings, problems, successes and insights of small businesses across multiple industries.
Many of Navin’s relatives have businesses in many countries such as the US, Australia, UK, UAE, India and in Kenya. Through these relatives, Navin also has a flavour of what it takes to run businesses in all the geographies.
Navin has an MBA from S P Jain Institute of Management and Research, a premier business school in Mumbai, India and also has done Business and Strategy courses from Nagoya university of commerce and business, Nagoya, Japan as a part of his MBA.
Navin has been playing an active role in helping small businesses grow in the various corporate roles has played in his decade long career. He has been a key thought partner to many business leaders in the corporate sector who are trying to improve the lives of small business owners through the knowledge and insights that his circumstances and experiences place him in this unique position.
Experience working with manufacturing small businesses while at Bosch
Navin worked in the purchasing function of Bosch, the German automotive giant for about 3 years, where he spent bulk of his time on the road meeting suppliers who were primarily small businesses.
During his stint at Bosch, he partnered with small business owners to help them improve their processes to improve their efficiency and cost effectiveness which would benefit small business owners with better profits while producing products at a lower cost.
He worked with more than 300 small businesses during this time to help audit their processes and implemented process improvements on site. He played the role of a process consultant to the business owners and helped them adopt world class manufacturing practices in their small business. He has helped businesses become preferred suppliers to Bosch and export their products as well to Bosch entities in foreign countries.
Helping sellers export and scale up e-commerce business at Amazon.com
After completing his MBA, Navin moved into a corporate role at amazon where he was a part of the 3P Sellers business as a part of amazon’s FBA program. During this role, Navin played a crucial role in working with thousands of sellers on amazon FBA to help them improve the availability of products closer to customers which would help improve their e-commerce conversions.
Navin has also worked on helping small businesses with their online selection of products to help them maximise the sales volume and minimise the costs of storing inventory. Navin helped small businesses with their data to plan the optimum stock levels in each of the amazon warehouses so that they could optimise their cash flows, minimise customer returns and reduce their inventory turn around times.
Helping small business owners with finance via follow me homes at Intuit and quickbooks
While Navin Krishnan worked at Intuit with the QuickBooks business, Navin was closely involved with developing and taking quickbooks to market. During this stint, Navin worked very closely with over 200 small businesses and business owners to understand all the pain points for small businesses.
During this time, Navin has spent time in the workspace and homes of small business owners to get to know their daily problems, their successes and what makes small businesses succeed. Navin has also seen some small businesses close down due to multiple reasons.
This experience gave Navin a hands-on grounding on the inner workings of small businesses, the psyche of small business owners and the ingenuity that small business owners employ to make sure that their business is successful.
During his stint at Intuit, Navin also had the responsibility to lead the sales operations function and business strategy for his business unit. Navin had the opportunity to work with sales leaders from Intuit, set their respective sales targets, develop sales compensation plans and build the go to market strategy.
Navin was also the thought partner to the global finance team and the country manager for the business unit, where he played a key advisory role on business strategy, the markets they should enter with QuickBooks, the revenue potential and unit economics assessment.
Navin also led the business planning exercise for the business unit and brought together all the costs, budgets and revenue plans together and cascaded these into individual goals to each employee so that business objectives can be met.
Enabling small businesses finding growth opportunities at Tata Business Hub
After working at Intuit for a few years, Navin joined Tata Business Hub, a company that was founded under the Large Tata Group umbrella. Navin was one of the founding members of this company, being the 8th employee in the business.
Tata Business Hub is a company established by the Tata Group to set up a digital platform called Tata nexarc to enable small businesses to grow their business. Tata nexarc offers solutions to small business owners to help them find new business opportunities, small business owners can find financing solutions and other solutions to their problems they face day to day.
At Tata Business Hub, Navin also is responsible for overall Go-To-Market strategy, business planning and for leading the sales operations function. He has experience in leading a team with more than 30 members with various skill sets across engineering, analytics and program management.
Hands-on Experience in Setting up and configuring CRM systems and other SaaS softwares typically used by small businesses
Navin has also worked on setting up a CRM system from scratch at Tata Business Hub. He has worked on Salesforce, Freshworks, Hubspot, LeadSquared and other small CRM solutions hands-on.
Navin has realised the benefits of using CRM systems and other business aiding tools such as ERPs to help improve business processes and efficiencies. Navin also knows how to best configure a tool for the business and the metrics to be tracked to drive efficiency and to get the full view of all key metrics for a business.
Using these data systems, Navin has helped drive business rigour, growing revenues for the business by a factor of 250% year over year for the past 3 years. With such rapid scale up, Navin has also built business processes that enable such quick scale up.
Navin has also worked with small business owners in translating the knowledge of implementing these systems at an enterprise level and has helped numerous small business owners adopt digital tools to have a meaningful impact on their business.
Expertise in sales strategy and sales compensation plans
Navin has over 5 years of experience and expertise in chalking out various sales strategies and go-to-market strategies. He has expertise in developing strategies to take SaaS products, internet services and digital products to the specifically identified target audience.
Navin has also specialised in creating processes to identify the Total Addressable Market (TAM) and the Serviceable Addressable Market (SAM) for a specific product and in identifying the sales and marketing channels to reach out to those audiences.
In addition to creating sales strategies and processes, Navin also has extensive expertise in creating Sales Compensation plans for sales teams. His approach has always been to “Reward the right behaviour” and have an “Alignment of incentives” to drive sales performance that is in-line with the best interest of the company. Navin’s sales compensation plans always puts the customer first and also enables the salesperson to earn well, proportionate to the effort put in for driving sustainable results.
Working on solving growth related challenges for small businesses
Navin is currently working on helping small businesses find newer growth opportunities through Tata Business Hub.
Through this website, Navin Krishnan aspires to share distilled experiences of his decade plus experience working with Small businesses and his learnings from their successes and failures. Navin krishnan aspires to transform SmallBizKnowhow.com to become a helpful and useful resource for small business owners and their employees. Navin aspires to provoke mindset changes, spark new ideas and motivate small business owners to pursue success with grit and determination.
Hope that you get value and benefit from the content that is published on SmallBizKnowHow.com.