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The King of Tough Times | Girish Batra @ Netambit
273 Plays5 years ago
“Organisation has to be larger than yourself” - Girish Batra
Girish Batra is the founder of NetAmbit - a 19-year-old organisation that has been powering startups in India to scale their businesses through a unique sustainable sales growth model. The model was so successful that it was featured in Forbes India magazine. A tenacious entrepreneur, Girsh has built NetAmbit from the ground up not once but twice, braving setbacks & rising above challenges stronger than ever.
Today NetAmbit is a well known managed sales service provider with a team of over 15000 employees. Girish is a graduate from the prestigious Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. He’s always aspired to be an entrepreneur, right from his early childhood days & is amongst the few who’ve had the courage to chase their dreams.
In this week’s episode on Founder Thesis podcast hosts, Akshay & Saurabh are in conversation with Girish, where he talks about his entrepreneurial journey and the lessons he picked up along the way.
Key takeaways from the show:
- How to scale businesses successfully.
- Mistakes to avoid when scaling your startup.
- Overcoming challenges with a positive mindset.
- Importance of ethics & culture in scaling the business.
- Advice for aspiring entrepreneurs on investors & how much capital to raise.
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Transcript
Introduction to Founder Thesis Podcast
00:00:02
Speaker
HD Smartcast You are listening to an HD Smartcast original
00:00:23
Speaker
Hi, I'm Akshay. Hi, this is Aurob. And you are listening to the Founder Thesis Podcast. We meet some of the most celebrated sort of founders in the country. And we want to learn how to build a unicorn.
Meet Girish Patra: Entrepreneurial Journey Begins
00:00:37
Speaker
I am sure you must have heard of the saying tough times don't last, tough people do.
00:00:43
Speaker
and today we speak to Kirishvatra, the man who is epitome of toughness. In his 20 years of experience as an entrepreneur, he has built up his company from scratch not once but twice and currently manages more than 15,000 salespeople who are powering some of India's most disruptive startups and making them into unicorns.
Are Entrepreneurs Born or Made?
00:01:10
Speaker
Girish, let's start by understanding more about what made you an entrepreneur. I mean, a lot of people say that entrepreneurs are born or entrepreneurs are made. What side of the debate are you? I remember my childhood days, right? So my dad was in a government job and most of my relatives were in business. So obviously we were always constrained for the basic communities of life. And I think my initial
00:01:34
Speaker
Thought about being an entrepreneur was more to do a business, right? And I wasn't very clear about the concept of entrepreneurship as a child. I'm sure nowadays the kids are more clear, but at our times, and I'm talking about 80s when I was in my school. So when you got into IMM, let's start from this. So did you know at the time you got in that you want to be an entrepreneur or was it like the
From Sales to Starting Up in Delhi
00:01:55
Speaker
regular path? And probably your family would have thought that you would take up a well-paying job.
00:02:00
Speaker
No, my family knew, all my batch mates knew. 110% I was very clear from day one that I will be an entrepreneur. So did you have experience before you joined IMM Dabat? Yes, I had spent around two years working in a sales job. So I had some sales experience and post time, what were you selling?
00:02:15
Speaker
I was a part of escorts, so I was working with escorts as a sales engineer. But that was a very interesting experience that made me travel into the hinterland of the country and really gave me exposure to working hard. So that's what I learned and I think that's one of the important traits an entrepreneur needs to have, right? You really need to work hard.
00:02:34
Speaker
So 97 you passed out. Did you take up a job or what happened? Yes, I joined Godrej and I was a part of their management training batch in 1997. I was very fortunate that I was asked to handle a new business within four months of my empty program and that gave me wonderful exposure to how do you really run the business.
00:02:53
Speaker
and then what happened after Godrej? I stayed with Godrej for approximately two years but incidentally a small incident in my life happened in fact I was getting married and my wife was working here in Delhi I was in Bangalore and three months before her wedding she told me that you know and she was working with NTBC at that point of time
00:03:15
Speaker
She told me three months before her wedding that NTBC, they don't have an office in Bangalore and she'll have to quit her job. And I always wanted someone as my life partner who has a stable job. So that actually made me think and one of my batch mates is a very dear friend. He suggested to me that, why don't you leave your job now and go to Delhi and start something? So that's the way my entrepreneur originally started or it was to start always. So it was always as a part of my plan in my life, but it kind of got pre-poned.
00:03:41
Speaker
And my friend convinced me that, you know, it's important for you to maybe take that step now. And I had concerns about capital, I had concerns about saving. But then he gave me very strong logic. He said, you know, you are never going to have savings in life, right? So once you're working, you get married, you have family responsibilities, you'll buy a car, you'll buy a home, and you'll never be able to come out of that.
00:04:01
Speaker
1999 you landed in Delhi. Yeah, I landed in Delhi in October 1999. I had no business plan in my mind. I just had confidence that I could do something. I could kind of churn something around and if it fails, I can always go back to
Founding Netambit: A Journey Without a Business Plan
00:04:14
Speaker
a job. And I think that confidence my father and my family gave to me, my father told me that even if you are not able to succeed, you know,
00:04:21
Speaker
you'll always find a job because you have good quality education. And I think that's where I would recommend everybody, especially young entrepreneurs, that it's important to focus on education. That's always your plan B in life. So that gave me confidence and I came back to Delhi. I got married. The day of marriage was a very tough day. A lot of people were asking me, hey, what are you doing? Are you still with Godrej? I actually had an offer from Coke at that point of time and everybody in the family knew that I was going to join Coke.
00:04:47
Speaker
But when I told them that I'm actually, I've left my job and I want to do something, everybody was asking me, what exactly do you want to do? And I had no answer. So it was a pretty stressful day. When I look back, I really feel that it's all destined in your life, right? What, what, and, and actually accordingly you start thinking. So maybe it was my destiny that I had to take this entrepreneurial journey and career. And I think I'm very pleased that I took that decision at that point of time.
00:05:10
Speaker
So Netambit initially started with providing, again, offline services to some of the e-commerce companies. That was the initial model. There were a lot of those B2B companies. There was Satyam at that point of time. There was HDFC Securities. They wanted to really acquire customers for their portals or their online businesses. That's what we started off with. And then in 2001, we signed up with Airtel for their SMB business.
00:05:33
Speaker
It was strong with their large corporates and with their retail business, but they had hardly any presence on the SMB side. So that's where we started acquiring SMBs for them. We started generating cash.
Netambit's Rise in Insurance
00:05:43
Speaker
We continue to reinvest all that cash, right? So I did not draw anything in initial three to four years from the company as a remuneration, right? So everything was getting reinvested back into the company.
00:05:54
Speaker
2001 towards the time when we got into insurance. So that was a big decision that we had taken. Insurance sector was opening up and we realized that private companies wanted support on selling. So we signed up as a corporate agent for one of the insurance companies and we helped them scale their business. We very shortly did very well in the insurance space. And in fact, we started doing so well that by around 2005, we exited everything else that we were doing because we realized that financial services distribution in country can become very large.
00:06:22
Speaker
There were not any structured large players on the financial services distribution side, especially insurance. So what was the trajectory post that? It was very good. In fact, by around 2005-06, we became extremely popular in the insurance sector. The model that we used to scale and sell insurance in India was, so people started calling it an attempt model.
00:06:43
Speaker
In fact, Forbes covered us in around 2008 when they did a story on how Net Ambit is creating a model for selling insurance in a country like India and how it can be a model for a lot of other countries to follow, especially developing countries to follow. So that's what we started doing and the business scaled to around 450, 500 member team by 2007. We were present in multiple cities in North India.
00:07:07
Speaker
2007 was the time when we raised the first round of VC money. Bessemer Venture Partners invested in us. 2009 we did Series B. Series B was Bessemer and Helion.
00:07:16
Speaker
We raised a reasonable amount of money. I think in four rounds between 2007 and 2012, we raised around 180 karosh. Did the Lehman brothers collapse and all of those things? No, nothing impacted us. Nothing impacted us because we were focusing a lot more on tier two, tier three cities, right? And that's where, you know, the need for insurance was growing. And that's where I think people were not aware of insurance as a product or
00:07:41
Speaker
how effective can a life insurance plan be or how effective a health insurance plan can be right. So that's where we were focusing on. Our focus was always in tier 2-3 cities and till date I think we have an expertise wherein we get into tier 2-3 cities in a very effective, cost effective and an efficient manner. We do sell in metros also so I'm not saying that we are not strong in metros but I think our biggest strength comes from
00:08:03
Speaker
Our ability to hire people in smaller towns, train people while they are remotely present and ensure that they are doing an effective work in those cities. It was
Facing Challenges: The License Hurdle
00:08:11
Speaker
2012-13, like what was Netambit like. Netambit was a mid-sized organization doing pretty well. We were present in 450 cities, approximately 7,000 people in that business.
00:08:22
Speaker
In 2011, we started our second company which is into real estate sales and distribution. Again, there we did extremely well. So, Netamet was doing very well. We had plans to do an IPO to give exist to our investors. 2013 was that time. Then in 2013, there was a problem with our insurance broken license. It wasn't renewed for around 8 months. It gets renewed every 3 years.
00:08:44
Speaker
That impacted us extremely badly and I think that's where my journey as an entrepreneur wherein you really have to live through a very rough time or a tough time came in. It came with a lot of challenges but it also came with tremendous learnings.
00:08:56
Speaker
Does that mean that for 8 months there were 7000 people who could not sell anything? Yes, so it definitely means that there were 7000 people, there was a lot of insecurity within the organization because license wasn't there and there was a chaos within the organization and for us it was the first experience in our lifetime, you know, how to really handle such a situation and you don't know how to really manage or handle it. We filed an appeal with the regulator.
00:09:20
Speaker
They took approximately 8 months to clear us on those kind of issues and we could finally get our license back. But in those 8 months, the damage was fully done. We lost a lot of revenue on us. We had large offices, large fixed costs, all those costs stayed. So although the license came back, we started selling again after 8 months but we could not sell effectively because as I said, our revenues dropped sharply.
00:09:43
Speaker
So it was a very, very tough situation and a lot of people advised that it may be a wise thing to really wind up the business and move on in life. But then as a group of entrepreneurs, me and my co-founders, we were keen to kind of give it a try to kind of revive Netambit, right? Because it's easy to wind up, right? But it's not a good thing to run away from the situation. So that's what the lowest point of Netambit like.
00:10:06
Speaker
you know like what had it come down to in terms of either headcount so headcount we dropped to around 500 600 odd people at its lowest level when was this that was in around 2017 approximately so what happened from 13 to 17 13 you had that eight month period
00:10:24
Speaker
So 13 we had that statement period. We definitely had cash in banks. So we could continue to sustain, but the cash obviously we kind of ran out of and I have a lot of learning sort of that phase, right? So, uh, which in hindsight, you know, I made a lot of mistakes as a CEO of the company, you know, which in hindsight, you know, had had, if, if I were to get into a similar situation, I will do things very differently to really kind of come out of that situation. And my sense is that damage would have been much less.
00:10:51
Speaker
Can you share what mistakes you made because it'll help other entrepreneurs? Yeah, I see a lot of companies also making that mistake. For example, we were slightly heavy on costs. Even if you're not going through a bad situation, you should not build large costs. That's what I've seen. Nowadays, we are all reading in media, a lot of companies scaling down, letting people go.
00:11:15
Speaker
These are clear examples of companies who have overbuilt for costs. So I think that is something that is a mistake. I'm not repeating again as we are building our version 2 of our journey, right? Although it's a very different business that we are building now. It has nothing to do with our old businesses, right? But still, we are being extremely careful about the cost structures. It's very easy to build costs.
00:11:34
Speaker
As in you had too much headcount, too much offices on rent. I think we had too much overheads, not headcount. I think headcount is required in our kind of business which is our revenue on us and you need the right structures. So you can't be penny-wise pound foolish but at the same time, you know, kind of building a lot of layers and having a lot of heavy structures.
00:11:58
Speaker
A lot of flashy offices. I think the times are changing now. Unless you become a very large company. A lot of founders make this mistake, right? And I think I also made this mistake, right? That while you are doing well, right? You start building the flashy offices. You start investing a lot in kind of other things,
Lessons from Downturn: Resilience and Revival
00:12:17
Speaker
right?
00:12:17
Speaker
maybe my learning is you should not do it right because ultimately the only thing you should care about is the well-being of your business and well-being of your people right so that ultimately people are extremely important to my mind right so you really need to ensure that you have cash balances for the rainy days any business will go through rainy days for sure right these are cycles
00:12:39
Speaker
I have not seen even a single business which continues to do well. From the outside, it may look that businesses are doing well, but I think the real strength of the business lies in looking at the cash flows. When we hear stories about businesses struggling or going down under, it's largely because of cash flows and P&L. These are the two main reasons. I think it's good to always conserve cash.
00:12:59
Speaker
for the rainy days and so no point in spending a lot and especially you know especially Indian businesses or till you become very very large very large one should be extremely careful about conserving cash so I think that's a big mistake that I made and second mistake that I made was you know when
00:13:16
Speaker
such a situation kind of came in right i think we should have cut down on overheads very very sharply which we did not do i i don't like to cut down on people right but i think you're especially other roads like you know you have offices etc etc even if you have lock-ins you should try to see negotiate or maybe somehow come out of those situations very very fast
00:13:36
Speaker
So I think there are a lot of other learning side which are smaller or kind of in nature but largely cost because costs are real and they have to be looked at very very sharply very sharply and being very dispassionate about situations is extremely important. A lot of times as entrepreneurs we are very very
00:13:55
Speaker
emotional about our businesses. I think that is something, especially in tough situations, you have to be very practical about such a situation. So there, you know, these are few learnings and I'm still learning. It's not as if the learnings have stopped. And I think that's what, to my mind, excites entrepreneurs, right? So you continue to learn till the last day you are an entrepreneur, right? So what were some of the tough decisions you had to make in that 13 to 17 period?
00:14:21
Speaker
lots of them lots of them i think there were tough decisions around you know we had limited cash so for example whether to pay rentals or do salaries or do you know you know your government use so those are the questions you have right because ultimately if you don't pay salaries you lose out on people right and that is required to rebound out of that situation you need people you need
00:14:45
Speaker
people to work on that in that tough situation to really kind of come out of that situation. So I think multiple tough decisions on a day to day basis had to be taken. What was this period like for you personally? No, I have realized one thing Akshay, you have two choices. Either you give up or you become stronger, right? So fortunately for me, I think the God was kind and I think my own mindset turned extremely positive.
00:15:06
Speaker
because I personally saw it as a learning phase right because there is so much of negativity around you in such situations right so there are there are various stakeholders who are telling you that maybe you know will not sustain and and so every day you get to hear such things from various people they could be your
00:15:22
Speaker
uh investors they could be your own employees they could be your own co-founders right who at times uh would say that hey it is very tough to sustain let's wind up or things will go bad or you get a legal notice from somewhere or you get a notice from one of the government departments there could be raids on you and multiple things happen so everyday stuff so but but i think what i've learned that the only choice you have is to remain uh positive so i've had very very
00:15:48
Speaker
I would say tough times, but I've learned one thing that if you remain positive, your intent is correct. You're not unethical by nature. If your intent is to ensure that every stakeholder is important and if your intent is to ensure that every stakeholder has to be treated in the right and ethical way, I think if you do that, to my mind you remain calm.
00:16:10
Speaker
So that's what I did. I tried to ensure that in order of priority, I kept myself the last as a stakeholder. And in fact, as founders, we did not take any salaries out of the company for around five and a half, six years. We're still not taking it as we speak because we want to clear off all the liabilities. And by God's grace, we've been able to clear most of the liabilities by now. So it's important to kind of remain focused on this agenda of
00:16:35
Speaker
of reviving the organization in such situations because organization has to be larger than your own self. If you work with that objective to my mind and if God is kind, I think God has to be kind on you, right? There are tough days, very tough days, you know, I've had days wherein, you know, kind of people whom, you know, whom we kind of
00:16:53
Speaker
Whom we had to pay, they came to office, they'll create rakas and all that. All that happens, all that happens. And I'm sure a lot of entrepreneurs who go through this situation would see those days. It's just important to remain calm. Another big learning that I had is, you know, never run away from the situation. If there is a tough situation, right? If there is a government notice or there is any problem, some people are at your office trying to create a rakas. So, so, so.
00:17:16
Speaker
You know, they're right.
Strategic Shift to Managed Sales Services
00:17:17
Speaker
They have every right to ask for their money. Maybe their behavior is not correct, right? So the best thing I've done and I've learned is I've always faced the situation. I've never run away from the situation. I'll go and meet them. I'll talk to them, convince them, give them this confidence. So what happens is if you owe someone some dues or some money, be it government officials or kind of anybody, right? No one wants to kill you. Ultimately, what they want is their money. And what they want is confidence. And what we want is entrepreneurs' time.
00:17:45
Speaker
So I think once you meet them, you tell them your problem, you explain to them what you're going through, you explain to them that your intent is not poor. I think I've seen 99.99% of the people aligning with you and giving you adequate time to improve things. And I think that's what I've seen and I've been able to successfully do in the last five years. I've not even had a single instance wherein someone has really gone physical. So you have to be fair, you have to be fair to everybody. You have to look at the situation from their viewpoint. Once you do that, I'm sure you will be able to solve any tough situation.
00:18:15
Speaker
So you had a real estate business also then from 13 to 17 why could you not
00:18:21
Speaker
Yeah, so the real estate markets also slowed down in a big way and a lot of a kind of cash got stuck with a lot of builders from whom we had to take payments. So that added to the problem. And in any case, our financial services business used to contribute approximately 85% of the group's revenue. So that was very large. And so since it was gone for around eight months, we had no way but to, you know, to just sustain on real estate business.
00:18:48
Speaker
So that led us to kind of, you know, that increased our problems. So, and it happens, Akshay, when things go bad for you in life, you know, you're struck on all the fronts. So, but I think lovely learning experience overall. So then in 2017, when you were at 500 people, so tell us about the journey after that.
00:19:08
Speaker
In 2017, parallelly what happened? In 2017, you were still in insurance? Yeah, we were in insurance but we were very keen to shut down insurance because unfortunately what happened during that phase of 2014-17, the misselling and the wrong practices in insurance increased a lot. So most of the employees who were selling were misselling which we were not very comfortable as founders. We are very ethical by nature, all of us.
00:19:32
Speaker
We don't want to get engaged in anything which is not right. We tried our level best. We really worked very hard. I personally traveled to all our locations, addressed our people multiple number of times that let's sell in the right way, you know, because our complaints were increasing. That's the point of time we'd...
00:19:48
Speaker
totally decided to shut down insurance you know and so we practically shut down so today we don't do any insurance business at all although we have the license we plan to rebuild it at some point of time in future but we then decided to you know kind of take a break because and that's where this idea of managed sales services came in that's a new business that we have started it's all together a very different business that that you know is there in the nature
00:20:11
Speaker
So we decided to shut off the insurance business in 2017-18 beginning. We totally shut it down. We made it zero. We could not have shut it down overnight because there were people and there were liabilities etc. So we really kind of scaled it down slowly. By step by step we started winding up our zones or markets. So we started with East India and then slowly we kind of finished it off. And apparently we started looking at opportunities to build our
00:20:36
Speaker
new business which is managed sales services. So we were fortunate that by around April, May of 2018, this new business started showing good initial signs of success. How did it start? Who were your first clients? What was the origin of the idea to offer managed sales services?
00:20:55
Speaker
Yeah, so the origin of the idea came from the fact that we realized that sales is a challenge for everybody, right? Be it, as I said earlier, be it insurance companies, be it banks, be it ultimately everyone has to sell. So we realized that especially all of these new age companies were coming up and ultimately, you know, we realized that a lot of these companies by DNA, by culture are not sales organizations, they are tech organizations or product organizations.
00:21:21
Speaker
But to scale, they definitely have to do sales. And that's where we thought then when companies can outsource their alt-interactivities or KPU activities, why not sales at large scale? So that's when we came out with this thought of starting a managed sales services business and we started approaching people. Initially, we experimented with some smaller companies, startups, basically to understand whether this idea will sail through or not. So all that was happening parallely and actually, to be very honest, you just continue to try, right, while you're building a new business.
00:21:50
Speaker
Our first break came from PTM. So PTM gave us this opportunity. They were keen that we work with them on managed sales services. But I think we were not prepared to handle such a large account at one go. So we started with staffing, sales stuffing, as one of the areas. And I'm really thankful to PTM and to Vijay Spishti, I think. So once we had PTM as a client, after that, we really built this business successfully today.
00:22:14
Speaker
We work with Amazon, Google, Swiggy. What do you do for each of these clients? For some of them, we do sales staffing. Although that's not a business we really intend to scale a lot. Our intentions are to scale managed sales services. In managed sales services, we
00:22:31
Speaker
work with every client and identify what their requirements offline sales or account management requirements are wherein they either on the supply side or the demand side so we basically sit with the client we understand what the requirements are we figure out what kind of models do they need to work on and we create those models for them and we manage those models for them so complete
00:22:55
Speaker
Hiring of those people, salespeople, salespeople are on our roles. They are accountable to Netambit and Netambit's HR policies are followed. We do the complete planning and performance management. So we take accountability of the business plan for those companies when it comes to whatever metric they want us
Scaling Netambit: Processes and Culture
00:23:11
Speaker
to try. Can you give some examples?
00:23:12
Speaker
So I'll take an example of a leading food tech company. So today, a food tech company requires to onboard restaurants for them, right? Because the restaurants that you see on a food tech platform. So for a leading food tech company, we do their restaurant onboarding, Pan India, and we started small approximately 14 months back for them. And today, 100% of the restaurants are onboarded by us, be it their national accounts or any kind of restaurants in their top 99 cities.
00:23:38
Speaker
Then the same company wanted to expand to around 1000 odd cities from at that point of time they were presented 45 cities. We have helped them scale from 45 to approximately 600 plus cities. So the launch teams are ours, the expansion teams are ours. So our teams travel, they really launch a city for this company and after that we have another set of team which really manages these cities for them.
00:24:03
Speaker
So we do multiple things for that company. So we are largely doing any kind of merchant onboarding. We just not only onboard or acquire the merchant or the client for our clients. We basically also help them manage them on an ongoing basis. So it's a complete sales and business development role that we play.
00:24:24
Speaker
We also work with some of the large companies who really want help on SMB onboarding, small and medium business onboarding and managing those accounts, basically driving revenue out of them. We also work with some clients who need us to get into large corporate. So we basically work across segments, B2B, B2C, B2SMB, B2 Retail. Whatever is any kind of sales requirement, any kind of offline sales requirement is what we try to solve for.
00:24:50
Speaker
So what are the lessons for entrepreneurs in terms of scaling up headcount? Because as you said, you currently have more than 15,000 people. And in 2017, you had 500 people. So from 500 to crossing 15,000. How did you do that in such a short span?
00:25:08
Speaker
I think fundamentally scaling requires to do basic things day in and day out in the right manner right. So it's a process. Sales or scaling or if you want to scale your hiring you want to scale your manpower you want to scale your organization you want to scale your sales or do you want to scale your demand side supply side. It's all about deciding a framework a process and following it religiously. I'm not saying that it should be hard cast in stone. You have to constantly keep an eye on key matrices and refine them as you go along.
00:25:38
Speaker
But one thing I've noticed why people are not able to scale, and then one big thing I'm noticing, especially with a lot of young entrepreneurs that I meet while I go around and meet a lot of start-ups, they change their plans too fast. They don't have the patience to look through a plan or say for example, I've seen them creating a plan and within one month if they're not getting the results, they get impatient. It takes time. It takes three to four months for any plan to really start showing results.
00:26:05
Speaker
I'm not saying that you should not tweak that plan as you go along, you should tweak, but fundamentally you should not change the direction of the plan. So that's what at least we don't do. We really spend a lot of time thinking through a plan, creating the right processes, right matrices around it. But once we are convinced about that plan, then we give it our level best, then we don't change the plans frequently. We definitely tweak the plans, we definitely review the plans, but we don't make large fundamental changes in that plan.
00:26:33
Speaker
And I've seen 99.99% of the times that sustains and that really helps you scale the business effectively. Because no point that you show impatience, right? Because in any case, you've invested for a month's cost or two month's cost, right? If you fundamentally change it altogether, then you're going to burn all that investments that you have made and again, you're going to restart from scratch. So that's what I've seen as a typical thing that a lot of people do. And we normally don't do that.
00:27:00
Speaker
We put a faith into a plan and just go after that plan. So what do you think of the famous slogan of Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things?
00:27:10
Speaker
Now moving fast is important. So I'm not saying that you should not move fast, but you know, the definition and the benchmark of moving fast has to be clearly defined, especially when you are building offline workforces where in wherever you need an offline intervention, I think you need three to six months to stabilize things. You know, if you think moving fast is moving at a pace in which you want to really move fast and change things within a month's time to my mind, that won't happen because ultimately you're dealing with human minds.
00:27:39
Speaker
They have their own practices, culture. I think one big important thing that I've really used always to scale my businesses is culture. I think culture is extremely important to be aligned. And when you are scaling fast, you get people from different backgrounds. So I think what they bring on table is tons of knowledge, tons of experience. But what they also bring on table is very diverse cultures. And I'm not saying any culture is good or bad. Maybe they come from very good cultural back.
00:28:09
Speaker
they bring on table a lot of good cultural practices or good culture. What is important is alignment of that culture, right? So as an organization, we also need to learn from them. At the same time, every organization needs to have a unique culture. So culture is extremely important to be retained and constantly refined. So that's what, but I think it's important that the teams are thinking alike in terms of the culture.
00:28:37
Speaker
Is there a difference in how you did your first scale-up when in 2005 you were about 500 people and then you hit about 8,000 people and now again from 500 to 15,000 people. So in these two scale-ups, is there a difference? Yes, I think the difference is A, we have become much wiser in terms of how we really want to scale-up.
Advice to Young Entrepreneurs: Balance and Growth
00:28:59
Speaker
So we are extremely conscious on cost, which I said earlier.
00:29:02
Speaker
Second, this time I think the last time I think as we build the organization from scratch to around 8,000 right and we had very strong leadership team at the top. I think one mistake I made was I stopped engaging a lot with the frontline people in this business. It's extremely important to engage with everybody. I think this time around I'm not making that mistake. I'm deeply engaged with the people in terms of communication, in terms of talking to them frequently because
00:29:30
Speaker
That's what I've realized for maintaining the culture or the right culture or doing the right things. It's very important for the leader to consistently be in touch with your folks. So that's what I think I'm doing. Third, we are not building very expensive structures within the organization. So we are actually bringing in youngsters who come with the right passion, who come with the right value systems, and upgrading them to take up the leadership roles. So I think that is the third thing. So that will help us.
00:29:59
Speaker
minimize or keep our costs under control and at the same time ensure that organization has a lot of energy, a lot of agility to kind of keep moving on. So if you could send a letter to your younger self, what would you tell him? Say, the day when you got married, if you could write a letter to you, which would be opened by you when you're getting married, what would that letter have in it?
00:30:23
Speaker
That's a very interesting question. I think if this question alludes to the fact that, you know, if I look back what I could have done better, if that's what the question is, then my answer is yes, I would definitely would have liked to maintain a better work-life balance, which I haven't tried until now, I think.
00:30:46
Speaker
I've really been working very hard which has come at a cost of my own health and my own family. I think I would like to change that moving forward. I would definitely like to kind of have a much better work-life balance and that's what my request to all entrepreneurs would be.
00:31:01
Speaker
that you should definitely have a better work-life balance. That's one. Second, I have missed out on learning in terms of knowledge beyond what I know. I think that's one big regret I have and if I were to kind of rewind and kind of relive my journey, I would have definitely remarked some time for my own personal learnings. For example, like you would have learned to play the guitar or
00:31:24
Speaker
So that's on the hobby side, yes, but I think on the knowledge side also. For example, I don't understand AI well today, right? I don't understand online part of the business well. It's not as if you have to learn anything to just run your businesses. It's also just, I think most of the entrepreneurs are very hungry for knowledge is what I have seen. I think that's a trait of entrepreneurs, right? So I've missed out on that.
00:31:47
Speaker
So that is one area that I think every entrepreneur must focus on. And I'm sure a lot of entrepreneurs do focus on that.
The Entrepreneurial Journey: Mental Strength and Sacrifices
00:31:53
Speaker
But I have missed out personally, so I would like to really focus on that as I move forward from here on. But is everyone cut out to be an entrepreneur?
00:32:01
Speaker
not really you need a lot of mental strength first of all you need you need to sacrifice a lot right so people who are not willing to sacrifice their personal lives not willing to sacrifice multiple things right as an entrepreneur you so as an entrepreneur so being an entrepreneur is a thankless job right so it's not
00:32:20
Speaker
As if very few, if you see very few entrepreneurs become extremely popular when they make a lot of money and so it's a journey and it is a passion. It's like being in armed forces, right? So only those people who are committed to, you know, lead that kind of a life, which is a very, very tough life, very tough life, I think they only should choose that, right? Similarly for an entrepreneur, it's not an easy life. You should be prepared for ups and downs and you should enjoy every phase of your entrepreneurial journey. If you are cut out for that, then only should take the entrepreneurial path.
00:32:53
Speaker
So that was Girish Patra talking about his roller coaster journey. Girish currently mentors young Sata founders and if you want to get introduced to him then shoot a mail at hello at the podium.in
00:33:12
Speaker
If you like The Foundathesus Podcast then do check out our other shows on subjects like Marketing, Technology, Career Advice, Books and Drama. Visit the podium.in for a complete list of all our shows. This was an HD Smartcast Original.
00:33:41
Speaker
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