TALE OF AN ENTREPRENEUR

What all struggles did you personally go through to make this happen?

If you are from a service background then there’s always that lingering feeling prodding you “go back to a job” “go back to a job”. The primary thing with a start up is money. Plain simple M O N E Y. I come from a service background and started with the money my grandmother gave me. We lost all the money in first six month. I have friend who chose not to follow his heart and worked for a bank in England. After first six months, I told him that am finished and there were clients running after me demanding money, so that friend of mine he took a loan and sent me 10000 pounds and that’s how Seagull could pay people and move on. So the first thing is simple money and the second thing is that horrible fear of anxiety whether you’ll get accepted and will the client pay me what he’s promised. For first three years we died. I dint meet any of my friends for about four years. And now I meet my batch mates and proudly tell them that I run my own business.

The current trend that we see today is that most of the MBA graduates take up high paying jobs and hence the motive of entrepreneurship is lost which is the ultimate aim of MBA. You being alumni of SIBM, what motivated you to start up something of your own?

Well it is the internal desire; I always wanted to be on my own. If you compare your corporate salary to what you will get when starting a business, there’s a huge gap, in the short run. But in the long run money doesn’t come. See if you have a great idea and you are engaging customers then you’ll definitely make money. If you delivery value you will satisfy customer and hence your business will grow. So for an entrepreneur I think the motivation has to be more than just money, it has to be a desire to create something which your own and that was my motivation.

What were the problems one has to face while starting up your their own thing?

I think, the first question that everybody asks you is “Who are you? Why should I give my business to you? Why should I believe you?” Most of them do business on credit. So the biggest issue with any start up is that there’s no credibility, nobody knows you. Linked to that is cash flows. Because I don’t know you, why should I trust you why should I pay you and everything you have to do, you have to pay in advance and that is the biggest challenge which we all face in any business. Challenge is not the idea, I think entrepreneurs have brilliant ideas, they fail only for one simple reason they don’t have cash flows. That’s the thing, if one has somebody to advice them well and guide them through it and if one has the persistence to hang on, then am sure they’ll make it through.

What was that one client/moment that propelled your business to new heights?

See we have dreams and we are on the way to achieving those dreams so I don’t think there’s one single thing that has changed us. The fact that we put up Bryan Adams in a concert for Pune it got us clients from city who are traditional or Pune based clients. So that was a big thing for us personally.

Being an alumnus of SIBM what advice would you like to give to the students?

Do what you wish to do in life. Today’s youth has the freedom to choose from a variety of fields. When we started our career had only one job and jobs were difficult to come by and I am purposely calling them jobs because today students don’t choose jobs they choose a career. So I think my only recommendation would be to choose a career. If you can then, do put your eye away from the money in the short run because this is something that I have learnt from a professor in Symbiosis, Late Colonel Rodricks. He would tell us that in life there are two things you need to go after, one is money and the other is experience. He said, “Choose experience first cause once you’ve got the experience money will eventually flow and experience comes from choosing a career of your choice“. Recently there’s this guy who’s joined us, he’s a marine engineer doing very well in his profession. But in spite of the astronomical amount of money that one gets in Marine and he’s joined us as a trainee. He has left the job just so that he may pursue what he wishes to do and follow his passion. So at management schools the passion gets sidetracked, coz there’s too much of peer pressure about salary, pay package etc.