Mahendra Yadav, Founder, Tavisca Solutions

The trendsetter!

"A company is successful when it makes both its clients and employees successful." This is the precept behind Tavisca Solutions' success and consummation. YourStory had a conversation with Mahendra Yadav, the founder of Tavisca Solutions where he discussed about his entrepreneurial journey and told us more about his mantras and ideologies.What is Tavisca all about?

Tavisca is a product development company, building and licensing enterprise software in online travel domain to global customers. Tavisca software enables online travel platform for small to large travel agencies. Tavisca licenses and maintains the platform as per the Client’s business needs. Being both B2B and B2C software, Tavisca products reach out to more than a million unique consumers today.Tavisca is a self funded and continuously profitable organization and one of the fastest growing SME organizations.

What do you think makes you different from others?

Tavisca creates its platform as software as a service model, with tremendous capability to make large customizations, integrations with other software and interfacing into third party softwares in online travel space. Tavisca platform’s Clients have the flexibility to request any customizations in the software, without constraints of a rigid platform. In near future, just like SalesForce.com, third party companies can build, customize and integrate their components into Tavisca Platform. We license our software on a transaction / unique users based model. We also offer custom development services to our Clients for any customizations they need on Tavisca platform.

What ushered you to be an entrepreneur? What made you stick to it?

We love our nation and feel obligated to create jobs, products and pride. We wish to maximize our ideas and capabilities to create success and wealth, for us and our employees. This is why I choose to be an entrepreneur. I never felt like giving up because of

Excellence & Success – Everyday if you believe that the company is always improving for its clients and employees, have high standards and the approach is successful, roller coaster never hurts.

Social Responsibility - As an entrepreneur your decision not only impacts individuals life but also the employees associated with the company

Passion for products and people - Being a people company, the endeavor always has been towards people growth and ensuring their time is well spent in the company.

What hurdles did you come across?

Finding good talent – We ensured that whoever we hire, we create job satisfaction and ensure near zero attrition. It worked wonders for us. From there on, we just ensured that we create and manage relationships with various colleges, training institutions and our sourcing affiliates.

Strategy & Sales – Being self funded, our strategy was so much cash oriented than roadmap oriented. In a matter of some months, we ensured to commit our focus, effort and finance management towards product development and professional services in a segregated and monitored fashion, ensuring predictability.

Time to market – We always believed that some products have a window of opportunity and we should make or break within that time. Given located in India and catering to US market, it was always a challenge. We changed our product development and sales approach to find Clients at every iteration of our products and managed to reduce the iteration cycle.

Long hours and emotional churn – No one is a startup without these. Quite a lot of startups fail when someone from the team falls out. Beyond professional lines, we ensured that we provide the personal space to individuals when the need arises and ensured that the team remains intact irrespective to professional and personal highs and lows. Openness in culture and every matter has a resolution were key approach towards it.

Any mistakes so far?

Yes. Marketing – We believed that after building great software, marketing will happen automatically. It never hurt us bad, but it’s never true in such fast moving market.

How do you think Tavisca can scale up?

We can scale up by-

Building highly customizable products, keeping the core intact.

Building partners to manage any elastic demand on custom development resources.

Globalizing products and widgetizing UI based web platform to enable global audience to use our software and possibly customize some portions of it on their own.

Growing company from inside building small independent organizations within.

What do you see in the near future?

In terms of people, we started with eleven people by the end of 2008, forty three by the end of 2009 and fifty six by the end of March 2010.We have only one branch, we have planned to open one more in 2010-11.

In terms of revenue for

• 2008-09 $150,000 in revenues
• 2009-10 $ in $1.7 MM in revenues
• 2010-11 Target to double up the 2009-10 revenues.

Our vision for the future is to be true SaaS platform, with zero in house professional services team

and to create tangible wealth for our employees.

Please share with us your moments of achievements and recognition.

100% Client retention

The company has grown many folds in terms revenues in a short span of time

Non-existent employee attrition

High profitability and profitable every day of existence.

We have not marketed ourselves much. In terms of our clients, we had been gaining clients from Client references and the chain continues.

What do you think is lacking in the enviornment provided to Indian entrepreneurs?

Government does not have any special support for export oriented SMEs. STPI is one of the ways, but it’s going to be history soon

The government machinery is still filled up with red tape and its own taste of corruption. It is more easy to start companies, but too much hassle in the name of compliance.

Visa norms across countries add to pains in agility of doing multi national business for any startup.

Marketing and advisors are key challenge for any startup. Startups with viable business model are willing to engage with “mentors” at some cost, but there are a few takers in today’s world.

Do you any advice for the coming entrepreneurs?

Have a team, which can take care of each other.

Be open and practical.

Have high standards, follow nothing is impossible.

Balance work and personal life.

Keep family into confidence.

Be no evil. Happy clients and associates accelerate your own growth

Everyone needs mentors, everyone shall look forward to work with people better than oneself, everyone should get space to grow. Don’t be arrogantly confident & take risks with people.

YourStory wishes Mahendra Yadav and Tavisca Solutions all the very best for their future.