Leaving the family business to walk my own path - RK. Jetty

Successful children agree they learn more about how to handle wealth from watching their parents. Like most children of wealth who turn out to be hard workers, Ravikanth. Jetty, 26, son of Mr. Rama Rao Jetty(Established businessman, Known personality, Industrialist), credits his father with showing him the value of work and giving him maximum career freedom. After college RK.Jetty felt he needed to make a name for himself outside his family’s businesses.

"Being an entrepreneur is not about love at first sight; it's about having an idea that intrigues you and increasingly pulls you in until you can no longer ignore it."

RK. Jetty now a partner of Raah Financials that he co-founded along with his friends Rahul Bansal and Alok Agarwal. Finance being a common interest among the trio, they chose to start a boutique wealth management firm that caters to the elite class of customers individually handled by our dedicated Relationship Managers who chalk out their

Starting your own venture is different from a family business and harder than you initially think, but interestingly enough, it gets easier as you set a vision and work on it step by step. It takes a great CEO to keep the company on track to achieve that vision. Thankfully for Raah, our CEO Rahul Bansal had a clear, crisp and concise vision for Raah.

Slow and Steady:

I decided to give the entrepreneur inside me a go and didn’t think twice about not having a business plan or strategy — I was going to give it my all to see how things turn out, and let me tell you they've been great ever since.

My father taught me at a very young age that anything is possible -- you just need to work hard and believe in yourself. When things go wrong he taught me to break the problem down into bite size pieces and push ahead, taking on each piece one at a time until the issue was resolved. As a result, no problem was insurmountable and no goal out of reach. I have been empowered by this belief throughout my entire life, something that fuels me now more than ever as an entrepreneur.

Hardships:

From interviewing people on the staircase of their under construction office site to hand picking every little item for their office interior as well as staying up late nights to plan things, RK. Jetty has many such memories/challenges at Raah.

In the early days, the founders are super excited about their company, but it's often hard to get a team equally excited. As start-ups are often small teams with undefined job roles and rather cash-strapped, not many are keen on joining one. But the kinds of people that one should hire are the ones who are confident and want to participate in the fun of forming a startup.

We were required to be a great judge of character on the fly and managed to get an excellent team on board. I was not a startup expert by any stretch of imagination. In fact, I’ve probably made thousands of mistakes during my initial days and I continue to learn from these mistakes. To me, that’s the beauty of trying something new and risky.

RK. Jetty also recalls the challenges of getting initial clients and investors.

‘For a startup like us, it made no sense then to invest in advertising. What we did instead was, we gradually built up confidence and a relationship with our handful clients. These clients grew our reputation among their family, colleagues and the entire community out of their own good experience. The key to our success in business is relationships.'

Today, Raah Financials employs 30 full-time staff (among them are dedicated Relationship Managers who plan our clients investment cycle), runs two fully established branches in India, has 280 active clients and has a good leadership position in the market.

A few achievements I'd like to share:

Raah Financials was awarded the ‘Best Performing Stock Broker in Bangalore 2014-15’ and ‘Super Star Performer in Bangalore 2015’.

Apart from the above milestones Raah was recently featured in India’s 25 most promising financials consultants of 2015 in a leading business magazine – Consultants Review and is recommended by a lot of their clients- thanks to my co-founders and consistent efforts from my team.

‘I am very proud of what I pulled off together with my co-founders, and I believe it’s nothing short of a miracle’.