A former actor who digitised his legacy business and an entrepreneur who built a Rs 470 Cr livestock feed company: the top SMB stories of the week
Small businesses across India are weathering the COVID-19 challenge and turning the corner. This week, SMBStory covered some inspiring stories: an actor who digitised his legacy business, an entrepreneur who launched a livestock feed company, and more.
The second wave of COVID-19 wreaked havoc on India’s MSME sector, bringing challenges such as supply chain disruptions, lack of demand, and mounting expenses.
To address the devastating effects of the second wave on MSMEs and throw light on stories of resilience in the face of new challenges, YourStory organised its third annual India MSME Summit. The 10-day India MSME Summit 2021, presented by Lenovo and Intel, and co-sponsored by AWS and TransUnion CIBIL, saw panel discussions on several themes, including cloud technologies, ecommerce, automation and much more.
This week, SMBStory also covered the inspiring stories of two entrepreneurs - Highphill Mathew and Amit Saraogi –to decode how they are scaling their businesses amid industrial revolution 4.0.
Highphill Mathew, Marco Pest Control Operations
After the successful release of his 2013 movie Sixteen, Highphill Mathew was content to be working at his Bollywood career until 2018 when his father’s health started deteriorating.
Suffering from colorectal cancer for the last couple of years, Highphill’s father, Dr Mathew, had built Marco Pest Control Operations in 1977 in Delhi to provide pest control services.
The Delhi-based company was started with the aim of offering pest management services to control mosquitoes, cockroaches, termites, bed bugs, and rats, but subsequently expanded to offer all-encompassing facility management services to organisations. It has a staggering base of clients like Honda, High Court of Delhi, Muthoot Finance, and many more.
Dr Mathews breathed his last in May 2021. In a conversation with SMBStory, Highphill narrates how he is walking in his father’s footsteps and working towards fulfilling his vision of scaling and strengthening the business. He also talks about his aim to transition to modern ways of working - the need of the hour.
Amit Saraogi, Anmol Feeds
Amit Saraogi, hailing from Bihar, was pursuing his engineering from Ramaiah Institute of Technology, Bangalore, between 1994 and 1998. He would often visit his family members in Bihar, and especially his uncle during his summer holidays.
Apart from running a grocery shop, his uncle also sold poultry feed. While assisting his uncle in his free time, Amit realised the imbalance in the demand and supply of livestock feed.
After completing his graduation, Amit retuned to Bihar, and started working on ideas to bridge the demand and supply gap in the livestock feed space. He soon rented out a factory space to work on his idea.
Amit started his entrepreneurial journey in 2000, after borrowing Rs 5 lakh from his father and working out of his plant in Muzaffarpur. This is how Anmol Feeds Pvt. Ltd. came into existence. Today, the company manufactures and sells different types of animal feeds, mainly for shrimp, fish, cattle, and poultry.
The company clocked Rs470 crore revenue in FY21.
Other top stories of the week:
Groovy Juices
When brothers Mitkaran Singh and Rajneesh Sharma – B2B manufacturers of packaged drinking water - would meet family members living abroad, they heard them gush about the high quality of juice packs available in the US and Canada.
The visiting relatives’ disparaging remarks about locally-made, Indian juice products - especially those supplied to rural areas - did bother the duo, but it also inspired them to do something about it.
Mitkaran and Rajneesh not only went on to launch their own brand of high quality fruit juice, but also made sure that they were affordably priced for underserved communities, by launching Enhaz Beverages. They also spun a fruit juice brand under it called Groovy Juices.
Established with an initial investment of Rs 10 lakh, Groovy’s production commenced in July 2020 amidst the pandemic in the brothers’ packaged drinking water plant in Rudrapur, Uttarakhand, which was revamped to manufacture fruit juice. The company has clocked sales worth Rs 15 crore since its inception, according to the claims made by the founders.
Edited by Teja Lele
