These entrepreneurs prove failures or small beginnings can’t stop you from building multi-crore businesses
This week SMBStory covered the journeys of three companies whose founders started small, faced numerous challenges and difficulties, but their perseverance and resilience enabled them to transform their companies into multi-crore businesses.
Someone once said the enormity of your problems is nothing compared to your ability to solve them. But not everyone is born with a silver spoon and history has enough examples that show, you may not always succeed in what you first set out to do.
This week SMBStory covered the journeys of three companies whose founders started small, faced numerous challenges and difficulties, but their perseverance and resilience enabled them to transform their companies into multi-crore businesses.
Piyush Somani, Founder, CMD, and CEO of ESDS Software Solution
Born into a middle-class family in Maharashtra, Piyush Somani was an average student. As his father was a bank official, the family was usually on the move. In 1989, they settled in Nashik. In 1999, Piyush left for Pune to pursue engineering. When he had completed his degree, his family urged him to start a business, but he did not trust their judgement right away. He took up a job at a manufacturing company in Mumbai, but later moved back to Nashik to work in the IT sector, as his income did not support his stay in Mumbai.
In November 2003, Piyush, then 23, decided to start a small web hosting support business with seven friends. But with no revenues yet, they couldn’t afford to rent an office space.
A partner’s mother happened to run a kindergarten centre in the city, so she offered the space to Piyush and his team to run the business after the children left. Piyush agreed.
He brought his personal computer and his friends, too, brought a few computers from home and installed them in the kindergarten room. Piyush’s father gave them Rs 25,000 to buy an internet connection.
During the day, the children occupied the kindergarten centre and after they left, Piyush and his partners would use the space. Thus began Piyush’s web hosting support business. Today, it is known as ESDS Software Solution — a name Piyush registered in 2005.
ESDS is no longer a small group of web support workers sitting at a kindergarten centre. The company says it is now a managed data centre and cloud hosting services provider with more than 850 employees that generates revenue of Rs 160 crore.
P Ravindra Reddy and K Satyanarayana Reddy, Co-founders of MTAR Technologies
P Srinivas Reddy, Managing Director of MTAR Technologies and Ravindra Reddy’s son
Precision engineering company MTAR Technologies’ origin dates back to 1970, when it was established by two friends and technocrats P Ravindra Reddy and the late K Satyanarayana Reddy. Its first project was the manufacture of coolant channel assemblies for nuclear reactor cores, as sought by the Department of Atomic Energy at that time.
The department had first approached state-owned HMT Ltd (then Hindustan Machine Tools Limited) for the project, but it declined, saying there was too much complexity involved. So the Reddy friends took up the challenge. With four machines at a small workshop in Hyderabad, they started MTAR.
A year later, Ravindra’s brother, PJ Reddy, joined the company to handle its finances.
Today, it is a leader in the nuclear, defence, and aerospace equipment space, with domestic clients such as ISRO, Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited, and Defence Research and Development Organisation, and overseas ones such as Bloom Energy, Dassault Aviation, and Elbit Systems. “We have over 400 machines, including 160-plus CNC (computer numerical control) machines spread across seven units,” says P Srinivas Reddy, Managing Director and Ravindra Reddy’s son.
“In FY 2020, our revenue from operations was Rs 213.8 crore, our order book size was Rs 345 crore, and our gross profits were 66.2 percent,” says Srinivas Reddy. In an exclusive interview with SMBStory, he talks about how the founders built one of India’s premier defence, space, and nuclear manufacturing companies.
Sachin Kharbanda, CEO of Lakshita Fashions Pvt Ltd
Sachin and Suneet Kharbanda, Director, Lakshita Fashions Pvt. Ltd.
Brothers Sachin and Suneet Kharbanda got into the business of exports right after completing their education in 1995. They started manufacturing and exporting women’s wear to the US and even sold the apparel in the domestic market.
They continued this for about three years, but things never seemed to work out. “We were only concentrating on manufacturing and making samples,” Sachin tells SMBStory. “Additionally, we were having conversations with wholesalers or retailers, and not the final consumer. This was leading to a gap.”
The brothers were always in the factory, trying to improve the existing items, but didn’t know what was selling in the market.
Their businesses reached a dead end and they had to shut shop. However, this was the beginning of another eventful journey.
Sachin says that while selling was their weakness, manufacturing became their strength. The brothers converted a property in Noida’s Sector-18 market into a factory outlet in 2002 and started selling women’s shirts and tunics.
This outlet helped them directly interact with customers and their feedback helped the brothers understand the market better and deliver according to current trends. This is how fusion wear brand Lakshita Fashions Pvt Ltd came into existence.
From one store, Lakshita grew to 69 stores (in the pre-pandemic era) and has become a well-known retail apparel brand in north India. It clocked a turnover of Rs 180 crore in the last fiscal year.
Edited by Lena Saha