This pandemic has taught us a lot from being more sensitive towards the society, being inclusive, being resilient or tech-savvy and also made us realize what actually is a necessity while all the un-necessities been given up. We usually get inspired from people who have achieved a lot and appear on news magazines, TV interviews or other media outlets whether they are stars , large entrepreneurs, comedians or other public figures.
This pandemic has given us the opportunity to connect with our neighbours, family and old-lost friends. This communication changed the way i looked at inspirations when recently i had about an hour long chat with my neighbour over the balcony.
The conversation started with a discussion about how his business was doing amidst this lockdown and he ended up in an hour long conversation about his journey so far. Mr. Raghu is a factory owner who builds rings for steel pipes? Nothing special right but wait what if i told it this way a person who used to be a labour at a factory ended up owing a 60 lac factory, interested now? So he is story goes as
Raghu passed his 12th and started working in a factory due to lack of interest in studies and his newly found interest in operating heavy machinery. Years passed by now he got married and now he realized the job was not enough to satisfy his financial needs so being a marwari business was the only choice but he knew nothing except operating machines. One day when is manager asked him to visit a factory to get some equipments from the manager, he went to the factory and his curiosity in machinery took him inside where he saw pipes being manufactured and rings being assembled in them, he looked at the ring a small round disc which was necessary for manufacturing pipes and immediately decided to make an attempt to make it, so he slided the ring in his pocket in took home. He went home and looked at it for a while and then kept it aside. After an year he went with his brother in law to sonipat for some factory related work while the brother in law went to speak to manager, he started exploring the factory and too his curiosity he found a ring being manufacture the ring that he had at home. He memorised the operations and machines required went home borrowed the money and to get equipments and made his first ring. He was very satisfied after he made his first ring but what to do with it who will buy it??So then he went to the factory from where he had taken that ring and asked them where they got th rings from and how much did it costs, he found that they bought the rings from maharsthra and he could produce that at much less cost so he got his first order of 20 rings that day. The journey thus began from working at factory at day to working for own firm at night. After a year of work he had some name and hired two workers. But now the market was saturated so he had to do something to grow so he startd visiting factories in nearby states giving his samples and asking them to try the product. His startegy worked but now he could not operated from home with the light machinery and the new equipment demand 40-50 workers but here is experience came into play where he bought the machine and did some minor changes and optimized the process in such a way that now the work required just 8 workers and they produced the rings that even chinese were not making, he had his usp now and started getting orders. The success was such that within a few years he had his own factories and 15 workers, but the lockdown hit the business what was interesting was the way he tackled the situation. He noticed his children using FB and Whatsapp every day so he asked how it worked and did the most marwari thing ever, he started looking for keywords like pipes and steel and using profile picture filtering like those who had a picture of machinery in the DP, he started sending friends requests to them and started networking and asking for their superiors number and then sending them his catalogue which he had made with his phone, such a simple thing but so rare he used social media to build his market. Using this startegy he got a bulk order from Mittal steels in these tough times and his ship sailed.Today he has a group of 2000 workers on FB connected with him so he is updated with industry and workers requirement.
His story made me realize that there is inspiration all around us and how a person with no formal business education was able to use almost all of verticals like operations, marketing and finance to manage a business successfully, We can learn from people like him to make opportunities out of no-where and build something of our own.
