Apart from taking us through how their businesses have grown, 10 entrepreneurs share with us some key lessons they learnt during their expansion phase
When I was young, my father often used to tell me that it is important to listen to others narrate their experiences as one can gain a different perspective or perhaps a valuable lesson or two from it. To be honest, I understood the merit of his statement only when I started my career and found myself stuck in tough situations. I looked around for advice, sought out friends who might have found themselves in a similar situation and tried to understand how they tackled it. In the world of business, an entrepreneur will understand this situation much better than anyone else, which also justifies the reason for them seeking out mentors.
A few editions back, I did a story with the global Chairman of the Entrepreneur’s Organisation. I understood that one of the primary goals of this organisation is to be a catalyst that enables entrepreneurs to learn from each other, leading to greater business success and an enriched personal life. That’s when it struck us that we are sitting on a gold mine of information. In the last four years, we have met over 800 entrepreneurs and featured over 1200 companies and each one of them has had a unique story to tell us.
In this current anniversary edition, we decided to share a few such stories with you. We approached ten companies that we have covered in the past two years and traced their growth since the time we last wrote about them. We also decided to take away some key lessons from them based on their experiences – be it in expanding into the global markets, forging joint ventures, hiring, tackling industry related challenges, patenting, or business model transformation.
For instance, S. Nandakumar, the founder of Perfint Healthcare, a company that provides interventional oncology assistance solutions, spoke to us about how the company did not get its export strategy right and how they are working on rectifying it. In another instance, Dhiraj Rajaram, founder, Mu Sigma, spoke about how the company had to let go for a large customer because the customer was asking for industry exclusivity. In hindsight, it was a good call but was one of toughest decisions he had made at the time. Tiger Ramesh of CSS Corp spoke to us about how he made the transition from an entrepreneur to a professional and how his entrepreneurial stint changed his management style for good.
Every founder covered here has an interesting story to narrate and we hope that our readers can gain another perspective on decision-making from these anecdotes. Read on to find out more.
