My father has been the inspiration behind all my choices. I grew up in awe of him as I watched him run his footwear manufacturing business. Over excursions to the factory and official conversations, I grew more and more interested in the general business scenario, marketing and brand management. The fashion industry with its ever changing trends in itself seemed very interesting, so as soon as I completed my graduation I joined our family business.

I spent the first year gaining a thorough understanding of the product and various manufacturing processes. However, I always wanted to add value to the system and bring in something different that would help our business grow faster. But, in order to introduce new systems and ideas it was very important to first understand the current systems that were in place.

During my second year as marketing manager I travelled to Europe to gain first hand marketing experience. I got a chance to build relationships with our existing clients and introduce our company to new potential clients. This was a great learning experience and gave a boost to my marketing and negotiation skills. Also, during this year I decided to take up the challenge of introducing a personalized ERP to our firm, as it would make our work a lot more systematic and efficient.  This challenge helped me brush up on my software and process flow management skills that I had acquired during my computer science engineering program.

By the end of 2011 we had enough orders and capacity to plan a public listing of the company at the stock exchange. This meant that if we performed well, we would grab the attention of the big financial investors. I have always wanted to understand the processes and the criteria big private equity, mutual funds and hedge funds use to determine huge investments. To help me gain first hand knowledge of the process I moved to Shanghai for 5 months to join an investment research firm based out of London. During this period I was in touch with top 50 mutual funds and private equity firms across the globe and got a chance to understand their working procedures. It helped me grasp the various aspects the investors look at before investing heavily in a publically listed firm and I gained valuable experience of working in a multinational company.

After completing three years of working in my firm, understanding the product and the various procedures, I now plan to improve my business innovation and entrepreneurship skills and at the same time work on my marketing and operational fundamentals that are vital to be a good manager. I believe that an MBA will give me a chance to understand various aspects of business administration and give me the confidence to take our company to newer and unprecedented levels of success.

For many years I have been associated with many social and charitable foundations in India. However, when I joined my family business I had a chance to be directly involved with the lives of our 1000+ workers. We clearly understood that our main goal was not only generating profits for our company but also at the same time we aimed to add value to the lives of our workforce.

With that in mind we started the employee training and hospitality program. With an initial investment of $10,000 the main goal of this program was to train the current employees to gain better working skills and at the same time we planned to dedicate a part of our profits into building an on campus housing for our employees.

The program was open to all managerial and job shop employees. The first part of the program was aimed at analyzing the current job skill level of the employees and then according to the results we allocated them to different mentoring programs. We held voluntary 2-3 hours of workshop post working hours every week. The program ran on a semi annual basis with a skill test at the end of each semi annual period. As we expected, more than 80% of our current workforce registered for our program and we received a positive feedback from the employees with respect to our initiative.

We hired 2 training professionals who were given the responsibility for conducting various class such as : English speaking, reading , writing, stitching, lasting and other product specific skills.

This training program was very valuable to the employees because the programs gave them an extra skill set and increased their chances of securing a promotion and at the same time the program gave everyone a chance to interact with each other post working hours. We added a mix of team building exercises in the program to make sure the program was interesting over the length of 6 months.

At the same time we finalized a plan for on campus accommodation for the employees. We ran a company wide survey to get an idea of the basic employee needs and got the approval from board of directors for our plan.

The plan was huge success and generated positive reviews from both within and outside the company. Using this plan we were able to establish a company wide culture that was unmatched in the industry. At the same time this helped our employees gain better recognition in the society and with the management within the company.  The “skill set” plan resulted in 25 promotions within the first year and 10 percent of our workforce could read and write basic English. Such an initiative also increased the employee confidence in the company and at the same time we had a better workforce that respected the companies human resource policies. The plan is currently in the third year of implementation and I am sure it will continue to add value to our company in the coming years.