Mar 26, 2021
by Neel Achary
#Akshay Chaturvedi, #CEO, #Co-founder and CEO, #Founder & CEO, #Founder & CEO Leverage Edu, #Founder and CEO, #GM, #Groww, #Lalit Keshre, #Nitesh Salvi, #Pocket52 Hemant Manglani, #PrimaDollar India, #Siddharth Ramasubramanian, #SMOOR, #StanPlus, #Swati Babel, #Vegolution, #Vimal Sharma
The year 2020 has been most insightful for us. We got time to reflect on our monotonous lifestyle and embark on new learning’s. While Covid has drastically affected most of us, Entrepreneurs think the pandemic will require them to mold their business approach for decades to come. Entrepreneurs choose to act on opportunities to make a difference with their ideation and contribute to the society. The shift to digitization, has led to new sustainable and innovative measures for business. To compete with the technologically advanced era the entrepreneurs are working like a Torjan. Here are some of the views shared by the entrepreneurs.
Akshay Chaturvedi, Founder & CEO, Leverage Edu “The last year has helped us to become more innovative, more efficient, and also a company with a huge heart. It saw us flip out the model and launch UniConnect, a virtual education fair that saw over 130 Universities partner to meet matched students. We also took the hard call of not letting a single teammate go, irrespective of much bigger peers in the tech ecosystem doing it. And pretty much resultantly, we ended up growing our monthly top line over 4x. Will always remember this year as one that gave us unbelievable character.”
Vimal Sharma, Founder and CEO, SMOOR “2020 was a year full of learning, innovation, and growth. As for nearly every brand, digitization has now become a way of life. At Smoor, we primarily focus on digitizing our front-end operations during pre-pandemic times. The crisis accelerated the same and we moved to implement this on a much larger scale than we had previously envisaged, and we pivoted quickly to achieve this.
Customer centricity was yet another key focus for us. More than ever before, we now need to keep a pulse and innovate and evolve to keep pace with rapidly changing customer preferences and behavior. This meant launching several new products and flavors but simultaneously improvising to come up with tamper-proof packaging, family-sized cakes (vs larger grammage earlier), and healthy products. Finally, agility was the key to not just surviving but also growing during the pandemic. We were able to make amendments in both our front-end and back-end to overcome the challenges, adapt to the situation, learn from it, and grow further.”
Nitesh Salvi, Founder and CEO, Pocket52 The novel coronavirus has entailed disruptions like never before. The biggest learning is to say no to unnerving moments and say yes to agile modifications of your business strategies. Re-inventing & pivoting the product and its features according to the need of the hour would keep the cash flowing. Most importantly, to achieve all this, you gotta keep your team together – they are the real heroes who would help you survive the crisis. And think about your audiences’ pockets too. We gave lucrative offers and bonuses in the time of dullness. The skill based games, Poker & Rummy, at Pocket52 were not only enjoyed by professional players but it also helped us keep occasional players entertained during the lockdown. We witnessed an average growth of 20% every month.
Hemant Manglani, GM, StanPlus “The year gone by has highlighted gaps for individuals as well as enterprises, with regard to their preparedness to deal with emergency & non-emergency medical response situations. The country understood the importance and the need for a robust ambulance network equipped with the state of the art technologies & medical professionals trained as per international standards to manage the golden hour medical response.
The pandemic has driven home the point that it’s an employer’s Duty Of Care’ to ensure that they take keen interest in their employees’ physical and mental health as well as their overall well-being – on-premise, at home, and in transits to ensure productivity and growth in our economy.
Today, multiple Fortune 500 companies & countries top hospitals have partnered with StanPlus as their only one-stop-shop for all their medical response needs”
Siddharth Ramasubramanian, Founder & CEO, Vegolution “People have been closer to their kitchens and family more so now than ever before as health and family nourishment has become our top priority. We have developed new eating and cooking habits that are here to stay enabling daily food experiences that offer taste and wholesome nutrition at affordable prices. This enables us with the perfect opportunity to launch a new category like Hello Tempat which not only addresses the nutritional requirements of a whole new generation of home cooks but also allows for experimentation in the kitchen which is the buzzword of the day.”
Swati Babel, CEO, PrimaDollar India “A paradigm shift towards digitization of the economy was already underway, but current events have accelerated the process. The pandemic is a reality check for businesses that have been reluctant to embrace digital transformation and now find themselves woefully unprepared. Some vital footsteps that have become inevitable for all of us after the lessons learnt in the past one year are digitization, reconciliation of government policies, simplify the complexities of conventional banking structures, adapting to change and having contingency plans. The entire cross border supply chain has been flared up due to the pandemic, companies are entangled in a liquidity crunch, the biggest relief for the supplier now is to receive early payments. Supply chain trade finance platforms are instrumental in solving the major issues currently faced by corporates. Large business houses, on having a way to pay their suppliers at shipment can definitely negotiate much better deals and obtain significant benefit in these tough times. With the support of their banks, this is a smart way to go on optimizing operational efficiency as well reducing the cost of landed goods.”
Lalit Keshre, Co-founder and CEO, Groww “The shared quote looks fine to me for this question “2020 has been a year of great humbling for everyone. It has been a year of investing in oneself – be it health, wealth or skills. The major takeaway from the upheaval caused by 2020 was to build a resilient organisation that can thrive under chaos and uncertainties. Following the path of antifragility, we were able to create the best in class investing experience to support our investors in leveraging market opportunities. 2021 would be the year of resurgence and making up for the lost ground. It would be the year of shedding inefficiencies and making the most of one’s time and resources. Carrying along with the lessons that 2020 taught us, we remain laser-focused on our mission of democratising investing in India in 2021 as well.”
