Turning Adversity Into Opportunity

Covid has highlighted the importance of a secondary source of income. With the job market tightening its threads, many are turning to investment as a secondary source of income.

Physical Assets: A viable option for most is making profit by investing in physical assets that are leased to corporates. One such platform which facilitates this unique investment opportunity is Grip Invest, founded by Nikhil Aggarwal one-and-a-half years ago.

Grip is an investment marketplace that provides investors with options to co-invest and have partial ownership in physical assets that earn lease income.

Digitisation: “I started my career in investment banking. I worked with Flipkart, Snapdeal and across lots of verticals deploying SaaS. There I gained insight on how they are running their business. I then co-founded a company called ‘Chalo’,” recalls Aggarwal.

Soon it was apparent to Aggarwal that investors were looking for new areas of investment while the companies were looking at creating assets which could be deployed on a lease model.

Consequently, Aggarwal and his co-founder started Grip Invest to create a market that combined these two opportunities.

With digitisation having taken the world by storm, the investment platform is using it to their advantage.

“Grip is something people already use in 42 different countries and 322 cities. We have done no traditional forms of advertising, nor have we created a physical office space,” says Aggarwal.

The ability to connect with such a vast international audience, is due to technology which forms the core of their business and will remain their focus area as they continue to scale the business, he adds.

Zero Attrition: However, starting the business, that too at a time when the pandemic was at its peak was no cakewalk. In Aggarwal’s own words, “Hiring a team and building a great culture was very difficult in a fully online environment.

Transparency on business performance, open communication, constant discussion on company vision and online interactions helped us build a cohesive team with zero attrition,” he says.

Technology-led Business: Keeping an eye on the future, Aggarwal believes that the markets will witness a massive overhaul in the coming years, led by new-age companies and technologies.

“The pandemic has accelerated what was going to always happen, because the customer benefits of those things are so large, the cost is so low, and the options are so many that people are happy to stick to a digital environment to consume those services and goods.” he says.

While Grip Invest is looking to take on a co-working space in the future, it is going to hold true to its sentiment of promoting a technology-led business by providing their employees with a sense of flexibility, enabling them to work at different times across different locations, which is very important especially during a competitive employment situation. All of these are possible due to massive digital adoption of technology.

Risk Taking: Aggarwal can serve as a source of inspiration to many who have turned adversity into opportunity with intelligent risk taking and using a difficult situation to their ad vantage.