If Your Fundamentals Are Correct, You Are In The Right Direction: Rohit Manglik, CEO, EduGorilla

At the BW Businessworld Growth Leadership Conclave and Awards 2018: From SMEs to Unicorns, there was a panel discussion on “The Road to Greatness- Resilient Entrepreneurs” which was moderated by Colonel Prakash Tewari, Executive Director, CSR, DLF.

“I see a lot of entrepreneurs here, who are young and middle-aged. The Wikipedia definition of entrepreneurship is the process of designing, and launching new processes. The young people here are the future Steve Jobs in the time to come. When I look at human beings, they are victims of curiosity. They are always desiring to experiment and come up with new things in life. When they are trying to bring about these new changes, it’s not always easy because of the environment and our society. Only an entrepreneur knows that after he faces the environment and society, how he uses the data to create knowledge and apply changes. Entrepreneurship also has its own set of problems and challenges which we will explore," said Tewari. “You need to have the right type of collaboration and the right people as an entrepreneur, which is very important," he added.

Jatin Ahuja, Founder & MD, Big Boy Toyz, “We are in to cars, we are Asia’s largest supercar dealership. We deal with luxury cars. We have all these famous brands under one roof. Business is all about challenges. Every morning you have a different challenge. I started work in 2003, and 2003 onwards when you take the leadership forward there are a lot of challenges because no one else has done this business. Challenges we faced maximum is the taxation system in our country. A used car has never been looked at as an industry. Taxation was the biggest challenge when we started the business. This is why I had to shift out of Delhi and move to Haryana. Now things are much better." “We have done negotiations in getting the key people for many years. An organization is all about the people who share a similar kind of vision, it is very challenging. When I started work in 2003, I wanted to hire a peon, and he said he would rather go to a larger company, and that’s when I had the motivation to become a bigger company so we don’t have problems hiring a peon. Business is about your risk-taking capacity," said Ahuja.

“The opportunity got created with real estate developer snot innovating. There was a trust deficit, which was a challenge. Anybody who has built an office space, they will know its very hard to deal with the contractor. Another thing which most companies did not watch out for is that the SME sector is an extremely fast-growing sector. Today the real-estate heads in most companies are the punching bags, they used to be rock stars before. We realized that SMEs will be the largest clients for us. All the inefficiencies of the real estate market are what we tried to solve. We have a large community, lots of seats, and there is a viable business created," said Amit Ramani, Founder & CEO, Awfis. Regarding his dealing with Capex and Opex, Ramani added, “We understood the real estate sector really well. The focus was on making money at the centre level. It is a capital-intensive business, so we partnered with the landlords. There has been a strong focus on de-risking the business and creating value for our partners and stakeholders." “We hired from parallel industries. If you are transparent, show the people the vision, the area to experiment, to fail, and move forward, that’s how you can attract people," said Ramani.

Rohit Manglik, CEO, EduGorilla, said, “I started back in 2015, I had one of the best jobs in the country, I was into investment banking. One day I had to visit my school for a guest lecture. I realized that the students get the same privilege as we get. My juniors did not have the exposure to get in touch with anyone they wanted. After I analysed the whole education ecosystem, I figured out there are multiple players in this area, but none are fulfilling the need. The approach is not holistic or transparent for the students. We started collecting data, using artificial intelligence and machine learning. Our name has gorilla in it since the gorilla because we needed to be a large entity in this sector." “Hiring the right sort of people is always a challenge for any organization. The key employees at my company were hired in the most unforeseen ways. Some of the interns in my organization who worked with us at a very early stage, I have never let them go. People stay for the culture, not just the money. They stay for the motivation, the growth. Money was never the motivation for any of the people I have hired. If your fundamentals are correct, you are in the right direction," said Manglik.

Anurit Kanti

BW Reporters The author is correspondent at BW Businessworld, he has a keen interest in sustainability and environmental economics