Part A, The impact
“Any business done for the sole purpose of making money, is not worth doing”
When I sat down to think about the Aditya Birla Group there is this one expression mentioned above, which resonated the most. There are companies that will be remembered for their huge success and then there are companies that will be remembered for the mark they left on the world along with their success. A conglomerate driven on principles, Aditya Birla Group is one of those flagship concerns of a particular nation, that bear the reputation of their nations on an international stage with honour and pride. This is the impact that the group has on many proud Indians like me.
The first company with international operations in the post-independence era, today the group is a leader in 14 industry sectors ranging from retail, banking, finance, viscose fibre, research and development to infrastructure, telecom and many more. With this huge presence, it is almost impossible to not be impacted in your life by the group. However, for me, the impact created is a little beyond the value added by its product in my life.
My father says that he has faced three milestones in his life which decided the future of my family, first is when he had to separate out of the family business and home overnight and buy a new house, second was 2 years after shifting out of the family home, the heart attack he had at the age of 40 and third when he finally quit his job and decided to start his own business. In all these 3 milestones, the biggest factor to be considered was where will the money come from, to which my father still replies that it was his shares of Hindalco and UltraTech Cement that helped us through these dire times. Even after exhausting almost all of his shares while purchasing the house, he still saved money in the worst possible situations to buy more shares and these new shares took us through one crisis after another. My father and I have made it a point that at any given time, we must hold shares of at least 2 companies of the Aditya Birla Group as a sense of security. This sense of security is simply derived on the basis of the principles on which the group has been built. This has left an ever lasting impact on my life.
Part B, The Challenge
“If all men were pacified by a “well tried”, we would still be pushing logs to transport rocks”
Being a leader in 14 sectors is not an easy task. However, being number 1 in the world in 3 particular fields, is a testament of perseverance, dedication and commitment. The leader in the world for aluminium rolling, viscose staple fibre as well as black carbon defines the very sentiment of “I don’t wait for a challenge to approach, I run towards it head first”
The impact the group has left on the global arena, propelling India to the centre stage as an industrial leader, could not have been created without taking the challenges head-on. This compels me to tell my story of a little challenge that came my way.
In the early months of 2014, I started a fashion discover and technology company called Stylabs along with my 3 friends as co-founders. The idea was simple, initially generate revenue by developing websites and applications for customers while building our own fashion discover and aggregation platform called “STYFI” which would then become our primary source of revenue. However, in the very beginning, apart from the typical challenges that an entrepreneur of a start-up would face, I also had to face an absolutely unexpected challenge which our investor put in front of us. The challenge was, within the first 4 months, the investor decided we needed to completely revamp the idea of STYFI and build a hyper-local delivery platform instead. The dilemma here was, we had neither the knowledge nor any interest in getting into logistics and supply operations while we also desperately needed the money and that investor. The only way out then was this, within 1 month I deep dived into the hyper-local market and its functioning, gathered all the data, rebuilt my knowledge and finally presented a comparative report proving as to why we should focus on fashion discovery rather than hyper-local delivery. I was constantly threatened to be thrown out, while I conducted the research my resources were cut out and my partners too felt like bending under pressure. Despite this, with whatever little case I could build in 30 days of an industry I had no idea about, I still went and met a reluctant investor to convince him on giving up his vision. The funny part is, I actually did it.
