You don’t always need the perfect plan - Parth Dave, MDI Gurgaon

Why Aditya Birla Group Is Big In My Life?

35 countries with more than 120,000 employees worldwide, Aditya Birla Group is reaching out to millions globally. Hardly any day goes by without getting influenced by ABG.

When I was in Bangalore, my typical day started with ABG’s Freshwrapp to pack lunch. Food retails its warmth and moistness and there is an immense satisfaction while eating the food which was packed long before.

Travelling by road or rail doesn't make a difference. There is a big possibility that we are a part of ABG’s presence. The road on which we travel has brick and mortar structures that might have used UltraTech cement in their construction. That’s not the end. A large share of the copper requirement of Indian Railways is fulfilled by Birla Copper. Big is indeed a big part of the lifeline of Indian Economy.

I still remember getting my first SIM card. My father suggested going for Idea because of better network connectivity since he had been using it since some time. What an Idea Sirji! From Indore to Gandhinagar to Gurugram, it has been a part of my life and it is indeed making distances disappear.

Even the big apparel brands like Allen Solly, Van Heusen, Louis Philippe, and Peter England are owned by Aditya Birla Group. I was doing my undergraduate from Gandhinagar, Gujarat. The placement season was about to begin. I asked my friends to accompany me to get new formals. We all ended up getting Peter England shirts and trousers from Pantaloons in Alpha one, Ahmedabad. Later on, I purchased a Van Heusen blazer for my college farewell and wearing it was an experience of sheer bliss. Big is indeed about great style.

All this is just a small part of how Aditya Birla Group is affecting our lives. A US $44.3 billion corporations, it is in the League of Fortune 500. We all experience the ‘Power of 5’ values in our lives knowingly or unknowingly. ABG has played a BIG part of my life and I believe that it will continue to add invaluable experiences in the future.

My Efforts To Make An Impact...A Continuous Journey

From taking an attempt on IIT-JEE to getting into MDI, my journey has been a simple journey of progress. It gave me a lot of experience to remember, failures to learn from, and a little bit of success.

Going with the flow did work for me in the initial part of my life. But it made me complacent and inactive in most part of my undergraduate college. There was no significant learning involved. The complacent attitude cost me a good placement at the time when opportunities were ample. That was a major failure for me and it changed the way I looked at things.

I did some serious self-introspection and realized that changing attitude is one of the most important things I need to do. I realized that my life is out of control because I have chosen to relinquish the controls. Over the next few months, after I graduated, I decided not to take any half-hearted attempts on anything in which I was involved. I decided not to take the job from campus placement. Instead, I went to Bangalore and started looking for marketing jobs. Being from a technical background, it did take a lot of effort for me to land a few interviews. After 3 months of consistent efforts and learning some key skills in marketing, I got an internship opportunity in a startup.

Although it was a lead-generation internship (manual data-entry work), I took ownership of some of the marketing projects and worked hard to achieve the targets that were not even assigned to me. After 3 months of hard work, I managed to get an offer from the company as a marketing analyst.

After working for one and a half years as a marketing analyst, I shifted to an Assistant Manager position in another startup. I even managed to get some independent marketing consulting projects from some U.S. based companies because of the skills that I gained in my previous company.

There were times when I had no certainty of achieving things that I was pursuing. Things which I perceived as risks were actually opening up the scope of learnings and opportunities. Uncertainty and my perceived risks were the most fun part of this process. Perseverance was the key that helped me throughout. Failures were immensely helpful and each one had its own unique way of teaching some important lessons. More importantly, success became more meaningful because of these failures.