Another instance where I felt my approach was unconventional, was during my next business: Mushroom Cultivation. Mushroom Cultivation is a labour intensive and dependent business. Hence, margins depend highly on labor output. My business model had a process where we used to start our harvesting process at around 4 am daily, had to be done with the weighing and packing by 8, so that it reaches the market at the right time. The person in charge of this process was semi-skilled labor. With the production of approximately 60 kg per day, he demanded a working force of 4 people. An avg. of 15 kg/person production capacity was simply unacceptable to me. I knew more could be achieved as the in-charge himself was not working on full capacity. I sat down with him and calmly presented that our competitor was functioning on an average of 30-35 kg/person, and asked for his views as to how can we solve this problem. “Is there a mistake we are committing, or is our process wrong, or is our speed slow, or anything else?” I said. He realized that such efficiency would be destructive for business and immediately cut short the workforce by 50%. By throwing down a challenge for him, I managed to save myself from his outburst, which might have been unavoidable had I criticized him and demanded more output directly. I might had even lost him as an employee because he was punctual, rightly skilled and a higher demand for output would have seemed unfair to him.
These instances along with others in my journey taught me, if we attack on the core of the problem with an intent of simply solving it and nothing else, we come out with a result that makes everyone happy. I realized that it is actually problem solving that lures people in entrepreneurship. It is problem solving that got us our B-Schools. And it is problem solving, that made me an Agripreneur from a Petroleum Engineer, and eventually now an IITian.
#MBAIITKanpur
Comments