Rethink, Revive, And Rise - Internship Elucidated!

It all started 3 years back, the idea of pursuing management education hit me while I was at the crossroads between reviving my effaced start-up in autonomous vehicles or move on and get ahead with other adventures. One thing that my startup experience during engineering taught me was that in today’s ever-changing professional landscape, one should be equipped with the tools of management and technology. And with this ideology etched in my mind, I religiously and relentlessly trained to bell the CAT. Ultimately, this one decision of rethinking and the following onerous pursuit led to the two most momentous events in my life, my selection into IIM-R and the subsequent internship opportunity at OfBusiness.

OfBusiness as an organisation was a place where people were not trained, they were nurtured. You could be a fresher or a domain veteran but irrespective of your background, there was always something or someone which could transform you into a better self of yours. Vikram Panwar, the HR Head at OfBusiness, during one of our many interactions, had earnestly mentioned that they hire personalities and then you have to find yourself where you fit in the organization, if you have done something special, and have that spike in your profile, we’ll give you a chance. This stuck with me till the very end of my internship and clearly resonated with the most important thing that we all learn at IIM-R is that addressing your weaknesses is a sign of strength itself, strength which has always been there in us but was never plucked. The one year I had spent working on my own startup which some might refer to as the “gap-year”,  did the job for me.

Internships are often called as the stepping stones of your eventual getaway to the corporate world out there which is predominantly (in)famous for its ‘man eats man without a burp’ nature. But, my encounter was inclined towards business perspicacity. The understanding and clarity that I gained during 2 months of internship expanded my vision of perceiving and nurtured my mind into business sophistication. I immediately felt a deep endearment towards the structure of how business was run and how different processes just flew their streams to culminate into one single product/entity.  At OfBusiness, this turned out to be handy. I was put in situations which I had never done, let alone even imagine which often reminded me of “Aarambh”, the genteel name of the strenuous time given to us by our seniors during the induction when we first stepped into the campus. I was made accustomed to different factors which I didn’t know even existed. The whole process seemed daunting at first but on closer inspection I realised it was nothing but a furnace which was forging and moulding me into the armoured person to prove my mettle. From day 1, I was involved in exercises which tested my ability to collect, analyse, and execute tasks and having this prowess was the sine qua non for anyone’s survival at OFB. My role was predominantly strategic operations in which I was responsible for streamlining various sales onboarding procedures and mimic growth opportunities into sure-shot successes. The initial 4 weeks were spent at the Gurgaon headquarters gaining knowledge about the various steel products we dealt in and honing my skill set after which I was sent on a long field service across the Eastern coast of India encompassing Chhattisgarh, Odisha, Jharkhand and West Bengal. This period of extensive touring led me to the next phase of my internship, that is, Reviving.

Revive

I always believed that eluding what you seek causes that thing to seek somebody else and boy, did it not. I had never envisaged myself traversing the remotest industrial corners of the country, meeting people who didn’t speak the same tongue, eating food which I had never heard of and exploring businesses whose scale I didn’t fathom. There were steel manufacturing and processing giants which were churning out thousands of tonnes of output daily. And there was I trying to quote and onboard such companies to tie-up with us for optimal benefits. That is when I realised that I was in a completely different set-up and the ball will not always be in my court. It was time for REVIVAL. Revival from what I had learnt, from what I believed and from what I sensed was my raison d’etre there. I understood that it was all about Pitch and Poach. Poach companies and people who are doing great in the industry and pitch them with what you have to offer. In the simplest way to make it attractive yet easy to comprehend, the seriousness of this point can be illustrated by the following incident. I, during the field trip of my internship visited a supplier in Rourkela, Odisha as my daily routine and gave him a brief introduction about our company as I had done with the 50 other suppliers I had met till the aforementioned time but, the response I received from this supplier dumbfounded me at first and later baffled. He said, “Bhaiyya Gurgaon ki companiyo ke saath krna he nahi kaam” after which I tried to ask him several times why he was insisting the same thing but he simply kept repeating until I was out of his sight. Later on, after some fickle investigation and asking a few people around, I got to know that in the early 90s, there were a lot of shell companies based out of Gurgaon region which used to buy from Rourkela but didn’t pay back or defaulted by huge margins and hence his disillusioned opinion. If I on my part had made it clear that we PAY IN ADVANCE then things could have turned out to be a little different. That day, I learnt what exactly Business Farming was and how an on-point conversation is needed to optimise the prospect. Afterwards, in all my interactions with suppliers, I was seeding the idea of collaboration through the utmost precision and then waiting for the idea to bore fruits. It was a complex amalgamation of timing, restraint and listening. Time your meeting according to the person, listen to what he wants and restrain from throwing anything ludicrous which could lead you to be thrown under the bus. And then it was all about how you could become the partner who would offer him the best deal, a deal which one can’t refuse. (Quoting Godfather here)

Following this process not only made me realise true virtues but also of human psychology. That a human being is a social animal for a reason. Because without socialising, humans do not tend to think rationally and become monotonous in their approach to everything, be it life or business.

Hence, it was critical to be flexible with every prospect and approach as every enquiry was unique in itself. Although it might feel that it's the same thing over and over again but soon you realise that If all you have is a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail. So, don't just have a hammer, keep your knives, swords and guns ready to approach the problems you face and go all the way blazing. This is how I approached every individual, every opportunity for the subsequent one month across the transpiring states and their speckles. I became confident, mature, accustomed and inspired by what I was doing and how I was doing it. I was able to cover a maximum of the suppliers, manufacturers and industries in different parts of the country and learnt something new and exciting from each of them. This phase of revival and enlightenment finally led me to rise above what I was, how I perceived myself and others and why I was doing it. It was amazing to see how just in a span of 6 weeks I transformed into a person who was not just job ready but emotionally mature and content to handle the responsibilities and expectations that come with it.

Rise

The end of my tour across the Eastern coast was the beginning of a new escapade. Coming back to Gurgaon, I submitted my internship reports, my experience summaries and an overall outlook towards the whole period and the company. While preparing these, I had never realised that I would get so involved and in liking of what I was doing that, I passionately aimed at a job opportunity with OfBusiness. The learning that I gained unlocked the key to success for me. The key to success was trying different things, approaching the same problem in different ways until a solution was found as doing the same thing won't get you different results, it's almost as if you are trying to fit square pegs into round holes.

With all this in my kitty, came the day of reckoning had come. The final day. The day which would tell me If I could be an OFBian or not. Years of extreme rigour, austerity and vexation that had shadowed my life since the engineering days flashed before my eyes and I just wondered if this is how it is meant to be, if this is how people feel and if this is what being from an IIM is like, perishing your burdens under the new hope of a new dream. I recalled all the financial constraints that my family and I had faced over the years ranging from the shutting of a business to arranging fees for the management education. The desperation in me was calling me to end this today, right now right here. Finally, I was called for my final review which was at part, bone-chilling for me but this was mainly due to the prior overthinking that I had done.

After two rounds of stress-inducing reviews, first one with the HRs and mentor and the second one with Bhuvan Gupta, Co-founder and CTO, I was called to the conference room where CEO Asish Mohapatra, along with CFO Ruchi Kalra and Head HR Vikram Panwar told me that there is a PPO waiting for me to be signed, that I could be a part of this great culture and one of the four to be finally selected for a permanent role among the pool of 14 interns. That moment, in true honesty, left me just gleaming there. With a package in hand which would kick out all our burdens, I called my parents to let them know that now you finally did not have to worry about anything and that I was there to handle everything. The ultimate joy that my parents felt was to be captured and it will be with me forever. Sharing below with you is that moment of eternal bliss for me at the newly built IIM-R campus when they came to drop me for my second and final year.

This is my story of Rethinking, Reviving and Rising.

For aspirants looking for an opportunity at Ofbusiness next year, I would suggest you build up your confidence, have that go-getter attitude coupled-up with in-depth knowledge about how to read and analyze financial statements of any company. So, pay attention when they teach you to analyze Financial reports and statements during your first year and some data analytics classes might also come in handy as they help you to represent your data better. All in all, the experiences and learnings that an internship can provide are unmatchable with any other thing.