For Mr R Sriram and Mrs KS Anita of ‘Crosswords’, the passion and knowledge of books were the basis of confidence and impetus towards forever revolutionizing the face of book-stores. The ambience ‘Crosswords’ offered encompasses a healthy mix of modern and conventional aspects about books. Its true success came from offering the best experience to customers, which even encouraged browsing and thus creating avid book-lovers. According to Mr. R. Sriram and Mrs. K. S. Anita, “Entrepreneurship is about pursuing one’s dream with passion and belief, to have a vision of making a healthy difference to society, not just of making money.” They hand-picked people who shared their love for books and made them a part of their work culture, one marked by positive attitude, vibrancy and continual evolution. For them, values are quintessential, thus upgrading and communicating values became a way of ‘Crosswords’. The venture capital was provided by Mr. Mirchandani M.D. of ‘India Book Publishing House’ and on 15th October, 1992, the first ‘Crosswords’ was launched in Hyderabad, AP, India.
riginally from Orissa, Ms. Sunita Nayak, MD of CBT Infotech, aspiration to pursue journalism led her to Mumbai, where she first wanted to initiate a venture in I.T. Belonging to a totally different background and knowing absolutely nothing about Information technology did not deter her from going ahead and conceptualizing and implementing the entrepreneurial venture related to Software development. Drawing inspirations from her own shortcomings, and from the astronomical success of software giants like Infosys and TCS, she dreamt of making ‘CBT Infotech’ into the next ‘Infosys’. They started with Software Training which enables them to fund themselves and ultimately moved into Resource Contracting, which involves manufacturing customized ‘Business Enabling’ software applications. Outsourcing of Space and Talent imparting to Corporates are other activities, this 300 strong man power company is involved in today.
Dr. Sarika Kulkarni, MD of Suyash Software, a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Mumbai, believes and candidly professes that every one of us is a born entrepreneur. Biographies of iconic women entrepreneurs were the source of, what she quotes a kick and also first sowed the seeds of inspiration which would ultimately lead her to realize her dream. Having come from a family of teachers, she herself started teaching Operations Management in JBIMS, Mumbai. Whilst writing a research paper, she happened to meet Raman Kumar, an IRS officer turned entrepreneur, partner C-Bay Systems, presently the world’s largest ‘medical transcription’ company. What inspired her was CBS’s business model, the anticipated growth prospects, the technology platform used and the services CBS planned to offer. An observation she made about CBS was that they were targeting only Tier 1 cities for franchising their business in India and were insecure about venturing into Tier2 or3 cities fearing lack of infrastructure and availability of skilled labor. She saw opportunity in this difficulty and decided that she would start out with the franchise of CBS in the city of Nagpur, a place where CBS would not dare to venture into alone. After some months of learning the nitty-gritty’s of the Medical Transcription business and with about 25 Lac rupees, Dr. Sarika landed up in Nagpur to initiate her own company. The contemporary closure of another medical transcription company was a simultaneous source of insecurity and also for economic and skilled labor at the time of establishment of Suyash Software. Her inherent womanly traits enabled her to ride over the adversities and finally start with a staff of 30 people in around March 2002, which saw phenomenal growth right from the beginning. But she found that she could barely break-even, after one and a half years also. The only solution appeared to be expansion. After a lot of deliberation and searching, Bank of India’s regional manager helped her out with money required for expansion, without any collateral. Then there was no looking back for Suyash Software after that, and today Suyash is so successful that she is even considering selling out her stake to C-Bay Systems, who is offering her a more than handsome sum for her stake in Suyash Software.
Ms. Smita Pethe, MD of Verjinia Foods, an MBA from JBIMS, and started out as a 10 pc partner in a company doing outsourcing jobs in the edible oil industry. On a family visit to London, she realized that cooking oils were obsolete in international cuisines. Travelling further and meeting renowned people in the cooking industry in UK and USA, she was struck with this idea of marketing the Indian taste globally. Returning back in around 1996, she convinced her partner to shift from edible oils to packaged Indian curries. In around 1999, she pioneered the ‘Retort Technology’, which involved heating vegetables at around 121 deg C, in order to meet international hygiene and safety standards. Exim Bank of India was the bank which whole-heartedly helped out Ms. Pethe with the seed capital required to establish ‘Verjinia Foods’ in its true sense. The thrust of this company is exports, which earns around 50 pc of the revenue for Verjinia Foods. She states that her recipes and packaged food curries are ahead of our times and will therefore see a sustained growth in the future too and the advent of the organized retail sector will augment the market for her products.
Sunita Singh, Program Manager, NEN, was the moderator for the WES panel discussion and played an integral role in tapping the best out of the panelists and the key-note speakers. Having a vast experience in panel discussions and lectures, she grasped the pulse of the audience and directed the discussion, eliciting relevant and interesting points. As a result, we became aware of various challenges women entrepreneurs of today could encounter. This made the panel discussion extremely contemporary, lively and interesting for the audience.
The Women Entrepreneurship Summit, an event hosted by Pathfinder E-cell at SIMSR, witnessed many professional revelations by the three eminent women entrepreneurs on their path to success.