Bharat Entrepreneurs

” When I thought of starting a company, I felt India needed 100 people like Narayana Murthy and Ambani. If 100 such people support 2 lakh people each, imagine how many Indians get supported. Entrepreneurship is needed to uplift the poor. It is not easy to be an entrepreneur, especially a first generation entrepreneur. There will be lots of challenges in the beginning but you should learn to look for the light at the end of the tunnel. Never give up even if there are hurdles. There are many who give up within a week. You need determination and a tough mind to cross the initial hurdles.” E.Sarathbabu

E. SarathBabu is not the typical IIM Ahmedabad student you read about in the newspapers. He did not take the easy path to earn mega bucks in spite of being offered plum jobs from top companies. Instead he chose, like a true entrepreneur, to carve out his own path to success. So he started FOODKING.

His mother worked as an ayah in an Anganvadi to educate him and his siblings. Later he went on to complete his higher education in the prestigious BITS Pilani and IIM Ahmedabad.

In the beginning, he took a loan of Rs 20 lakh and started Foodking in August 2006. Initially the losses were poised at Rs 2000 a day. The cafeteria’s he set up initially did not work according to plan and he soon came to the conviction that only by selling in large volumes that any profit could be made.

In 2006 IIM A alumni meet, he hoped to bag a contract but could not.

In march 2007 he got an offer to start a unit at BITS, Pilani. This contract proved profitable. Spurred with this initial profit and with the money that he borrowed from his IIM A friends, he wanted to move ahead. He got BITS Goa contract which was to be his biggest break. He had to cater to over 1300 students and the sales peaked at 65,000 Rs per day.

Then he got an opportunity to serve at SRM deemed college which boasts of over 17,000 students!

Right now he has a turn around of Rs 3.5 crore per annum. By next year he hope to increase it to Rs 20 crores.

At present he has BITS hyderabad in his hands and it all set to be operational by July 2008. So the future does look rosy to this Foodking.

http://www.rediff.com/money/2006/aug/31spec.htm

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Whenever anyone talks about the Indian Railways or it’s over
the head financial turnaround, one name that invariably comes to our mind is the rustic, maverick, wily and shrewd Lalu Prasad Yadav.

What makes Lalu so special? What are the strategies that he formulated for this turnaround? What is his modus operandi? I will try to find answers to these questions in this post.

When lalu took over the reins of the railways in the year 2004, it was a “huge” loss making organisation.The Rakesh Mohan Committee (headed by Rakesh Mohan, secretary, department of economic affairs) even went on to predict that it would hit the Rs 61,000 crore (US$15.4 billion) mark in bankruptcy by the year 2015. The only solution
seemed to be privatization. Then lalu came into the scene and defied conventional logic by engineering the financial turnaround by without even touching the passenger fares and found other sources of revenue.

The present railway budget that he has presented not only does not raise the passenger fares and freight charges but also reduces the passenger fares and also the freight charges on inflation sensitive products like petrol, diesel(both of them by 5 p.c. apiece) and flyash by 10p.c. The present step is going to go a long way in containing the raise in inflation.

Sceptics say that all that Lalu did is to implement the recommendations that were proposed by the top bureaucrats in the railways(without much interference) for which he is the face. Whatever be the truth, we have seen an unprecedented growth in the railways under the helm of Lalu Prasad Yadav. The impact made by Lalu on the Indian Railways made the press say “just like there is no samosa without
aloo, there is no railways without laloo.”

To sum it up lalu had been called by colleges like Harvard and Wharton to explain the financial turnaround of the railways andstill there are eight more ivy league colleges waiting. Our own iim ahmedabad has prepared a case on it.

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