MBA
ENTREPRENEURS
On Paths Less Travelled
Not
all B-school graduates are interested in running other peoples’ businesses;
some prefer to build their own
B-schools
turn ordinary graduates into well-rounded managers who go on to make their
employers a pile of money. This fetches them (some of them, at least) fat
salaries, ESOPs, club memberships, etc. But that is only half the picture.
There are some who emerge from B-school as risk takers, with an appetite for
trying their hand at businesses that are out of the ordinary.
They shun the
routine, the mundane... in short, the safe option. They are the ones who go out
on a limb and do what they really want to. Entrepreneurs who have leaned
heavily on B-schools to be able to walk down their unique business paths are
here. While their businesses are very different, they have one thing in common:
the will to succeed. One has turned to retail services, another to making wind
energy cost-effective. A third has looked up to God, literally, for answers,
while another set of entrepreneurs has used technology to find answers for
local advertisers. Here are a few of the extraordinary enterprisers...
Shopping, With A Purpose
A leading salon chain in Bangalore
was struggling with customer retention. They approached Pankaj Guglani’s
RedQuanta for help. Guglani, through his network of mystery shoppers, figured
out that the problem was with the employees focusing more on sales than
service. RedQuanta then proposed that employee incentives be tied to service
rather than sales. “Ever since, the salon has seen a huge jump in its loyalty
metrics,” says Guglani.
A mystery shopper is someone who is
sent to a shop or outlet to buy a product or try a service and present her
views on it. The assignment can vary from watching a movie at a theatre to
trying food at an eating joint. She gets paid once she submits a report on the
assignment.
Guglani, 32, started RedQuanta in
August 2009 with a bootstrap capital of Rs 10 lakh after quitting as business
head at Zapak Digital Entertainment. A portfolio company of Morpheus venture
partners, it has currently raised about $1 million from India Quotient, Blume
Ventures, India Venture Partners and a group of angel investors in Mumbai. The
company does a business of a couple of crores every year.
RedQuanta, as a mystery shopping
specialist outfit, works closely with managements of retail and hospitality
companies to design programmes to help companies improve their services. “This
technique is about 30 years old in developed markets, where nearly 60 per cent
of all retailers use it,” says Guglani, who passed out of the Management
Development Institute, Gurgaon, in 2007.
Mystery shopping is used extensively
to enforce compliance. In the UK, the finance department carries out mystery
shopping checks on banks. This technique is also used to keep a check on
channel partners or franchisees, revenue leakages, employee integrity, process
implementation or acceptance, and service level benchmarking.
RedQuanta currently has about 20,000
mystery shoppers in India, a number it plans to increase to 100,000 in the next
12-18 months. The company is growing at 50-75 per cent year on year. Some of
its clients include M&M, Mocha, Bajaj Capital and Fun Cinemas.
The company rates its shoppers
depending on their reports and their adherence to time lines. “This way we are
able to churn out the bad ones and keep only the good ones,” explains Guglani.
RedQuanta currently works with 50 clients, mostly in the beauty and fitness,
food anwind beneath their wings d beverage and auto sectors.
Shrutika Verma and Vishal Krishna BW 120903
No comments:
Post a Comment