All it takes is a Dream!

Here’s an intriguing synopsis about these six business men, who just like many others dared to dream and set new goals for themselves, leaving no stone unturned when it came to unconditional passion and enthusiasm.

Backed on by venture capitalists, they broke new ground in their respective avenues: An online bus ticket booking service, selling insurance policies over the phone, a home away from home etc. Today these seven businesses are on the path to achieve excellence.

1.Meeru Cabs, Neeraj Gupta (MD)

Cool Cabs, For lakhs of Mumbaikars who travelled to and from work every day in the city’s muggy, worn out black-and-yellow cabs, commuting was a nightmare. In 2006, Meru Cabs’ air-conditioned taxi-on-call services brought in some fresh air. The GPS-linked, electronic metered taxis were the brainchild of Neeraj Gupta, who was inspired by similar services in London and Singapore. Gupta sensed an opportunity when the Maharashtra government invited tenders for such a service for 10,000 cabs. His confidence stemmed from running taxi services for BPOs and corporate clients. This time, he wanted to cash in on urban Indian aspirations. With the support of private equity investment, Gupta went ahead with his dream and the result is in front of you.

Meru runs 5,000 taxis in Mumbai, Bangalore, Hyderabad and Delhi and has a topline of Rs 100 crore. It expects to post its maiden profit in 2011.

2.REDBUS, Phanindra Sama (CEO)

The long haul, Missing a bus to take him home for Diwali some years ago was no reason for Phanindra ‘Phani’ Sama to fret and fume about a wasted opportunity. Today, he runs a nearly Rs 100-crore online bus ticket booking company, Red Bus, that was born out of his experience with the vagaries of road travel. Phani enlisted partners for his online ticket booking venture, and took an informal survey among travel agents, bus operators and frequent bus travellers to test its viability. All of them were sold on the idea. But this was when he came up against hurdles. Four of his friends left the venture for various reasons. Besides, bus operators across Bangalore and Hyderabad were cold to the software the team came up with. At this point, Phani and his friends came in contact with global professional network The Indus Entrepreneurs who later become the reason for Red Bus’s success.

3.NETAMBIT, A Phone Call Away Girish Batra (CHAIRMAN & MANAGING DIRECTOR)

All salesmen don't really sell, when they knock at customers’ doors. Most of the time, they’re identifying a need for a product. To Girish Batra, sales manager at Godrej, this was a colossal waste of field time.
 Batra broke out of the system, and applied what he believed to be a more efficient selling technique: use the telephone to generate leads.

 In 2003, he quit his job, borrowed Rs 1 lakh from his father, hired five undergraduates and approached ICICI Prudential to sell life insurance products. Soon enough, he started calling potential customers.
 His experiment clicked. NetAmbit, the company he founded, is eyeing a turnover of Rs 180 crore this fiscal, and has grown from five people to over 4,000.

4.HUMMINGBIRD, Vivek Madappa & Vinod Thimayya FOUNDERS A Place Like Home

The idea of comfortable,intimate, affordable” apartments for executives was new, not just to the corporate landscape, but also to Vivek Madappa and Vinod Thimayya, who were both executives in big companies till they took the leap.
The brothers started HummingBird in 2005, and have grown to having over 750 customers, including IBM, Accenture, JP Morgan and Wipro. The company projects revenues of Rs 35 crore this year.
 But the journey this far wasn’t easy. Banks didn’t give them money, and together, they had just Rs 3 lakh in savings. But they kept the dream alive, systematically working on its fruition.
 In 2008, Bangalore-based venture capital firm, Helion Venture Partners, invested $4 million in Hummingbird, and the rest is history.

5.MAHESH TUTORIALS, Mahesh Shetty FOUNDER-CHAIRMAN
Touch of Class

A chance meeting with a friend in the1980s changed Mahesh Shetty’s destiny from pursuing a career in the army to entering the thankless, then unremunerative world of teaching. Shetty took up a job with Dr Shetty’s Academy after graduation on his friends’ prodding, not realising where the journey would lead him.

 In 1988, he started Mahesh Tutorials. With banks unwilling to finance his land purchase, he mortgaged his mother’s jewellery, took loans from a maternal uncle and his grandfather, and booked a property worth Rs 6 lakh in Mumbai. Shetty soon purchased more property in two Mumbai suburbs, and entered into a partnership model to cut his risks. By 2006, Mahesh Tutorials grew to 26 branches across Mumbai. It now has 180 branches, with 50,000 students enrolling every year.

6.YOU LOOK GREAT, Rahul Bhalchandra(CEO) Cut & Polish

Before Rahul Balchandra embarked on his beauty salon business, he’d discovered a secret no man knew: how much women spent at beauty parlours every month. Kanwaljit Singh, MD of Bangalore-based fund Helion Venture Partners, who Bhalchandra went to meet about his proposed chain some years ago, was stumped by the realisation. Sure enough, his guesstimate was way off the mark. Barely four months later, Helion pumped in Rs 20 crore into the company, You Look Great, or YLG.
The first outlet opened in Bangalore in January 2009, and a year later, the chain has spread to 18 locations in the city. YLG’s model tweaked the way the business was conducted, based on its holistic understanding of not just the industry, but also customer behaviour.

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Source : Economic Times