TOP 5 Learnings for entrepreneurs in past one year and the road ahead

Team L&M

The year 2020 has been most insightful for us. We got time to reflect on our monotonous lifestyle and embarked on new learnings. While Covid-19 has affected most of us, entrepreneurs think the pandemic will require them to mould their business approach for decades to come. Entrepreneurs choose to act on opportunities to make a difference with their ideation and contribute to society. The shift to digitisation has led to new sustainable and innovative measures for business.

Akshay Chaturvedi, Founder & CEO, Leverage Edu
The last year has helped us to become more innovative, more efficient, and also a company with a huge heart. It saw us flip out the model and launch UniConnect, a virtual education fair that saw over 130 universities partner to meet matched students. We took the hard call of not letting a single teammate go, irrespective of much bigger peers in the tech ecosystem doing it. We ended up growing our monthly top line over 4x. Will always remember this year as one that gave us unbelievable character.

Nitesh Salvi, Founder and CEO, Pocket52
The biggest learning is to say no to unnerving moments and say yes to agile modifications of your business strategies. Reinventing and pivoting the product and its features according to the need of the hour would keep the cash flowing. Most importantly, to achieve all this, you got to keep your team together as they are the real heroes who would help you survive crises. And think about your audiences’ pockets too. We gave lucrative offers and bonuses in the time of dullness. The skill based games, Poker & Rummy, at Pocket52, were not only enjoyed by professionals but helped us keep occasional players entertained during the lockdown. We witnessed an average growth of 20% every month.

Swati Babel, CEO, PrimaDollar India
A paradigm shift towards digitisation of the economy was already underway, but the current events have accelerated the process. The pandemic is a reality check for businesses that have been reluctant to embrace digital transformation and now find themselves woefully unprepared. Some vital footsteps that have become inevitable for all of us after the lessons learnt in the past one year are digitisation, reconciliation of government policies, simplify the complexities of conventional banking structures, adapting to change and having contingency plans. The entire cross border supply chain has been flared up due to the pandemic, companies are entangled in a liquidity crunch, the biggest relief for the supplier now is to receive early payments. Supply chain trade finance platforms are instrumental in solving the major issues currently faced by corporates. Large business houses, on having a way to pay their suppliers at shipment can definitely negotiate much better deals and obtain significant benefit in these tough times. With the support of their banks, this is a smart way to go on optimising operational efficiency as well reducing the cost of landed goods.

Hemant Manglani, GM, StanPlus
The year gone by has highlighted gaps for individuals as well as enterprises, with regard to their preparedness to deal with emergency and non-emergency medical response situations. The country understood the importance and the need for a robust ambulance network equipped with the state-of-the-art technologies and medical professionals trained as per international standards to manage the golden hour medical response. The pandemic has driven home the point that it is an employer’s ‘Duty Of Care’ to ensure they take keen interest in their employee’s physical and mental health as well as their overall well-being – on-premise, at home, and in transits to ensure productivity and growth in our economy. Today, multiple Fortune 500 companies and country’s top hospitals have partnered with StanPlus as their only one-stop-shop for all their medical response needs.

Siddharth Ramasubramanian, Founder & CEO, Vegolution
People have been closer to their kitchens and family now than ever before as health and family nourishment has become our top priority. We have developed new eating and cooking habits that are here to stay enabling daily food experiences that offer taste and wholesome nutrition at affordable prices. This enables us with the perfect opportunity to launch a new category like Hello Tempat which not only addresses the nutritional requirements of a whole new generation of home cooks but also allows for experimentation in the kitchen which is the buzzword of the day.