Part B
My love for business and management started when I was 17, but I didn’t realize it back then. I was in my dad’s farm land, watching field workers harvesting sugarcane on one side and my dad having an intense conversation with the contractor for the price. That day when I asked my dad, why did we incur loss, he told me, “Son, wages of labor are huge in seasons, and around 75% cost goes to labor. That eats away all our margin” he said. I sat all night that day and was trying to come up with ways and techniques to make the operation of harvesting better. Naturally I thought the solution lies in engineering, I thought engineering is something I would love. I wanted to invent a machine that does the work thus reducing the cost. I failed and decided to do mechanical engineering as a major to learn how. Fast forward 4 years, I was able to do the very same thing that I wanted 4 years ago. But for some reason, it didn’t quite work out. The machine worked, but the solution didn’t. The cost didn’t go down. My dad was happy that I was able to achieve what I wanted and I worked hard for 4 years and learnt a lot. But I wasn’t happy. I should have been. Afterall I invented something at the age of 21. But I wasn’t happy. Only then I realized that my fascination was not in the machine but in the cost optimization. I read few books, thought about it a lot and then I decided to work on a 2nd solution for the same problem. Nearly 5 years later. But this time, the solution was not in tech, but in management. I convinced my dad to make few changes. I studied the process in detail and came up with few methods to streamline the process. I increased the spacing at the cost of yield quantity per acre (to make it machine compatible), bought automatic saws, employed workers in contract for pay per ton rather than per day. And voila, the whole work got completed in 2 days instead of usual 20 days. I didn’t make profit that year, in fact I made a loss because of automatic machineries and others. But I was happy. I developed a system that when scaled will give me more profit. But I didn’t scale up the system. I let my dad do it. I left my home. I joined an IT company. Why you ask? I was preparing. I decided, my love is in managing and making things profitable. I earned by working in the morning for my future education. Studied in night. 3 years later, I was able to crack CAT. Now, here I am. In IIM Raipur, studying what I love, learning things that excite me, getting ready to change the world. Hello World! Be ready. I’m coming to change everything that I see.
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