Inspiration and Learning - the SME way

I am an SME founder who started my factory 8 years back. In the early part of the last decade everyone was starting up. Angel and VC money was flowing like the Ganges in Monsoon. Things were so crazy and frustrating for a young factory owner who could only imagine what would have happened had he founded a start-up and not a factory, like others his age.

A friend's idea of starting a company which makes advertorial-blogs got eight figure funding (Rs). I could tell he would never be successful because of his rule of working only 5 days a week "because thats how the industry works" he told me and here I was running a cash positive business from day-one, running from pillar to post to get a paltry Rs 15 Lakh working capital loan and working 365 days of the year with no timings. 

Since I needed a collateral free loan it took me more than 40 visits to SBI to secure it. Our business doubled in a year as soon as it got some WC. Since we were a factory, we also needed a factory license, an NOC from the environment ministry, an NOC from the fire department, ESI license, PF Registration. Which meant back to back rounds to the govt offices, even though all licenses were applied for online, the departments would raise mass-objections to all applications so that you would have to visit them physically. 

This is me in our first factory. We have now moved from a 2,000 sqft setup to a 30,000 sqft area

It took me around a year to get all certifications only to realise none of my competitors had even a single license. One hadn't even registered his company, all of his transactions were cash. Since I got all licenses, govt inspectors knew I existed and they included me in their monthly rounds. I had a very steep learning curve on how to deal with the inspectors and somehow got them to stop visiting without paying them a single penny. 

Anywho, so my business started, as I have mentioned in my other blog we used some guerrilla marketing techniques, some thinking out of the box and followed set principles of business to grow ourselves into the leading player in India of our product. 

Throughout my ongoing journey, I've looked on the internet for inspiration, for guidance or just for someone to read about who has gone through the same stuff that I have and I've not found much. Whatever I have found are stories of men who are double my age and they talk about things from their current prospective, they seem to have forgotten what it was like to start a factory. 

This blog and hopefully a YouTube channel in the future is going to be my attempt to stop any future SME founder to feel as lonely as I did in my journey to find inspiration. I hope to impart all my learnings here and interview or talk about founders much more capable than me and join you in our journey to inspiration.