Saturday, April 30, 2011

Entrepreneurship : Many Times All is Not well At the Very First Go


Today I just came across this video and hence thought of sharing some past nuances about WebPro Technologies



Every entrepreneur starts a business venture with a dream of being successful  but many times all is not well  at the very first go. When you decide to take up a job you learn on the job and try to be better with every passing day gaining experience and knowledge and also you are assured of a pay packet at the end of the month.

But, when you venture out to invest in business you do get experience with every decision you take but you may not always end up with monetary gain at the very first go. So that is the difference one needs to take risks and also be prepared for unforeseen situations  or vagaries of the market despite  taking  wise and careful decisions. Always have   a backup plan ready for such situations.

I am not writing all this hypothetically, I have gone through these situations and experienced it .   I have been on both the sides . I started my career in 1987 working as a faculty at DataPro (Mumbai –Bandra) , Placement Head at  NIIT  (New Delhi ) and then  finally as Centre Manager at TuLec (A division Of Tata Infotech – Ahmedabad) . After that planned to take up a franchise of DataPro for Ahmedabad but after a good start due to the changing market conditions as we are all familiar with the dot com bubble burst period of early 2000 it became very difficult to survive and meet the salary expenses of the SCJPs and MCSEs and the huge infrastructure cost of running a training institute .

But we had to continue even at a loss as we had enrolled students for 3 year Diploma  courses and had to keep up to our commitments . The  final blow came when DataPro – the Parent Company announced its closure and we had to now create an identity of our own. We had to remove the DataPro Sign Board  and decided to start under the name of WebPro Technologies. Designing our own courses and setting marketing plans.

We started with Web Designing and Web Development courses and also got projects for web development.After the initial hiccups and teething problems we managed to get out of the loss and actually reached a decent profit margin with the web development and web designing courses we started for B.E’s  (Engineers) only and we tiled the course as 'The eEngineer' . The first few batches were the saving grace and we came out of the difficult times.

The website owners whose website we had developed wanted to know how they can rank on Altavista, Lycos, Yahoo, Hotbot,etc. the search engines which were widely used. I  started working on that and since then I have never looked back . I personally got so interested in optimizing sites that SEO services became the focus of our company.

Once you are out of the difficult times then it is in your hands to restructure, reorganize and rework the entire set up to narrow down or expand and go ahead more confidently.

Hence, every business venture will have its ups and downs but only during these times the entrepreneur has to prove his/her mettle and  integrity as these are the true testing times  and many times you are left alone to face these situations or the most faithful few of your team may help you.


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