Thanks for showing so much love to my book – The Anexas Story. Based on many requests to publish chapters of the book on LinkedIn, I continue to write a series of articles based on these chapters. Please read on and keep believing that there is an entrepreneur in you…and everyone!
————–
We got encouraged by initial success. That is the thing about success. It is required in small doses and suddenly the mood changes. A little dose and utopian dreams arrive!!
We thought of registering a formal company. A team of five persons was formed to represent the Board of Advisors. Varsha, who had started her part-time Pediatric practice in Bangalore by then, agreed to help us and was designated as Managing Director. I say, bring on the wives to the board of the business. It works! Apart from giving you company in your lives, they can also help you form a company, that’s what I realized. And that was the beginning of her immense support and contribution to the company, which still continues unabated. With three more friends on board, we formed the first team of advisors. At the same time, all of us stayed with our regular jobs or professions. The fun was really big with my efforts to make it a legitimate company. Every company needs a name. Those days, if you applied for a company formation, you had to give your choices of names and the Registrar of Companies would get back to you if they were fine with the name that you desired. It could not clash with some other company’s name.
I realized that all the generic consulting company names had been already taken. We were at a dead end with that. But that seemed to give us a new edge, to be different! I tried conjuring up names and they kept rejecting. In between, I thought of naming fanciful names like Flying Foxes, Super Duper, Quality Rockers and what not. Basically, I was highly irritated.
One day, on a call with my school friend Manish, I asked his email ID. And he gave it – something as strange as shanim@xxxxxx.com. He sensed my puzzled voice, he went on to explain that shanim was the reverse of his name Manish and that he had to resort to this tactic due to the non-availability of Manish as an id. Bingo! I had an idea! I could also do the reverse of my name or surname and have a nice company name. Anexas was zeroed in on, it happened to be the reverse word for Saxena. I applied with this newly created word for the Company’s name, it got approved.
To celebrate the registration of company, five of us, the board of advisors, assembled at my Koramangala home in Bangalore. These included me, Varsha, Pradeep and Bharat with my school friend Manish Bhardwaj joining on phone. I don’t remember the menu so well, but I think there was a selection of snacks and tea. Varsha often jokes that in that board meeting, the so-called Managing Director was serving tea, and if you were to make a wild guess about that company’s future, it would not indeed be anywhere close to what it is today.
It was a lark that had started small and turned serious. The company was formed with zero investment. Even the company’s registration charges were paid from the fee earned from the first batch of participants. There was no thought of opening some grand office. There was no desire of possessing some valuable real estate in Bangalore, the IT city. We shied away from such ostentatious display, otherwise abundant in Bangalore.
We believed that small is beautiful. Over the next six months, we launched one training each in Delhi, Mumbai, Nagpur, Chennai and Goa. If I conducted a training in a city where my relatives lived, I would invite them to the program just to share my newly found passion for training and self-employment. Like, when I did the first program in Goa, my sister Dr. Richa, who practiced as Pediatrician there, attended with her whole family! And my parents attended our Nagpur program where they were invited to give away the certificates to the fifty-five participants who showed up at Hotel Centre Point. That was a stupendous response indeed from the city where I was brought up and had completed my education.
Nagpur is a cynical city. Its people can bring your aura down by many lengths if you are not prepared or presentable. Imagine, I, who had started in this city, had to go back and prove myself in front of my parents and others.
I did.
Sometimes, it is worthwhile to see a mother’s happy tears too.
————–
For subsequent articles, please watch this space.
You can buy the book directly from its website on https://www.anexasstory.com
or on Amazon on https://www.amazon.in/ANEXAS-STORY-There-Entrepreneur-Everyone-ebook/dp/B07ZGLN8C7
————–
Amitabh Saxena is founder of Anexas, a well-known lean six sigma and project management consulting organisation. He has trained over 50,000 participants and has 30 years of experience in consulting more than 300 organisations around the world including Fortune 100 companies across industry domains. With a strong team of 25 Master Black Belts, his organisation Anexas has been helping individuals and organisations achieve eminence through excellence since 2006. They can be reached on enquiry@anexas.net.