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| The Turning Point by Lavina Melwani
That
lucky break.
Can
dinner in an Indian restaurant lead to a big deal with
Walt Disney? Can giving out a business card randomly
end up landing superstar Patrick Ewing as a client?
And can a laid off techie parlay his pink slip into
fodder for a popular cartoon on CNET? Read on!
An Ivy League education, business smarts and ambition
may all be big factors in success, but there is also
that random factor — call it chance, luck, destiny —
which sometimes kicks in for that once-in-a-lifetime
opportunity. Almost every entrepreneur who has made
it will recall that first break, an accidental happening
which somehow turned the tide and made success possible.
Take the case of Vinod Gupta, founder and chairman of
InfoUSA, Inc, based in Omaha, Nebraska. This publicly
held company has more than $300 million in annual revenues
and nearly three million customers use its comprehensive
databases of 12 million businesses nd 100 million households
for direct marketing and telemarketing. Gupta, a graduate
of IIT Kharagpur, has been so asuccessful that he has
gone on to donate $2 million to establish a business
school at his alma mater modeled after the School of
Management at MIT and $2 million to establish a curriculum
for small business management at the University of Nebraska
at Lincoln from where he graduated.
Yet it was a small crisis in the office that became
the launching pad for a multimillion-dollar business.
In 1971 Gupta was a 25-year-old marketing research analyst
for Commodore Corporation, a manufacturer of mobile
homes in Omaha, trying to compile a list of all the
mobile home dealers in the United States. Since most
of the available lists were incomplete, he ordered telephone
directories and decided to create the lists himself.
When all 4,800 Yellow Pages arrived at the office and
filled up the entire reception area, his boss wanted
the eyesore out of the place by 4 p.m. — or else.
< ALIGN="justify"
InfoUSA’s
Vinod Gupta: “Don’t work hard, work smart.”
Gupta struggled to take the massive books home and painstakingly
sorted and compiled the information. A light bulb went
on: people would pay to have this information at their
fingertips and he decided to compile an electronic database.
With an initial investment of $100 he started out on
his new venture, hiring part-time workers. He launched
American Business Information (ABI) in 1972, creating
various lists from the information lying dormant in
the Yellow Pages. So successful were these lists as
a marketing tool that Gupta was able to quit his job
and embark full-time on compiling a database of every
industry from A to Z. ABI later became InfoUSA.
As Gupta observes, “Twenty-nine years ago I had an idea
and $100 in my pocket. I thought that if companies had
the right information in front of them, they could market
and sell the right products to the right people at the
right time. Today that $100 investment has transformed
into a $300 million public company with more than 1,550
employees nationwide. I tell everyone, ‘Don’t work hard,
work smart.’”
Sometimes a lack of the proper product can start one
up on a search and discovery mission and in essence
that becomes the big break one needed. The foundation
of the multimillion-dollar Bose Corporation, noted the
world over for its state-of-the-art speakers, was laid
in 1956 when Bose, an assistant professor of electrical
engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
went searching for a suitable speaker for his personal
use.
Dissatisfied with the speakers available on the market,
he decided to build a better one. His groundbreaking
research revolutionized the home hi-fi systems with
the Acoustimass Speakers, which make component hi-fi
virtually invisible with a hidden module and speakers
small enough to fit in the palm of a hand.
Entrepreneurs hoping to hit the big one can sit all
day in front of their computer screens and check their
email messages all day — and yet sometimes a fantastic
idea is lurking right there on the monitor, just waiting
to be discovered. Sabeer Bhatia came up with Hotmail,
the revolutionary idea of free email access to millions
of people across the world. Until then, email was a
proprietary service accessed through one’s internets
evice provider, such as America Online. Hotmail made
I possible for even people without an ISP account to
sign up for email and to check it anywhere in the world.
Bhatia, who came to America as a student to study at
Cal-Tech and Stanford, recalls: “We started out very
small with just two people with a great idea.” The rest
is history and Bhatia and his partner Jack Smith went
on to sell Hotmail to Microsoft for a reported $300-$400
million. They had succeeded in transforming $300,000
in venture capital into a $300+ million company in just
two years.
Mohan Ramchandani sizing up another
one of his celebrity clients. Amazing what randomly
handing out a business card can sometims do.
Life being unpredictable, sometimes the big break can
come through a chance encounter — and bring a string
of celebrities with it! Mohan Ramchandani who owns the
successful Mohan Custom Tailors in Manhattan got his
big break from just such a chance encounter. While visiting
his wife in hospital after the birth of their child,
he handed out his business card to the nurse who was
curious about his profession. It just so happened that
she was a childhood friend of Patrick Ewing’s mother
and when the upcoming star athlete needed a suit, guess
whom his mother called?
At that time Ewing was a college basketball star and
Ramchandani went to Georgetown to take his measurements.
He had to stand on a chair since Ewing is seven feet
tall! That first suit was such a success that Ewing
had him make many more and also agreed to let his picture
be used in advertisements, which Ramchandani ran in
major newspapers. By then Ewing had been drafted to
the Knicks and he was a red-hot celebrity. Ramchandani
says, “That was the biggest break I had and The New
York Times has also been very important for me.”
Not only did he get a lot of publicity in the media,
but he also started the trend of using himself in his
ads, measuring his celebrity clients. After Ewing, he
nabbed major sports celebrities, including Bobby Bonilla
of the New York Mets, footballers Leonard Marshall and
Greg Buttle and basketball star Manute. His client list
includes Mark Jackson, Kenny Walker, Pat Cummings, Ken
Bannister, and Ron Reagan, Jr. U.N. Secretary General
Kofi Annan has also bought suits from him as has former
New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, although via his Hong
Kong office.
While Ramchandani concedes that a lot of luck is involved,
he says the most important is hard work and how you
approach your customers and care for them by giving
them high quality products. Believing in your product
is vital: Ramchandani was in his 20’s when he came to
the United States from Hong Kong and the first thing
he did after arrival was place an advertisement in The
New York Times. It cost him, but he’s still reaping
the results. He recognized the American mania for celebrity
and uses it to market his suits.
Relativity’s Vivek Wadhwa: Overcoming a bad hand.
Serendipity is often given the prosaic name of networking,
but the fact is that you never know whom you’ll meet
and where that will lead. Indeed, sometimes a chance
encounter can turn your career around 180 degrees. Ask
Sushil Malhotra, the intrepid New York entrepreneur,
who heads Dawat Restaurant and half a dozen Cafe Spices
and has his finger in many pies. Originally an engineer,
Malhotra was dabbling with spices on the side and had
started Foods of India, the first Indian-owned spice
store in Manhattan. In the good old days he had lots
of ideas and enthusiasm, but little money.
While holidaying in Trinidad with his wife in those
tightwad times, Malhotra was intrigued by one name that
seemed to be splashed on billboards and stores: Kripalani.
He learnt that Ram Kripalani was a self-made entrepreneur
who owned major businesses in the Caribbean. On a whim,
he tried setting up an appointment with him. To his
surprise, he got it immediately — the big man had mistaken
him for another Malhotra whom he knew in New York!
Even though he was the “wrong” Malhotra, the gracious
Kripalani insisted on hosting the couple and gave them
his chauffeur and car for island sightseeing along with
a picnic lunch of Trinidadian rotis and vegetables.
Recalls Malhotra: “He was a little man, barely five
feet, sparse structure but a very dynamic personality.
He was literally the God of this island, a very generous
man.”
That chance encounter led to a decade long business
relationship: “I didn’t have too much money, but I gave
him ideas on how he could start supermarkets in the
basements of his 40 department stores.” Kripalani gave
him a partnership for putting up the ideas and securing
agencies for major American products in Trinidad, such
as Pampers and Beechnut baby foods.
Dawat’s Sushil Malhotra got his big break when he
tried to hook up with a name he saw splashed on stores
and billboards while holidaying in Trinidad.
Since Kripalani also owned a bank, he loaned their newly
formed company funds to start the business.
Recalls Malhotra, “In 2-3 years we were very successful.
The Kripalani name was very strong on the island so
many agencies came to us. But I was the guy orchestrating
the whole thing while I was still running my little
Indian grocery stores in New York. That was the beginning
for me of making some very fast moves in those two or
three years.”
He attributes his big break to Kripalani, who has since
passed away. “I learnt a lot from that man. He helped
me make my first million. I really got this break from
him because while everyone has ideas here was a man
who believed in my idea and was willing to fund it.”
Malhotra’s next big break came through a really big
name — Walt Disney! It just goes to prove that sometimes
it’s just about being at the right place at the right
moment. Malhotra was a partner in Akbar Restaurant in
Manhattan and one day, way back in 1978, a managing
director of Walt Disney came in. A Britisher, he really
knew his Indian cuisine and started chatting with Malhotra.
Again this chance encounter led to a major business
deal. Walt Disney was looking to have a presence in
India and wanted the right person to handle its licensing
programs in India.
Malhotra volunteered and amazingly, got the job. He
became the licensee for Walt Disney in India and did
everything from registering the copyright to meeting
prospective licensees. He went several times to India
setting the licensing program in motion, including publishing
Disney comics in eight languages through Chandamama
in Madras.
When India opened up under Rajiv Gandhi, Disney sent
Malhotra to live in India with the title of President
of Walt Disney India. He held the post for six months
before moving back to the United States, which had been
home since he was 16. He says, “In the evening, because
you had the title of president of Walt Disney India,
you were invited to the most glamorous parties and everyone
wanted to know Mickey Mouse. But during the day I found
it very difficult to deal with the bureaucratic way
of doing business in India.” He helped find a new licensing
partner for Walt Disney — the Modis — and received the
golden handshake. The Disney episode made it possible
for Malhotra to open Dawat Restaurant in New York and
get into investment banking. He now also has a chain
of five CafÈ Spice restaurants, and is still utilizing
random happenings to create more success: When he recently
opened a quality control commissary in Queens to monitor
the consistency of the sauces served in various Cafe
Spices, he decided to supply his ready chilled sauces
to gourmet and health stores, thus creating a new business.
All these events for Malhotra spiraled from his chance
encounters: “I think one has to have foresight and aggressiveness
to get the right partners, when you don’t have the money,
but luck plays a part. A little bit of luck — or a major
bit of luck, whichever way you want to look at it —
is an essential part of the recipe for success.”
Almost every successful entrepreneur or businessperson
has had that epiphany, that moment when things look
the darkest and suddenly that becomes the turning point,
the point from which things turn around. Manoj Ajmeri
has certainly seen lots of ups and downs, and he’ll
be the first one to tell you just how much luck plays
a part in business success.
He should know — he won the Lotto!
Ajmeri came to the United States from Baroda under the
family reunification act. He joined his brothers in
a small wholesale business, going from candy store to
candy store selling general merchandise like pens and
lighters. He did that for two and a half years, while
also working at several part-time jobs in candy stores
to eke out a living. He says, “It was a hard life. I
used to work many hours a week, but nothing worked out
good.”
Things went from bad to worse: while living in the Bronx,
he was mugged in his apartment building. The assailants
hit him with iron rings, took his valuables and his
green card and left him bleeding in the foyer. Within
a month he was mugged again in the candy store where
he was working. He managed to safeguard $7,000 in cash,
but was knifed in the stomach. During that time he moved
to Astoria and started running a candy store again in
Woodside. One day he played the Lotto at the corner
store — and beat the odds!
That evening his friend who played his numbers for him
came running — he had won! The amount wasn’t millions
— just $11,000 — but it was the turning point for Ajmeri.
It gave him the opportunity to invest in his own wholesale
company. Krishna Import Sales was registered in 1990
and has since become a successful wholesale company.
Ajmeri has moved to Long Island and his American Dream
is finally shaping up.
Now with the economy souring and competition fierce,
business isn’t the best, but he is upbeat. “I’ve been
through so much that I know I will survive.” A believer
in the powers of the planets, he says the stars have
to be aligned right for success to happen. Yet he feels
that although luck is important so is one’s own initiative
and hard work: “Even if you see a dollar lying on the
pavement you have to bend down to get it — it’s not
going to come to you by itself.”
And sometimes you make your own luck — by sheer persistence.
Venu Myneni, CEO, Radiant Systems, Inc., came to the
United States from Andhra Pradesh 11 years ago. He had
always wanted to see the world and thought the United
States would be the place for the opportunities and
the exposure. He came as a student and then worked his
way through a number of different jobs in engineering,
marketing, planning and production. All along he was
an entrepreneur at heart and finally with a partner,
Vinod Koduru, decided to start Radiant Systems, offering
software services and products.
That was the time the hi-tech boom was just about starting
so it was really a matter of riding the wave, but the
partners had few contacts and certainly no venture capital.
They had to depend on sheer initiative and elbow grease,
working crazy hours and making cold calls to jumpstart
the business.
“We were working really hard, faxing a list of our services
to various companies but we had had no results,” says
Myneni, recalling their first big break. “The CEO of
Health Network happened to be working very late on the
weekend and around midnight on Saturday she was passing
the fax machine in her office and she saw our fax come
in.” Impressed at their dedication and persistence in
working so late, she called them up and asked them to
come in for a presentation the next day. They did and
landed the contract.
PC Weenies Krishna Sadasivam: Parlayed a layoff into
a cartooning career..
That first break set the ball rolling. Today Radiant
Systems, Inc. is a successful IT organization, experiencing
a 17-fold growth in the last five years. The company
has won a gaggle of awards, including the Inc. 500 award
as one of the fastest growing companies in the nation,
the Deloitte & Touche nation Fast 500 award, New
Jersey Finest award from PriceWaterHouse Coopers, and
40 Under 40 award from Business News New Jersey. It
was also a finalist for Entrepreneur of the Year award
sponsored by E&Y, NASDAQ, CNN, and USA Today.
“I have to go a long way before claiming to be success-ful,
but I agree that it involves being at the right place
at the right time,” says Myneni. “ You can call this
luck or anything but I don’t believe in luck. People
make their own luck when they recognize problems as
opportunities. Also just being there is not sufficient
to make it happen. One needs to know what to do, how
to do it and really work hard. That is why only 5 percent
of the businesses survive and only a few become successful.”
Indeed, sometimes even a layoff can carry within it
the seeds of future success, and you can wrest something
positive from the jaws of rejection. Krishna Sadasivam
is a techie who’s been through two layoffs, most recently
one in January, but is on his way to an exciting new
career, which he is passionate about.
Born and raised in Winnipeg, Manitoba, he migrated with
his parents to the United States from Canada in 1979.
His childhood took him to many states including New
Hampshire, Connecticut, and North Carolina and his family
is currently in Knoxville, Tenn. A techie, he’s been
through two layoffs, most recently one in January of
this year.
Sadasivam was a senior ASIC customer engineer working
for LSI Logic Corporation, largely responsible for getting
computer chips through the design process and into manufacturing.
It was his second engineering job since graduating from
college — and the layoff was a tough introduction to
the real world.
“The hardest part about being laid off was adjusting
to the idea that I would have to create my own income,”
he says. “Rather than have a constant paycheck doled
out by a corporation, I would have to learn how to manage
my own business.” This layoff became the chance to turn
to cartooning, which had been a passion since the age
of three. His cartoons are now created completely on
the computer, using an Apple Power Macintosh G4 and
a graphics tablet.
“The idea for the PC Weenies (which is a thinly veiled
term used to describe ‘an overly zealous computer geek’)
came about while I worked as a design engineer in Orlando,”
says Sadasivam. “ This was several months prior to my
first layoff. Having spent a great deal of time with
computers, and other fellow computer geeks, I had gathered
quite a few anecdotes relating to my field. I came up
with my cartoons and began sharing them with my co-workers,
who quite easily related to the humor.” Sadasi-vam contin-ued
to publish on the web (www.pcweenies.com) and the hits
to the site continued to grow over time.
Hotmail founder Sabeer Bhatia: Sometimes that idea
is staring right back at you on your monitor.
His layoff certainly gave him subject matter for his
appealing PCWeenies, but could a hobby be turned into
a vocation? He says, “I’ve found you have to be adept
at public relations and marketing, in addition to cartooning.
As I’ve found out, there is much more to cartooning
than simply drawing pictures.”
After his first layoff, he made a cold call to Jay Singh,
an editor at Cnet.com: “He liked what he saw, and put
me in touch with the managing art editor. It was my
first big break, to be published on a very prominent
tech website.” The cartoon series ran on C/net’s news.com
for two months, during which time “What PC?” Magazine,
a leading UK computer publication, saw it and liked
it. This led to a contract with the magazine and PC
Weenies have been appearing in print for the past three
years.
“Luck is definitely a factor in this business,” says
Sadasivam. “Hard work and talent can take you only so
far, but, for me, luck is a fundamental catalyst to
moving beyond the normal scope of an ‘internet cartoon’
to other avenues. For every successful cartoonist who
makes it big, there are thousands of other equally talented
artists that go completely unrecognized. Such is the
nature of this field.”
Besides launching the PC Weenies in print in the United
States, Sadasivam would like to collaborate on animation
projects, using FLASH and also use the characters as
a “branding” mechanism for advertising tech products
to “techie” audiences. Yes, the talent is there and
so is a fun product — all he needs is a dollop of luck!
“Everybody’s had lucky breaks in life — that’s the way
it goes,” says Vivek Wadhwa of Relativity Technologies.
“Everyone has his stories — it’s never planned; it’s
your destiny, it’s karma and the right things happen
to you when the time is right. That’s our Hindu philosophy
anyway — that it’s a mixture of your destiny and your
determination.”
He should know. Way back in 1986 he was a computer programmer
at Xerox and had interviewed for a job at First Boston.
He had a good feeling in his bones that everything was
just right and that the job was definitely his.
He was stunned to learn that he hadn’t got the job and
just couldn’t get over it. Sure enough, a few days later
he heard from the personnel office — they had goofed
and sent a rejection letter when he had actually been
approved! The job was his! That lucky break led to his
rising from a programmer to a vice president at First
Boston, and introducing some revolutionary technology
that set the stage for his first start up.
Amar Bose turned his disenchantment with commercial
speakers into a hi-fi revolution.
“In my life there have been many times when everything
seemed to be going wrong and out of it always came the
next big thing for me,” says Wadhwa. “The spiral is
what gets you to the next level.” Wadhwa’s first startup
was a $120 million public company, in which he had stock
worth $15 million. After the IPO, everything went wrong
and the company crumbled within a year.
He says, “I was very disappointed. But at the end of
the day I ended up negotiating to take all the technology
from that company and starting my own company. For me,
success is having learnt from failures and grown.”
Wadhwa put in his life savings into his new company
Relativity Technologies that over the years has grown
into a leading supplier of legacy modernization software
and solutions. Founded in 1997, Relativity Technologies
offers a low risk, cost-effective solution for improving
mainframe-based legacy systems, and clients have included
Charles Schwab, Care First Blue Cross Blue Shield, Owens
& Minor, State of Pennsylvania and the US Air Force.
In 1998, Intel Corporation became an equity shareholder
in Relativity Technologies. Relativity Technologies
received the annual Fortune Magazine Cool Company Award
in 2001 and was recognized in Computerworld’s Top 100
Emerging companies for 2002. In the changed economy,
however, business has taken a beating and recently Wadhwa
suffered a heart attack too. Although the company faced
financial difficulties and had some difficult discussions
with investors, it is rebounding. Wadhwa believes that
hard times can be productive too.
As the driving force behind the TIE in North Carolina,
he says, “Even if people have lost their jobs, it’s
an opportunity to reflect on what they’ve learnt and
who they are. They should get their energy back and
focus on rebuilding. People have to realize it’s the
journey that counts, not the destination because along
the way you grow a lot.”
Do people make their own luck? Wadhwa believes so: “You
may have been given a bad hand, but you can fight as
hard as hell and you can make yourself succeed if you
work hard enough. You’ll get the lucky breaks because
you work hard and don’t give up.” He recalls the early
days of Relativity when he was working out of the basement
of his home and the whole family was pitching in: “I
was basically working at $100 a week to get the company
off the ground. I made my own destiny here — it came
out of a disaster, but after working on it long enough,
I got the lucky breaks.”
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