From Reluctant Participant to Team Leader, Recent JC Graduate Discovers a Knack for Business

As it happens with many youngsters graduating from school at the beginning of the pandemic, Hemang Agrawal was greeted with more free time than he knew what to do with. He was aware of the necessity to move beyond his comfort spaces as the adult world beckoned, and took up as many online courses he could manage from various institutes. And while they engaged him productively, they didn’t satisfy him. His eagerness for physical interaction, perhaps exacerbated by the lockdown loneliness, urged him to seek out extra-curricular activities, including sessions at a famous life school, which did successfully bring him out of his shell.

Joining Enterprise India Fellowship was thus the proverbial next step in his journey, especially because his brother was a fellow at the institute and vouched for its impact. But Hemang himself was reluctant initially. As someone already heavily engaged in various activities, he didn’t feel he had the time to dedicate to it. He wanted to conserve his free time for play, which he correctly assumed, was important.

So despite learning about the Fellowship in 2020, he finally relented and joined at the beginning of the next year. His interest peaked during his meetings with Aditya Jhunjhunwala, Co-Founder of Enterprise India Fellowship, whose talking points about the institute and its philosophy felt persuasive to Hemang. Even then, he wasn’t completely sold on the idea, and expected to gain very little from his stint as a ‘Partner’.

As the fellowship progressed, Hemang was slowly, but surely, brought out of his cocoon, to become an active and enthusiastic participant in the different projects. He overcame his fear of public presentation and speaking through Enterprise’s ‘Service Design Project’, as well as hosting a ‘Greed Room Event’. The younger sibling of his generation, Hemang had developed self esteem and anxiety issues through constant comparison with his sister from family, friends, and teachers. Thus, the ability to successfully engage, and lead, different projects for the institute, helped reinstate confidence in himself. In his own words: ‘I was finally pushing myself outside the comfort zone I created for myself. there were many instances where I could break the barricade slowly and steadily that I had created for myself unintentionally.‘

Along with his intrepid personality development, Hemang also became quite professionally cognizant, quickly. Through his participation in internal and client projects, he picked up proficiency with tools like excel, and developed a soft skill-set with transferable applicability across different fields. Most importantly, he became aware of the discipline necessary in working with a client and running a business. The multiple steps involved in the planning and establishment of an institute and the absolute risks that form part of the journey were revelatory for him. It put his own work, in tandem with them, in a new, more responsible perspective, that he had managed to maintain with zeal and discipline.

The client he worked with, Dr Alifia Cementwala, was a physiotherapist who was trying to take her practice online to connect with her old patients better way. This experience with the external professional world helped him employ the tools and skills he had learnt to use throughout his fellowship, appearing as a meaningful conclusion to his journey.

It was a culmination of all that he had learnt and developed throughout his tenure at the Enterprise. In association with the institute he had masterminded and executed a research paper on the demands of employers from their workers, and how young Indians could develop those necessary skills. It had involved him interviewing various industry leaders, as well as his compatriots who had graduated from the fellowship into the professional world. The work introduced him to the structure of interviews and transcription, which he then used in his client project in order to delineate the talking points of the social media campaign.

In fact his conversational skills were in constant usage throughout his stint as a partner, as he participated in a ‘Capsule’ project that initiated a tree planting drive. As the primary person in charge of the initiative, Hemang communicated with businesses and NGOs to help raise the funds, as well as organised a dance workshop in association with Yukti Jethwani to facilitate and market the event.

Alongside such soft skills, he has also discovered a leadership potential in himself, which he has begun exploring beyond his professional space. His correct assessment of ‘leadership’ as a position of responsibility rather than command, has helped him flourish better in the role, as well as a team player in general.

As his time as a partner comes to an end, Hemang, thus emerges as a much more fully formed person, with a dogged will to learn new things, and grow as a human being. The way he has ‘sculpted’ himself out of the multiple opportunities he availed is illuminated by the observations of his mentors and clients:

Hemang Agrawal

Hometown: Silvassa, Diu & Daman

College: SSR College of Arts, Commerce and Science, Silvassa
Subject: Bachelor of Business Administration – Human Resources

Interests/Cares About: helping businesses solve problems
Fellowship Span: Apr 2020- Aug 2021

Fellowship Activities Sneak Peak:

-Worked on 5+ projects including Enterprise projects like #start & #karo, and Chandrayaan 0.0  (with the Client – Area Sabha Association of Pune)

-Wrote 2 blogs, hosted a Green Room community story-sharing evening, 3 #karo workshops, co-designed and co-hosted a session for peers on ‘Decluttering the mind’

-Co-led a team of 7 new Enterprise Partners to organize #karo, and help them kickstart their fellowship experience by activating the “doing”  mindset 

Plan after Graduation:

– Working with the MD of KlugAvlon, the first Indian company to indigenously develop safety systems for cranes all the way back in the year 2000

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“As a mature organization, we were finding it difficult to incorporate today’s technological tools in our business. Under our internship programme, we hired Shiv, a student at the Enterprise India Fellowship. Shiv has been working for the last 6 months and has already successfully implemented CRM for the sales department. He is currently working on integrating cloud telephony with CRM and automating the communication through email and Whatsapp. He is hand-holding our sales team to help them get more productive using CRM. Shiv is focused, hard-working and doesn’t shy in taking the plunge to learn anything new. The organisation has greatly benefited from Shiv. With his approach and attitude, he is onto building a great success story.”

Rupesh Gupta
Managing Director, Klug Avalon

Hemang is open about his future plans. As he says,

‘The next few years, I want get more knowledge. I want to do a few internships, and expand my skill base (learn animation and coding, among other things), and grab some more business opportunities in preparation for my eventual participation in the family business.‘

Currently pursuing his graduation studies in Mechanical Engineering, Hemang speaks and acts with a clarity of vision that stands testament to the growth he has undergone in the last few years, and bodes well for his experiences in the future.

Interviewer: Akash Bhalerao
Author: Jagruti Jethwani
Video Editor: Rahul Devkar
Story Editors:  Aditya Jhunjhunwala, Akash Bhalerao, Ankita Parashar, Lubaina Cementwala, Yusuf Hakim
Webpage Designer: Dnyanesh Chandewar

Through this project, Shiv learned how to fundraise, create leads and close sales as well as create a unique user experience for the participants. Shiv contributed to the project with action-orientedness, discipline and punctuality. Ankita Parashar, Business Partner and Marketing Lead at Enterprise recalls, “When we interviewed Shiv for the Fellowship, he had a white board in his background and he carefully wrote notes from our conversation. We knew then, this guy won’t have to be hand held for anything, rather he will be leading!” And through this project, his peers and mentors were amazed to see his time management and “doer-ship” in action.

From experiencing day to day operations of his family business, he had learned that it was quite different from the theories learned in college which made him realise that applied knowledge is power. 

Before joining the fellowship Shiv had shared, “The primary reason I want to join the Enterprise India Fellowship is to gain practical knowledge by working on projects which will also help me build my career, skills, relationships, and self growth.”

And through the fellowship, that’s what he ended up doing. 

Throughout his fellowship journey, he worked on over five projects including in-house projects like #karo & #start and a client project called Chandrayaan0.0 with the Area Sabha Association of Pune. . 

Shiv considers #karo as the most meaningful part of his fellowship journey. Shiv says, “I won’t be able to explain how much it has impacted me. That word #karo is going to be stuck in my head, heart and life forever.”

In September 2020, all the Partners came together to co-create #karo 3.0 – a seven weekend-long online festival to celebrate the “art of doing”. The idea was to help people understand that just watching, learning, and hearing something is not enough. We need to DO it, #karo it!

Shiv worked in the sales and outreach team and also hosted one of the workshops . Public speaking did not come naturally for him, so he was stepping out of his comfort zone and asked for help when he needed it. On the day of the workshop, he  gracefully hosted the 150 participants, and courageously stepped out of his comfort zone. 

Following that, Shiv, along with Enterprise Partners Apeksha Rathod and Jagruti Jethwani, took up every opportunity to learn and do, stuck with the project through a couple iterations and became a part of the #karo leadership team. Recently they co-led a team of 7 new Enterprise Partners to organize #karo workshops, and helped them kickstart their respective fellowship journeys by activating the “doing” mindset.

Hemang Agrawal

Hometown: Silvassa, Diu & Daman

College: SSR College of Arts, Commerce and Science, Silvassa
Subject: Bachelor of Business Administration – Human Resources

Interests/Cares About: helping businesses solve problems
Fellowship Span: Apr 2020- Aug 2021

Fellowship Activities Sneak Peak:

-Worked on 5+ projects including Enterprise projects like #start & #karo, and Chandrayaan 0.0  (with the Client – Area Sabha Association of Pune)

-Wrote 2 blogs, hosted a Green Room community story-sharing evening, 3 #karo workshops, co-designed and co-hosted a session for peers on ‘Decluttering the mind’

-Co-led a team of 7 new Enterprise Partners to organize #karo, and help them kickstart their fellowship experience by activating the “doing”  mindset 

Plan after Graduation:

– Working with the MD of KlugAvlon, the first Indian company to indigenously develop safety systems for cranes all the way back in the year 2000

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