Learning from Entrepreneurs : interview with “Ravindra Puttewar”

[dropcaps type=’square’ font_size=’80’ color=’#4a4a4a’ background_color=’#ffffff’ border_color=”]I[/dropcaps] am an aspiring entrepreneur and work in my family business with my father. I joined the Enterprise India Fellowship 2 Years back in January 2020 Jan. I was working on different projects and simultaneously grew interested in reading blogs and creating too. I got a question back then that I could relate to myself completely, how do entrepreneurs achieve so much? How did they do it? We only see the good, the rosy and the successful parts of their journey. But just like me, they must have also struggled and failed to turn their ideas into reality. That’s when I decided to interview entrepreneurs and understand what’s beneath the surface, what’s under the water, and what hard work they did that we didn’t see. This enabled my curiosity to connect with them and ask questions and write a blog.

The story starts with someone who inspired me from his life story typical rags to riches who has to cross many hurdles which are coming his way. “Ravendra Puttewar” owner of Aditi IT services is situated in Nagpur Maharashtra. He is a very helpful person and believes in the trial and error learning process.

1. What is the definition of a business for you and what should be your mindset while doing business?

For me, the definition of business can be described in two simple words Profit and Loss. Now Talking about mindset as you feel happy making the profit you should also make yourself capable of accepting loss with a smile. What You should think after that is, how can I recover? Always keep in mind for your whole life, loss happens for many reasons, sometimes by our own mistakes sometimes because of external factors like covid but never play the blame game with yourself.

2. What qualities do you see when it comes to having a business partner?

I believe the qualities a founder has is induced in the company. The major factor for a business is to have a good footing and to sustain for the long term. So whenever I think of having a business partner I should know what his or her strength are. Is he transparent, honest, consistent? Aditi IT Services has become a brand of trust because of these qualities. While starting a business you have to bring people together as a team and make them trust you where these qualities help. This results in creating a brand and making the business for the longterm. One more thing I would like to add is to never misuse someone’s trust and relationship.

3. Why do you feel networking is important?

I think this is something you should give importance to, “Networking”. The more network you have the more beneficial it is. There will be times when your network will support you in life. Adding to the point it could also be converted into cash. Just like the way you reached out to me by the means of your network where that person was mutual to both of us to help you to talk to me and ask questions.

4. How do you encourage your employees to contribute towards the betterment of the organization?

In our company, if an employee has an interest in a specific role or task or field we give him full freedom or liberty to do the whole work. Like if he brought a project by himself then we support him and he has our back every time and we don’t stricture. And even if he made a loss we just accept and digest the loss as he is in the learning stage. But one rule is that if a mistake is accidentally made we believe he will gain some knowledge from it and in the second case where the mistake that he has made is intentional like he is repeating the mistake again and again we think it’s unethical towards business and can cause big harm to the business.

[highlight color=” background_color=’#949494′]As I already mentioned in the introduction Ravendra sir is a person whoinpired me because of his life story and his attitude of not givingup. But addition to this few years back I had so many idead to start a startup and everytime i think of a business partner it was my friend only. But that friend was not so active in working on the project. I think here I made mistake by not considering what qualities he has and what strengts that he can bring to the startup. I knew I mde mistake that time but I was not so clear where should I improve my decisons on selectong right busiess partner. But talking to ravendra sir I found my answers I think. [/highlight]