An Entrepreneurial Interview!

Recently we had Amit Grover, founder of Nurture Talent in the premises of Sharda University for an Entrepreneurship Workshop. We had a personal interview with him. Here are the excerpts:

Hello Sir! How are you? We are glad to have you here. :)

“Yeah I am fine. Thanks for the invite!”

•   How do you define entrepreneurship? From your view, what is it?

Amit Grover during the workshop

In my view, somebody starts something keeping in mind a problem and solves it for certain type and number of people; that is entrepreneurship and ultimately it is to try to make a difference in life of a few customers. That’s it.

•   And of course if I am to open a venture I may perhaps face a few probable challenges. Isn’t it?

See, there are various challenges. Some of the biggest challenges are to overcome the internal fears like what will happen if I start, the uncertainties, there is no-one to start with me, lack of financial resources or something like that. Other challenges could be somewhat like society does not support the idea or the educational system does not support it and there are certain business challenges which are true for any business, for example, getting customers, doing marketing, developing products, getting teams. Those are the business challenges which any one has to go through in the process of their entrepreneurial journey.

•   Then, you must have also confronted a number of problems while starting NT as an entrepreneur. What were they?

So as I said, I had a couple of problems I had to face once. One was about the challenge of marketing. Okay so, entrepreneurship training and development is a nascent area of business. Hence, there was a lot of spirit among people but will they pay, how they will pay, how much will they pay… how can you reach and market to them. So those were the initial challenges which I faced but I heard lot of support coming from investors, entrepreneurs, mentors, organizations and eventually overcame these difficulties.

•   After working with Infosys, Asian Paints and Onida, how and when did you decide to start NT?

It happened about a span of three years, I would say. While I was in Onida, I was meeting entrepreneurs every day and as a part of process of investment, decision making, business analysis; at the end of the day I used to discuss what entrepreneurship is. If you meet Shahrukh Khan every day, then you want to become Shahrukh Khan. That is what has happened to me as well.  So, I said one day I have had enough discussions and delegations and debates on entrepreneurship that led me an entrepreneur and tried to help them, train them, mentor them, work with them and starting with their challenges.

•   What served as your motivation to keep moving when the times were hard?

I always had these objectives that we had to have entrepreneurs coming out of NT and through it, had to generate 2500 jobs. We were working on these ideas and even if there is only one person in the workshop, we would never have postponed the workshop. So, it kept us moving. Recently we achieved the milestone of 100 workshops with 500 entrepreneurs trained who hopefully land in the world of business.

•   Why is entrepreneurship training important?

I believe it’s some kind of polishing your ideas up before starting. It saves your time and the cost of starting a business. It gives a form of belief in your business ideas. Training is a very important thing. It may be for a short duration to understand the things which can go wrong and have plans accordingly to overcome those challenges. You will know the difficulties that might halt your way and be ready one day before. Anybody else who has not gone for these programs will not understand from an entrepreneurs’ prospective, investors’ prospective, from customers’ prospective. Form my angle, it’s a good business but getting you a thing from customers’ angle is what is required. And this is exactly what we are trying to do in these training programs.

•   In India we see a lot of grass root entrepreneurship, what are your views on that? How do you visualize the future of entrepreneurship in India?

The future is very bright in long term prospective. The GDP is going by 10% and I don’t see even a single reason why an entrepreneur should fail while starting. There is a tremendous opportunity whether it is agriculture, or technology or any other sector. In fact, there is a huge amount of scope! It has just begun.

•   Where do you see NT after 5 years? What are the prospects?

We will definitely have reached the 1000 entrepreneurs goal and 20000 jobs. In future we have many services coming up which are in the pipeline. So, hopefully by the end of the next year we will be able to finally reach for the possible customers. Team is a one angle on which we are looking out for, how do we group and how do we grow.

Thank you Sir for your valuable time. We wish that Nurture Talent reaches new heights and we pray for the best! :)