The last year for Udhyam has been magical. How else could you describe a small 20- member team in Bangalore, being approached by a progressive government in Delhi, working hard to a daunting timeline of launching the Entrepreneurship Mindset Curriculum (EMC), being able to incorporate principles of systems development for increasing quality, launching within 6 months of first conversation to enable a statewide rollout.
Isn’t it magic, when you go –
from:
working for 6 months, interacting with 500 small entrepreneurs, only 60 agree to work with you and eventually, only 2 see sustainable income uplift – I refer to this period as the valley of death: most startups go through it – very few cross it. The initial team at Udhyam Vyapaar not only crossed it, it has reached the following state:
to:
being able to predictably and repeatedly enable income uplift amongst 25% of the entrepreneurs we work with within 60 days of our engagement starting – and having achieved significant income uplift for 100 small entrepreneurs, and more importantly the learnings of enabling this for the chai and ironing entrepreneurs….yes, it’s magic! I consider ourselves very fortunate that an opportunity like EMC came our way, probably a lot earlier than I had imagined it would. I also consider ourselves very fortunate that over 300 small business entrepreneurs have trusted and partnered with us.
But then, fortunes are made by going out and trying hard – which I think the amazing team at Udhyam has done a LOT of. I feel both proud and fortunate to be working with the diverse and high ownership people who have come together to make the Udhyam vision come true. While the achievements visible outside are limited – they have been built on learnings from experiments, mistakes, realisations and reflections of all the team members, current and past.
With this magic of hard work, customer focus, impact focus being created by a radically different small organisation this far and I am very excited about what’s in store ahead. Wish us more fortune – the kind that comes in the shape of learnings and smiles we see on our and our customer’s faces.
Originally published as the foreword for the Udhyam Progress Report
